Cool: Women Gamers Week: Amy Brady continues to make gaming history - National Arcade Game

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by Patrick Scott Patterson, Arcade Game Examiner
September 24, 2011

"A ten year veteran in the industry, Amy Brady has built up a long resume in the video gaming world. From co-founding the Pandora’s Mighty Soldiers (PMS Clan) to her membership in the Frag Dolls, being part of the first female team to rank in a pro gaming tournament and being featured in the first season of WCG Ultimate Gamer, Brady is among the most successful female professional gamers in history.

“I have played video games as long as I can remember,” she recalled. “One of my earliest memories was my mother taking us to an arcade by our house, where I always played Pac-Man and the pinball machines. I have always been drawn to video games, and while I wouldn’t have called myself a gamer until I started playing online games I was obsessed enough to invest my own pocket money as a kid for my own games.”

The PMS Clan, a group Brady co-founded with her sister, has grown into one of the major forces in all of video gaming.

“PMS Clan is my heart and soul that was almost an accident,” Brady said. “Through my love of gaming and finding other females in the beginning of Xbox Live, PMS was born. At first, the clan was simply there for female camaraderie and to kick some butt together, but it grew into something much more than just I myself could make it. It grew into a home and a passion for thousands of other females to bond and gain support from, and that is what it continues to be....”

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Fascinating Read: Not-So-Smart Cities - 20,000 Acres, Infrastructure & All for Robots

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Greg Lindsay is a visiting scholar at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University and the co-author of “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next.”

THE Southwest is famously fertile territory for ghost towns. They didn’t start out depopulated, of course — which is what makes the latest addition to their rolls so strange. Starting next year, Pegasus Holdings, a Washington-based technology company, will build a medium-size town on 20 square miles of New Mexico desert, populated entirely by robots.

Scheduled to open in 2014, the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, as the town is officially known, will come complete with roads, buildings, water lines and power grids, enough to support 35,000 people — even though no one will ever live there. It will be a life-size laboratory for companies, universities and government agencies to test smart power grids, cyber security and intelligent traffic and surveillance systems — technologies commonly lumped together under the heading of “smart cities.”

The only humans present will be several hundred engineers and programmers huddled underground in a Disneyland-like warren of control rooms. They’ll be playing SimCity for real...."

Genius. Love. Want. Seriously: Artefact's Printer Redesign Isn't Boring, It's Visionary | via Co. Design

Seriously: Artefact's Printer Redesign Isn't Boring, It's Visionary

By Belinda Lanks (Excerpt from original post)

"The SWYP takes the pain and guesswork out of a historically clunky device.

If our office is any indication, printer use is on the decline. (Some of us wouldn’t know how to find the printer, let alone how to connect to it.) That’s in part because we’ve adjusted to working and communicating on screens, but it’s also because they’re damned frustrating to use. Command one to print a short email, and what you get is microscopic type and four pages of ads--that is, if you get it to work at all. A new printer concept from Artefact, a Seattle-based design firm, radically streamlines the device, packing an intuitive user interface into a radically simplified box design that would appeal to design god Dieter Rams.

At the heart of the SWYP (See What You Print) is a large touchscreen that allows users to see and manipulate on a 1:1 scale what the finished result will look like before hitting “print.” Pictures and documents can be previewed and edited, and unwanted areas, like those irritating margin ads, can be removed by “swyping” them off the screen. Users can also bypass the computer altogether by seamlessly connecting their camera, phone, or tablet to the printer. Once connected, they can select and crop photos with their fingers.

To us, one of the most impressive features is the folding paper tray, which has the simple genius of the iPad screen flap. The thin, fabric-lined aluminum sheet neatly folds up when not in use; the well-placed creases make it rigid enough to hold paper when unfolded....."

Super Cool! | A Piece of Burning Man to Light Toronto Aflame at This Year's Scotiabank Nuit Blanche

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Description from the site:

"Creators of the flame-throwing interactive sculpture, The Heart Machine, prepare the piece for its Canadian debut as an official exhibition at Scotiabank's Nuit Blanche 2011 Toronto. The project came to light last year through the creative inspiration of Canadian artist Christine Irving, along with 25 other artists, to make its debut at the Burning Man art festival, in Black Rock City, NV, 2010.

The Heart Machine is a collaborative art project that combines sculptural structures, flame effects and modern mechanics to create an interactive experience that invites participation.

The sheer scale of the project, spanning 80ft x 80ft, features a large industrial heart as its center, surrounded by 16 foot "arteries". When its hand sensors are touched or stroked by passersby, participants control the fireballs, shooting flames up to 25-feet into the sky.

It is also the first art project by a Canadian woman to receive official honorarium status by Burning Man.

Christine also noted, "The Heart Machine at Burning Man was a fantastic opportunity to show Canadian art on an international scale, I'm excited to ignite the Toronto audience with a piece of Burning Man on their home turf."

The Heart Machine will be located in "Zone B", near Bay & Edward Street in Toronto.

Image with caption: "The Heart Machine at Sunrise, Burning Man 2010 (CNW Group/interactive arts)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20110920_C4987_PHOTO_EN_3553.jpg "

Like. Yup. LIke: How StencylWorks can turn anyone into a games developer (via Wired UK)

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By Alan Martin, 21 September 11

"StencylWorks, a free program for Mac and PC just two months out of beta, promises to simplify the process of game design to the extent that you can make a Flash game without any knowledge of how to write code. What's more, a paid version of the software that will export to iOS formats for iPhone and iPad game development is currently in beta.

