304 research outputs found
Generation of power: economic, social and environmental
No full text6 p.Paper written by John Magnuson in the fall semester 2008 at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls for Dr. Greta Gaard's English 228 class. In this paper, the author discusses how the generation of energy by hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants and oil refineries results in changes to the sociological, ecological and economic interactions between humans, animals and the environment
Game Poems
No full textScholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols.
This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis.
“Everyone who loves the true power of games will benefit from the treasure trove of insights in Game Poems.” — Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design
“Magnuson shines a sensitive and incisive light on small, often moving, videogames.” — D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Professor of Digital Media, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence, MIT
“[Game Poems] tells a new story about games— that games can be lyrical, beautiful, emotionally challenging—to inspire creators and critics alike.” —Noah Wardrip-Fruin, author of How Pac-Man Eats
“Even as the news swells with impending doom for creativity, writing, and text itself, this literate and crafty book pursues poetry not through implacable algorithms but in concrete and personal play. It should be an indispensable guide for anyone who aims to maintain the true, human promise of technical poetics.”—Stuart Moulthrop, coauthor of Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives
“For far too long videogames have flourished – and commanded both capital and attention – in a kind of counterculture that they seem to have created as if ex nihilo for themselves and their players. But we are these players, and their culture has always been integrated with all of our own. In this evenhanded artist-scholar’s ars poetica Jordan Magnuson respects the material cultural specificity of videogames while regarding them through the ‘lens of poetry’ in order to discover – and help create – a practice and an art of Game Poems within the wider field. Magnuson formally, int(erv)entionally embraces this art as lyrically poetic.”—John Cayley, Brown University
“In Game Poems, Magnuson listens carefully to videogames, and hears them speak to questions of art, language, and meaning that connect our written past to our software future. Read this book and you will hear it too.”—Frank Lantz, Director, NYU Game Center
“Jordan Magnuson has created a work that ties together the worlds of poetry and videogames in a deep and enlightening way. For those of us who care about the potential of poetic games, Jordan greatly improves the language of how we talk about them and expands our ability to see what this unique form can become. This is one of my favorite books on game design and I apologize in advance to those whom I will end up cornering and not being able to stop talking to about it.”—Benjamin Ellinger, Game Design Program Director, DigiPen Institute of Technology
“A groundbreaking and accessible book that helps us think about games as poems. With patient tenacity, Magnuson teases out what he felt for years as he engaged in his own practice of making videogames. His mission to help us apply a ‘lyric reading’ to games so that our engagement with, and appreciation of, games can be enhanced feels deeply personal. Drawing from a wide range of games and computational media scholars, poetry scholars, game creators, and poets, Magnuson provides a rigorous, balanced, and unique interdisciplinary contribution. A must-read for videogame scholars, practicing game makers, and anyone interested in the potential of ‘game poems.’”—Susana Ruiz, University of California, Santa Cruz
“This book tenaciously wrenches videogame hermeneutics from the insatiable maws of rhetoric and narratology—to the cheers of poets everywhere. In elucidating the lyric characteristics of the ""game poem,"" Magnuson demonstrates not just that poetry is a useful lens for understanding videogames, but also that videogames can be a useful lens for understanding poetry. A rewarding text for scholars, game designers, poets, and anyone in between.”—Allison Parrish, Interactive Telecommunications Program and Interactive Media Arts, NYU
“A concise, passionate articulation - and defense! - of an artistic space between poems and videogames. If game scholars wish to prove that they are not engaged merely in an apologetics for violent pornography, they need only to teach this book.”—Chris Bateman, author of Imaginary Games and 21st Century Game Design
“I feel I've found a kindred spirit in Jordan Magnuson and his practical recommendations for creating distilled, compelling, personal videogames – throw out the conventions of game design one at a time? Yes, please! The revelation for me in this book, however, is the heat and power of the language of poets and poetry brought close to videogame design. There's much in here worth pursuing to kindle the fires of new and exciting videogame poems, and Jordan is a capable and delightfully humble guide.”—Pippin Barr, author of How to Play a Video Game and The Stuff Games Are Made Of
“With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson lays to rest any last vestige of the notion that the implicit limits of games are as ‘entertainment products’. By taking games seriously as successors of the lyric poetry tradition, he opens up new avenues for how game designers can think about what they do, how critical game theorists can approach their many-faceted object of study, and how players can more fully engage with videogames.”—Soraya Murray, author of On Video Games
