Audience 1: Gamers
How many people play games? The numbers are growing everyday, but the knowledge about how games are designed and created is still scarce. For these people, this paper is meant as an introductory into the mind and workings of designing a game. Games are enjoyed by lots of people and so should the creation of games.
In a way, games are complex systems. But at the same time, they are also logical and coherent. Most people own a car, but most people don’t really understand them because the car is a complex system and could be seen as too complicated to understand. Likewise, many people play games, but few understand how they work.
Going from start to finish will show this audience exactly what goes into the process.


Audience 2: Sixth College Students

For most colleges, an article about game design and development would make no sense, but Sixth college is unique in that it requires all students to become “fluent” in technology. While the required course to fulfill this requirement is far short of demanding, it does give every student going through the college an idea of what code looks like and how programs are structure.

For these students, this paper is meant to show a side of programming and computer science that is often overlooked in the introductory courses. These courses are designed instill basic knowledge about too much into students. In doing this, the courses also often overlook the more enjoyable part of programming which is the fruition of concepts.

To a child

There is a reason why some people are born boys and some people are born girls. There are even some people born in between. A large part of what I've learned is how living things are made. There are a lot of steps to making something live, and it always needs another living thing (a mom.) Did you know some thing don't need a dad to be born? Some things can have kids all by themselves, but people always need a mom and a dad to be born. There is a reason for it that I'm sure your parents would love to tell you about if you just ask them.

Whether a living thing needs two parents or one to be born, or whether it is born a boy or a girl or big or tall depends on some small parts of our body. Just like a hair is hard to see by itself but makes up a big part of your head, the rest of our bodies is made up of parts even harder to see but together they make up our body. One of these super tiny parts of our bodies is called DNA. This thing is so small we can never see it with our own eyes but DNA has the instructions for every part of our body. Its like the instruction manual for every person, and we get it from out parents, half from our dad and half from our mom. Learning about this “instruction manual” helps us figure out what happens when someone gets sick, or why some people grow tall or short or are boys or girls. Sometimes we can even read the instruction manual to find a way to help people before they get sick. If you ever wonder why a lizard is green, or why you have ten finger and ten toes, or why your teeth are white and your parents can't answer, don't worry. There is an answer; stay in school and you just might find it.

To a senior

There is always a specific reason why our bodies do the things they do, and why they wear out. A lot of the changes that happen to us are caused by changes in our genetic composition. DNA is the molecule that determines who we are. As we get older or get sick how we use our DNA, and sometimes even the DNA itself, changes. When it changes too much, or is changed in a bad way people get cancers. When someone exercises, DNA starts getting used to make muscles. When someone gets older, the DNA itself actually gets shorter.

Knowing about how these things change our DNA helps us figure out what to do when they something bad happens. Genetic disease isn't something that can be cured. We can only use our knowledge of DNA to detect problems and try to figure out exactly what went wrong, but we can't change a person's DNA. For example, some people are born without the ability to use phenylalanine. If a baby is given this amino acid, it can cause permanent mental retardation. This rare genetic condition has to be tested for when someone is born. This technology is still very new, so there aren't too many profound practical applications, but in the future genetics will continue to show us what is going on behind the scenes of our own bodies and hopefully we will be able to use that knowledge to live healthier, happier lives.

Rated PG: Psychology Guidance Suggested

Psychology Major: The basis of social cognition in the field of social psychology has to do with categorizing our social world into schemas or mental frameworks based on our prior experiences. These experiences are usually shaped by the social learning theory where we acquire knowledge through modeling the actions of our social world. Different from other branches of Psychology such as Freud’s psychoanalysis, Pavlovian classical conditioning , or Skinner’s behaviorism is that social psychology has to us as the individual figuring out our social world and finding the causes of why people do the things they do and also why we do the things we do. It is less individual based where it not only look at our behaviors alone, but how we as an individual function in a social system in the social interactions that we have. It analyzes how these social dances then affect the ebb and flow the locus of control in our behaviors.

Non-Psychology Major: As humans, we are biologically predisposed to see patterns. Without such tendency, every stimulus that we come upon in our environment will flood our system and we will have to allocate time and energy in analyzing every little thing that we come upon, even if we have stumbled upon such stimuli before. This why is our mind use mental shortcuts or stereotypes in categorizing things in that we do not waste mental energy figuring out the familiar stimuli and allocate that effort into figuring out novel stimuli. For example, if we have no framework for dogs vs. tigers, we will spend precious time figuring out the differentiation between the two every time we come upon a 4 legged animal and whether it is dangerous or not, which by then could be too late and we would be dead. We also do the tendency when it comes to human beings whether grouping people by race, political party, or major. This is because it is more efficient. This is a branch in social psychology where we study how in our mind works in the presence of others because biologically, us humans are social creatures by nature and we operate in groups. So we operate using social cognition, which are the mental processes that we use in order to understand our social world and to attribute the causes behind not only other people’s actions but also our very own.