For StencylWorks creator Jonathan Chung, it's all about democratising the game development process. While indulging his hobby of remaking the likes of Mario, Kirby and Metroid, Chung quickly realised that a lot of the codebases were reusable, and constructed a simple tool to reuse specific elements. From there, it developed from a niche editor for platformers into a multi-purpose tool set allowing the creation of games of various genres, and it took the leap from hobby to fully fledged startup...."

Whoa. Cool. PBS To Debut First Episode of Ken Burns’s “Prohibition” On Free PBS Apps for iPad and iPhone Beginning September 23 : PBS

PBS To Debut First Episode of Ken Burns’s “Prohibition” On Free PBS Apps for iPad and iPhone Beginning September 23

ARLINGTON, VA – September 21, 2011 – PBS announced today that the first episode of PROHIBITION, the much-anticipated film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, will premiere on the free PBS for iPad and PBS Apps for the iPhone and iPod touch beginning Friday, September 23.

Set in the era of bathtub gin, bootleggers and speakeasies, PROHIBITION tells the true story of the rise, rule and fall of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It was called the “Noble Experiment,” but it was in fact one of America’s most notorious civic failures, an object lesson in the challenge of legislating human behavior.

The entire series will air nationally on PBS Sunday-Tuesday, October 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Each episode will also be streamed live on video.pbs.org, timed to the national broadcast. Episodes 2 and 3 of PROHIBITION will be available on PBS for iPad and PBS Apps for Phone and iPod touch the day after each television airdate and remain available through Friday, October 7th.  All episodes will be available for purchase on DVD at shoppbs.org and on iTunes.

Fotopedia Photo Stories Arrive on Flipboard, As Photo Curation Goes Mainstream | Excerpt via Xconomy

Fotopedia Photo Stories Arrive on Flipboard, As Photo Curation Goes Mainstream

Wade Roush 9/20/11

The mobile Web is fostering a remarkable renaissance in traditional art forms such as photography—surprisingly, right alongside the explosion of videos, games, gossip, tweets, and other distractions. And if there’s one organization that has figured out how to use the Web and the latest mobile gadgets to showcase great images, it’s Paris- and San Francisco-based Fotonauts, creator of the online photo curation community Fotopedia and seven related mobile apps. I’ve been following this company for three years now, and I think they make the most elegant photo apps available for tablets and smartphones, including the marquee Fotopedia Heritage and National Parks apps and the more self-contained travelogues Above France, Dreams of Burma, Memory of Colors, North Korea, and Paris.

Today Fotopedia is announcing some big news—the company is branching out beyond its online presence and its one-off mobile apps to introduce a tablet-based photo magazine within the travel section of Flipboard, the popular social media reader for the Apple iPad. Starting today, Flipboard users can add the Fotopedia magazine to their favorites list and explore photo stories consisting of a series of images and captions on a single theme. The company plans to update the magazine with new images several times a day, drawing from its database of images contributed by the community of 30,000 professional, semi-pro, and amateur Fotopedia members.

With the Fotopedia magazine on Flipboard “the goal is to push the stories everywhere, so that we extend our ecosystem in a huge way,” says Jean-Marie Hullot, the Apple veteran who founded Fotonauts in 2006. “I think we are the only one in the industry equipped to deal with thousands of pictures, absorb them, make sense of them, curate them, give them the right structure, and distribute the product.” Even as it makes its Flipboard debut, the company is rolling out other publishing and business-model changes designed to make the venture-funded startup into “a photo platform for the 21st century,” in Hullot’s words...."

Read more...

INDUSTRY ALERT: World-class digital storytelling talent head to Australia for Multi-platform Clinic

Friday 23 September 2011

Screen Australia is thrilled to announce the mentors for its upcoming Digital Ignition Multi-platform Clinic, including renowned pioneer Lance Weiler (US) on his first trip to Australia, whom WIRED magazine named "one of 25 people helping to reinvent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood".

The team of mentors will join StoryLabs director Gary Hayes for a five-day residential workshop running 21–25 November in the New South Wales Southern Highlands. The purpose of the clinic is to enable selected teams to develop a multi-platform production strategy and roadmap for their experiential film, television, interactive or game project.

Other mentors include Matt Costello (US), writer of ground-breaking and award-winning novels, games and television; writer and producer David Varela (UK); and story executive, writer and producer Neil Richards (UK). Laurel Papworth, one of Australia's leading social media experts; Jennifer Wilson, Director of the multi-platform media company, The Project Factory; and creative director, producer, visual and new media artist and curator, Anthea Foyer (Canada), will also join the mentoring team.

Applications to the Digital Ignition Multi-platform Clinic close on Friday 30 September. Guidelines and application details are available on the Screen Australia website.

Worth Considering: How Many Slaves Are Working For You? | Excerpt via Fast Company

How Many Slaves Are Working For You?

BY Ariel SchwartzThu Sep 22, 2011
A new website and mobile app looks at your purchases and determines the amount of forced labor that's gone into everything you own. The number may surprise you.

It's not easy to be a socially responsible consumer. Even if you buy mostly local products and diligently keep track of corporate environmental footprints, you may still be leaving a trail of slaves in your wake. After all, who do you think is digging up the minerals in your smartphone or picking the cotton for your T-shirts? Slavery Footprint, a new website and mobile app that launched today (the 149th anniversary of the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation) can tell you approximately how many slaves have pitched in to make the goods you enjoy on a daily basis.