“Game Poems shines an important light on a neglected area of videogame theory and provides unique guidance for those interested in exploring the poetic potential of videogames.”—Jenova Chen, designer of Flow, Flower, Journey, and Sky: Children of the Light
“Popular frameworks for video game scholarship consistently fail to account for the most avant-garde and affective works of interactive art. With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson provides not only a lens to understand these diverse and important titles but also a guide to constructing the next generation of personal and incisive games. With numerous examples from decades of experimental games, including Magnuson's own minimalist and insightful work, this book is an excellent introduction to the form for neophytes as well as finally providing words to describe a movement that many experienced game poets previously understood only intuitively.”—Gregory Avery-Weir, creator of The Majesty of Colors and Looming
“Jordan Magnuson is one of a surprisingly small group of artists who see in the technology of videogames a versatile medium capable of expressing much more than conventional games.”—Michaël Samyn, co-founder, Tale of Tales; co-creator of Sunset, The Graveyard, and The Path
“So much has been written about what games are, and yet there’s always a new way of thinking about them. In Jordan Magnuson’s Game Poems we discover that games are also a lyrical form of art; that games can be understood as poetry, and that the making games as poetry creates new modes of artistic expression. Jordan Magnuson’s book is a fascinating exploration of games as poetry, and the poetry of play.”—Miguel Sicart, author of Play Matters, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Playing Software
“In Game Poems, I found a new perspective on the kind of videogames that are dearest to me: short, personal, poetic games. By looking at games through the lens of lyric poetry, Jordan Magnuson puts into focus the workings of that mysterious hodgepodge of audio, visuals, and interactivity: the language of videogames. Both experienced and novice game makers will find approachable, practical advice on the craft of videogames. And anyone who plays short games will find new ways of appreciating and talking about them. I know I will be returning to it for inspiration when making my own small games!”—Adam Le Doux, creator of Bitsy
“As a creator and researcher, Jordan Magnuson has been able to demonstrate through the utmost visual simplicity, by enhancing basic geometric forms, the empathetic capacity of the videogame medium. Game Poems explores this idea and the reconfiguration of the videogame beyond its ludic component, highlighting the artistic and poetic potential of games.”—Antonio César Moreno Cantano, University Complutense of Madrid
“Poems ask us to slow down, pay attention, and take the time to appreciate our experiences. Emerging from Magnuson's need to find ways to talk about his own creative practice, this book is all about discovering ways to do this with videogames. Magnuson explores what it means to view videogames as poetry, and provides insight, as a practitioner, on how to make game poems that enable and encourage this type of reflection. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from literature and philosophy to game studies and game design, this book covers a lot of material, but always remains grounded in concrete examples and solid theory. The book ends with a call to “go make some game poems!” After reading the book, I was keen to do exactly that. I urge you to do the same!”—Alex Mitchell, National University of Singapore
“To many, poetry is a dying – or dead – art form. Few people sit down at night to open their favorite poet’s chapbook with the latest streaming service at hand or their favorite videogame console sitting nearby. Spectacle seems to be the cultural norm, and this can be no more evident than in videogames: when the latest and greatest offers 60+ hours of spine-tingling excitement, why would someone want to launch a smaller-form game about expressions such as love, death, loneliness, or even God? But, as Jordan Magnuson, in his new book Games Poems, shows, poems have always been an integral piece of forming human culture. Poems have the ability to get right to the heart of the matter and, in fact, pierce the heart of the reader. Poems can be a form of cultural resistance, and even launch revolutions. Magnuson’s book highlights what it means to use the medium of game design as poetry. Magnuson presents several examples of the intricacies of poetry in general, as well as work that fuses the ideals of poetry with game design. Magnuson succinctly examines how the imagination, rhythm, intensity, style – and brevity – of poetry can enlighten the game design process in order to form possibility spaces within videogames that are pointed and powerful.”—Tim Samoff, Games and Interactive Media Program Director, Azusa Pacific University
Boosting family income to promote child development
