There's something very interesting to me about such a reasoned approach to risk taking. It's less like heroism and more like rational risk/reward analysis.

I wonder if there is a population here in the States that would be willing to take a compelling risk like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly1al4K3u2M

The suicide rate for 15-24 year olds in the US was still 10.0 per 100,000 in 2005, giving us a conservative estimate of 80 attempts per 100,000 persons.

The Wired article a published a month or two ago claims that the suicide rate at American colleges is higher than at Foxconn. According to Wikipedia, the suicide rate per 100,000 persons in the US is 11.1, and according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, there are between 8 and 25 suicide attempts for every reported suicide death. That gives us an attempted suicide rate of around 88 or 89 per 100,000 people.

Looking at the information on Foxconn in the linked article, it would appear that the attempted suicide rate is somewhere around 12 per 100,000 for the first part of 2010. That would come out to maybe 36 per 100,000 for the whole year?

Maybe the headline should be: Making iPads in a Chinese Factory Is Truly Awful, But You're Much More Likely to Kill Yourself if You go to College in the US.

Unless I'm missing something here. Also, the article appears to be pretty old.

In my day, we had to wait until we got home to play video games.

http://slashdot.org/story/11/04/08/2157238/Gaming-Is-the-Most-Popular-Use-For-Tablets

Oh... I know. "Predator." That's not a loaded, terrifying term at all.

"Frightfully dim," indeed.

The linked article mentions "the agency that collects music royalties in Canada," which should be understood to be a separate entity from the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

It's worth pointing out that there are several different agencies and several different sections of copyright law at work here. Purchasing a song for your own use and playing a song in a public place (or over internet radio) are two different things. I often see people in the US confusing the RIAA with ASCAP and vice versa, and a little clarity might be helpful.

So, in the US:
The RIAA represents distributors and publishers.
ASCAP and BMI represent songwriters and publishers, who are supposed to get a royalty when a piece of music is performed or played in a public place (or over internet radio).
SoundExchange represents performers or recording copyright owners, who are supposed to get a royalty when their recordings are played in a public place (or over internet radio).

So when all hell breaks loose and Justin Bieber does a cover of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean that is then streamed over Pandora, Soundexchange would collect royalties for Bieber's performance and ASCAP would collect royalties for Michael Jackson songwriting. If the original Billie Jean is streamed over Pandora, then Jackson would be (I believe) entitled to royalties as both the performer and the songwriter. These are performance royalties and are typically paid by the entity playing the recording (in this case Pandora).

When 100 trillion pre-teen girls try to buy a copy of Bieber's version of the song, they pay iTunes or WalMart or whatever, which is then supposed to pay the distributors. These are not performance royalties and are not administered by ASCAP, BMI, or SoundExchange. When you, out of morbid curiosity, illegally download the track, the RIAA will sue you to the tune of $xx,000,000 on behalf of the distributors.

I say this because it's important to know that even though these organizations are related, they are not the same. Also, performance royalties in most cases actually make it to the artist, so I'm hesitant to hate on ASCAP (I'm a member) although sometimes I wish they would just chill out a little bit.

I took a game design/development course as a student at CalArts. Many of the students were from the film program, but we also had some musicians, sound designers, and theater kids. Many of the students came into the course with a basic knowledge of programming. Out of that class I saw games developed and completed in Processing, Flash, and Torque.

Another game design class that worked with created two games based on Arduino hardware and Max/MSP. One game incorporated RFID scanners and custom built MP3 players to take players on an audio scavenger hunt. That game received funding from the city arts council and was installed in local mall and again later as part of a city-wide arts festival, the other used video tracking to track players in a physical game arena and has been shown at several Maker Faires and art exhibitions here in LA and Europe.

Many artists I've met are more than capable programmers, and many of them make their art exclusively in coding environments. I would assume that artists taking a game development class would at least be technically minded. The point is that it's probably a mistake to assume that "fine arts" students can't or shouldn't handle more technical work.