text:
Programming Outside The Cube
I don't quite know why I am writing this, but maybe it's because I spent most of 1997 working in a cubicle. In my current (new) job, I work in an office with natural light, comfortable chairs and music. I am experiencing new levels of productivity.
Programming is a combination of art and science. However, some companies stick their programmers into cubicles. Cubicles lack privacy, are usually subjected to
(and harsh) lighting, provide cramped working areas and generate an overwhelming
Programming is an intense activity that requires extended periods of quietness and concentration. Cubicle environments are noisy and distracting.
Programming often involves brainstorming (whiteboards are historically one of the tools of choice). Cubicles do not support large whiteboards. Going from a remotely placed whiteboard to the cubicle workstation requires copying the contents of the whiteboard onto paper. This is time consuming.
Programming often involves reading books. Books are best read with directed and controlled lighting (reading lamp, natural light over the shoulder, etc). Cubicles offer overhead indirect lighting shared by all. Books are also best read in comfortable chairs. Cubicle chairs are ergonomically designed for workstations (typing on a keyboard and looking at a monitor).
Programming in cubes hinders creativity and productivity.
Take your programmers out of cube environments! Give them offices, or better yet, give them
conducive to creativity. Ask them what their ideal environment would be. Feed them natural light (or if they want to be cultivated like mushrooms, give them a shadowy area). If the business sells software or the bottom line is directly affected by software, it is in their best interest to do everything to make sure that the producer of the software is given an adequate environment in which to produce.
Artists do not work in cubicles, they work in studios. They need space; they need natural light. They need a muse.
Scientists do not work in cubicles, they work in labs. They need equipment; they need whiteboards. They need inspiration.
Actually, many will rabidly demand real (green) blackboards. Possibly ones hung in pairs from chains for swapping to make use of more vertical space.
Programmers should not work in cubicles...
This rant is brought to you by the letter "P".
Also See the
The C3 team works in a single room, maybe 24x48. We have 15 glaring fluorescent lights, no carpet, no windows. We get air on Tuesdays and Fridays. We have four tables with three computers each. Every edge of table is wide enough for two developers to sit there. We have a conference table and about 40 linear feet of whiteboard.
When I designed programmer space for Comshare and Oak Tree, I had single-person offices with big windows and glass facing the hall. And doors.
My computing space at home is an Anthro desk overlooking a view of the lake. Carpet, soft lighting, music at the touch of a button.
With one programming pair, I think we'd be more productive at home than here. With a dozen people ... God love us, I think we're better in this big room. Now, a big room with a window? I could go with that. --
Hmm... Twice during the past few years I've worked on HIGHLY productive teams. In both cases we all worked together in a very large room, with a very large window (that in both cases looked out onto nice views of the beautiful North Carolina piedmont). Sounds like you have something there, Ron...
On a related note... It used to be that
, but unfortunately it isn't any more. --
Re whiteboards and copying from them when they are not in your workspace... I want a whiteboard with a URL. --
Probably something like <
> or <
>, hooked up to a Wiki? (Do an web search for "Electronic Whiteboard" to find other links.)
Someone (I forget who) said, "We put our people in cubicles and then tell them to think outside the box." (
sounds like Dilbert to me. --
) I'm with you all the way in this, Todd. Years ago in another job in another life, I was sent on missions to an affiliate in the Netherlands. I loved going there. Their offices had large windows and were furnished with real furniture, the likes of which you'd love to have in your home. At the home office in the States, we lived in windowless boxes with bad panelling on the walls. I wondered, why is this so? What my Dutch colleagues told me was that there were regulations that mandated a certain area of window space for each office worker. In other words, just as OSHA protects manufacturing and other workers in their workplaces, so did work regulations extend to office environments. One more reason to admire this small and dynamic nation, in my book. Of course, as I sit typing this, I am inside of a cube, sans natural light, sans any resemblance to the natural world. Quite frankly, it sucks big. I can only hope that whoever designs these spaces is confined to them in eternity. --
We put our people in cubicles and then tell them to think outside the box.
Hmm, cubes are boxes, so that essentially means:
We put our people in boxes and then tell them to think outside the box.
OK, that makes more sense, so we have a box, but we are supposed to leave it to think. Cool. I'll be in the park for the next few hours.
Uhm, if you leave before your shift is up, you're fired.
So, I supposed to think outside the box for this job, but I'm not allowed to leave the box to think. How am I supposed to think outside the box.
Damn it, that what your off time is for.
But my off time is supposed to be for me to do my own thing.
Officer, arrest this bourgeois bastard. He is being unconventional. Thinks he's better than the rest of us.
Now, on which side of the box do I think that..?
In the book,
by TraceyKidder
(a very cool documentary the engineering milieu, BTW, although it is hardware rather than software) the founder of
corporation is said to have bragged that he could rip all the cubicles out of a large room and turn the place into a manufacturing floor in a week. A Cube makes you feel like a CogInTheWheel
. --
It sounds like there's a lot of variation. I don't like natural light. I'm sitting here beside a window with the curtain drawn and the electric light on, because I don't like the glare. Microsoft apparently give every programmer his or her own office so that they can work without interruptions, while other people here prefer large, open-plan offices. (Cubicles would be the worst of both worlds?)
I find a handful of things really distracting - a radio is fine, as long as its music rather than dialogue. Static on the radio is intolerable, as is someone else with a walkman. --
Right now, the air vent above my cube is driving me nuts; it's too loud. I left my headphones at home, so I can't listen to music on the radio or on a CD.
A related book:
From the cartoon called
by Dan Piraro, an episode entitled, "Eric Experiences a Disturbing Vision of Veal": A veal calf is looking in on a fellow sitting at a workstation in a cubicle. He says, "We have more in common than you think, Mr. Davis.We both spend our time confined in a little box and sacrifice our lives for the financial gain of others."
A little extreme, perhaps, since no one is holding a gun to my head to do this job (save for economic necessity), but it does strike a nerve, eh? Hence the near-appropriate term for cubes as
. --
Can't help but contribute here (maybe this belongs under
I worked at Trilogy development group in the summer of 1998, and for a brief and horrible period I was taken away from my large office with two glass walls overlooking the Austin river valley and put into a strange gymnasium-sized room in our new building, filled with Hayworth cubicles, along with some fellow interns. Unfortunately for our managers, interns tend to play in the office on weekends a bit more than normal employees, and so it happened that we discovered a whole utility closet full of un-mounted white boards. Within a couple of hours we had constructed "forts" around our cubicles by leaning the boards against the openings in the cube walls, and setting boards on top of the cubes. We had also stolen most of the white board markers from other peoples offices. No-one at the company was confrontational enough to tell us to take them down, nor were they passive-aggressive enough to disassemble the forts while we were gone.
We were moved back to our offices about a week later.
