28 The philosophy of the course as it pertains to technology and other environmental affordances...

Message no. 28[Branch from no. 22] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, January 22, 2007 11:03pm Subject: PLEASE READ: The philosophy of the course as it pertains to technology and other environmental affordances...

Hi Adrienne and all of you, (or should I say, "Marhaban, Salaam Alaikum!")

I'm also thrilled by the response we are getting from our fellow crew-mates on "spaceship earth" during these early moments in our voyage, and the smile I'm feeling grows from sea to shining sea!

A note to you all: don't let any of the technojargon scare you -- the fact that you are here, on-line, reading this, means that you have already mastered the necessities of running this ship. You are in a virtual environment called "the internet" that connects all of us real life flesh and blood minds from all over the world. That is a major evolutionary achievement! Think about it!...

When I was a youth in Dobbs Ferry back in 1981 taking summer night classes at Mercy College in Sign Language and Spanish because I was working with the deaf, autistic and mentally handicapped children and adults at BOCES, I never thought I would see the day when I would be able to teach a class at Mercy that brought together people from all over the planet to share in the experience of helping us all overcome our handicaps as imperfect beings in challenging, changing environments.

Yet here we are, a mere quarter of a century later, using a technological infrastructure that enables all of us, whether we are male or female or hermaphrodite, black, brown, beige, olive, tan, red, rust, yellow, pink or white, tall, fat, short, thin, strong or slight, shy and sedate, or willing to scream and fight, able-bodied or handicapped, blind or deaf or with full hearing and sight -- to participate in the full adventure of our human struggle toward the light! (I got carried away by the possibility of a rhyme there! :) )

The bells and whistles that we can add to the course -- blogs, videos, 3d avatars, panaroma wraparounds etc. -- these are mere icing on the cake! So have no fear -- everyone will get an A for effort -- nobody can lose in this course for trying. The idea of environmental psychology as I see it, is to collectively learn how we can improve ourselves and our environments in the most comfortable and mutually supportive way.

We study environmental psychology to bring some order into the chaos and confusion of our lives, and make them more livable. We strive to learn a common language that helps us communicate our similarities and accept and understand our differences no matter what physical, social, environmental, psychological or cultural barriers seem to separate us.

In the past, space and topography were huge barriers. All of us taking classes at Mercy had to live within bus, walk, train or car distance from Dobbs Ferry. And we had to plan according to our personal and environmental handicaps. We had to assemble in a sterile room at the same arbitrary time, and try hard to homogenize ourselves so as to adapt to a learning environment that either favored the so-called "lowest common denominator" (usually meaning those unfortunate students whose backgrounds equipped them for rapid adaptation to the challenges of the environments they had to face in real life, but didn't adapt them for the artificial and abstracted environment of the prison-like atmosphere of "the classroom") or favored the so called "rapid learners" (usually meaning those unfortunate students whose lives had already taught them most of what the class offered, but were forced by "the system" to sit redundantly in a room where stuff they already knew was thrown at them by "the defenders of the class system" for them to toss back, like faithful old canines who have learned how to fetch a long time ago but still get showered with praise for demonstrating "old tricks".

You will notice from my tirade (which, in a classroom might be called a "lecture") that I consider most classrooms and school systems to engender subtle (or not so subtle) forms of discrimination.

It goes with the territory -- "school" is a Pavlovian environment of rewards and punishments in a largely stimulus free cell where the flows of information are severly restricted and peoples' commitments to their children, or aging parents, or friends-in-need, or true interests, or dreams, must be put aside so that they can slavishly follow the rule of "the bell" and the artificial hierarchy set up by the pulpit demagogue called "teacher" and his/her sheeplike accolytes called "students".

But on-line learning has the potential to change all that. Radically. We are peers. We are equals who come together to share our special skills and knowledge and insights.

And we will learn how to use the new tools of liberation together.

Think of it this way: if "a picture is worth a thousand words", as they say, and a teacher were to demand a thousand word essay, would it not make sense for the teacher to allow the student to spend the same time that it would take writing a description of an object or event instead learning how to upload the perfect picture?

Obviously the calculus of words and pictures is not exact, but my point is merely that we are, in a course that is based on advancing human knowledge, concerned with THE OUTCOME, not the process. It would be discriminatory to insist that students must write, or type, or post pictures or videos, or sing, or dance, or fly. What students must do is LEARN and COMMUNICATE. That is whay I believe the essence of education is: we go into our environments and we learn how to make them more manageable and enjoyable, and we come back to the tribe and we report in. We communicate our findings. We scratch drawings of the bison and deer and mammoths we saw on the cave wall using charcoal from the fire and mud from the stream. We jump up and down and hoot and holler acting out what we did on the days journey hunting and gathering. We use whatever communication tools we can to share our discoveries with our peers. The environment gives us challenges to solve and the psychology of our behavior gives us the tools not only to solve the problems found in our environments, but to communicate the solutions to others.

That's it: Environment and the Psychology of Behavior.

Our job is to help each other to do these things better and better. That is why we are all here on this ship together. As captain I will help steer the ship, but you all have a great group of crew members with different skills, and we can all help each other to move forward.

No one will be left behind.

There will be no discrimination on this ship.

