Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. – Maya Angelou

Mr. Walker's Classroom Blog

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    If there is one recurring image that defines the cinema of Steven Spielberg, it is The Spielberg Face. Eyes open, staring in wordless wonder in a moment where time stands still. But above all, a child-like surrender in the act of watching, both theirs and ours. It’s as if their total submission to what they are seeing mirrors our own.
    The face tells us that a monumental event is happening; in doing so, it also tells us how we should feel. If Spielberg deserves to be called a master of audience manipulation, then this is his signature stroke. [Fandor]

     

  • Web Designer Wall has this list of Mind Blowing Parallax Scrolling Sites.  Check them out on your phone and your tablet.  Are you taking Web Design, Animation, or Game Programming?  Mind bending!

    Video games and animation often use parallax scrolling technique to create an illusion of depth by moving multiple layers of images at different speed. This technique can also be applied in web design. This post consists a list of mind blowing parallax scrolling sites, design tips, and resource tutorials. If you are considering to start a parallax scrolling site, this is a must read post.

  • By NICK BILTON, NYTimes

    screenshot via Activision

    Modern Warfare 3, the first-person shooter video game, passed $1 billion in sales in just 16 days, according to Activision Blizzard, the game’s distributor. Modern Warfare 2, an earlier installment of the game, took 60 days to reach the same milestone.

    The sales did not just shatter previous video game records, but also surpassed benchmarks for movie sales. The popular 3-D movie “Avatar” took 17 days to reach $1 billion in sales.

    Robert Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, said the increase in sales was a testament to the broader appeal of Modern Warfare as an entertainment experience that was not just for gamers.

    “Modern Warfare 3, and other games by us, have a much broader appeal than they have had in the past, with the social nature of the game offering a different type of interactive experience that has not existed before,” he said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “As the number of new game consoles has expanded, along with the audience, it’s capturing a new audience that in the past has not considered playing video games.”

    Modern Warfare is the ninth game in the Call of Duty series, which first appeared in 2003. It is available on a number of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii.

    Mr. Kotick said he believed the Call of Duty series had been so successful because the video game creators continually focus on creating a better storytelling experience with each new game.

    “Really knowing the taste of your customers is something we do really well; we’ve had so much sustained success with this franchise because we continue to look at what the audience is interested in,” he said. “We continually make sure we are delivering products that have audience appeal.”

    In a press release, Activision noted that movie box office revenues were down 4 percent in 2011, to $9.4 billion, while “the number of people purchasing and participating in gaming is on the rise, with no sign of slowing.”

    “With more than 30 million gamers, the Call of Duty community now exceeds the combined populations of the cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Madrid,” the company boasted in the release.

    It hasn’t been all good news for video games this year. In June, the NPD Group, which tracks domestic sales performance of video games, said video game sales had fallen to $863 million in May, down 23 percent from the same period a year earlier. The drop in sales was partly attributed to the recession, and they have bounced back leading up to the holidays.

     

  • J.R. Eyerman/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

    A drafter at work, 1952.

    By ADAM DAVIDSON, Published: November 23, 2011, NYTimes

    The 2012 presidential election can be seen as offering a choice between two visions of how to return us to this country’s golden age — from roughly 1945 to around 1973 — when working life was most secure for many Americans, particularly white, middle-class men. President Obama said his jobs plan was for people who believed “if you worked hard and played by the rules, you would be rewarded.” Mitt Romney explained his goal was to restore hope for “folks who grew up believing that if they played by the rules . . . they would have the chance to build a good life.” But these days, many workers have lost a near guarantee on a decent wage and benefits — and their careers are likely to have much more volatility (great years; bad years; confusing, mediocre years) than their parents’ ever did. So when did the rules change?

    Deep Thoughts This Week

    1. The economic rules have been changing since the ’70s.

    2. The U.S. produces a large number of workers whose skills aren’t needed.

    3. Inequality is even more rampant than you think.

    4. Time to consider getting a master’s.

    It used to be that if you worked hard, you were guaranteed a certain kind of life. There are reasons success is no longer a straight shot.

    It has been hard to keep track. Over the past four decades, we have experienced the oil embargo, Carter-era malaise and a few recessions. Mixed in were the thrills of the late 1990s and mid-aughts, when it seemed as if you were a sap if you weren’t getting rich or at least trying. But these dramas prevented many of us from realizing that the economic logic was changing fundamentally. Starting in the 1970s, labor was upended by a lot more than just formal government work rules. Increased global trade devastated workers in many industries, especially textiles, apparel, toys, furniture and electronics assembly. Computers and other technological innovations had an arguably greater impact. While factories continue to make more stuff in the United States than ever before, employment in them has collapsed.

    Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

    As a result, the people whose jobs remained valuable in that “Mad Men” office were then freed up to do more valuable things. A talented art director could produce more work more quickly with InDesign. A bright accountant could spend more time thinking of new ways to make and save money, rather than spending endless hours punching numbers into an adding machine. Global trade works much the same way. It’s horrible news for a textile factory worker in North Carolina, but it may be great for a fashion designer in New York.

