Netflix’s Sacred Games. It was their first domestic production and is a straight faced noir cop drama. It’s my favorite crime series of all time - I think it blends The crime boss mythology of The Usual Suspects with the multi-decade story telling of The Godfather. It is told in a way that it feels like a picture coming into focus, rather than a linear narrative.
A recommendation to the Dutch "precursor" to Paradise Lost: Vondel's "Lucifer" is a tight five-act play along the same lines. It's about a century older than Paradise Lost, with a contemporary energy that's quite fun and punchy, and a quick read.
Noel Clark's translation gives it a modern air of office politics as Lucifer and Beelzebub quarrel with Gabriel on how to behave in their shared workplace.
There's a bit of OT apocrypha that's a likely source of inspiration for Paradise Regained, Milton's sequel to Paradise Lost. I believe it was the Book of Adam (or something similarly titled). A quick Google search doesn't turn up anything likely and the I lent the volume I had which included this apocryphon to my brother who subsequently lost it at some point later, so I only have 20+ year old memories of the book.
There's a long tradition of retellings and expansions of Biblical stories in both Christianity and Judaism that also contributed a great deal to Paradise Lost.
Forgotten Books of Eden. Apparently it's less obscure than I thought, which gave me a Wikipedia article with the contents. The text was the First and Second Book of Adam and Eve aka Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan. Wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_Adam_and_Eve_with_...
Your [1] could be Walther J. Ong's Orality and Literacy? It goes into differences between cultures rooted in written/oral language, and has several examples where words that are "missing" from or present in a language reflect the way the speakers think and reason.
Can you say more about the autodidacts and the conflict with professional staff? I'm interested in specific areas that were problematic, and if you have any learnings from mitigating it.
Olpc leadership saw government education bodies and curriculum groups as potential road blocks best avoided. This is with some reason as it can take years to work through then. That said, they can't be advoided in my experience if you expect to have any impact. They also disregarded the concerns of every day teachers because they presumed every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop.
It all stems from Seymour papert's original vision that inspired olpc. This theory is called constructionism and held that children can develop knowledge of the world through experiential learning. They can "construct" their own knowledge. Unfortunately, the role that a teacher might need to pay on this process was often underestimated.
To counteract this, we engaged the most creative Nepali teachers (of which the re are a large number) to create educational activities that aligned with the nationial curriculum and addressed content areas where nationally Nepali kids were struggling.
>every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop
So, if I understand you correctly, OLPC went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out? This is hyper-relevant to what I'm working on, so: did a proper theoretical constructionist framework fail you, or was underestimating the role of teachers the main problem?
Did engaging Nepali teachers give any insights in the above?
> went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out
I have no knowledge of OLPC, but it seems obvious to me: successfull autodidacts in societies where self-directed-learning is not commont (probably most societies...) tend to be internally motivated, so higher proportion of them are introverts, also higher proportions have at least little bit of aspergers-like traits etc. Extroverts on the other hand tend to learn most from human teachers they physically interact with!
If you'd crunch the numbers and compare them with the personality traits of "influencers", you'll likely see they are opposite. So any chance that a positive view of the device will spread via word of mouth is low, aka any change of whatever the equivalent of "going viral" would be amongst African villages is low!
By targeting the self-learners you're basically going anti-viral... you're doing anti-marketing! You'd need to try and hit the "micro-influencers", and probably only chance of that is by hitting teachers and some community leaders and local "celebrities".
We techo-focused hyper-individualistic self-learners only thrive in societies after they've been properly wired up both socially and technically. Drop us in a borderline-medieval society and we're useless and have zero influence on the people around us. Heck, "geeks" started to thrive in medieval Europe after the church managed in a primitive way to network part of the world. Probably similar patterns happened in China and the Arab world too. Most underdeveloped societies today totally lack that kind of useful networking ...otherwise they likely wouldn't be underdeveloped in the first place!
no == there, not that strong of a claim, just "if [A], then more likely [B] than without prior [A]" ...if you have endless time (or a few PhD students you can task to research literature for free) and patience search for studies about "associations between [A] and [B]" dig and dig through things.
