Forms of Inquiry: 9/21/14 Today's Inquiries

Sunday nerdy Sunday.

The Links:

To start off, the New York Times convened a roundtable to discuss the rise of nerd culture. If you're looking for several long pieces to read which all provide different takes on nerds, go here. Given the recent very apparent problems with gaming and nerd culture, the authors are all relatively critical but very hopeful for the future. Here's a good taste of the critical side:

Popular culture right now frequently appears to be a large-scale experiment in cognitive dissonance. By any rational measure, the geeks — fans of comic books, science fiction, video games and fantasy — are utterly triumphant. Economically, the genre in the media is dominant, earning billions of dollars a year. Critically, it is celebrated, getting sympathetic reviews in the stuffiest publications and winning national awards. In every meaningful sense, geeks are the overdogs.

Geeks now need to recognize their great fortune, enjoy it and extend a little sympathy in the direction of us sad few who prefer other things.

For the geeks, this should be a moment of triumph and celebration. And yet instead, the typical geeks today still regard the world as fundamentally hostile to their beloved properties. The 800-pound gorilla still thinks of itself as a 98-pound weakling, and the results are ugly. The recent GamerGate controversy, so thoroughly misogynist and angry, demonstrates the problem with winners self-identifying as losers: once you’ve cast yourself as a victim in your own mind, there’s no need to interrogate your own behavior.

The FBI is investigating the threats made against Sharkeesian. Good, send those bums to prison.

Oxford has a fantastic collection of maps of the internet. I liked this one:

Alibaba, the giant Chinese amalgamation of Amazon and Ebay, went public this week raising the most money ever.

You may have seen that a war photographer was sent into the virtual wasteland of The Last of Us. Time Magazine published the article and accompanying pictures in this week's issue. Very smart thoughts:

None of the game’s characters show distress, and that to me was bizarre – it’s a post apocalyptic scenario, with a few remaining humans fighting for the survival of their race! To be successful, a player must be the perpetrator of extreme, and highly graphic, violence. I’m interested in a more emotionally engaged type of photography, where the human reaction to a scene is what brings a story to life. That was tough inside this game. Occasionally the characters show anger, though generally they’re nonchalant about the situation they’ve found themselves in. In the end, their emotions mimicked that of the zombies they were killing.

I thought that was a very import point to make about distress. I haven't played the game but I did watch two play-throughs. I remember being overwhelmed at the emotion of it all but now I wonder if the emotions were mine alone.

The Royal Observatory announced the winners of it's annual photography contest.

It looks as if only 1 classroom in the entire LAUSD is using the super expensive Pearson curriculum the district bought. I wonder if this has anything to do with it:

The report lists a number of concerns including that a Pearson app lacked a high school math curriculum and that components of the English Language Arts curriculum were also missing. Several respondents also noted that uploading the application's content was "cumbersome and lengthy."