E1n1verse

Credit: Photograph by Jake Rome (jakerome) under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

Image: Photograph composited from pieces of many other photographs: a visual affinity.

James Paul Gee introduced the idea of affinity groups in his seminal What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Language, Learning, and Literacy (Gee, 2007). It is defined as the people associated with a given semiotic domain. That basically is a domain in which people use particular symbols or language to communicate and interact. We’re already well used to the concept, even if we don’t realize it. A given academic discipline, for example, will have its own vocabulary and, in that context, use language in a particular way, even if others use it differently in another context. It’s all about situated cognition and situated meaning. Games and their communities will have their own semiotics and constitute a semiotic domain. Members of an affinity group will have a way to recognize others who belong and to assess what counts as acceptable or recognizable within that semiotic domain.

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Credit: Photo by Marsha Brockman (whodeenee) under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license

Image: Marbles, many marbles. I think I have lost mine in a sample of many marbles.

I’ve been re-running analyses today on my population of survey responses. I decided to remove some more responses to eliminate some the scatteredness in the population. The majority of responses were from European PvE (player versus the environment) realm players, so I removed the four American realm players and then the five non-PvE players, leaving me with a sample of 30.

The more I read about sampling, the more confused I am.

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Dropbox recently changed its terms of use. Dropbox says on their blog the change was to make the terms easier for people to read as they’re written in more accessible English than in legalese. If you look at the comments on the post or read around the net, manny people were unhappy with the change. In particular, the following paragraph seems to have drawn their ire (purple underline is my emphasis):

We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files). By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent reasonably necessary for the Service. This license is solely to enable us to technically administer, display, and operate the Services. You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.

Photo Credit: Photo by Alexandra Bellink (Alex Bellink) under an Attribution Generic license.

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