Is it possible for humanity to consciously direct our own evolution and if so can we evolve to be better, smarter and faster? Can we evolve ourselves to be able to sustain an utopic society?
There have been studies done of the effects of decentralized social networks in terms of geopolitics and global civil society, however not as much work has been done on the analysis of the content of the citizen media for the purposes of breaking through imagined geographies. As of 2010, BlogPulse reports that there are more than 144 million blog sites. Because the the interconnected nature of blogs (bloggers will often link to posts in other blogs) a hierarchy of blogs develops, with a trickle up effect of opinion from smaller blogs up toward bigger blogs with more readership (Drezner, D, & Farrell, H. 2004). The blog hierarchy aggregates public opinion (at least the opinion of the online public) and presents it to the rest of the world. The opinions may be biased, one-sided and ignorant, however, they are reflecting of a side of societies that before now has gone unheard or has been repressed.
Our goal for TiNZ was to create a simple, but addicting game that played off of old-fashioned handheld and vintage arcade games, but utilized newer technology that allowed for a more modern feel and the implementation of more exciting features. We succeeded in creating a challenging game that takes the user's movements as inputs via an accelerometer to move the player on the board, which consists of a small 8x8 RGB LED matrix with a seven-segment display showing the timer and score. A piezo is also included to produce different sounds for specific actions in the game. These components contribute to a gaming experience that is stimulating both tactilely, visually and aurally. The game design also makes the game easy to reprogram to include more levels and additional features.
When Google acquired SketchUp in 2006, they announced a competition for college students across the nation to model their campus in 3D using SketchUp, and then to geolocate the buildings in Google Earth. Seven winning teams would then be invited to a three day SketchUp seminar at Google Headquarters in Palo Alto and their models added to the official buildings layer in the Google Earth database. In a span of about 2 months, I helped lead a team of 10 individuals who collectively took over 2000 photographs and modeled over 130 buildings. On the day of the submission deadline, we submitted a complete model of the entire Dartmouth campus. A month later, among 350 teams, we were announced as one of the winners.