The European Commission is planning to force cell phone companies to standardize their cell phone chargers so that all phones will use the same style of charger. The goal is to cut down on the amount of waste caused by the variety of chargers currently used. Cutting down on e waste is great, but the [...]
While much of the generation-based research seems more likely to produce buzzwords than to actually provide a meaningful framework for thinking about social or cultural trends, a new report from Accenture on the tech habits of Millennials (people born between 1977 and 1997) confirms a broad trend I’ve heard a number of faculty commenting on: [...]
This week, US citizens began noticing billboards promoting Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. This would be nothing new, except the billboards appear in the XBox 360 game “Burnout Paradise.” The Obama campaign has sunk a portion of its funds into advertising in online games. The skeptic in me doubts that these ads would have much [...]
I’ve started to analyze our latest data from a few rural regions in the U.S., where small communities recently obtained broadband services. This is a five-year, USDA-funded study that should provide us with some insights about what difference broadband makes in rural areas, a topic that I’ve been writing on over the last five years [...]
An article today on the Washington Post site—FTC Wants to Know What Big Brother Knows About You–discusses the United States Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing review of behavioral targeting practices among companies such as Yahoo! And Microsoft. While many ad-supported websites have used content-specific advertising—displaying ads for dog food when a user performs a search for [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
There is a petition to convince director Uwe Boll to stop making movies. Boll has apparently said if the petition gets a million signatures, he’ll quit [story]. Now, the director has proven a bit quirky — challenging film critics to boxing matches, which Boll won, and featured in Postal — but, there is something of [...]
BoingBoingTV presents the above short piece about the movie Second Skin, which premiered at SXSW. The film explores the impact of massively multiplayer online games on the people who play — including one self-identified gaming addict.
The documentary looks like it may be covering some of the same territory explored in Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life [...]
U.S. Law and Video Games
A piece of news that should be of interest to folks both in industry and in the academy: A couple weeks ago, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a law that would have limited the sales and rentals of video games to minors. The court found the California statute to be a [...]