No full textFamilies who live in poverty face disadvantages that can hinder their children's development in many ways, write Greg Duncan, Katherine Magnuson, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. As they struggle to get by economically, and as they cope with substandard housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and inadequate schools, poor families experience more stress in their daily lives than more affluent families do, with a host of psychological and developmental consequences. Poor families also lack the resources to invest in things like high-quality child care and enriched learning experiences that give more affluent children a leg up. Often, poor parents also lack the time that wealthier parents have to invest in their children, because poor parents are more likely to be raising children alone or to work nonstandard hours and have inflexible work schedules. Can increasing poor parents' incomes, independent of any other sort of assistance, help their children succeed in school and in life? The theoretical case is strong, and Duncan, Magnuson, and Votruba-Drzal find solid evidence that the answer is yes-children from poor families that see a boost in income do better in school and complete more years of schooling, for example. But if boosting poor parents' incomes can help their children, a crucial question remains: Does it matter when in a child's life the additional income appears? Developmental neurobiology strongly suggests that increased income should have the greatest effect during children's early years, when their brains and other systems are developing rapidly, though we need more evidence to prove this conclusively. The authors offer examples of how policy makers could incorporate the findings they present to create more effective programs for families living in poverty. And they conclude with a warning: if a boost in income can help poor children, then a drop in income-for example, through cuts to social safety net programs like food stamps-can surely harm them
Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder and Other True Stories from the Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns\u3c/i\u3e By Stew Magnuson
No full textJournalists of late have often been at the vanguard of recent history, using their particular research methodology, which is more comfortable with the elusive nature of the near past, to beat historians to the punch. This has been particularly true of American Indian history .. Part-time journalist Peter Matthiessen was among the first to tackle the history of tumult on Pine Ridge Reservation during the 1970s, including the Dick Wilson presidency, the siege of Wounded Knee, and the Leonard Peltier trials. Journalist-turned-literary-scholar Robert Allen Warrior and journalist Paul Chaat Smith were quick to examine the Red Power era more broadly, including the affairs of Pine Ridge. More recently, journalist Steve Hendricks researched the FBI\u27s role in Indian country during that same period. Now journalist Stew Magnuson has taken on one of the pivotal events of the Red Power era in general and the American Indian Movement and Pine Ridge in particular: the 1972 fatal beating of Oglala Lakota Raymond Yellow Thunder by a band of drunken whites in the border town of Gordon, Nebraska.
Magnuson\u27s goal is twofold: he seeks to craft an authoritative and thorough account of the Yellow Thunder killing and its aftermath, all the while composing a history of the often troubled, sometimes intimate relations between Lakotas and white border town residents that stretches from the earliest days of the reservation to modern times. The author succeeds on both counts, but it is in his rendering of the Yellow Thunder affair that he truly excels. In addition to plumbing archival materials, Magnuson relied upon his journalistic skills to conduct personal interviews of key players in the event. In building his case, Magnuson does not hold back in detailing the wanton brutality of the Yellow Thunder affair, yet he manages to avoid getting trapped by the dialectic that so often shapes discussions of 1970s Pine Ridge
Oral History Project World War II Years, 1941-1946 - Harry Magnuson
No full textHarry Magnuson was born 17 October 1923 in Minneapolis, one of five children. He grew up there, and graduated in January 1943 from West High School. Immediately after graduation, Harry enlisted in the US Army Air Corps. In the Air Corps, Harry was trained as a waist gunner on B-29 Superfortress four-engine heavy bombers. Upon completion of training, he was assigned to the 39th Bomb Squadron, 6th Bomb Group, 313th Bomb Wing, 20th Air Force, and sent to the island of Tinian, in the Pacific. Missions were flown from here to Japan. On the night of 25-26 May 1945, during an incendiary bombing raid over Tokyo, Harry\u27s plane, the B-29 Tokyo Trolley, was shot down. Harry parachuted out; he was the only crew member to survive. Harry was captured soon after he landed, blindfolded and beaten, then taken to a nearby detention facility of the Japanese police, the Kempeitai. Over the next three months, until the end of the war in August 1945, Harry and scores of other captured B-29 crew members were imprisoned at this facility in small cells, where they endured interrogations, physical and mental torture, sickness, and starvation diets. They were kept separate from other POWs, for the Japanese did not consider them normal military prisoners but rather, because of the nature of their missions against civilian targets, war criminals and thus not deserving of human treatment. Only in mid-August 1945 were Harry and the other surviving internees from this prison taken to a regular POW camp, Camp Omori, which soon thereafter was liberated by American forces. Harry spent many months in hospitals recovering from his ordeal, finally being discharged in January 1946. Again a civilian, Harry was reunited with his wife Elizabeth (married June 1944) and helped to raise three children. He spent his working career in retail clothing sales, in Minneapolis, and also real estate, retiring in 1985
