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Saturday, September 24, 2005 |
Robin, best ever, on 'Many Young Women'.
Must must read follow-up by Slate's Jack Shafer to the NYTimes bogus trend story earlier this week: "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood" based on a specious, unscientific survey of just over 100 Yale girls where even the so-called "data" was misinterpreted and extrapolated all over the Ivies and to educated working women in general. (see my previous posts)
Turns out the writer Louise Story, not a Times staff reporter but an intern, was herself a '03 Yale grad. This article came out of her masters project at Columbia Journalism School. Shafer unearthed some of the leading questions she sent; her revision of the questions mid-way through the survey; her continued use of earlier responses which should have been dumped. And the general shrug the Times gave to foisting this piece of drek on readers as an opinion survey. [Apparently enough readers complained about the methodology that Story later had to write a separate article explaining how she went about the survey.]
Moreover, the Times has no institutional memory, having printed news of the exact same "trend" in a 1980 article: "Many Young Women Now Say They'd Pick Family Over Career." In a wonderful flourish, Shafer went so far as to track down the young woman featured in the lead anecdote of that article to see what became of her:
One criticism of Story's article is that college students are poor predictors of what sorts of adults become. To test this idea I conducted some purely anecdotal research of my own: I Googled the lead character of the 1980 New York Times story, Mary Anne Citrino. Within minutes, I reached her at her New York City office at the Blackstone Group, an investment and advisory group, where she is a senior managing director.
Citrino laughed at this week's Times story when she read it, recalling her role in the similarly squishy Times story from a generation ago. She says the Times reporter misrepresented what she said, attributing to her sentiments that were "the exact opposite of what I meant."
"I never wanted to be a full-time mother," says Citrino. She says she was considered the most gung-ho career woman among her classmates, never stopped working after finishing school, has three children, and put in 20 years at Morgan Stanley before joining Blackstone a year ago.
"I never even considered giving up my career," Citrino says.
But that's just one anecdote, mind you.
[Girl in the Locker Room!]
10:02:09 PM 
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A Generation of Game Boys, Girls. A growing number of universities and design schools around the country are offering degrees in video game design. The idea may sound crazy to some, but the schools say a burgeoning industry must be fed. [Wired News]
10:01:48 PM
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Warcraft Plague Runs Amok. Players in the popular online game find themselves fighting an unstoppable virtual virus. From the Wired News blog Gadgeteer. [Wired News]
10:00:49 PM
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Virtual Plague.
 World of Warcraft is the most popular massively-multiplayer online game in the US and Europe, and is rising quickly in Asia. We've mentioned WoW (as it's usually called) before, and I play occasionally. It's by no means the most advanced game in terms of graphics or underlying technology, but the designers have done a good job of building something that's both easy and fun to play. But they've managed something else, something less expected: emergent phenomena.
A recent patch added a new region to the world of Azeroth, a region where players must fight the troll god of blood, Hakkar. One of the effects in the fight is a "disease" that does persistent damage and -- more importantly -- can be passed from an "infected" player to any other nearby characters. It was a nasty but seemingly straightforward effect. But then things got weird:
The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the general population including npcs [non-player characters, controlled by the computer]... Some servers have gotten so bad that you can't go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). GM's [game managers] even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarantine and infecting other players.
Suddenly the virtual world, which had largely been viewed by players in utilitarian ways (does this town have an auction house or bank? Can I get or complete quests here?), started to take on unexpected -- but surprisingly compelling -- mythic aspects. One of the main cities, Ironforge, became a plague-ridden ghost town, avoided by all but the most powerful characters; roving bands of infected players would seek out "clean" areas in the enemy kingdom to attack, with the main weapon no longer fireballs and battleaxes but disease. Locations that used to be considered "safe" from outside attack became deadly, not just from enemy action but from the environment itself.
On one level, this was simply an example of game players behaving in a way that the game designers had not anticipated (in this case, leaving the battle with the blood god while still suffering from the disease). But the overall reaction of players wasn't to curse the designers or shun those who had "exploited" a game function, but to embrace this event as a surprising, emergent change to the world. For all of the celebration of massively-multiplayer games as being dynamic because one's allies and opponents are other people, the settings themselves are notoriously static. Quests are run over and over again, as friends help each other complete them. "Unique" monsters are killed over and over again, respawning in the same location. You can even hit websites detailing exactly how to complete various tasks, because they're always the same each time they're done.
There's a lesson here for those who design virtual worlds: look for ways in which the world itself can change in meaningful ways, not just through scripted events, but through the non-obvious combination of dynamic interactions between players and the environment. The virtual plague that came to Azeroth demonstrated that game players have become sophisticated enough to see such unexpected changes not as the system "breaking," but as ways in which the virtual world could lose its predictability.
We may be on the brink of a new era of virtual worlds, brought to us by an unexpected epidemic.
(Image cut from a series by NecroRogicon at Flickr)
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
10:00:14 PM
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Is "open source" the new "low carb"?.
Wired News has a story about Adcandy.com, an online company that solicits volunteers to create ad and slogan ideas, then packages them to sell to corporations. For the most part Adcandy works by way of unofficial contests. A Coca-Cola contest, for example, challenges amateurs to create Coke ads but doesn't have Coke's endorsement; rather, Adcandy launched the effort in the hopes of getting Coke to buy the entry data. On one hand, what Adcandy is trying to do is pull off a kind of legal shell game. People often come up with ideas for ad campaigns and submit them to...
[Stay Free! Daily]
9:50:36 PM
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Iranian Revolutionaries in France. NYT: Exiled Iranians Try to Foment Revolution From France Shades of 1979! MARYAM RAJAVI, a wide-eyed woman who goes by the title president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran … [lives in] … The sleepy town of Auvers-sur-Oise, 20 miles northwest of Paris, … now home to an almost cult-like [...] [The Politburo Diktat]
9:49:35 PM
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[TS] The Education Gap. As the information age matures, a new sort of stratification is setting in, between those with higher education and those without. By DAVID BROOKS. [NYT > Opinion]
9:47:00 PM
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