Reading List 2010 (6/34)
This week’s reading:
- The Believers, Zoe Heller
- Losing Your Parents, Finding Yourself, Victoria Secunda
- The Poet, Michael Connelly
- The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly
- Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff
- Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent
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Tags: books, gender
Robot Chefs Battle With Knives!
And do you really need to know more than that?
Then, a month later in Nagoya, Japan, the Famen restaurant opened, with two giant yellow robot arms preparing up to 800 bowls of ramen a day. When it’s slow, the robots act out a scripted comedy routine and spar with knives.
Okay, okay, so it’s in the context of a clever article about how to humanize robots. Quirkiness, it seems, comes across as more human than robotic perfection – even when the quirkiness is thoroughly and consciously designed.
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Tags: robots
Gorak!
A friend sent me this video about a game called Gorak, out of Brazil. According to the video, they’re trying to achieve emotional growth and value development through games. I’m curious what the gameplay is like, and what their plans are for release. Googling “gorak” brings up a lot of Warhammer sites, though I suppose I might find something on this game if I could read Portuguese!
From the video, their assessment plan looks particularly interesting. They’re trying to measure players’ approach to conflict after playing the game, and how they represent the world through drawings. I hope they publish their methods and results at some point!
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Tags: emotion
Mashable on Social Gaming
Mashable has a nice piece on social gaming … except I’m a bit puzzled by how they’re using the term. They talk about social games as “immersive environments that simulate real-world problems,” but the term “social games” reads to me as being about who plays and how they play together. Still, it’s a well-written piece, and does a nice job of showing that learning doesn’t have to look like traditional schooling.
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Tags: learning
Reading List 2010 (5/28)
Caught up!
- A Reliable Wife, Robert Goolrick
- Out of Our Heads, Alva Noe
- Selling Anxiety, Caryl Rivers
- Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
- Voluntary Madness, Norah Vincent
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Tags: books
Useful Presentation Tips
A friend sent me a link to this great post on giving presentations. I’ve got some major presentations coming up – GDC in March, AERA in May, and NMC in June, just to name a few – so this was pretty timely!
As a presenter, I draw a lot from my experience teaching. I rely on talking to my audience, not at them; I focus on delivering material that they couldn’t get by reading a book (or, say, my slides); I change the emphasis on what I’m saying in real-time based on audience reaction. This means I avoid a lot of the problems he mentions, like reading directly from the paper or being thrown by something unexpected happening.
That said, I’ve never had a true technical explosion, like having to operate entirely without visuals. I’ll definitely be printing out my notes in the future, rather than using my slides as reference points – just in case!
I’m also wondering how I can incorporate these lessons into my teaching practice and improve my classroom skills. For example, I’m good at speaking to a pre-defined length in a presentation – but somehow my classes often go over the alloted time. Is that because my students are generally willing (and excited!) to stay longer? Because teaching a class is more interactive than giving a presentation? Or just because there’s no real consequence for ending class ten minutes late, while ending a presentation ten minutes late is a disaster?
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Tags: conference, presentation
Reading List 2010 (4/23)
You know, playing Dragon Age obsessively hasn’t been interfering with my reading nearly as much as I’d expected. Which makes me wonder just what’s falling by the wayside so I can save Ferelden from the Darkspawn …
- The Making of a Marchioness, Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
- The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull
- Game Change, John Heilemann & Mark Halperin
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Tags: books
Reading List 2010 (4/19)
How am I behind with my reading list already? It’s barely February, and after today I’ve still got a backlog of eight books to write about. I guess I could read less, but what fun would that be?
- Under the Dome, Stephen King
- Just After Sunset, Stephen King
- Beyond Armageddon, ed. Walter M. Miller Jr. & Martin H. Greenberg
- Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, ed. John Joseph Adams
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Tags: books
Stanley Strogatz Teaches Math!
On a completely different topic, I’m terribly excited about the Stanley Strogatz math-education series in the Times. I can’t wait to watch how he teaches math, and how he gives us a new way to think about numbers. I’m already thrilled at how he situates numbers in a half-real space that is the product both of our imaginations and of a self-consistent reality.
I imagine I’m going to learn something important about teaching a complex topic effectively from this series, so I’ll be watching it closely. You should too!
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Tags: math
Women Scientists and Housework
As part of my research on gender, I often find myself reading pieces like this one, and the Academe article it cites, on the impact of housework on women scientists’ careers. Admittedly, the articles I read aren’t always quite so relevant to my life! But they’re often eye-opening, and this one was no exception.
The thrust of the piece is that women scientists do a lot more housework than their spouses and their male peers, and this is a Bad Idea. Not only is it unjust, it’s also an incredible waste of time for highly trained individuals. I’ve invested a whole lot of time and money in my career; my training is in doing research and designing games, not in cleaning the kitchen. This isn’t to say that cleaning the kitchen is somehow not worthwhile – and I hate a dirty kitchen as much as anyone! But it’s basic economics that I should spend my time doing the things that I can do better than anyone else, not on tasks that someone else can do as well as (or better than!) I can.
I really liked Lorraine Tracey’s take on cumulative disadvantage, too:
Ms. Tracey, who is also a postdoctoral research associate at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, said additional personal responsibilities could add up over time for younger female scientists.
“If you have five hours a week less than your male counterparts available for your research over the five- to 10-year period of your graduate and postdoctoral training, this certainly adds up to a significant amount of time that I imagine could impact your competitiveness in the marketplace,” she said.
To me, this ties to work showing it takes time to become an expert – about ten thousand hours, according to most estimates. Five hours a week you’re spending doing the laundry or cooking? That’s just over 250 hours a year, more than 2% of the total time investment required. Unless you’re more talented than everyone around you, you’re either going to fall behind your colleagues or you’ll have to find five hours per week somewhere else.
So why can’t women just find that time elsewhere? Sadly, it’s not so easy. People need leisure! But leisure, for people who are passionate about their work, isn’t always purely fun. When I look at my own life, I spend a vast amount of my “free” time doing things that are actually related to my professional career. I read, I think, I play and design games, I invent new projects and more! Five hours is a big chunk of that time, and would have a huge impact on the imaginativeness and breath of my work.
After reading this article, I recognize how very lucky I am to have a partner who cooks, does the laundry, and is devastatingly witty and handsome to boot. But I shouldn’t have to feel lucky! As a highly trained professional with something significant to contribute to the world, I already have more demands on my time than I can handle. I just don’t have time for extra hours of housework. Neither do my less lucky peers, but they end up doing the extra work anyways.
I don’t think there’s an easy solution, but all this has reminded me why I’m working to change people’s ideas about gender. This is work that matters.
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Tags: academia, equity, gender
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