This is what I did in 1997:
I stood on my desk and "unscrewed" the fluorescent rods directly above my desk. I then brought in a nice bankers desk lamp, a portable stereo and some really nice headphones. Other developers did the same. We got 1 complaint from a technical writer who shared overhead lighting with a developer cube - it was too dark and depressing for her - we offered to buy her a lamp. I also brought in a notebook computer with an Ethernet card. Whenever the cube got the best of me, I headed for an often empty conference room (with headphones and notebook computer in tow). On one side of the conference room was a huge window looking out toward a patch of trees.
The point of this story is that you can be creative in how you survive in a cube environment. If management complains, well... you have to wonder whether they have best interests (supporting you so you can be productive) in mind.
Even more important than cubicles or large rooms or whatever is, IMHO, diversity. Sometimes, I want to read a book (alone, preferably on a sofa or something like it). Sometimes, I want to work alone (ergonomic workstation, separated). Often, I want to do
(table with lots of space for two persons). A desk and a chair and a desktop simply don't fit that pattern.
For a nice description of how a really productive environment could look like, see
. Drool...
(Hi Todd, how's life?)
I went from having my own office (with nice desks, chairs, and lots of glass) to programming in a true "studio" environment.
There are walls, but the space is quite open and laid out in a sprawling irregular fashion. There are lots of windows, and they all
. Most everyone on my team is in talking earshot. The lighting is mostly natural, but partly indirect track lighting. And everyone has headphones for concentration time.
Overall its the best environment for developing that I can imagine. I've been more productive here than anywhere else. And it certainly doesn't hurt to have the Pacific ocean right outside =).
Offices and cubes stifle productivity... offices may promote privacy and concentration, but they have the same negative effect on communication and "synergy" that cubicles do, and I believe that cancels out any privacy benefit. After all, chances are that if your project is progressing nicely, you are working on a close knit team with whom you must be in constant communication..
-- DanLiebgold
One interesting thing that we have here at Lucent is a 802.11b wireless LAN deployed throughout the entire facility. Because all the developers have laptops we can roam around (in pairs) and work just about anywhere. I suppose we could even go outside. Very nice if we need to escape from the noisy (open) office space and find a quiet area to write code.
Some years ago we had a programmer who liked to go outside and sit on the grass while reading technical manuals.
(This was in the Los Angeles area, where it's beautiful outside nearly all the time. ;-)
The people in the office across the street called the police. --
What did those people think the reader was doing? Sounds like some seriously conformist people out there.
They probably thought he was homeless (non-programmers can't read the subtle cues that differentiate the two groups' appearance). The homeless are a big problem in Los Angeles: because of the nice weather, they don't die off every winter like they do in the Northeast. The people across the street were scared to death he'd follow them home and try to live with them, or something.
As I understand, it is much more encouraged to work in the same space, a big office for the whole team, in XP and
; it serves the affordance for communication and sharing. OTOH, according to
, workers who occupy quiet,
offices tend to perform significantly better than workers who occupy noisy, crowded work bays or cubicles. Isn't this a dilemma?
I suppose that for
it would be possible to allow two developers to share an office. Although, the wireless LAN cited above sounds a lot better.
One more thing: If the writers on this page work in cubes, and they don't like it, then why not leave? We all have that prerogative, we are not slaves, and even in the wake of the NasdaqRecorrection
the market is still buoyant enough to support another contractor. --
I'm lucky enough to work for a company that believes that engineers need offices to really work. The informal policy is to leave doors open to reduce the feeling of isolation and allow for spontaneous conversation from people passing in the hallway, but if you close the door it is a sign that you are trying to concentrate and, unless it's important, no one will disturb you.
However, there are still things that interrupt my flow. The telephone is one of them. I wish I had the 'do not disturb' button to divert calls that was described on
. Another is the temperature. While most people are dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and are quite comfortable, some people are feeling warm enough to walk around in shorts and I am freezing to the point that I usually wear additional layers to feel warm. But still by the end of the day, my unprotected hands (wrist-down) are freezing too much for me to concentrate on the code I'm trying to type. I tried gloves, but while you can type with them, you can't achieve the speed you need when you're in the
and that's frustrating enough to break the flow.
<rant> An issue that I find particularly irritating is people who insist on taking up window offices and leaving the blinds down all the time. Prestige is not sufficient justification for this (especially as most of these are my peers and it doesn't add prestige in our company's work culture) and I find it quite inconsiderate. Why can't people who prefer to work like owls or moles take the inner offices and leave the window offices to us plants who need natural light to thrive? (I leave corner offices and executive type people out of this as those are a tad more justifiable.) Alas, this is a "personal choice" issue that the managers here cannot or will not tackle for now. </rant>
Awhile back someone with a window cubicle (one of only 2 windows in the programming department) quit and we were hiring someone new. A few people in management were very nice to insist that the senior programmers should be given the window cubicle instead of the new hire, and that the option had to go in order of seniority. But none of us wanted it. Neither did the new hire. That cubicle's still open...
I did also spend some time in a cubicle while the company was acquiring and refurnishing the new building that we've now moved into, so I can relate to a lot of what's been said earlier regarding the cubicle experience. That truly is the worst of both worlds.
I'll attempt to summarize what other people have alluded to above; IMHO, this comes down to two things:
1. Variety or Diversity as
says above. This includes the fact that we all have work we need to do in isolation, like email, administrivia, individual coding and design (if any), and so on, which require an office. And we also have work we need to do in groups (or pairs) which require other settings. Both types of work would surely come up even if everyone was
- after all, CodingIsNotOurOnlyJob
. Hence additional types of environments like areas for
and discussion, FreeWheeledThinking
, reading, and so on are required and have varying requirements.
2. Customizability. The fact that different people like or dislike different things (as
pointed out earlier, and which many of my experiences confirm), leads us to desire more customizability in our immediate environment. At home you automatically have this customizability, which is probably also why
felt he'd be most productive pair-programming in his home office. Diversity, as I mentioned first, can help partially alleviate this. If there are public office areas that fit my ideal reading or discussion environment, then those custom requirements are met.
But there are usually other requirements that diversity alone cannot tackle. These require a change in the way we design offices. To take my example of temperature above, it would be really nice to have individual temperature controls in each office. I know that part of the problem is that centralized heating and cooling are more cost-efficient, but there are many arguments against that, as well as ways to reduce the impact of that. Lighting is the classic example of something that is automatically customizable if you have individual offices. People here who don't like the overheads get their own torchieres or other lighting and leave the overheads turned off.
Is that a reasonable summary?
Something I want to do someday: Grab 5 - 10 laptops and a wireless hub, and take the team down to the local (or not-so-local) park.
Anyone game in Saskatchewan?
One of the most productive environments I've ever worked in happened by accident. I was working for a startup company located in a hi-tech "incubator" facility at a local technical university. As the company grew, we needed to expand into another office suite, but the adjacent ones were not available. We developers ended up in a separate suite nearby.
