Megacorporation influencing media producers in an attempt to change public opinion
You would need very few changes to make it really creepy.
I'm not sure if learning that The Amazing World of Gumball is a thing makes it better or worse.
Google operates a “Computer Science in Media Team” that stages “interventions” in Hollywood to steer film-makers towards realistic and accurate depictions of what it's like to work in IT. The company announced the team in 2015 and gave it the job of “making CS more appealing to a wider audience, by dispelling stereotypes and …
"Shows Google influenced include Miles from Tomorrowland, The Fosters, Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch fire, The Amazing Gumball, The Powerpuff Girls and Ready, Jet, Go."
I've sort of heard of the power puff girls, but none of the others.
And you can have "nerdy" by being funny, engaging and not stereotypical, CBBC's So Awkward is a great example of this; one that many girls can relate to and if you want girl nerd cool, then Project MC2 is the one.
I came here to add this.
Silicon Valley is very amusing.
In silicon Valley and in "Mr Robot" you can actually see the effect of things like the subject of the article.
Gone are the early NCIS/CSI type thing where the correct types of words are used but with no sort of correct context "we've pinged his VPN and hacked his IP" "let me just unix his router", and you notice that in more and more cases the correct words are using in the correct context.
Well... they didn't manage very well with making that technically accurate. I bet the elevator pitch was Mad Men with computers.
Obligatory link: Source Code in TV and Films
If I want technically accurate, I'll read a manual ;D
Silicon Valley is very good, especially from the second season. What it isn't is a historical account.
Similarly, Silicon Valley. If you can just go with their McGuffin of an impossibly good compression algorithm, the door is opened to satirising the odder aspects of start-up and VC culture.
Personally I would rather an incorrect stereotype than Google professing to represent me.
Anyhow - I don't think the stereotype portrayal puts off people who get a kick from code. I do think that sort of thing pulls people in, regardless of the cool factor portrayed.
I think there are better things to make cool. Like being generally nicer to people in everyday life.
> I think there are better things to make cool. Like being generally nicer to people in everyday life.
How are you supposed to solve crimes if you have a happy home life and no drinking problem??!
Actually, Columbo is the exception that proves the rule: he's nice, he's cool, he has a wife and dog.
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He says he has a wife, but we never see her.
For all we know, Mrs Columbo is his schizophrenic alter ego who goes out and commits the murders then Columbo finds someone else as a fall guy/girl. Any scenes of the fall guy/girl killing someone could be handwaved away because the series is shot with Columbo as an unreliable narrator.
Or perhaps I've been watching too much Mr Robot.
“Five years after the premiere of the original CSI television series, forensic science majors in the U.S. increased by 50%, with an over index of women.”
The result (at least from what I've read about in the UK where there's been a similar huge growth in forensic science degree student) is that there is a massive (we're talking 10x+) oversupply of people graduating with forensics related degrees + in any case I've also heard that UK police forces prefer to train their own forensic officers.Let's hope thet can start to highlight the areas where there actually is a need for gradautes.
(The other area of up-coming oversupply is, I've heard, law since, according to someone whose in a senior position in a "Russell Group" University with the current UK funding system where Univerisies are now allowed to take as many students as they want then they are keen to maximize the incoming tuition fee income and starting a law degree is very attraactive as students will come as they think law is a good career choice and it only costs a few hours of lecture time a week to put on ... again the problem is that in a few years time there will not be enough junioor legal jobs left for people graduating with law degrees to be able to get the next stage of legal qualification that they need to make use of it).
the problem is that in a few years time there will not be enough junioor legal jobs left for people graduating with law degrees to be able to get the next stage of legal qualification that they need to make use of it
This happened to a friend of mine after he decided to do a law "conversion degree"; he's currently doing a job that requires little more than Excel skills and ringing up suppliers and shouting at them.
You raise a point that is being missed on a lot of people (and has been a long time). Just the other week I heard someone moaning that they have XYZ of debt and they are struggling to get a job (and house, and, and and). Somehow they thought a History degree would allow them to walk straight into a job and buy a £300,00 brand new house, flash car, and go socialising every night of the week.
That Media course, that Law course, that Architecture course...what are your chances of getting a job at the end? Each course should have a "Number of people working this field after passing" type stat.
Some would be very, very low.
There is , unfortunately , a school of thought that thinks that merely getting a degree , in whatever bullshit subject is enough to get you a job because "It proves I / they can work hard , prioritize time , see end goals , manage workloads, do research , blah , blah , buzzword"
This is particularly annoying to people like myself who thought it might be beneficial to society to learn something incredibly difficult and technical that life as we know it is absolutely dependent on , but because I only got a "Higher National Diploma" rather than the magic "degree" , I am somehow outqualified by some dick who got a useless degree in "vineculture" because he liked the subject.
>That Media course, that Law course, that Architecture course...what are your chances of getting a job at the end? Each course should have a "Number of people working this field after passing" type stat.
Agree with you completely on Media and probably Law. You could add social sciences, politics, philosophy and a load of other subjects. Fairly sure we still need architects though (and its one of the longest courses to graduate). Unless, the plan for Brexit Britain is to do away with the H&S aspect of designing buildings and just letting anyone build whatever they want, wherever they want it.
>That Media course
I'm not sure whether it's still true, but the last time I looked, the infamous 'Media Studies' courses were one of the best job credentials of them all (i.e., more MS graduates got jobs than other disciplines).
Engineers & the like love to look down on generalists - but generalists rule the world, and always will do. Specialists go out of style, very quickly.
“Five years after the premiere of the original CSI television series, forensic science majors in the U.S. increased by 50%, with an over index of women.”
And then they get hired, realise that the guys in the office aren't hunks and the IT person is neither a perky goth nor able to read a licence plate by zooming up a single pixel a billion times...
'I bypassed the storage controller, tapped directly in to the VNX array head, decrypted the nearline SAS disks, injected the flash drivers into the network's FabricPath before disabling the IDF, routed incoming traffic through a bunch of offshore proxies, accessed the ESXi server cluster in the prime data center, and disabled the inter-VSAN routing on the layer-3.'
Take me! Take me now!!!
So the end effect of Google's efforts is that rather than leaden dialogue that appears to have been written by a computer, we now have leaden dialogue that appears to have been written by a computer - which is technically plausible.
Forget all this hacking. There are fully logged-in laptops with decryption dongles all over the place held by hipster coders who can't see because of their dot-com hoodie, can't hear because of their $2000 bluetooth headphones, and are terrified of people appearing IRL. The hoodie logo even says which network you're gaining access to.
How about a few grey headed types and some balding types with children and grandchildren might make the depictions a bit more realistic. All they have done is remove the hoodie, given the guys a shave and haircut, dress them in more normal clothes, etc. Still 20 something clueless children.
The example about the VNX, IDF and so forth used some of the right terms, but still failed to put them together in a coherent way. Is that better? I don't really think so.
It reads like if you tried to make up a fake language using a bunch of random German and Russian words, so it would almost sound like something real to a German or Russia speaker, but not quite. You'd rather they make up something that's complete bullshit, like Klingon.