Every week, people across the globe spend 3 billion hours playing video games, but that isn’t enough for Jane McGonigal. She says video games can help solve some of the world’s biggest problems — and we really should be playing more.
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/11/135248010/how-to-save-the-world-one-video-game-at-a-time
Can problems like poverty and climate change by fixed through games? Visionary game designer Jane McGonigal thinks they can. With more than 174 million gamers in the United States, McGonigal explores how we can save the world through the power of gaming. McGonigal is helping pioneer the fasting-growing genre of games that turns gameplay to achieve socially positive outcomes.
This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on January 24, 2011.
Jane McGonigal is the director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California. She has created and deployed games and missions in more than 30 countries on six continents. She specializes in games that help gamers enjoy their real lives more — and games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, through planetary-scale collaboration.
McGonigal is the author of the newly released book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.
It is possible that there are many other universes that exist parallel to our universe. Theoretical physicist Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, explains how that’s possible in the new book, The Hidden Reality.
Famed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and theoretical physicist Brian Greene dissect time as we know it. What is the smallest unit of time, and what does it look like? For starters, you should stop looking at the clock, and start looking at the universe.
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Media/PodcastDetail.aspx?cid=f3f02313-c697-49da-b298-9b00f2e3d541
Jonathan Lethem has created an alternate NY City circa 2004, with astronauts lost in space, aging child stars and a tiger stalking the Upper East Side. Chuck Klosterman reexamines the Unabomber’s Manifesto and thinks there are some interesting ideas in his writing. V. Vale is republishing author J. G. Ballard, considered a science fiction writer, but self-described as "picturing the psychology of the future." Brent Silby describes a view that suggests that our ‘reality’ is a simulation being run in a massive computer.
Fresh from signing a £1m deal with Gollancz, the science fiction author Alastair Reynolds has penned a story for the Guardian which follows a new recruit sent out to battle in an interstellar war.
Nineteen years after his first short story appeared, and nine years after the first of his eight novels was published, Scales is Reynolds’ first foray into militaristic SF. In it, he explores the transformations war imposes on soldiers as his hero Nico’s mission evolves into something stranger than he could have possibly imagined.
Reynolds is best-known for his mastery of space opera – the SF sub-genre in which the stakes are high and the aliens deadly – but, after 16 years working for the European Space Agency, he brings a scientist’s rigour to the genre’s high drama.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jun/19/alastair-reynolds-scales-short-story
Where is the world of the web taking us and how far down the track of augmented reality are we? And, come to think of it, what is augmented reality?
From http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2009/2695136.htm
Tagged with book:author=john allsopp web technology virtual reality vr
Sir Roger Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and is the best-selling author of The Emperor’s New Mind. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, most notably the Wolf Prize in physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their "development of the theory of general relativity, in which they have shown the necessity for cosmological singularities and have elucidated the physics of black holes… enlarging our understanding of the origin and possible fate of the Universe." Penrose was knighted in 1994 and currently lives in Oxford, England.