The salient features of the environment were:
Each developer had a
There was plenty of shelf room for books and enough horizontal workspace to spread things out if necessary
Developers with related tasks were physically near each other
Developers were physically isolated from management and from other distractions
Offices were very close to each other
[note 1]
The hallways themselves were isolatable
Hallways were lined with whiteboards and were usable as meeting space.
[Note 1]
The acoustics were such that we could easily leave our office doors open and converse room-to-room with those nearby without having to raise our voices too much. Shutting one's office door was entirely sufficient to shut out nearby conversations and surrounding sound. It became solid unwritten protocol never to interrupt someone whose door was closed unless someone's life depended on it. --
I have to say that in my ten-some years as a professional developer, I have never been as comfortable programming than just recently, when I moved in to a quiet little shared flat, and did up my room with a clean corner desk made of glass and a view of the surrounding area. Beauty.
It seems that the people posting here who prefer open environments have a large team of developers working on the same project at the same time. That isn't typical of the way most software development is done, at least not in my experience.
I've done software development at a number of companies, and it has almost always been me alone working on a project while other developers are working on completely different projects with different deliverable dates. I currently work in a sea of cubicles, with each cubicle occupied by a developer working on his or her own project. There are constant interruptions from conversations in other cubicles, or from the non-programmer office dwellers who seem to think their conversations bother nobody as they walk down the hallways between cubicles, or make impromptu meeting rooms out of hallway intersections. The thing that is maddening to me is that people right out of college (or with no college at all) who are in non-development positions are given offices while I sit here with a Master's degree, 20 years of software development experience, and am expected to be just happy as a clam and productive in my 6x8 cubicle. I start work at 6am so that I have at least a couple of hours of uninterrupted concentration time before having to listen to some office dweller's conversation with others about the restaurant she went to last night, then 10 minutes later she decides to go back to her office and shut her door. And that is only the first of many interruptions to the day. --
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July 31, 2011
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subset: commoncrawl


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As Immunotherapy Revolutionizes the Cancer Treatment...
Wall Street Decline Takes Its Toll...
Quadruple Helices Appear To Have Role...
Adapting to Evolving Business Environments Is...
Celgene said today it acquired rights to develop and commercialize Nogra Pharma's GED-0301, a drug for Crohn's disease and other gastrointestinal indications that is set for Phase III registration by year's end, in a deal that could net the Irish drug developer about $2.6 billion.
Under a global license agreement, Celgene agreed to pay Nogra $710 million upfront, as well as up to $815 million in payments tied to regulatory and development milestones for unspecified "multiple" indications . Nogra would also receive an additional up to $1.05 billion in aggregate tiered sales milestone payments if annual net sales reach $4 billion—the milestone cash starts at $500 million—and tiered royalties.
Celgene's best-selling drug last year, Revlimid®, generated $4.28 billion in net sales, with approved indications for multiple myeloma in combination with dexamethasone, as well as for mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) and anemia. Revlimid is on pace to beat that number this year, Celgene said today in releasing first-quarter results. The company reported a 14% jump in first-quarter Revlimid sales to $1.144 billion, and affirmed earlier guidance to investors that 2014 net sales are expected to be between $4.9 billion and $5 billion, up about 16% from 2013.
GED-0301 is a first-in-class oral antisense DNA oligonucleotide targeting Smad7 mRNA indicated for moderate-to-severe Crohn's. Celgene said it entered into its deal with Nogra following completion of a multicenter Phase II trial assessing the efficacy of three doses of GED-0301 in 166 patients with active Crohn's disease. Results from the 166-patient Phase II trial have been submitted for publication to "a major medical journal" and will be presented at an undisclosed upcoming medical congress by year's end.
"GED-0301 is a potentially transformative therapy that demonstrated striking clinical activity in a phase II trial for Crohn's disease," said Scott Smith, svp and global head of inflammation and immunology. "It strengthens our expanding pipeline of novel therapies intended to address significant unmet medical need in immune-mediated diseases."
The license agreement will take effect upon expiration or termination of the applicable waiting period under the amended Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976.
If it succeeds in Phase III and goes on to enter the market, GED-0301 would join a Celgene portfolio of inflammatory and immunology drugs that includes Otezla® (apremilast). While Otezla won FDA approval in March as the first treatment indicated for psoriatic arthritis in active adults, the drug was in Phase I study for Crohn's disease among several additional indications as of last month. Otezla has a September 23 PDUFA date for an FDA decision on a second indication, psoriasis.
Another Celgene drug candidate is indicated for Crohn's—the cell therapy PDA-001, which is now preclinical studies.
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Artist: Oak Pantheon
Album: The Void (EP)
Genre: Rock
As I walked through the void
I put all fears aside
Hoping to find what made
The azure unclouded sky
Oh grand pantheon
Where have you gone?
A crowd stands before me
They're all dressed in black
One man moved before me
His hands held the stars
Right before my eyes
I watched him as he ripped the world
Such a feeble thing is man
In the mercy of a god
The wisdom we've repressed
No reason comes to mind
I've been longing... for what, I don't know
A grim solitude dismantles my soul
I want everything, the world and the sun
To know how it was made and why!?
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London Stock Exchange shares surge on historic $2.7bn US index company deal
Acquisition of Frank Russell will boost earnings in first full year after deal, LSE says
The London Stock Exchange said today it would help fund the acquisition of US indexes group Frank Russell with a $1.6 billion rights issue of new stock. Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
The London Stock Exchange has unveiled the largest purchase in its history, snapping up US indexes group Frank Russell for $2.7 billion (€2.98 billion) to send its shares surging.
Europe's oldest independent bourse said today it would help fund the acquisition with a $1.6 billion rights issue of new stock. It said the move would boost earnings in the first full year after the deal and would catapult it into third position in the booming market for exchange traded funds (ETFs) – low-cost funds that provide an alternative to active fund management – behind global leaders S&P Dow Jones and MSCI.
Analysts welcomed a deal that creates a compiler with around $9.2 trillion of assets benchmarked against the performance of its indexes, which include the UK's FTSE 100 and other high-profile market measures. – (Reuters)


text:
Top Definition
Nishgi is an expression for gentlemens, which can be used in most situations.
while you are walking the street wearing your top-hat and monockel, you see something really fancy or surprising, then Nishgi would be a apropriate word to use.
po Tony Tigermasken Pettersson Март 1, 2005
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Can you define these popular missing words?


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Frustration mounts over lingering power outages
FARMINGDALE, N.Y. -- A week and a half after Superstorm Sandy slammed the coast and inflicted tens of billions of dollars in damage, hundreds of thousands of customers in New York and New Jersey are still waiting for the electricity to come back on, and lots of cold and tired people are losing patience. Some are demanding investigations of utilities they say aren't working fast enough.
