For Competitive Two-Person Debaters: A couple of years ago, I finally scanned and recycled all of the old Fort Hays backfiles I was lugging around "just in case". I lost track of them but found them again during the recent site move so I'm posting them here though I can't imagine any reason why anyone might want them beyond historical amusement.
They're raw scanned TIF images so you don't have the benefit of full-text searching. Like expired medicine, you probably don't want to be using these unless you know what you're doing (yes, some of the cards were crazy old even when we used them). Of all of them, the artificial-life and wipeout files have the most potential for evergreen cards but you're much smarter than we were back in the day so you probably wouldn't run such silliness anyway. You've been warned, have fun.
I need more time in my day.. Just found out about a new alternate reality game (ARG) that launched a few months ago but gameplay begins sometime tonight. The game is sponsored by the Institute for the Future and was designed by ARG-guru, Jane McGonigal, whose keynote address at last year's SXSW Interactive was a highlight of the festival. The point of this new game is to imagine our world 10-years from now, plagued with potentially civilization-ending crises. Players in the game will work together to try and find solutions or structures to solve these problems. From the game FAQ:
Superstruct is the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you’ll help us chronicle the world of 2019--and imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.
McGonigal explains more about how to play the game in this YouTube video:
I've been fascinated by the concept of ARGs as a way of understanding and discussing social change since her keynote and the theme of this game reads like the categories list on this site, so I'm definitely in. I'm racing to get a sub-blog up for this game and get my profile online, will update soon with the details for anyone else playing along.
I'm trying out a new experiment on the site by adding "Digg This" buttons to (some of) the stories. One difference between these buttons and the over-saturation of these social bookmarking buttons on so many sites is that rather than link to any content on this site, I'm trying to connect to the external story as it already exists on Digg.
For example: I recently posted this story from the Independent on the "Methane Time Bomb" (a global warming positive feedback mechanism caused by methane releases from melting permafrost) and then checked Digg to see if the story was already posted. It was, so I simply added the Digg URL into my post and added the button to the news item. Another post on the "Global Security Bubble" hadn't been posted yet on Digg so I submitted my writeup to Digg and added the resulting Digg URL back into the post.
My hope is that this experiment will have some modest impact on improving the visibility of these stories and ideas through the much broader network of Digg. I'm also interested in seeing how smaller sites such as this one can co-exist with Digg by focusing on a tiny subset of the news stream.
Welcome to our new site! I was adding yet another story to the database a few weeks ago when I noticed that I had passed the 5,000 story threshold. Its an arbitrary milestone but its been a while since I’ve taken time to reflect on what I’m trying to do here or celebrate what I’ve accomplished. I started this project back in the Fall of 2000 as a way of practicing my web development skills by creating a research tool. I developed this site from scratch, creating my own blog platform that allowed me to relate stories across categories, keywords, and frameworks (kind of a crude version of the 'tags' concept).
Since then, I’ve only made minor improvements to this site (adding RSS, an email-list newsletter, upgrading search, fighting off the hordes of comment spammers) but have largely neglected it. I devoted my energies to other projects (ex. the open debate engine) and finishing my Masters degree. I continued to blog stories I found interesting, mostly out of habit but have managed to keep the site relatively up to date even while travelling overseas.
For the new site, I converted the entire database and site over to the Drupal platform. This made it very easy to import the content from the old custom system and retain the same keywords and categories taxonomies. Drupal's powerful taxonomy tools also make it easier to clean up or merge outdated keywords and add custom images to each new term, a task I intent to waste countless hours on ;)
I have many more plans for this site, including taking advantage of Drupal's powerful bibliography and citation tools to build out more sophisticated research tools and libraries. I'm opening up the comment and interactivity features again and will be working on building up community discussion around the issues cataloged on the site. Finally, I'm looking to start posting more of my original research in progress here on this blog, fully taking advantage of the research database I've built up to explore these concepts in depth.
Let me know what you think and thanks as always for your interest!
For Competitive Two-Person Debaters: A couple of years ago, I finally scanned and recycled all of the old Fort Hays backfiles I was lugging around "just in case". I lost track of them but found them again during the recent site move so I'm posting them here though I can't imagine any reason why anyone might want them beyond historical amusement.
I need more time in my day.. Just found out about a new 
I'm trying out a new experiment on the site by adding "Digg This" buttons to (some of) the stories. One difference between these buttons and the over-saturation of these social bookmarking buttons on so many sites is that rather than link to any content on this site, I'm trying to connect to the external story as it already exists on Digg.
