Month: March 2014

TradeCity: A Game That Shows You Your Own City

- Adam Clare

TradeCity

TradeCity: Toronto is a new expeirmental art game made by Golboo Amani that begins April 1st (no fooling’) and runs to the 12th. The game is set in Toronto and you need to physically traverse the city to play the game. TradeCity will expose players to really cool organizations in the city that they may have previously been unaware of.

I’ve had the chance to help Golboo on this project as an advisor so it’s really exciting to see the game about to start. You should sign up soon as space is limited and it looks like it’s going to be a some bizarre fun!

TradeCity: Toronto beta is a live reality game that takes place from April 1st to 12th 2014, throughout Metro Toronto. TradeCity is an experimental art project by Toronto-based artist Golboo Amani. Amani has partnered up with various co-operative communities to design an exciting game that is both fun and challenging!

TradeCity:Toronto is an adventure based game that explores Toronto by asking Players to compete in site-specific as well as virtual challenges. There are dozens of chances to win prizes by demonstrating your gaming skills!

To play you must register in person on April 1, 2014 from 7pm to 9pm at TradeCity: Toronto beta Headquarters, University of Toronto Art Centre, 15 King’s College Circle. Players can register as a team or as individual players. You must be 18 years or older to play.

Registration is FREE! For more information visit tradecitygame.com.

Originally posted on Reality is a Game.

Smart People Trust Others

- Adam Clare

Oxford University researchers have concluded that the more intelligent a person is the more likely they are to trust other people. This is assumed to be the case because smarter people have a better at determining what sort of people they want to be around and self-select to be around people who can indeed be trusted. The study also points out the benefits of trust for society at large (including not intelligent people).

The Oxford researchers found, however, that the links between trust and health, and between trust and happiness, are not explained by intelligence. For example, individuals who trust others might have only reported better health and greater happiness because they were more intelligent. But this turns out not to be the case. The finding confirms that trust is a valuable resource for an individual, and is not simply a proxy for intelligence.

Read more.

New Research: Brains Do Heal Themselves

- Adam Clare

After a traumatic brain injury, it sometimes happens that the brain can repair itself, building new brain cells to replace damaged ones. But the repair doesn’t happen quickly enough to allow recovery from degenerative conditions like motor neuron disease (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS). Siddharthan Chandran walks through some new techniques using special stem cells that could allow the damaged brain to rebuild faster.

A Billboard That Finally Has a Reason to Exist: Free Water

- Adam Clare

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In Lima, Peru, there is a new billboard that is selling an idea by providing free water to the local population. Water access is an issue in the area for a variety of reasons which impacts poverty and other water-related issues in the area. A local engineering school wanted to show potential new students what impact they can have on their country and chose to make a billboard a functional piece of infrastructure with simple engineering.

Usually when billboards are mentioned on this site it’s because they are being banned or taxed more to fund city beautification projects. It’s nice to be able to show a billboard that does something out of the ordinary to improve people’s lives.

“We wanted future students to see how engineers can also solve social needs in daily basis kinds of situations,” said Alejandro Aponte, creative director at Mayo DraftFCB.

The city’s residents could certainly use the help. According to a 2011 The Independent piece ominously titled “The desert city in serious danger of running dry,” about 1.2 million residents of Lima lack running water entirely, depending on unregulated private-company water trucks to deliver the goods — companies that charge up to 30 soles (US $10) per cubic meter of H2O, or as The Independent notes, 20 times what more well-off residents pay for their tapwater.

Read more here.

Thanks to Kathryn!

Inject More Serendipity Into Your Online Adventures

- Adam Clare

Not Recommended For You is a new website that is a reaction to all the other websites that recommend content based on what you do. Google tailors your search results so they are different than your friend’s and other websites track what you do on their sites to drive you to click more. Not Recommended For You is the opposite of that, it’s like walking through the library and discovering random books.

We’re big fans of the Internet, but not always the biggest fans of its recommendations. Our browsing history – what we’ve clicked, liked, watched or listened to – is turned into “Recommended For You’s” by smart algorithms. “Not Recommended For You” is a collection of video recommendations by people across the globe answering the question “What would you recommend, if you could recommend anything at all, to someone you don’t know?”.

The answers aren’t “algorithm smart” or even recommended specifically for you. But, they feel personal and turned out more unpredictable than we could imagine, ranging from practical recommendations like “try to live like a siamese twin for a week” or “choose small bad looking apples for the perfect apple pie” to motivational recommendations like “look up (…) if you can see the sky there’s always something to strive for”. Now, we’re turning it into a collaborative project by inviting people online to share their recommendations on our site.

Check out Not Recommended For You.

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