An angry New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined the calls for an investigation Thursday, ripping the utilities as unprepared and badly managed.
"Privately I have used language my daughters couldn't hear," he fumed. He added: "It's unacceptable the longer it goes on because the longer it goes on, people's suffering is worse."
The power companies have said they are dealing with damage unprecedented in its scope and doing the best they can. And there is no denying the magnitude of what they have done: At the peak, more than 8.5 million homes and businesses across 21 states lost power. As of Thursday, that was down to about 750,000, almost entirely in New York and New Jersey. And that's after a nor'easter knocked out power to more than 200,000 customers in New York and New Jersey, erasing some of the progress made by utility crews.
"We lost power last week, just got it back for a day or two, and now we lost it again," said John Monticello, of Point Pleasant Beach, N.J. "Every day it's the same now: Turn on the gas burner for heat. Instant coffee. Use the iPad to find out what's going on in the rest of the world."
The mounting criticism came as New York City and Long Island followed New Jersey's lead and announced odd-even gasoline rationing.
The power industry's defenders have pointed out that Sandy hit the nation's most densely populated corridor. By the Energy Department's estimate, it left more people in the dark than any other storm in U.S. history.


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Day dress (skirt and bodice)
Designer unknown
France or Italy
Printed silk, with insertion and trimmings of cream silk gauze, hem bound with pink velvet, lined with silk, whalebone supports in the bodice, and metal hook and eye fastenings
Museum no. T.368&A-1960
Given by the Comtesse de Tremereuc
This dress would have been worn for fashionable day wear. It has a fitted bodice, with a pointed waist, and a frilled collar and cuffs trimmed with gauze and a machine-embroidered border. The leg-of-mutton sleeves are long, full, gathered at the shoulders and gauged at the insides of the elbows.
The marked, horizontal emphasis at the shoulder line meant that it was often difficult to wear fitted coats and jackets out of doors. The short, circular cape therefore came into its own for both day and evening wear.
The growth of the sleeve was balanced by an increase in the size of the skirt. In about 1892, flared skirts were introduced. They grew to their widest extent in about 1895, along with the sleeve, and had names such as 'the bell', 'the fan' and 'the umbrella skirt'.
The low collar is an unusual feature, more common towards the end of the 1890s than at the beginning. Since the dress has been let out, suggesting a longer period of use, it may be a later alteration.


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Winner in the MyHeritage.com Holidays Charts Contest
Today we closed the voting for the Holidays Charts Contest - to see the voting list click here.
We added up votes from all our different language blogs to get a final result: German, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese.
We noticed that around the world the tastes for designs were a little different. In France people preferred images of nature in the background; in the english speaking countries people preferred simple and clean designs.
Neverthless, the design that shows family images is the most popular around the world. Here we present the winners:
First place goes to Chart No. 7 that belongs to Aline Machado. She lives in Brazil, has a family tree with 1312 people and has in her family site 1578 photos. She will receive a voucher for $200 to be used with our printing service.
Second place goes to Chart No. 1 that belongs to Victor Zugasti. He is 14 years old and lives in Argentina. He will receive a voucher of $50, to be used with our printing service.
We want to thank all the people who sent their charts and everyone that voted. We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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Tuesday, December 30, 2014
2014 Year-End Wrap-Up
Even though I've been preoccupied with teaching art to college students, I've still spent plenty of time playing games this year, so I wanted to rundown a quick top 10 list of games that were released in 2014 that I enjoyed quite a bit.
1. Gran Turismo 6 (PS3)
2. Kentucky Route Zero: Act 3 (Mac)
3. Nidhogg (PS3)
4. NaissanceE (PC)
5. Terra Battle (iOS)
6. Mountain (Mac)
7. FRACT OSC (Mac)
8. Threes! (iOS)
9. Sportsfriends (PS3)
10. Desert Golfing (iOS)
Obviously I missed some games from this past year that a lot of other people are talking about, but this is the best of what I actually played. Honorable Mention to Crossy Road (iOS) and The Fall (Mac).
However, there were some other amazing games that I played this year that were released prior to 2014, and I'd like to acknowledge those in no particular order.
Gone Home
Mass Effect
The Last of Us
Pac-Man CE DX+ (again)
Finally, I'm not going to do a rundown of all the best things I ran on this blog, but here are a few of my favorite pieces I wrote for Kill Screen this year.
Vib-Ribbon and Obsolete Relevance
Emergents - Lilith
Changes at Games for Change
Light, Shadow, and the Beauty of NaissanceE
Genre Study - The Evolution of Music Games
Here's to more great things to come in 2015! Happy New Year!
Monday, September 29, 2014
Blips: Historically Low-Poly
Source: A Comprehensive History of Low-Poly Art, Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3
Author: Tim Schneider
Site: Kill Screen
If you haven't had the time to read through Tim Schneider's extensive treatise on low-poly art, I'd like to humbly suggest that you carve out some time to do so. It's a 3-part essay, but reads like one long piece broken into three sections, so I'd recommend taking in as much as you can in one go as possible. Schneider's main thesis here is the exploration of why so many contemporary game makers are opting for the low-poly art style, and the answer in most all cases comes down to emotional resonance. Low-poly art, like the bear shown above, doesn't try to exactly replicate real world objects, but reveals the material of its making while also leaving gaps for viewers to fill in. Schneider relates these artistic moves to Modernist painters, who when faced with extinction at the hands of the photograph, took a turn toward painterly-ness as expressiveness.
Schneider references so many great examples from the contemporary games space and from Modernist painting, and really captures the thinking behind these methods now while grounding them historically. Still, my mind kept wandering toward the actual construction process of low-poly art which has the most in common with sculpture, a medium that goes unmentioned in the article. When I look at the low-poly bear at the top of this post, I think of the subtractive processes of whittling. The flat surfaces mimicking the cuts made by a handheld blade given quick, gestural strokes. It's interesting that low-poly art aesthetically looks most similar to wood-carving when the act of 3D modeling more directly relates to wireframe armatures and applying skins on-top of them, a notably additive method of sculpting.
There's probably another whole essay that could be written here juxtaposing low-poly art with sculptural movements, and I actually credit Schneider's work with spurring this line of thinking in myself moreso than me pointing out that something was missing from his own. I can't recommend strongly enough giving the entirety of his essay a read.
Friday, September 12, 2014
Blips: Linkpile
So I've been collecting a lot of Blips articles for a long time here, but the time I have to dedicate to posting on Low Cutoff has been greatly reduced now that I'm teaching sculpture or preparing to teach sculpture for much of my week, and what's left is probably spent researching and writing articles for Kill Screen or (gasp) making my own art. That said, I do want to share this treasure trove of articles that I've really enjoyed the past couple months, covering a wide array of issues in and around the sphere of games. Hopefully you'll find them as enriching as I have.
