Further information on the internships is available on the internship page, right here.

The Supreme Court previously ruled in 1982 on issues of minors and video games in the case of the City of Mesquite vs. Aladdin’s Castle, Inc. In that case, the court ruled that limitations on minors’ ability to play coin-operated video games violated minors’ rights to free speech and to freedom of association. That case effectively established games as a protected form of free speech.

You can read more about the recent court decision here, and if you’d like to read up on the earlier case I mentioned, the text of the decision is available here from FindLaw.

Hopefully the EC push for standardization will lead to broader standardization as the companies in compliance eliminate their non-standard chargers. Of course, the industry is already claiming standardization is an impossible pipe dream. Read more about it at Telecom Paper.

Ivan Franco of industrial affiliate YDreams is leading a panel on “New Interfaces for Performance.” Affiliated faculty member Bruce Pennycook is participating in the discussion.

The whole panel schedule for the festival is available at the SXSW web site.

Hope to see some of you there — we’ll be posting further updates on festival activities as we near the event.

Application details and further information is available here.

“…this difference between expectations and reality has led over a quarter of the employees surveyed by Accenture to use technology that is unsupported and unsanctioned by their corporate IT departments. Almost half of all Millennials who use social networks, blogs, vlogs, or Twitter do so without support from their IT departments (and often against the IT policies of their companies). Millennials also see no problem with using unsupported mobile phones or instant messaging services at work.”

While the report seems to make much of the fact that these Millennial workers often don’t even know their company’s IT policies, I wonder how many older (or even slightly older) employees are that well-versed in the regulations and guidelines enforced by individual corporations. Further, I’m not sure that the lag between employee preference and company policy is particularly novel. In any case, you can read a lengthier summary of the report here.

This program is the culmination of a lot of ground work, and we’re excited to have it up and running. There’s a lot more information about the program available on the internship page. One notable change we have made is to institute rolling deadlines, to make the program more accessible to students who are still in coursework. Students who are interested in applying should do so at least two months prior to when they would want to intern.

In short, we’re working to place qualified graduate students and early-career professionals at digital media companies in the Austin area for either a semester or a summer. These internships should provide some good learning and professional development opportunities for students. We’ll be providing some workshops aimed at professionalization to supplement the internship experience.

If you’re interested in learning more about internship opportunities, check out the internship page. And, watch here for application details, which we should have posted by mid-to-late June.

Breakthrough, an organization that does human rights work in both the United States and India, has released a game, ICED (I Can End Deportation) to help players learn the ins and outs of immigration policy and rights. The game, which targets youth, is intended to teach players how unfair U.S. immigration policy is.

The game is available as a free download, and includes educational materials for teachers who might want to use the game in the classroom. It’s an interesting intersection of web activism and educational gaming, to say the least. The amount of collaboration that has gone into the project is impressive — New York City teachers and dozens of students weighed in on the project. A number of organizations have created web-based games related to their pet issues, but ICED is more comprehensive than many of these projects. It’s not just a gimmick to convince players to spend more time at the organization’s web site, and incorporates a great deal of significant information. What remains to be seen is how successful the project will be at reaching its intended audience and what that audience will think of the game.

It might behoove the ACLU, or some organization devoted to civil liberties, to devote some resources to figuring out how to defend speech that is inconvenient to plaintiffs lawyers.

Sandy Szwarc of the excellent blog Junkfood Science has a lengthy and interesting post about a subpoena delivered to the author of Neurodiversity, a website (and blog) focused on providing resources and information about autism.

The subpoena is particularly sweeping, demanding records and documents and citing, of all things, the bloggers listed on the site’s blogroll. Kathleen Seidel, the woman behind Neurodiversity, is fighting the subpoena, noting that she has nothing to do with the case in question. Another blogger has been maintaining a list of responses to the case, and the Wall Street Journal was the first mainstream media outlet to comment — yesterday. The quote at the top is from the WSJ article.

These are exactly the types of cases that will determine the rules of engagement for citizen journalists specifically and for bloggers more generally. Should Seidel be granted the same types of protections as more conventional journalists? If she isn’t, what does this imply about the practicability of blogging that is, as the WSJ puts it, “inconvenient to lawyers” or to other powerful people?