Carnegie Mellon University’s decision to implant video-game characters in a technology-training program geared toward high-school students might seem, on first glance, like a savvy PR move. But the institution has good reason to hope that avatars from The Sims will pique young women’s interest in information technology.
The Sims is rare among video games in that more than half of the people who play it are women, according to Electronic Arts, the game’s maker. That makes the program tantalizing to IT-department deans — most of whom have struggled to cut through the oft-violent, oft-nerdy gaming culture that, experts say, dissuades women from pursuing computer-science degrees. (The New York Times)
16 Responses to A Game to End IT’s Gender Gap?
mbelvadi - February 3, 2012 at 7:48 am
Huh, was this Lingua Franca or ProfHacker?
I’m a big fan of backups (I preach them to my colleagues ad nauseam) but when I see that Lingua Franca blog heading I look forward to something about language, not computers.
Carol Saller - February 3, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Mbelvadi, please don’t be grumpy! Lingua Franca is also about “writing in academe,” after all, and as a copy editor, I tend to focus on the mechanics. And I’m afraid my next post won’t be about language, either: I’m planning to talk about submitting art with a MS for publication.
digiwonk - February 3, 2012 at 2:46 pm
I used to back up on stacks of floppy disks back in the day! What a pain!
Now, since I have a Mac, I back up with their Time Capsule. It is so godawful easy: I set it up once, and now whenever my laptop and I are at home, the laptop and the Time Capsule sort out among themselves, in the background, what needs copying. I literally do nothing, and yet generate hourly-daily-weekly-monthly backups of every file that has had any changes made to it.
That’s nice.
Richard Grayson - February 3, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Art is a language, too.
rsgassle - February 5, 2012 at 7:45 am
I have a computer a. Every document I automatically save to my stick and my computer.
rsgassle - February 5, 2012 at 7:49 am
I’ll try
again. I work at home a lot, so I treat my memory stick as my primary storage
place and my home computer as backup. (Not the one at work any more, since it
seems less secure.) To save time, I save to the correct file on my stick but to
a file called “a-to be filed” on the computer. I also use that in both places
for downloads. It’s fast and so far I have had few problems.
Carol Saller - February 5, 2012 at 9:24 pm
Rsgassle, I hope you don’t leave your memory stick in the computer! Unless you store it in another place, you’re still at risk for theft, fire, mysterious electronic frying, etc. Also, memory sticks don’t last forever. Sometimes they wear out and fail. Take care–
mbelvadi - February 6, 2012 at 10:11 am
I’d like to reinforce the point about the sticks failing. And they fail catastrophically, without warning. As a librarian who spends some hours in a large and busy “information commons”, I frequently see students in tears begging us to help them figure out how to recover their files from their USB sticks which have suddenly failed with no warning, irrecoverably. A memory stick was never engineered to be a primary storage place, but just an ephemeral portable one.
urbanized - February 6, 2012 at 11:57 am
Data can be recovered from USB sticks with software such as Data Rescue so long as the drive is not physically damaged. Most data is not really irrecoverable, but often it’s not worth the trouble. Still, it’s true that despite what manufacturers claim, USB sticks should not be used as a primary storage place or even, for that matter, as a backup drive.
Although data loss is always a possibility, you are least likely to lose files backed up on a “cloud” storage service such as dropbox, skydrive, etc. Time Machine and other consumer level backup programs are nice, but they shouldn’t be the only backup option you use. Hard drives are prone to corruption and failure so in order to replicate the level of security (in terms of data loss) offered by cloud storage services, you’d need to set up a fairly large RAID system. Of course, cloud storage introduces a new set of security concerns. It’s not all flowers and safe files.
urbanized - February 6, 2012 at 11:57 am
Data can be recovered from USB sticks with software such as Data Rescue so long as the drive is not physically damaged. Most data is not really irrecoverable, but often it’s not worth the trouble. Still, it’s true that despite what manufacturers claim, USB sticks should not be used as a primary storage place or even, for that matter, as a backup drive.
Although data loss is always a possibility, you are least likely to lose files backed up on a “cloud” storage service such as dropbox, skydrive, etc. Time Machine and other consumer level backup programs are nice, but they shouldn’t be the only backup option you use. Hard drives are prone to corruption and failure so in order to replicate the level of security (in terms of data loss) offered by cloud storage services, you’d need to set up a fairly large RAID system. Of course, cloud storage introduces a new set of security concerns. It’s not all flowers and safe files.
rogerc47 - February 6, 2012 at 12:18 pm
I’d like to back up Carol’s point. I’d suggest that losing the stick is a good deal worse than having it fry, since if it goes missing on a public computer its contents may be readable by others. I have an acquaintance who is currently being pursued for thousands of dollars by his employer on account of a missing memory stick containing confidential information – this being the cost of shutting the stable door after the horse has gone missing – and with no evidence that the data has been misused, used or even viewed.
rogerc47 - February 6, 2012 at 12:18 pm
I’d like to back up Carol’s point. I’d suggest that losing the stick is a good deal worse than having it fry, since if it goes missing on a public computer its contents may be readable by others. I have an acquaintance who is currently being pursued for thousands of dollars by his employer on account of a missing memory stick containing confidential information – this being the cost of shutting the stable door after the horse has gone missing – and with no evidence that the data has been misused, used or even viewed.
yeidel - February 6, 2012 at 2:11 pm
It’s useful to distinguish between backup for different purposes. If you need to recover a single file due to an “oops” moment, CrashPlan, Dropbox, and Time Machine are very useful (I employ them every day). They even preserve previous versions of files, so if your blunder is (e.g.) deleting two-thirds of a Word document, you can get back to a version before the goof.
However, if your entire hard drive becomes unusable, CrashPlan and Dropbox will still leave you hours of work to reinstall the operating system, applications, and software licenses — and, depending on how you back up, you may never recover preferences, bookmarks, and settings. [As Carol says, sometimes this is a liberating removal of "cruft" , but it's expensive in time.]
A disk-cloning program (I use “Carbon Copy Cloner” on my Mac — free for academics) is an important complement to file-recovery backups, because in case of a disk failure, it lets you simply swap disks and go.
My backup suite includes CrashPlan, Time Machine, and CCC — all automated, simple, and effective.
blueskin - February 6, 2012 at 3:54 pm
Everyone needs to be very clear about the difference between a copy, a backup and an archive.
A copy is often made to a TimeCapsule or USB stick in the same location – it is NOT a backup.
A backup means that you can recover the recent copies of your data from a local catasrophic event such as theft or fire. A backup must be in a dfiferent location. They usually only recover recent changes.
An archive is a dated snapshot of your data and is not overwritten. These are very important for databases. If you corrupt your data and only realise a record is corrupt a year later, a backup is useless as it only recovers the recent corrupt data. You need to be able to look at the data as it was a year ago.
George Grenley - February 8, 2012 at 12:08 pm
Backblaze works very well; is very inexpensive. I recommend it for offsite backups. http://www.backblaze.com. And no, I have no connection with the firm, other than as a user.
George Grenley - February 8, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Blueskin is correct about the definition of copy vs backup vs archive. For most of us, the most-economically painful (and most emotionally painful) thing is to lose work product – the Word file, illustration, etc that we’ve poured hours into. Being able to quickly restore system files, apps, and other things is also good, but if you just make the habit of regularly, or automatically, copying work files to some safe offsite area, as well as an on-site backup like a thumb drive, you cover the critical issue. IMHO. ;-)