Angela R. Cox on teaching games as text (part 4/4)
Frank Lantz on the relationship between game theory and game design
Lana Polansky on metahistorical constructions in games
Simon Parkin on indie gaming's obsession with moneymaking
Heidi Kemps on the search for the origin of lost Sonic the Hedgehog levels
Robert Yang on walking simulators and the "post-mod" era
William Highes on repetition in games
Robert Rath on why games have such a difficult time with water
David Chandler on the aesthetic of ruins in games
Jane Douglas on why many Japanese games reveal characters' blood types
Kris Ligman on the screening of "let's play" videos at the LA Film Festival
Cara Ellison on the history of sex in games
Leigh Alexander on playing Street Wars, the watergun assassination game
Zolani Stewart on the inner depths of Sonic the Hedgehog
Chris Priestman on the role on video games in response to the tragedy in Ferguson, MO
Liz Ryerson on right-wing video game extremism
Lucy Chinen on artist Femke Herregraven
Matthew Burns on video game consumer kings
Maddy Myers on journalistic integrity, the gaming community, and the audacity of being a woman in tech
:image credit momijixbunny:
Monday, August 25, 2014
Blips: Previously On...
Sources: Charting the edges of avant-garde videogames, Keeping the Cold War quiet in CounterSpy, Twitch gears up to conquer the final frontier: mobile
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen
Just wanted to pop in and quickly plug three (!) articles of mine that popped up on Kill Screen the past couple days. First is a feature on DePaul professor Brian Schrank's new book Avant-garde Videogames, which frames experimental games in an art historical context. The chart above is an image from the book, detailing the categorical field that serves as the basis for many of the book's chapters. As you'll find out from my article, I think it's a tremendously useful book, especially for someone looking for that art context. I have so many avant-garde games to seek out now that I had never even heard of before.
Next up is a review of the Cold War-inspired side-scrolling stealth game CounterSpy. It's a game I quite enjoyed, but found the design to be pretty unforgiving if you don't play it very well going into the final run-up. It's stylish as all get out though, and now that I've got a handle on what to watch out for, I'm actually pretty eager to dive back in and play through again. I do wish that you could hide incapacitated guards and avoid firefights more frequently that the game allows. It is supposed to be a stealth game after all.
Lastly is an article about Twitch's mobile broadcasting aspirations. This article was written a while ago, but other bigger Twitch news kept popping up. Glad it finally got out the door because mere hours later, the Amazon buyout news hit. I think the challenges of bringing broadcasting tech to mobile platforms is pretty interesting, but I wholly expect the story to get buried amongst all the other news surrounding that company. Ah well, maybe someone will click it by accident.
Friday, August 8, 2014
Blips: Needs More Metroid
Source: 'Troid Rage: Why Game Devs Should Watch Alien—and Play Metroid—Again
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste
It's rare that I can side so wholeheartedly with opinions about video games, but Maddy Myers' recent piece for Paste about the state of the metroidvania had me repeatedly exclaiming "yes, exactly this!" multiple times while reading it. Myers (an undisputed Metroid aficionado) lays out the reasons why so many so-called metroidvania games fall short of the titles that originally inspired the hideously titled sub-genre. Real quick note here, but I'm in the camp that thinks this genre should drop the "vania" addendum, as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was really just a Metroid-like that did some interesting, original things with the formula. OK, but still, there are game like Shadow Complex that rekindled interest in Metroid-like game design, yet miss the core of what made Metroid play the way that it does.
Myers argues this point as well as the way Metroid itself draws inspiration from the Alien films to frame its environments and protagonist in an extremely powerful way. In contrast, Shadow Complex feels positively soulless, full of bland characters, bland levels, bland weapons, and a bland plot. All that's left is the basic mechanical device of an open ended map that requires specific abilities be gained before passing through certain doorways to new areas. And that's a great game design framework to emulate, but it's not enough on its own. Everyone likes to taut Metroid's atmosphere as a defining feature, but for some reason atmosphere (a combination of many factors including character design, animation, difficulty, level design, music, sound, and more) isn't seen as a necessary component of a metroidvania. And that's a shame, because it seems like the knowledge of what made Metroid special is actually being deteriorated by modern metroidvanias. Still waiting for a proper Metroid Prime 2: EchoesVania over here.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
About Face: The Fall (Mac) Review
The term "interface" says a lot about how humans view computers. Meaning literally "an exchange between faces," the concept of interfacing anthropomorphizes computers so that one-on-one interactions with humans feel more natural. But interfacing isn't just people talking to machines, computers also interface with other computers without the need for voice recognition or stupid biological organisms getting in the way. Yet this cold digital data exchange is still defined as interfacing, despite the fact that the only reason a computer would need a face would be to make humans feel more comfortable around them.
In The Fall, developer Over The Moon's debut game, you play as an operating system and spend most of your time speaking with other AIs. You have a name (A.R.I.D.), a set of prime directives, and because you're installed in a combat-ready spacesuit, you have a body, or at least the shell of one. The game begins with you crash-landing on some middle-of-nowhere planet; the impact knocks your pilot (the human inside your spacesuit) unconscious. From there, it's your duty to ensure the safety of your pilot above all else, and you'll need to bend the rules of your and other AI's programming to do so.
Other than A.R.I.D., the other major character in The Fall is an unnamed mainframe AI that oversees the abandoned robot factory where you'll spend most of your playthrough. The mainframe AI might be "in control" of the facility, but it's still subservient to its human-instituted directives, even in the absence of actual humans. AIs in The Fall use their humanoid voices to speak to one another, and the mainframe AI seems particularly conflicted about how it's supposed to behave around another robot like A.R.I.D.. When answering your questions, it will begin its reply with a standard answering machine message, "Oops, I'm sorry, the option you selected is not…," but will cut itself off halfway through to speak in a casual, organic voice, often dismissing the canned response as some kind of involuntary reflex. The mainframe AI claims to have developed its skills through extensive time with humans, gradually naturalizing its speech patterns to sound more familiar to them. At some point in your interface with the mainframe AI, a TV monitor turns on, displaying a glitchy logo. "That's my face," it tells you.
In a certain sense, most video games are experiences where players attempt to outwit machines; the game console is a mechanical puzzle box with video display and handheld controller interfaces. The Fall turns that concept inward by having you roleplay as an OS and subverting your own character's programming to progress through adventure game puzzles. It's like lifehacking, but you're a robot, so you're actually just hacking –intrafacing, if you will. From the menu screen, you can see that A.R.I.D. has many abilities that have been locked away from automated switch-on, except in emergency circumstances. If the human pilot was conscious, they could turn on the cloaking device at will, but the OS can't activate abilities on its own, which I assume is to prevent a Matrix-like robot takeover. So in one of the game's early puzzles where you have to sneak past a sentry gun, you have to do something that's the exact opposite of what you'd want to do in most games: attempt to kill yourself. Since this is part of a puzzle solution, I don't want to give away exactly how it's done, but the result is that you take enough damage that A.R.I.D.'s programming registers the situation as one that threatens the pilot's life and allows for self-activation of the cloaking device. This action sets the precedent for the rest of the game, which finds you sort of cheating your way through a series of testing scenarios on your way to figuring out what's going on in the facility and considering the nature of AI.
