There has been a serious swelling of people involved in the social networking site myspace.com, and I am seriously perplexed as to why. I have been involved in a social networking site for about 2.5 years now (Friendster) but all of a sudden everyone and there mothers are on myspace. I've asked people "but what about Friendster, they were around for awhile before any of these other sites (myspace, facebook) were out and now they get no love". Most answer I see center around myspace more mature themed site, although I don't know how that's possible since the site and service is nothing more than the members that make it up, somehow I guess more "adults" have gotten on myspace making it the more adult networking site. Bah I say, friendster was and is still awesome. At the behest of my friends however I jumped onto myspace and created a profile and have not been back since. To create my profile I simply cut and pasted my friendster profile over to the appropriate myspace categories. I think I am just bitter because it was hard enough wasting time on Friendster but now there is another site that I should, in theory, keep up to date and checking. These sites are great things to fill some dead time at work or at home when one is bored, but my plate is full of such sites and it seems I cannot possibly keep up with all of them. I see why people who just report on goings on in the "blogosphere" even have a job.
In other news, I just finished an article about Children versus Chimps with regards to learning and imitation. RTA for more details. The short story, Kids imitate to learn while chimps look at the end goal and do what it takes to get to the solution. The article tries to explain why learning by imitation is not only better or at least not worse than the chimp method, but also what makes us uniquely human. I really don't have much background in child psych or psych in general, but at face value I can't see how this experiment demonstrated learning by imitation to be a superior method. After you read the article, leave a comment and tell me what you think. This just seems like humans are hard wired to do what they see all the time and not look at what their actions are actually achieving.
Its funny that I should read this article only a few days after I saw the movie "S1MONE" which had oodles of potential but ultimately was not that great of a movie (it might have had something to do with the contrast between the idea of a digital actor and 42" LCD screens and the computer the sim was on still having and using a 5 1/4" floppy drive). Apparently we are not so far off of a S1mone-esque reality where digital actors can actually be used. This article is total fiction but it is done well, and with the pace of technology these days, I guess this is not so far off.
No comments:
Post a Comment