Mommy the Automaton: New Interactive Simulators Teach Labor and Birth
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A new generation of complex, electronic birth simulators allow medical students to practice labor and birth -- especially when there are complications. Meet the mannequins.
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THE modern PC is a marvel, isn&#39;t it? Here&#39;s a machine that lets an ordinary person with very little training create a new document, check its spelling, dress it up with graphics, send it electronically
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Children have always enjoyed  make-believe. Now, some new Web sites are letting them live out  their fantasies in virtual worlds using self-designed avatars.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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Legs or wheels? Entertaining or functional? The robot world has a lot of questions to resolve.
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Buddy, can you lend a thumb? MySims, Rune Factory and Drawn to Life give gamers a chance to play the selfless card.
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Teaching online isn't unusual, but professors are taking advantage of Linden Lab's 3-D metaverse to shape meeting spaces to their needs and provide an added dimension to learning. By Daniel Terdiman.
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Online video is no longer just  fun and games: You might actually learn something.
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A Pac-Man-like game that delivers electric shocks to gamers reveals the brain's reaction to danger.
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Inside the new classroom power struggle: what teachers say about pushy moms and dads who drive them crazy
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Electronic Arts has unveiled a "Family Play" system for novice players.
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London's Science Museum shows off technologies that may one day make computer games more fun to play.
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By Munz, Tania  LORRAINE DASTON and GREGG MITMAN (eds.), Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp. vii+230. ISBN 0-2311.3038-4. Pounds 32.00, $49.50 (hardback).
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On his blog today, Chris Hartjes has a quick screencast he's created showing off an interactive testing console he's worked up for use with the CakePHP framework.   I had suggested in an email to the CakePHP mailing list that an interactive console for doing testing of Models would be good. While at php|tek I spent a lot of time with the CakePHP guys talking about this. Out of it came some more ideas (like the ability to test your routes) and they even implemented a console that spits out API information for you. Very cool stuff. So, I decided to do a little screencast demo of a very early alpha version of the interactive console.   The screencast shows Chris running a test on his own classes, including demonstrating the built-in help the app offers.
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A Web site on sex branches out to one on babies. Surprise!
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From MIT's hallowed halls to tiny digital art academies in San Francisco, innovative new programs are changing the way game designers learn their craft. By Chris Kohler.
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A GNOME 2 frontend for the Visual Boy Advance emulator.