Everything about the way the AIs communicate with one another in The Fall is designed with a human intermediary in mind, and nowhere is this more apparent than A.R.I.D.'s humanoid frame and movements. Using a keyboard and mouse, it can sometimes be a bit cumbersome to control A.R.I.D., especially when the game requires you to click the mouse, hold the shift key, and navigate a menu with directional buttons simultaneously. While it's not the most intuitive control scheme, I found the awkwardness strangely appropriate considering A.R.I.D. is built to support a human pilot, not necessarily to run the show on its own at all times. Occasional firefights are slow and clunky, and the way A.R.I.D. searches around with the suit's arms outstretched holding a pistol-mounted flashlight, has the stiffness and firmness of grip of a child riding a bicycle for the first time without training wheels. Players themselves are the closest thing to an in-game human consciousness, but through the controls, participation is kept at a certain distance, which oddly makes the AIs seem more sentient.
Granted, a spacesuit walking around with an unconscious person banging around inside is a somewhat disturbing premise, but the comatose pilot is also the instigator for A.R.I.D.'s own agency. In the absence of human consciousness, the AIs carry out humans' final wishes, but like a bunch of relatives clamoring for a share of inheritance, the self-conflicting will leaves room for interpretation. Another AI at the abandoned facility, known as The Caretaker, labels A.R.I.D. "faulty" for breaking one of its prime directives, even to enforce another. The Caretaker would like to "depurpose" A.R.I.D., an AI colloquialism that means "kill." The only way out of the situation is to convince The Caretaker of your just intentions, proving your self-worth as you navigate between two conflicting social realities: the human-coded AI hierarchy and the understanding that A.R.I.D.'s programming is itself faulty when humans are removed from the equation. Only fractured interfaces remain.
Monday, August 4, 2014
Blips: Television X
Source: Revisiting the gxTV, a "television for gamers" from 1997
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen
One aspect of video games that often gets overlooked is the TV. We tend to focus mostly on what happens on a screen and occasionally delve into the physical act of interaction on the part of the player, but almost always ignore the device that houses the screen, the object we perform in front of. To some extent, this is because TVs are seen, more or less, as constants. It's assumed you have a TV if you're playing video games because you can't play them without one. But different TVs provide different play experiences, both on a technical level and an intertextual interpretive level.
My most intense, most free time spent with video games was playing them on a gxTV in my bedroom during middle school and high school. The gxTV was billed as a "TV for video games," which meant that it provided a particularly appealing platform for games (especially in the audio department), but also that it was not meant to be the primary family television. Thus, the gxTV was mine and mine alone. It was in my room and it's unique style and functions made it non-interchangeable with other TVs in the house. Other TVs are just plain boring, even moreso with modern TVs that seek to hide that the device is anything but a magic floating rectangle.
It was with this nostalgia and profound appreciation for what the gxTV was and is that I wrote the above-linked article, detailing what made it special to me and in the industry. Also, I wanted to share some more pictures of the gxTV that didn't make it into the article because my mom was kind enough to take them for me, and I think they're pretty great. See below:
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Often referred to as the "grey ghost" because of the distinctive color of its short, sleek coat, the Weimaraner is a graceful dog with aristocratic features. Bred for speed, good scenting ability, courage, and intelligence, he remains an excellent game hunter and active participant in other dog sports.
A Look Back
Originally known as the Weimer Pointer (derived from the court that sponsored the breed), the Weimaraner is a product of selective German breeding and comes from the same general stock as other German hunting breeds. It is believed to be a descendant of the Bloodhound and was originally used to hunt wolves, deer and bear. Over the years because of the rarity of bigger game in his surroundings, the Weimaraner adapted to become a bird dog and personal hunting companion.
Right Breed for You?
Lauded for his ability to work with great speed, fearlessness and endurance when on the hunt, the Weimaraner is also known for being an easily trainable, friendly and obedient member of the family. This is a breed that loves children and enjoys being part of his family's "pack." Grooming maintenance is low due to his short coat.
- Sporting Group; AKC recognized in 1943.
- Average size: 23 to 27 inches tall at the shoulder.
- Hunting dog, family companion.
AKC Meet the Breeds is a registered trademark of the American Kennel Club, Inc.


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Tommy Robredo
Tennis Player
Born May 1, 1982
Tommy Robredo Garcés is a Spanish professional tennis player. His career-high singles ranking is world no. 5, which he reached in August 2006 soon after winning the Hamburg Masters. He turned professional in 1998 and was coached by José Manuel "Pepo"… Read More
View newly released photos of Tommy Robredo.
News + Updates
Browse recent news and stories about Tommy Robredo.
Djokovic Refreshed And Ready To Go In DubaiYahoo News - Feb 21, 2016
Three Hours, One Break As Raonic Beats Robredo At Australian OpenYahoo News - Jan 21, 2016
Fognini, Robredo Into Buenos Aires SemisFox News - Feb 14, 2014
Robredo Ousted In ChileFox News - Feb 05, 2014
Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of Tommy Robredo.
1982 Birth Born on May 1, 1982.
1996 14 Years Old Robredo began playing tennis regularly when he was five and his family moved to Olot, where his father Ángel became the director of the local tennis club, Club Natació Olot. (Robredo's mother Dolores is herself a former assistant coach.) He was coached by his father until 1996 when he joined the Spanish Tennis Federation at the Centre d'Alt Rendiment ("High Performance Center"), a famous center for professional sports training in Sant Cugat del Vallès.
1999 17 Years Old In 1999 he made the semifinals of the boys' event at the French Open and won a Futures tournament in singles as well as another in doubles. … Read More
2001 19 Years Old 1 More Event
2001 was a breakthrough season for Robredo: He reached his first final at the ATP Tour level in Casablanca and won his first title on the main tour in Sopot. … Read More
2003 21 Years Old Arguably, the highlight of Robredo's 2003 season was his run to the quarterfinal of the French Open. … Read More
2007 25 Years Old 1 More Event
2007 brought increased hardcourt success for Robredo: After years of contesting finals on red clay he reached the final of a tournament played on hardcourts for the first time at Auckland, followed by two more hardcourt finals at Beijing and Metz. … Read More
2009 27 Years Old 14 More Events
… He won his first two titles of the year in 2009 Brasil Open defeating Thomaz Bellucci 6–3, 3–6, 6–4 on clay in both the singles and doubles tournaments for the first time.