I avoid making a stronger claims bc it would require too much work to research it, do it yourself if you want do (dis)confirm, I'm just "throwing a bone here", too lazy to think or research more about it :)...
Ahh, so you are making these claims because you think they are true. You presented them as some sort of fact by stating that this is obvious to you. I just don't really get why it was relevant to lay out that chain of relevance. I don't see the obvious connection between self motivated and introvert, but I guess it could be possible. The other connections just seem like random thoughts. I was trying to figure out why something so obvious to you doesn't explain itself when presented without evidence...
We had to show results in a short period of time and focus on the top priorities of the parents and teachers which boiled down to belong their kids not fail out of school in the early grades.
You can focus on nurturing autodidacts but you will never have more than a handful of anecdotal successes in the short run at best. And you need more than anecdotes to keep educational projects alive. Further, educators run the school. If you want an educational project to be successful, You live and die by their support.
as an observer from the sidelines (i was contributing to the OLPC development but never involved in any deployment) my guess is this: if there was a proper theoretical constructionist framework then it failed because of the resistance of the existing educational system.
in other words, a constructionist model may work in a situation where kids are left to themselves, but it may not work if there is a competing educational system that doesn't allow the kids to take advantage of the opportunities the constructionist model provides.
personally though i am skeptical that a pure constructionist approach will enable the children to achieve their maximum potential, and any successes of it are in comparison to a failing traditional model.
There were many reasons the OLPC failed, but I don't think constructionist education was one of them, when it's succeeded in so many other places.
EA donated SimCity to OLPC because of its relation to constructionist education, thanks to Maxis's collaboration with Doreen Nelson, who wrote the SimCity teacher's guide, and developed "City Building Education" and "Design Based Learning", in which kids built cities out of cardboard instead of pixels:
>SimCity can be used educationally, but not in the sense of literally training people to be urban planners or mayors.
It's more useful for "Constructionist Education" and "Design Based Learning", as practiced by Seymour Papert and Doreen Nelson.
>[...] One of the teachers Curtin hired was Doreen Nelson, a brilliant and innovative educator who had developed a pedagogy called City Building Education, in which students collaboratively built cities out of craft materials and role play. Nelson become a regular visitor to Maxis, and Curtin made some trips to Los Angeles to see City Building in action, where she found the experience of “watching a classroom actually go through a couple of days worth of creation” to be “very inspiring. … I will never forget that experience” (Curtin 2015; Nelson 2015). [5]
Chaim Gingold wrote a section about Doreen Nelson's work in his dissertation on "Play Design":
Here's an unboxing video of the SimCity Classic "School Edition" Lab Pack, which includes the teacher's guide by Doreen Nelson and Michael Bremer:
LGR - SimCity Educational Version Unboxing & Overview
An overview of the "School Edition" Lab Pack of SimCity Classic by Maxis. Unboxing, first impressions of the package and testing of the radically rad software ensues.
Thanks for digging out the links on Doreen, pocketed both.
But am I reading GP wrong that it wasn't constructionist education proper that failed, but a "let's do things with laptops" being retconned onto constructivism?
at the time i had the impression that not much thought was given on how to implement education using the laptops. looking at it now, i have the impression that the expectation was that the mere existence of the laptops would allow for constructionist education to happen all by itself.
i don't know enough about constructionist education to know what factors ought to be present, but i can't imagine that an education system and teachers that do not understand or do not want constructionist education aren't a problem.
i also believe that OLPC didn't sell constructionist education to the buyers, nor that the buyers wanted to start using constructionist education.
i have the impression that it was rather hoped that constructionist education would not only happen by itself but also undermine the existing education system in that it flourishes despite the existing system.
in the end the failure was that the expectations of parents, teachers and others in the education system were not met.
one might argue that the failure was to not educate the buyers on what to expect, but then i can't imagine that OLPC would have successfully sold anything if they had tried to sell constructionist education along with it.