Blog 4

Audience: Students

A collage student has many things to worry about. At UCSD there are midterms every other day. Some dont have time to sleep or even eat because of the rigourous currriculum. With so much on students' plates, some do not have any time to engage in social activities and move up the social ladder. Wouldnt it be great if there was just a formula to become ''cool'' in several easy steps. In fact, there is such a formula and it is called the scientific method. The scientific method is originally designed for implimentation of scientific research but with some slight modifications it can also be taylored to meet the needs of many socialy uncool students.

Audience: Parents

When observing collage students it may seem that there is far too much fun occuring and not enough studying happening. Students who desire to climb the social ladder seem to waste their time with pointless activities and tasks. But what if for some students, the time spent gaining friends was not only benifical socially but also had educational value. This is precisely what is occuring when students implement the scientific method in order to become more ''cool''. The steps of the method includes background research, devising hypothesis', performing experiments and analyzing data. Although all of this work is done with the goal of gaining more friends, the concepts of the scientific method are being utilized and undoubtedly will be naturally be learned and transered to the base of knowledge needed to perform academic research.

2 Audience Summaries Take Two

ORIGINAL BLOG 4 LINK

REPOST OF ORIGINAL
Audience1: Non-Computer Science Peers
When I was about six there was this interactive kids story website that I would visit. It was very clunky because in order to progress through a story, I would have to click on a link and then I would have to wait for the next page to load.
Today, web applications get rid of that clunkiness. Web applications are self contained programs on a web page. Google Docs and Farmville are two examples of web applications. These applications provide quick and instantaneous results to the web user.
Having studied in the field of computer science at UCSD. I have learned how to create efficient algorithms and debug my applications which are both essential parts to creating a web application. An algorithm is a set of instructions used to solve a problem. Debugging is finding and fixing problems within my application. With both of these skills, I am able to create a web application that works efficiently and the way it's supposed to.

Audience2: My Sister's Peers (Ages 10-12)
When I was half your age, which was about eighteen years ago, I didn't have Facebook or Webkinz to spend all my time with. I had a lame kids story website that was nothing like those. It was slow and every time I clicked I had to wait for a whole new page to load.
Those games you play on Facebook and Webkinz are called web applications. Web applications are relatively new to the Internet which is why I didn't have those games back then. Imagine playing a game online that made you wait seventeen seconds after every click. Not fun at all. Web applications make it so that you don't have to wait.
The college I go to has shown me how to make web applications. I learned how to make the comments on your Facebook walls work and I learned out to make them work so that when you write on your friend's wall, the message doesn't come out completely different.

Emerging Scientist

To my parents:

My expertise primarily lies in asking questions. Since I am a scientist I am interested in why and how things works. With each new discovery comes a new question. Why do bananas ripen in presence of an apple? Does sunscreen actually protect your skin? These are the types of questions that most people think about on occasion, and the researchers are the ones that probe into it and discover the reason why. They set up experiments, make observations of the experiments, collect data, and draw conclusions.

I played the role of a researcher when I was trying to search for an alternative and more eco-friendly way of using botanicals as a repellent to prevent mosquitoes from harming humans. Initially an extensive literature search was conducted to select various plants, based on previously known medicinal uses. From that information bioassays were set up from the extracts. Bioassays are used to measure the effects and strength of a substance on a living organism. In this experiment mosquitoes were harvested in my backyard by keeping a tray with water in a shady area which was damp with trees and other shrubbery covering it. The bioassays were administered on a filter paper placed on top of the breeder. The breeder was a cylindrical chamber with two compartments. On the bottom larvae were able to grow into pupae and fly to the upper chamber. The adult flies would then be in direct contact with the fumes from the filter paper. After the study conducted several plants were shown to be powerful in killing off the mosquitoes. A separate experiment with commercial products was also conducted. Being that we(my family) frequent India every other year and are always in close proximity to swampy mosquito rich areas, the efficacies of commercial repellents was tested. The data suggested that some of the commercially bought products were just as effective as some of the plant botanicals.

As a scientist I can ask questions and solve problems that plague many people around the world.

Job Interview:

The art of inquiry and probing is one that is innate in a scientist. I have always asked the questions why, how, where, when etc. to my parents as a child and this is what most likely led me to a field in the sciences. The interest in how things work and building an experimental model to ask questions and to solve them keeps me motivated to continue research and discovery.