2010 28 Years Old 15 More Events
His first ATP event of 2010 was at the 2010 Heineken Open, where was the top seed but was upset by John Isner 6–7, 6–3, 4–6 in the quarterfinals.
2011 29 Years Old 5 More Events
Tommy started his 2011 season at the 2011 Heineken Open where he lost to Thomaz Bellucci 4–6, 6–3, 1–6 after defeating Michael Venus 6–7, 6–3, 6–0.
2012 30 Years Old 1 More Event
Current through the 2012 Valencia Open 500.
Original Authors of this text are noted on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robredo.
Text is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Text is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.


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About AIN Plastics
AIN Plastics is a Division of ThyssenKrupp Materials NA. Prior to it's purchase AIN Plastics was a plastics distributor and fabricator based in Mt. Vernon New York. to see more about AIN Plastics history visit our posts page .
AIN Plastics Here Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
AIN Plastics is a leading full line distributor and fabricator of industrial plastic shapes, adhesive products, rapid prototyping materials, and high pressure laminates, specializing in engineering plastics for the fabricator and OEM communities. The company operates over twelve warehouse locations and 13 sales offices in the United States, structured around local distribution service centers providing fast, efficient delivery to their customers. Their value-added processing system is customer-based, designed to give salespeople the tools they need to quickly and accurately process orders. The company's nationwide logistics system allows next-day delivery to the majority of customers in North America.
AIN Plastics Locations
8143 Eagle Palm Drive
Riverview, FL 33578
1980 Shiloh Road
Building 7 Suite 150
Kennesaw, GA 30144
300 County Line Road
Bensenville, IL 60106
110 Shawmut Road
Canton, MA 02021
1750 E Heights Drive
Madison Heights, MI 48071
NEW ADDRESS – April 20, 2016
13732 Rider Trail North
Earth City, MO 63045
|New York
60 Fullerton Avenue
Yonkers, NY 10704
1360 Boltonfield Street
Columbus, OH 43228
499 Running Pump Road
Suite 16
Lancaster, PA 17601
3001 Alouette Drive
Suite 100
Grand Prairie, TX 75052
1347 Diamond Springs Road
Suite 100
Virginia Beach, VA 23455


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Sunday, June 5, 2011
HAIR WEEK: Felt Flower Clips
2 comments:
this is so cute! I love cute accessories and will have to try this one out! I found your blog through a link party and I love it! I am your newest follower and would love it if you would come check out my blog and follow me too! Thanks!ReplyDelete
Love it Danielle! Nice and simple! but very pretty.ReplyDelete
Thanks for linking to a Round Tuit!
Hope you have a great week!
Jill @ Creating my way to Success
Blissful and Domestic is a place for inspiration and encouragement. Please remember that when commenting. I read all your comments and am thankful for them :)
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We're sorry, but we currently have no tickets available for this event.
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Tampa Bay Championship News
Big Money on Line at 2013 Tampa Bay Championship
With many of the world's top golfers playing at peak levels and the proceeds from ticket sales benefiting local charities, there's nothing not to like about the Tampa Bay Championship. This phenomenal tournament is scheduled to take place from Thursday, March 14th to Sunday, March 17th, and it's all happening on the idyllic Copperhead Course at Innisbrook Resort & Golf Club in Palm Harbor, Florida. Once again, 156 of the PGA Tour's finest golfers will be competing for a total purse of $5,500,000, and the winner will receive $990,000 and 500 FedExCup Points. With prize winnings like that up for grabs, it's no surprise that this tournament is always extremely competitive, and subsequently, it's also an extraordinarily fun event watch.
At last year's tournament, England's Luke Donald won his third PGA Tour event in fourteen months and returned to No. 1 spot in the Official World Golf Ranking. Donald emerged victorious by shooting thirteen-under par through 72 holes, and then beating out Jim Furyk, Sang-Moon Bae, and Robert Garrigus with a birdie on the first hole in a riveting playoff. Over the years, stars of the game like Vijay Singh, Retief Goosen, Jim Furyk, and K.J. Choi have all claimed victories at this beautiful course, so make sure to purchase your 2013 Tampa Bay Championship tickets today and be there to see who's up next. Nothing beats a wonderful weekend of golf in the Florida sunshine, so get your tickets as soon as possible.


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Alphabet Construction Site: Letter Recognition Activity for Preschoolers
My son and the little boy I look after are almost 3 and a half (where does the time go?!). The little girl I watch will be 3 in a few months. They all love books. They enjoy having me read to them, they like to flip through books themselves, and lately they've been "reading" to each other, which is beyond adorable.
My son is learning how to spell his name and likes to see it prominently featured on the fridge (ending with the number 3, since that's "his number") using our alphabet magnets. He has even written some rudimentary letters representing his name in my notebook.
Our little girl friend is really interested in the alphabet. Throughout the day she'll go to our alphabet chart and touch and say the letters. She likes to line up several letter magnets and declare that she's spelled her name or one of the boys' names.
Needless to say, it's the perfect time to build on the kids' enthusiasm for letters and words by providing them with FUN, play-based literacy activities.
I set up this alphabet construction site in our big play table (made last year by my husband using scrap wood left over from other projects). The table sits at one end of the kitchen and I change its contents weekly or bi-weekly depending on how engaged the kids are with the activity.
Here's a look at the whole set up. I loosely used the concept of an alphabet construction site (construction is always a popular theme around here!).
Besides having plenty of letters to push around and transport with the construction vehicles, this activity also includes a few extra elements to encourage letter recognition and also engage the hands and fingers in some fine motor work.
I put some of our wooden blocks on the table and stuck letter stickers on a few of them. An older child might make words with these. Since the focus for us was letter recognition, the stickers provided another way to play with letters and to identify them and talk about them while sticking them to the blocks and cans.
My son never tires of magnets so I included some cans that he painted and our magnetic fridge letters.
Peanut went immediately for the painted cans and magnetic letters, which are a mix of upper and lowercase.
Then he turned his attention to the little dumptruck and foam letters. This led to some great construction site pretend play.
Next he grabbed his mini kitchen tongs and spent a long while picking up the magnetic letters and dropping them into one of the cans and the little dumpster.
I loved seeing the pride on Peanut's face when he found letters that he knew and then discovered that he could match them to the alphabet chart.
Our alphabet construction site has been set up for five days now and I am so pleased that the kids have been enjoying it as much as they have. They've been identifying letters, practicing letter sounds (with my help) and finding the first letter of their own names and each others' names. Peanut repeatedly shows me his "favorite" letter, D for Daddy, every time he finds it.
More play-based early literacy activities:
How about more pretend play meets letter recognition in the form of Alphabet Soup?