It's not straightforward just how to apply those theories, and takes a lot of experimentation and adaptation. And getting the established education system to change is a Sisyphean task.
Instead of thinking of SimCity as a way of directly teaching urban planning, or financing, or building construction, you can use it to motivate and indirectly develop language, logical argument, and debating skills. You can ask students to write about their cities, by describing their aspirations, proposals, platforms, campaign promises, then promoting and defending and discussing the issues, then holding elections and voting for which plans to implement, then implementing them, then discussing and writing about how they turned out.
I don't have personal knowledge of the project, but it was very heavily constructionist (or they said it was - can't comment on the implementation) so if you look around it should be easy to find talks and papers about their approach. Lots of links from here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Constructionist
>Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup.
The infamous crank, the $100 price, and the Sugar user interface, were among the indigestible stones.
Seymour Papert's vision of constructionist education provided some of the most nutritious meat and potatoes that nourished the soup, as did Mary Lou Jepsen's display hardware:
>Also, the OLPC's hybrid monochrome/color display that Mary Lou Jepsen designed was truly innovative, power saving, easily manufacturable, green electronics, and it was even quite efficient and crisply legible and under direct sunlight (requiring no backlight for the high resolution 200 dpi reflective grayscale LCD pixels, which could stay on while the CPU was asleep).
We were able to convince EA to relicense SimCity under GPL3 and contribute it to the project, because it was a quintessentially constructionist educational game. Without the OLPC project to rally around and rationalize the virtues of free educational software, it would have been impossible to convince EA to do that.
Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold.
Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold:
I may be alittle late to the party here but came here to thank you for your service back then it was all for a good cause even if things didnt go as planned.
+1 with the thinking that content was a big problem as well
Things like wikipedia & khanh academy offline in-a-box and translated into local languages like they have now would have been a better direction of effort for OLPC in general.
Sliding offtopic, but do you have any more memories around this specific collaboration? I'm deeply familiar with the theory, but anecdotes on such an ambitious project would be useful to a text I'm working on. Thanks.
I provided Chaim Gingold with a bunch of emails and code as material for his dissertation, which he analyzed, wrote about, and quoted in the sections about SimCity. He also interviewed other people who told sides of the story I had not yet heard.
Please send me an email (contact in my profile) and describe what you're interested in, and I'd be glad to answer questions, dig stuff up, and forward it to you.
His dissertation is long and detailed (as those things tend to be) but well worth checking out! Especially all the great stuff about Doreen Nelson's lifelong work.
I don't have a direct pdf link, but if you prod and jiggle it a little bit, this pdf viewer will let you download the entire pdf:
PhD in CS dissertation on "Play Design" by Chaim Gingold, June 2016, UCSC.
Playdead spat out a series of incredible GDC talks after their game INSIDE. They did a full presentation on the ending of the game [0] as a collab between engineering, rendering and art.
It’s fascinating just to see the creativity, but also a teaching moment on striking the balance between tight, accurate engineering and enough hack&mirrors to pass inspection.
No-one claims that gamedevs see lock-in as something positive; only that very few AAA gamedev shops care about lock-in - especially for a relatively small part of the production pipeline as a graphics API.
What you see as locked-in API, others see as a great feature set to build on, probably with access to driver developers to help reach even further, past publicly available APIs.
A game engine is not something you can switch out of easily anyway. Everything from game code, to years of asset libraries to decades of source control repositories - all of those are very rigid parts of the production pipeline.
Chernobyl is still open for tours, afaik. You won't get very close to any of the running reactors (and not the closed one, of course) but the tours generally go through the complex' main road and through the Pripyat ghost town.
> You won't get very close to any of the running reactors
They've all been decommissioned. #3 was the last one to shut down in 2000.
