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> From: VeryPDF-Email-Service <noreply@verymailer.com>
> Subject: [VeryPDF RSS to Email] RSSMix.com Mix ID 8161944 - 20151215192013
> To: moganomics@yahoo.com
> Date: Wednesday, 16 December, 2015, 3:20 AM
> Generated by VeryPDF RSS to Email
> SubscriptionMade just for his kids, prof's board game is now
> taking off
> 15 December 2015, 6:53 pm
>          BOSTON   
>     (AP) -- When Darren Kisgen decided to make a
> board game, his only goal was to entertain his family. But
> over the past few months, the finance professor at Boston
> College has seen his game selling thousands of copies around
> the world and winning a big prize. "I'm surprised by all of
> this," said Kisgen, a former Wall Street investment banker
> who now lives outside Boston. "Frankly, it's been a lot of
> fun." Called Dragonwood, the game borrows ideas from poker
> and rummy but blends them into a fantasy world of dragons
> and goblins. By drawing a strong hand, players can boost
> their chances of "capturing" mythical creatures in a
> fictional forest, which helps them win the game. It's
> advertised for anyone 8 years old and up. The idea struck
> Kisgen two years ago after he found that most fantasy games
> were too complicated or violent for his two children, who
> were 5 and 7 at the time. "I felt like I was missing a game
> that I would want to play with them, so I decided to try to
> come up with that game myself," he said. He called it Forest
> Quest, built with ordinary playing cards and dice. But over
> time, Kisgen thought it would be more fun with colorful
> cards illustrating the dragons, trolls and ogres. So he sent
> a prototype to a nearby game publisher, Gamewright, which
> provided art for the cards and began selling it as
> Dragonwood earlier this year. The game has sold more than
> 20,000 copies since summer, Gamewright said, making it one
> of the top-selling games from the Massachusetts publisher.
> It also won a top gaming prize from Mensa, a society for
> people with high IQs. Once a year, members of Mensa meet for
> a weekend to test dozens of new board games and recognize
> those seen as original, challenging and well-designed. This
> year, Kisgen's game was one of five winners out of more than
> 60 they tested. Greg Webster, the event's chief judge,
> praised Dragonwood for its simplicity but said it also lets
> players employ a variety of strategies that can lead to
> victory. "It makes it interesting to play when you've got
> different options and you're not locked in," he said. In
> recent years, Webster added, it has become more common to
> see popular games that started out as a casual idea in
> someone's living room. "They say this is the golden age of
> board gaming, and I think that's true," he said. "There are
> so many ways for someone who has an idea for a board game to
> pull it together." The game is also winning nods as an
> educational tool that can teach kids about arithmetic,
> number patterns and probability. Kisgen, who grew up in
> Omaha, Nebraska, said he remembers devising games for his
> brother and sister as a kid. But there's little overlap
> between gaming and his finance career. "To design a game
> takes some logic, takes understanding strategy, and this
> game has a lot of numbers in it," he said. "But that's where
> it ends." After hearing feedback from players around the
> world, Kisgen said he's already thinking of ways to expand
> the game - but not too much. He still wants to keep it
> simple.
>
> Kenya Barris Creates An 'Absolutely Black' Family for Prime
> Time
> 15 December 2015, 6:47 pm
>
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>             Kenya Barris, the
> creator and writer of Black-ish, in his office on the ABC
> lot in Burbank, Calif., in December. Black-ish is now in its
> second season, airing on ABC.
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> Megan Miller for NPR
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>         Megan Miller for NPR
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>         Kenya Barris, the creator and
> writer of Black-ish, in his office on the ABC lot in
> Burbank, Calif., in December. Black-ish is now in its second
> season, airing on ABC.
>        
>            
>             Megan Miller for
> NPR
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>    Kenya Barris sometimes looks at his five
> kids in wonderment. Private schools, professional parents
> who can give them things and open doors. No sense of
> privation. And the kicker is, he's responsible! "We're kind
> of taught to give your kids more than you had," Barris
> muses. "But in giving them more, what do they
> lose?"   And that, friends, is the core of
> Black-ish, which examines the life of advertising exec Andre
> Johnson, his pediatrician wife Rainbow (her parents were
> hippies) and their four children. Like the Cosbys before
> them, the Johnsons are black, prosperous and well-educated.
> And just like Barris, who created the show, Andre has given
> his kids the opportunity to grow up with serious material
> advantages and a multiracial cast of friends while worrying
> it's a "filtered version" of the black
> experience.   Barris says although many of
> the storylines from Black-ish come directly from experiences
> he and his writing team have had in real life, they can also
> be universal. Around the Los Angeles suburb where his family
> lives, he's noticed parents dealing the same sort of
> anxieties about their own cultural traditions — their kids
> were growing up Persian-ish, Chinese-ish and so forth. He
> believes these kids, although not black, are way better
> versed in black pop culture, through the music they listen
> to and the celebrities they follow, than the non-black kids
> he knew as a teen. And the parents' parents were giving
> their adult kids the side-eye for allowing the cultural
> dilution: "This is your fault!"   Parents and
> grandparents of all ethnicities worry about how cultural
> ties are loosening with each generation, even as they look
> with satisfaction on the widening spectrum of choice their
> kids now have. What if your kids' choices pull them away
> from how you were raised?   Growing up in
> Compton, Barris says, he had a very specific idea of what
> black was, what it sounded like, how it moved, and what its
> obligations, joys and challenges were. His kids seem to have
> a different, wider idea of what black is. That realization
> was "beautiful in some sense, and in other senses it was
> scary."   