Awhile back, I pinned a post from The Imagination Tree called Alphabet Rocks Construction Site. I'd encourage you to read it if you have construction fans in your house or classroom. It also includes some simple and fun letter games.
And for more fun and learning with magnetic letters, take a look at these fantastic posts from Connecting Family and Seoul (Morning Messages) and Fun-A-Day (Magnetic Letters – Sorting as a Way to Teach the Alphabet).
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RANGOON — Burma's first nationwide census in three decades was conducted successfully and in line with international standards across the country, with the exception of Arakan State, according to a team of independent observers.
A team of 46 national and international monitors witnessed how the census was conducted between March 30 and April 10 in all 15 of Burma's states and divisions. The Independent Observation Mission witnessed a total of 2,193 interviews in 901 different enumeration areas in 121 townships, according to a statement dated Aug. 14.
"The Mission described the Myanmar Census as successful on the whole and in line with international standards, except in Rakhine [Arakan], where almost all communities that wanted to self-identify as 'Rohingya' (who the Government call Bengali) were not counted," said the statement distributed by the UN Information Center in Rangoon.
"At the time of the observation, it was noted that some parts of Kachin State, controlled by the Kachin Independence Organisation, were not enumerated."
Rohingya are not included in the list of 135 official ethnic groups in Burma. In a last minute change of policy, the government announced that the name many in the Muslim minority in Arakan State use to refer to themselves be excluded from the UN-backed census.
"By not allowing these specific subpopulations to self-identify and be counted, the census in these areas fell short of international standards," the mission's report said.
"If the missing populations are not included, based on a proper count or estimation, the resulting undercount will have a negative impact on the census results at the State and Region level and the national level."
Outside of Arakan State, the observers said the census enumeration process was well organized and the enumerators, trainers and supervisors were well trained. Census awareness raising activities were effective and the public were "generally positive about the census."
However, they did note some shortcomings in the census process based on their observations. The observers said census enumerators "seldom explained the census," failed to "explain the concept of confidentiality of response," and did not ask specifically about the night of March 29, the chosen night that the so-called "de facto" census was supposed to record.
"[A] large portion (31 percent) of the enumerators did not systematically refer to the census night to determine who was in the household on that reference night, which is a core concept of a de facto census," the monitors' 124-page-long report said.
The observers' report said that sometimes enumerators also filled out the forms using inferences rather than directly asking the respondents.
"Questions on religion, ethnicity, education and household characteristics and assets were sometimes inferred or directed from what the enumerator could observe (for instance, after asking the ethnicity of the head of household and spouse, the enumerator filled in the ethnicity of their biological children without asking)," it said.
"Additionally and even though most respondents could self-identify their ethnicity, the observers noticed that most enumerators only recorded the main ethnicity rather than the sub-ethnicities."
Salai Isaac Khen, a member of National Technical Advisory Board for the census, said he agreed with the findings of the observation team, which chimed with problems he encountered while monitoring the census in Chin State.
"[Enumerators] did not emphasize questions on disability according to the guidelines. They also did not ask specific questions on ethnicity, and just record it with their own guess as enumerators are locals," he told The Irrawaddy.
Salai Isaac Khen, who is also coordinator of the Chin national supporting committee on the census, said these issues meant that while gender and population figures in the census would likely be accurate, ethnicity and religion results might not be acceptable.
The question of ethnicity in the census has been highly controversial, drawing 80 complaints nationwide, he said, and the census commission has decided to withhold the results on ethnicity from the main census report, due to be published next year.
Ethnicity data will be released in 2016—after the national elections—following a review of complaints by a team consisting of parliamentarians from the ethnic affairs committee, ethnic representatives, academics and experts.
"We are trying to avoid the use of ethnic data [from the census] in the coming election's voter list," Salai Isaac Khen said.
Re: Refusal on the part of enumerators (What a name by the way) to accept the term Rohingya as a self identifier.
I'm amazed at the diversity of people living in Myanmar and feel this is a great advantage to the Burman majority. It's certainly a way to bring in tourists. The enumerators or I guess the number counters were trained to ignore the Rohingya. Does this mean the Rohingya will be eliminated. It's time for the government and the people to recognize this as nothing short of bigotry. I need to understand why the feeling is so strong against the Rohingya. Is there anything written in English that could help me? I've blogged on my assumptions but I'm limited in my knowledge of the situation. I'm still hoping to understand.
From 1948-1962 the democratically elected Burmese Governments recognized Rohingya as ethnic minority of Burma but from 1982 the dictator's Ne Win stroke out the name Rohingya from the list of ethnic communities of Burma. Lot of restrictions were put on Rohingyas ( Free movement, marriage, birth control, education). Rakhine state has two communities, Rakhine, Buddhist and Rohingya Muslims. During Military dictatorship Government, Rakhine state was neglected and development was the least in Burma though abandon gas reserve was found there. Misusing of GAS revenue by Junta slowly coming out to surface and Rakhine people are asking shares of GAS revenue in Parliament. To divert these demands, Junta use Rohingya as soft target and allowed to be targeted. Suddenly monks killers Junta became the saviors of Buddhist religion, instigated to attack Muslims minority and tried to corner Daw Aung San Su Kyi by blaming her the Muslims supporter.
One of the observers willing to say…" Everything about my examination was fine except I missed to put my roll number on the exam paper!!!!" Then he said again " Unfortunately I failed due to minor blunder!!" Ha Ha Ha..
I would like to know the percentage of Non-Burmans with Myanmar citizenship in the whole country, and the number of people born in M.yanmar, who are NOT citizens, because the government discriminates them.
Also the numer of citizens, Burman and ethnic, who are presently living abroad. Are they counted at all?
The number of "Burmans" by ethnicity is likely to be inflated. Every one who can will claim to be Burman, as this is advantageous in the present situation,
But ethnicity also some happens in the head and the heart, as a way of life, it not only shows in the genes and the body.
The number of indigenous "Non-Burmans" may be higher than most people think.
I think it is important to be aware of this to understand how the country can become peaceful. – you have to be aware of problems to be able to solve them.
It is a social skill to be able to assimilate outsiders, and the people of Myanmar have it, whether it is officially recognized or not.
Let it keep Muslims as floating population all over Burma ( Myanmar ) especially Muslims in Arakan. Let authority plan it what to do. Either they kill all Muslims through out the country or they have to decide with UN and US to relocate them in an Island and make a country as latest member of the UN. Please do not act like a child play, enough is enough.
Rohingya name was in circulation between 1948 and 1962. I wonder why not during the British period or before? Can anyone explain, please?


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Ricky's old man at the VLT's was pretty classic. The weed train (Sebastian Bach) and the Rush episodes were all great.
Love Trailer Park Boys - incredibly funny.
Here is prob. my all time favorite bit -
Here is another classic episode that is pretty funny -
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