I'm curious as to how they plan to implement it, especially because some people do a lot of moving across the country. Will it be able to warn people who are vacationing (or on business trips, etc) of emergency alerts where they are, as opposed to back at home? The article mentions "geographical targeting," but gives no indication of whether this will be done with real-time information as opposed to phone registration data.

Well, of course. Marketing companies don't want to be unmarketable themselves. Being selective about their questions allows marketers to make their customers think they're really liked, instead of disappointing them with the truth.

I'd like to submit the following real-world research that's been going on for the past six years, minimum:

http://verg.cise.ufl.edu/vp/
Warning: video on-site is stored as Windows Media Player format.

I personally worked on this research project some during my undergraduate years - in particular, the mentioned Cranial Nerve 3 case. Long story short, the project completely simulates a Standardized Patient interaction for the medical students, complete with life-size display and standard questionnaire. The scripting system isn't exactly precanned - okay, you have a limited set of questions, but the medical student isn't told that - they simply ask questions naturally and see what the patient responds with. None of your classic "select from these three to five options" gag that we're typically stuck with in video games.

Even if the speech recognition element of the system doesn't pan out, all you'd have to do is train someone to run the system, rather than how to fully act, speak, and appear as such a patient themselves. In addition, there are certain scenarios (such as the cranial nerve palsy case) where it is completely unsafe to have a newer medical student interviewing such a patient, as said patient would need immediate, highly trained medical intervention due to an immediate (potentially fatal) health risk. In addition, this case in particular is quite rare; thus, if nothing else, there is no other way to have standardized patient training for these cases in a reproducible and safe manner, and this sort of project has a future.

For those interested, this particular lab's research focus with this project is to determine just how much the "virtual environment"/"virtual person" aspect of the system would affect the impact that such interactions would have on those training with it. You'd be surprised at how much people subconsciously treat virtual people like real people... especially as long as the speech recognition is working properly. Do we exhibit the same racial biases toward virtual people as we do toward real people? Yes. (Other publications are also linked on this page.

As a twenty-five year old still in-process within the educational system, I must whole-heartedly agree with the article's sentiment. There are a lot of people in college that I truly believe would be better served by moving on with life outside of the university system. Sure, having the chance to "broaden one's horizon" and learn about various things is "nice," but is it neceesary? Is that, in particular, what our nation really needs?

I believe the undergrad system (at the very least) does a terrible job at addressing what democracy really needs - people who sit down and examine things for themselves, rather than parroting on everything that they're told. There's a proliferation of study aid sessions on college campuses, all aimed to give you the essentials that you need to memorize to get the grade that you want, rather than actually teach you the material for keeps. Whether a student actually learns it is up to them, and unfortunately, many students are here not for true education, but for a simple piece of paper that gives them their right to a job... or so they think, until they graduate. So many people go through the halls of our colleges without ever being educated by them.

I have tutored and taught students at my university - heck, I'm even instructing an undergraduate course right now as a grad student and Ph.D. candidate - and I have met students with very poor problem solving skills who have made it into one of the top 20 public universities in the US. One of these students probably had no problem solving skills whatsoever before I scrapped everything in our one-on-one tutoring sessions to teach her some!

While we in the states might like to think that a university is a great tool that prepares everyone to properly contribute to the real world, it simply fails to do so in some of the most important ways. Either universities need to step up their game to make ensure that those who go graduate are truly quality students, or we should stop subsidizing everyone who wants to delay their life for four or five years by simply going through the motions rather than learning.

As I've been told by someone who works in state government, the one good thing about finally getting into a government job is that it takes nothing short of an act of Congress to fire you from said job.

With it being so hard to actually lose a government job, it's fairly easy to see where the lack of motivation comes from.

Unfortunately (?) for this person, the "act of Congress" actually happened.

I actually had a class that looked at philosophy through science fiction. Episodes of TNG would often help to jump-start our discussions.

You mean Q? Not only did he fix everything, he even caused everything.

It depends on what sort of potential "adjustment" we'd be talking about. A lot of video games allow you to adjust the difficulty, but most of the time this simply means an increase in stats that makes it easier for the same old AI to kill you and harder for you to kill it.

What a lot of video games DON'T seem to have is an adjustment in AI. I don't know how many games (RPGs in particular) where it simply seems like the enemy is wailing on my characters at random, rather than attempting to *gasp* strategically isolate one character, kill them, and then move down the line! If they see you use healing magic, then why can't they realize that they should mute - or eliminate - the mage(s) first?

Other posts above have mentioned that we'd like to be rewarded sometimes for our increased skill in a game - so accordingly, I'd agree that not all enemies should be able to adjust as much as others. At the same time, what would really make a game more interesting is if a zone change resulted in a more strategic AI to combat, rather than just a simple stat increase.

Start off a game with a few areas (or dungeons) that allow you to comprehend the game mechanics and get strategies. Then, allow the enemies to understand the mechanics and those same strategies, rather than just adding a status ailment or two and increased stats to their armament, and allow there to be a semblance of intelligence to what we're fighting.