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Essay generator can spew out BS, still get you an 'A'
While automated essay-grading machines can tackle 16,000 essays in 20 seconds, are they any good compared to a human? Online course administrators in the machine camp think so, but retired MIT prof Les Perelman has shown that such bots aren't about to pass a Turing test anytime soon. His proof is the Babel Generator, aka the Basic Automatic BS Essay Language Generator. In less than two seconds, the software can spit out an essay capable of scoring 90 percent or better on automated tests. The only problem is that while grammatically correct, the papers are utter gibberish. Here's an example he gave the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent."
Coming home to Azeroth
For a number of months, I knew my computer was dying, but it was the release of patch 5.4 that finally did it in. With a seven-year-old motherboard, processor, and a paltry two gigabytes of RAM, even just opening an internet browser was eating up a significant portion of its memory. Running WoW was definitely out of the question. So I began the process of upgrading my machine--new motherboard, new CPU, new RAM, new operating system--and along the way my monitor died too, so I got a new one of those as well. There were some wrenches thrown into the machinery, but at last I found myself once more logging into the familiar World of Warcraft. I've played WoW for six of its nine years in existence, and I sometimes struggle to explain what keeps me going. Though changes and tweaks have been made through the years, at its core the game remains the same. It's the same night elf druid that greets me on the login screen each time I load the client, the same familiar landmarks that guide my travels across Azeroth. After a two-month forced absence, however, I think I understand better what the game represents to me: it's home.
Tim Berners-Lee entreats us to keep the net neutral, standards open, and speech free
We've always thought pretty highly of this Tim Berners-Lee fella, and now we've got a whole essay penned by him to show you why that is. In a six-page treatise on the current state of the web, Tim discusses why universality of access is so important to our freedom of speech and other democratic liberties, why open standards will always prevail over closed ecosystems (with a special critique of Apple's iTunes and concordant appification of the web), and also why it's necessary to distinguish between the web and the internet. Oh, and he also manages to squeeze in one of the most succinct explanations of net neutrality and its growing importance in our massively interconnected world. Hit the source for the full shot of enlightenment. [Image courtesy of Paul Clarke]
Global Agenda fansite competition offers up more keys for next closed beta phase
With Global Agenda's current closed beta being all the buzz these days, getting in is no easy feat. Hi-Rez Studios is treating their testing phases as actual controlled testing -- with only around 1,000 people to start and mandatory feedback from the testers. If you're just looking for a free game to play for a few months, you might want to look elsewhere.Going hand in hand with that, many Global Agenda fansites are being offered a very small amount of beta keys to distribute to their readers. You may remember earlier in the month when we gave away 10 keys for AgendaSource.com, and now we're here to help another fansite give away their keys. Keep reading below for more information.
World of Warcraft as evolutionary model
This must be the time of year for zany social theories about videogames. First, we heard that World of Warcraft might quality as being a religion. Then we heard that it might make for better citizens. And now, in an essay over at Gamasutra on the event of Charles Darwin's birthday, Noah Falstein suggests that games like World of Warcraft are actually models for evolution -- as we level up with experience points, our characters get stronger and more evolved, and we feel comfortable with that because that's exactly what we see happening in the world around us.Technically, of course, you can't model Darwin's theory of evolution with a single character -- evolution isn't about one individual getting better, it's about a process of natural selection in a species over a period of time. To really model evolution, you'd have to play hundreds of alts, and quit them each time you ran into a problem, leaving you with just a few characters that worked really well. Wait -- maybe some of you are already doing that.But Falstein makes good points in saying that certain elements of what Darwin described as evolution have shown up in game design as well -- the idea of specialization for certain character classes, tribal and national allegiances, and even the idea of memes (which are certainly widespread in WoW -- anyone ever heard of Chuck Norris or Leroy Jenkins?) are all drawn from Darwin's thinking and definitely embodied in the game we play.
Microsoft considered new Xbox every two years
In a guest essay over on The Mercury News, original Xbox co-creator Kevin Bachus revealed that early on Microsoft kicked around the idea of releasing a new Xbox every two years. Bachus goes on to say that,"our very first thoughts on Xbox included the somewhat misguided notion that we might upgrade the system every TWO years. Now wouldn't that have been disruptive!"Disruptive indeed, thank god they scrapped such a horrible idea. In his guest essay Bachus also went on to describe the early days of the Xbox, how they brought developers on board, and what the big black Xbox's legacy ended up being. It's an insightful read into how the Xbox got off the ground and what the team's goals were going forward. Read Kevin Bachus' full essay after the jump.[Via GameDaily BIZ]