On a related note, this Youtube user [0] has videos from what appear to be tours inside units 2, 3 and 4 (the one which suffered the meltdown in '86). The one from the reactor hall in unit 2 [1] is particularly interesting.
On the contrary. If you look at the projected search area, it's a huge swath of deep ocean. A plane is very small. Once it breaks up against the waves it's really, really small. The debris sinks into silt at the bottom of a deep ocean. Currents spread them out. Even if we knew where it went down, finding it is a difficult problem.
On top of that, we don't have radar tracking over the oceans. Transcievers don't communicate all the time while in flight. There are long periods of time where you are outside any national radar system. Compounded, it's entirely reasonable to lose a plane.
There are 15-20 planes that have never been found since the 1980s.
AF447 has to be the typical example of this: we had a good idea of where it crashed, having found debris within 48 hours of the crash, and yet it took nearly two years to find the wreckage.
In other words, 'kbart is right. We could track planes over the water, but for some reasons we don't bother. Not the future we've been promised. Maybe MH370 will make us start caring though.
Not sure if it's that easy you'll need over the horizon radars to have coverage over the ocean and it's not like they are cheap to build or easy to operate.
You'll also need to integrate that system across borders and jurisdiction which isn't easy politically.
It will also not surprise me if many actors want to have certain level of privacy as far as international airspace goes.
But the biggest factor at the end is cost compared to the relative costs of S&R missions if you did had additional tracking data.
In the past 25 years only 3 scheduled passenger flights were not found including MH370 there were quite a few other private, chartered, and cargo flights that went missing mostly in tricky areas to search for in the first place like the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean.
It's doubtful that better radar coverage could even help with such cases even if you build a network of over the horizon radars which will scan for aircraft at various altitudes e.g. 2000-30000 ft. This will be very expensive and when you have a small aircraft that crashes onto a mountain side in an area where S&R can't get too or crashes over a 5KM deep ocean they might very well not help that much.
Probably the massive amount of money involved, and for very little gain. Most of them are going to crash hard and end up in the bottom of the ocean in little bits. Knowing where they crashed isn't going to save anybody, they're dead on impact.
But there's a lot to gain in analyzing the data. E.g. AF447 was a perfectly flyable plane that was lost due to bad piloting.
I don't know if Air France has actually started training and/or screening their pilots to help prevent a similar accident. But that's why we search so diligently; we need to know what went wrong so we can try to fix it.
AF447 Is a bad example they found bodies (first 2 were found within 5 days of the crash) and some wreckage pretty much immediately.
In this case the last known position wasn't "that off" our understanding of currents and ocean topography was.
Even if Radar will give you the exact point of impact with water (which it will never do) there are still so many variables that it might not be that much of a help to begin with over a general grid area.
This echoes the tribulations of the original Starcraft devs. [1]
> ...based on my experiences the biggest problems in StarCraft related to the use of doubly-linked linked lists. Linked lists were used extensively in the engine to track units with shared behavior. [...] Some of the link fields were shared among several lists, so it was necessary to know exactly which list an object was linked into in order to safely unlink. And some link fields were even stored in C unions with other data types to keep memory utilization to a minimum. So the game would blow up all the time. All the time.
Serialising game state to disk was done by moving all those scattered objects into a contiguous memory block, re-link, save to disk, and then restore the game engine's internal state.
> It was necessary to fixup all the link pointers (taking special care of unioned pointer fields) so that all 1600 units could be written at once. And then unfixup the link pointers to keep playing. Yuck.
No, you're right. The use case for Grunt/Gulp is in the name: task runners, to automate the running of tasks, to stabilise and formalise the build process to the point of repeatability across a team.
It's a bit strange to have him bash on the Grunt/Gulp ecosystem's plugin dependence and SemVer configs, and then go on to recommend using npm instead, which is also dependent on node and its ecosystem.
That said, the npm solution looks attractive for simpler build flows, but hook in a fat custom plugin to a watch task on a subset of files and I'm sure you'll get the same complexity in package.json.