>            
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>    
>        
>             Kenya Barris plots
> out the storyline of upcoming episodes with the other show
> writers in the writer's room on the ABC lot in Burbank,
> Calif.
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> Megan Miller for NPR
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>         Megan Miller for NPR
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>    As a kid, Barris watched many of Norman
> Lear's comedies, and remains, to this day, a huge fan. "He
> was telling comedy, but he was also talking about things."
> Sometimes difficult things, like the changing roles of race
> or class or gender. "He was pulling the curtain back and
> giving America a look at part of society that they were
> living next to, but didn't know how they
> lived."   Via the Johnsons, Barris is doing
> the same thing, in an equally fraught racial climate. Now in
> its second season, Black-ish has handled some, well, ish:
> What makes someone authentically black. Bringing ' hood
> cousins to the burbs. Deciding how to react when the white
> neighbors are astonished that yes, you really are a medical
> doctor. Whether or not to spank that disrespectful kid's
> booty.   This season includes a pretty
> complicated examination of who can use the "N-word" and why.
> Andre, who also goes by Dre, is appalled when teen daughter
> Zoey says all her friends use it. "It's just a word," she
> explains. Dre begs to differ — he says his generation
> fought hard to reclaim that word, turning it into an
> in-group salutation used with affection. "And now you're
> just giving it away to everybody!" His Pops believes the
> current problem started with Dre's generation, with all
> their saggy pants, font of all evil in Pops' opinion, and
> their "willy-nilly, hippity-hoppity, 'Yo, what up, my
> n——-?'" greetings.   
>            
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>    
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>             Kenya Barris, the
> creator and writer of Black-ish, sits outside his office on
> the ABC lot in Burbank, Calif., in December.
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> Megan Miller for NPR
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>         Megan Miller for NPR
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>    Pops' kids (and Dre's) take things for
> granted, just as Barris did, as the first generation to
> benefit from the civil rights struggle. "Our parents fought
> so we didn't need to avoid those obstacles," he says. So
> when it comes to making the right choices, he says, "maybe I
> don't bang on my own kids so hard."   Barris
> and his staff of writers didn't want to put Cosby 2.0 or
> Race 101 on the network grid. Instead, he says, "We're
> trying to pull the curtain back on this one family's point
> of view, "he says. "And maybe you'll see some things you
> hadn't seen before." And maybe as they're laughing, viewers
> may rethink some race-based assumptions they weren't aware
> they had.   So far, walking that fine line
> has worked: In October, Barris was signed to a three year
> deal to continue Black-ish and develop several new products
> for ABC.
>
>
> British police arrest 21-year-old man in VTech hacking
> 15 December 2015, 6:38 pm
>          NEW YORK   
>     (AP) -- Police in the UK say they've made an
> arrest in the hacking of kids' technology maker VTech, which
> compromised the personal information of more than 6 million
> children around the world. The South East Regional Organised
> Crime Unit, a regional task force made up of a handful of
> English police departments, says its cybercrime unit
> arrested a 21-year-old man was on hacking-related charges
> Tuesday morning in Bracknell, a town about 30 miles west of
> London. Police seized a number of electronic items that will
> be examined by a cybercrime forensics unit. Craig Jones, who
> heads the cybercrime unit, says in a statement that the
> investigation remains in its early stages and much work
> still needs to be done. Few other details were provided.
> VTech officials didn't immediately return emails seeking
> comment. The November hacking of Hong Kong-based VTech
> Holdings Ltd.'s Learning Lodge database compromised the
> profiles of 6.4 million kids around the world, along with
> the 4.9 million parent accounts that they were connected to.
> News of the breach came just as the holiday shopping season
> was shifting into high gear. Kid-friendly tablets,
> smartwatches and other connected toys made by companies such
> as VTech are often high on the holiday wish lists of many
> children. The company also has drawn fire in the weeks since
> the breach from some members of Congress who have demanded
> to know the details of how VTech collects and secures the
> personal information of children. The information contained
> in the parental accounts included names, email addresses,
> secret questions and answers for password retrieval, numeric
> Internet Protocol addresses, mailing addresses, download
> histories and encrypted passwords. Information in the
> children's accounts was restricted to names, ages and
> genders, the company says. But security experts warn that
> the stolen information could potentially be used to build
> profiles of children, potentially setting them up for
> identity theft or worse down the road. The breach didn't
> expose any credit-card or other financial account
> information, as payments are handled by an outside company
> on a separate website, VTech says. Some reports suggested
> that photos of children and chats between kids and their
> parents might also have been accessed, but VTech has yet to
> confirm that. --- Follow Bree Fowler at http://twitter.com/APBreeFowler. Her work can be found
> at http://bigstory.ap.org/author/bree-fowler.
>
>
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