Characterization of the Microbial Community and Activity of Nitrate-Reducing, Benzene-Degrading Enrichment Cultures
No full textBenzene is a natural component of crude oil. It is highly toxic, carcinogenic, and persistent contaminant. This work studied anaerobic benzene-degrading, nitrate-reducing enrichment cultures that were previously cultivated for over twenty years. Amplicon sequencing of nitrate-reducing cultures amended with benzene and benzene degradation intermediates provided evidence for a process by which Peptococcaceae is responsible for initial substitution of the benzene ring, followed by further degradation by Azoarcus. A qPCR study found an increase in copy number of Peptococcaceae and the abcA subunit of a putative anaerobic benzene carboxylase (Abc) associated with Peptococcaceae was correlated with benzene degradation. Further study of an Azoarcus-enrichment culture found that it was capable of degrading the BTEX compounds, but only under limited conditions. Finally, a metagenome was assembled for the benzene-degrading, nitrate-reducing culture. Annotation of metatranscriptome data to this metagenome provided further evidence for carboxylation of the benzene ring by Peptococcaceae.M.A.S
Characterization of the Microbial Community and Activity of Nitrate-Reducing, Benzene-Degrading Enrichment Cultures
No full textBenzene is a natural component of crude oil. It is highly toxic, carcinogenic, and persistent contaminant. This work studied anaerobic benzene-degrading, nitrate-reducing enrichment cultures that were previously cultivated for over twenty years. Amplicon sequencing of nitrate-reducing cultures amended with benzene and benzene degradation intermediates provided evidence for a process by which Peptococcaceae is responsible for initial substitution of the benzene ring, followed by further degradation by Azoarcus. A qPCR study found an increase in copy number of Peptococcaceae and the abcA subunit of a putative anaerobic benzene carboxylase (Abc) associated with Peptococcaceae was correlated with benzene degradation. Further study of an Azoarcus-enrichment culture found that it was capable of degrading the BTEX compounds, but only under limited conditions. Finally, a metagenome was assembled for the benzene-degrading, nitrate-reducing culture. Annotation of metatranscriptome data to this metagenome provided further evidence for carboxylation of the benzene ring by Peptococcaceae.M.A.S
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It\u27s Time to Remove the \u27Mossified\u27 Procedures for FTC Rulemaking
No full textThis article, prepared for The George Washington Law Review’s Symposium “The FTC at 100,” addresses the FTC’s rulemaking process — specifically the quasi-adjudicative process mandated by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty — Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975 and the additional procedures added by the Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act of 1980 (collectively called the “Magnuson-Moss Procedures”). The article compares how long it took the FTC to complete or terminate the rulemakings it undertook under the Magnuson-Moss Procedures (including amendments to previously issued rules) with the amount of time it took the FTC to issue rules under the “regular” Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) notice-and-comment rulemaking process. This latter category includes rules now on the books that were either issued before the Magnuson-Moss Procedures, or after it — with special authorization from Congress. As the title indicates, the main finding is that the Magnuson-Moss Procedures take significantly longer — leading the author to advocate for allowing the FTC to use APA procedures, like most agencies, in its rulemaking while giving it the discretion to use procedures in addition to notice and comment when desirable
It\u27s Time to Remove the \u27Mossified\u27 Procedures for FTC Rulemaking
No full textThis article, prepared for The George Washington Law Review’s Symposium “The FTC at 100,” addresses the FTC’s rulemaking process — specifically the quasi-adjudicative process mandated by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty — Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975 and the additional procedures added by the Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act of 1980 (collectively called the “Magnuson-Moss Procedures”). The article compares how long it took the FTC to complete or terminate the rulemakings it undertook under the Magnuson-Moss Procedures (including amendments to previously issued rules) with the amount of time it took the FTC to issue rules under the “regular” Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) notice-and-comment rulemaking process. This latter category includes rules now on the books that were either issued before the Magnuson-Moss Procedures, or after it — with special authorization from Congress. As the title indicates, the main finding is that the Magnuson-Moss Procedures take significantly longer — leading the author to advocate for allowing the FTC to use APA procedures, like most agencies, in its rulemaking while giving it the discretion to use procedures in addition to notice and comment when desirable
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