    A general guideline these days is that people are rewarded when they can do things that take trained judgment and skill — things, in other words, that can’t be done by computers or lower-wage workers in other countries. Money now flows around the world so quickly, and technology changes so fast, that people who thought they were in high demand find themselves uprooted. Many newspaper reporters have learned that their work was subsidized, in part, by classified ads and now can’t survive the rise of Craigslist; computer programmers have found out that some smart young guys in India will do their jobs for much less. Meanwhile, China lends so much money to the United States that mortgage brokers and bond traders can become richer than they ever imagined for a few years and then, just as quickly, become broke and unemployed.

    One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.

    Though it’s no guarantee, a B.A. or some kind of technical training is at least a prerequisite for a decent salary. It’s hard to see any great future for high-school dropouts or high-school graduates with no technical skills. They most often get jobs that require little judgment and minimal training, like stocking shelves, cooking burgers and cleaning offices. Employers generally see these unskilled workers as commodities — one is as good as any other — and thus each worker has very little bargaining power, especially now that unions are weaker. There are about 40 million of these low-skilled people in our work force. They’re vying for jobs that are likely to earn near the minimum wage with few or no benefits, and they have a high chance of being laid off many times in a career.

    Global trade and technology are significant trends, but they’re not laws and policies. The actual rules have also changed notably since the 1970s. Back then, there were all sorts of stabilizers that pushed working-class wages up and kept rich people’s wages lower. The minimum wage, at its pre-1970s peak, was almost 50 percent higher than it is now (inflation adjusted, naturally). Unions were stronger and had more government support. The United States taxed the rich much higher relative to the working class. (The top bracket was taxed at 70 percent in 1978; now it’s 35 percent.) It’s hard to imagine, but regulations largely limited the profitability of banks and kept bankers’ financial compensation low.

    The new rules, combined with the other major changes, have effectively removed both the floor and the ceiling. It’s easier for some to make a lot more money and for others to fall much further behind. That has meant a huge increase in inequality. The top 1 percent of families now makes 26 times the average of the other 99 percent (the ratio was 11 to 1 in 1979). The top 0.1 percent makes 130 times the bottom 99 (up from a 38-to-1 ratio 40 years ago). And the inequality is not just between classes. The average wages of the average American have stayed largely flat for decades, but those averages hide a lot of volatility, as more people find themselves at the extremes of wealth or poverty. A successful plumber who has mastered all the new water-flow sensor technology and pipe-fitting innovations (and is probably in a union) can make more than $100,000 a year, while other plumbers, who just know the basics, could make less than $20,000.

    The increasingly vicious battle between left and right is, at the most basic level, a dispute over how to respond to these new rules. Republicans largely claim that the new rules will make the country richer and, in the long run, will be beneficial to everyone willing to put in the hard work. Few Democrats call for a return to record high taxes and trade barriers — after all, the free flow of cheap goods has helped many, particularly the poor. But many do want a return to the spirit of the old rules, when the government sought to make life more equal, more stable and, for some, less rewarding. The rest of us, meanwhile, should go to school, learn some skills and prepare for a rocky road.

     

  • From the NYTimes, read the original article By , Published: November 28, 2011

    The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight — colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic — shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe’s Photoshop software, the photo retoucher’s magic wand.

    “Fix one thing, then another and pretty soon you end up with Barbie,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth.

    And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.”

    Dr. Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said.

    Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Their work is intended as a technological step to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. Such images, research suggests, contribute to eating disorders and anxiety about body types, especially among young women.

    The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be “hugely important” as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered. He and his wife, Eva Matlins, the founders of a women’s online magazine, Off Our Chests, are trying to gain support for legislation in America. Their proposal, the Self-Esteem Act, would require photos that have been “meaningfully changed” to be labeled.

    “We’re just after truth in advertising and transparency,” Mr. Matlins said. “We’re not trying to demonize Photoshop or prevent creative people from using it. But if a person’s image is drastically altered, there should be a reminder that what you’re seeing is about as true as what you saw in ‘Avatar,’ ” the science-fiction movie with computer-generated actors and visual effects.

    The algorithm developed by Dr. Farid and Mr. Kee statistically measures how much the image of a person’s face and body has been altered. Many of the before-and-after photos for their research were plucked from the Web sites of professional photo retouchers, promoting their skills.

    The algorithm is meant to mimic human perceptions. To do that, hundreds of people were recruited online to compare sets of before-and-after images and to determine the 1-to-5 scale, from minimally altered to starkly changed. The human rankings were used to train the software.

    His tool, Dr. Farid said, would ideally be a vehicle for self-regulation. Information and disclosure, he said, should create incentives that reduce retouching. “Models, for example, might well say, ‘I don’t want to be a 5. I want to be a 1,’ ” he said.

    Yet even without the prod of a new software tool, there is a trend toward Photoshop restraint, said Lesley Jane Seymour, editor in chief of More, a magazine for women over 40.

    Women’s magazine surveys, said Ms. Seymour, a former editor of Marie Claire and Redbook, show that their readers want celebrities to “look great but real.”

    “What’s terrific is that we’re having this discussion,” she said. But readers, she added, have become increasingly sophisticated in understanding that photo retouching is widespread, and the overzealous digital transformations become notorious, with the before-and-after images posted online and ridiculed.

    “Readers aren’t fooled if you really sculpt the images,” Ms. Seymour said. “If you’re a good editor, you don’t go too far these days. If you give someone a face-lift,” she said, adding, “you’re a fool.”