An example of my research initiative is when I was a senior in high school. I created an experiment to help understand the efficacies of various plant species. The title of the work: “Bioprospecting for Effective Mosquito Larvicides and Adulticides” is looking at a way to essentially keep mosquitoes at bay and prevent them from harming humans with malaria. The experimentation did not take place in one day, but over a six month time frame. Initially an extensive literature search was done to find plants that have known medicinal qualities as well as those that are commonly used in the past to keep mosquitoes at bay. The first step was to create bioassays of the plants and oils that were used. The data from this looked at mortality levels of these assays. The method to test this was using a cylindrical breeder. The bottom of the breeder held the murky water containing the mosquito larvae, and once these larvae grew into adult mosquitoes they were able to fly up to the top compartment. The top of the compartment had a vented opening on which a filter paper with the prepared bioassay was inoculated. The findings from these experiments determined that three of the plant species: Tulsi, Sweet Fennel, and Sweet Annie were highly effective in killing the mosquitoes. The results from this experiment were also used to test against Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly to see if there would be any mortality in other parts of the ecosystem. The results showed that these flies were also killed, suggesting that the dosage of the treatment may need to be altered to only kill the mosquitoes and keep other parts of the ecosystem intact. In another separate experiment there was some compelling evidence for the interruption of growth from larvae to adult mosquitoes when using steam distillates of various plants. This data was interesting since if the growth of adult mosquitoes is able to be hindered, then the transmission of malaria will be able to be curtailed.

The research done here helped me to fully understand the pieces of the scientific method and the importance of asking questions and seeking answers.

A lil' about me

Professional

I have a problem. My problem arises every time I invite people to my house. The problem is that if any stranger, passer-by or casual onlooker happens to pass my threshold, it is not entirely unlikely that our 60 pound red-nosed pit-bull terrier will jump on them. It's scary to have a dog barrel down on me at pounce in a oddly hilarious linebacker-style tackle. He's not a wild dog and no one is ever in any real danger, since he only tackles guys and getting tackled by a 60 pound dog is kinda like getting tackled by a school boy. It is, however, quite put-offish. My house is my business, I rent rooms to pay the mortgage, so having a dog that jumps on prospective tenants is actually quite expensive.

Roscoe, the dog, and Chris, the human, are by all means good animals. I live with them so I know this as certainly as you can be about any living thing. Kicking them out of my home is the right buisness decision, but I am not sure it is the right desicion. I think a lot of what scares people about Roscoe are preconcieved notions about the disposition of a breed of dog know as pit bulls, just like what scares people about Chirs and Andy are preconcieved notions about the disposition of a breed of humans known as blacks and latinos. I wasn't really willing to kick him out on the premise that he was a bad dog.

The expense of it had finally gotten to me. Having an empty room for a month is expensive, so I decided on the first of May if I hadn't found a tenant I'd have to give the ruinous news that Chris would have to find a new awesome home to live in. The very last day was April 30, and on that day, after having scared off tons of people, the Idahoan transplants Joe and Gary came to interview. Joe shared our views on animals, which is a good indicator he shares our views on people too. He was able to look past Roscoes faults and observed his gentler nature that comes with time and familiarity. So, Im out a few hundred dollars but at least I live with cool people. I'm not sure if happiness is derived from quantity of money or quality of friends but I guess I'll find out.

Personal

The best driving road I know of is the Pacific Coast Highway. This road has sections that run precariously along cliffs and over short yet immensely deep chasms. A bridge the length of a basketball court might be hundreds of feet from the bottom. There is even a ridge just south of the coastal town of Pacifica that is known as "Devil's Slide" for its dangerous positioning. This part of the PCH runs around the ocean face of a mountain. The view is spectacular as the elevation give the traveller a tall perspective on the ocean and the setting sun, but the traveller would be well advised to focus on the road. Just a few feet from the edge of the road there is no land, only a steep descent into the jagged and unforgiving northern california coast that has, year and again, claimed the lives of wreckless drivers.

My most memorable experience on this road happened to me the year before I left for college. I was on my way to meet my friends camping at Big Sur, and on my way I encoutered a heavy fog that is characteristic of a lot of coastal areas. I was in a Jeep Wrangler that had no top or windows, which was just as well because the windsheild became quickly obscured by fog forcing me to drive with my head out out the vehicle, like a dog. This is generally dangerous, as mentioned before there are scary cliffs on this road, and unadvisable but I admit that it was fun. The reason many people own convertibles, motorcycles and wrangles is to avoid the secure comfort provided by cars, or "cages" as they are known in certain circles. At one point in this heavy fog the magical PCH ascended to a point just above the heavy fog, and I reached this point just as the sun was setting. I was late and off schedule, and rewarded for it by an ocean of pink cotton candy clouds laid out and extending forever under a clear, empty sky. It looked like the inspiration for a cloud level of Super Mario. It was one of those strange and life affirming scenes that challenge the observer to seek out more of life's little easter eggs, although it might be the type of experience that actively eludes the pursuer.