The key to this class is just to explore, attempt, try things out and COMMUNICATE what you are doing to the rest of us, in whatever medium you feel comfortable. Frustrating hours spent trying to learn a new thing will not be lost in this class even if one fails to get a so-called "positive result". Simply share with us the experience you had in the new environment. That too is "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior". Remember that TECHNOLOGY IS AN ENVIRONMENT. New technology is a new environment. Wandering around the virtual environment of a computer screen is just like wandering around a new city or a jungle. It is scary and disorienting and takes time and energy. Don't worry! Don't panic! In time we will all master the tools (our textbook calls them "AFFORDANCES") that we need to make the next leap in our personal and social growth. There is no deadline for mastery in this course -- all I demand is that you read the textbook, think alot about what it says and what your fellow learners (including your professor) relate about their understanding of its theoretical and empirical information, and how we all relate it to our worlds, and communicate your experiences in such a way as to help add value to all our busy and challenging lives.

I think we are going to have a really fun semester! It blows my mind to think that we have students from as far away as Yonkers, the Bronx, South Carolina, Virginia and upstate New York, and that you could be, like me, online from places as far away as California, Germany and Cairo.

And, by the way Adrienne, if you and your daughter would like to share your experiences with the rest of us as she explores the stimulating environment of Dubai, that would be really cool! Hopefully some of the technologies we employ in this class will help you and her stay connected while so far away!

To that end, I've attached a googlemap picture of Dubai, and one of what, I think, may be your home (I typed in the address from the registrars info!) The next task would be to highlight or circle important locations in red (using a paint program) and type in a label (using the text tool of the paint program) and then label the photographs you take with the same name so we can see what they look like on the ground as well as from the air! I will model this myself for you tomorrow!

Enjoy!

T

21 This is a test: Screen capture for PC

Message no. 21 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, January 22, 2007 4:28pm Subject: This is a test: Screen capture for PC

Hi,

For all you PC users, a detailed description of how to use the "print screen button" can be found here:

http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/general/ht/winscreenshot.htm

Here is what it says:

"Have you ever pressed the print screen key on your Windows keyboard and wondered why it was there since it never seemed to do anything? Well, it does do something! It places an image of your screen on the "clipboard," ready to paste into any graphics program. These steps show you how to use it along with Windows' standard image editor, Microsoft Paint, to save an image of your screen. Difficulty: Easy Time Required: 1 minute Here's How:

1. Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard. 2. Open an image editing program, such as Microsoft Paint. 3. Go to the Edit menu and choose Paste. 4. If prompted to enlarge the image, choose Yes. 5. Optional: Use your image editor's crop tool to crop out unnecessary portions of the screen shot. 6. Go to the File Menu and choose Save As. 7. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the image. 8. Type a file name for the image. 9. Select a file type. 10. Click the Save button.

Tips:

1. Hold the Alt key down while pressing Print Screen to capture only the active window. 2. Generally the GIF format works best when saving screen shots of application windows. The JPEG format usually makes screen shots (especially those with text) blurry, blotchy and discolored. 3. See related resources below for more screen shot tips and listings of screen capture software that offers many more options for capturing screens and portions of screens on Windows and Macintosh computers. 4. The Windows " clipboard" is a term used to describe the temporary storage space in memory where an item is placed when you copy or cut. When you paste, the item is transferred to the program you're working in. If you copy something else, the old item is replaced with the new. You can't navigate to or manipulate the clipboard directly; it's only used for copy and paste operations.

Happy capturing!

Here I have posted the whole town of Essen, Germany, where we will be next week. The green arrow still points to my wife's family's home. I have posted here a more distant map on which I have used paint to draw a red line showing the path I usually take to jog to the train station, then walk through the old city and then to the Saturn Electronics center in the shopping mall where one can buy virtual reality games, equipment and DVDs. See if you can use screen capture and Paint or some other program to point out features of your environment.

20 Print screen function

Message no. 20[Branch from no. 19]

Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, January 22, 2007 3:26pm

Subject: this is a test

Hi Michelle and all,

Michelle, your first test downloaded to my computer as some kind of .mft file, so I could not open it.

How are you doing your screen capture? On a Mac I generally use the application "Grab" (found in the Applications/Utilities folder), which captures it as a .tiff, then I open it with the application "Preview" and do a save as to a JPEG, which I upload as an attachment (JPEGs are much smaller).

I encourage everybody to convert pictures to JPEG files for this course. Can you try again?

Here are the instructions I got from the Grab Help screen (if you are a PC user, I will check that system out and let you know in a minute, but I think you can do the same thing with PRINTSCREEN.):

"Converting Grab screen shots to other formats Grab saves screen shots as files in TIFF format. If you want to use your screen shots on the web, in email, or in a word processor, you can use the Preview application to convert the TIFF files to other formats, such as JPEG or PICT.

Open Preview (located in Applications) and choose File > Open. Locate the file you want to convert and click Open. Choose File > Save As. Choose a file format from the Format pop-up menu and click Save. You can also use third-party applications to open and convert TIFF files created in Grab."

Here is an attached picture of Dr. Sybille Culhane (my wife's) family home in Germany. This is where we will be conducting the course from next week (we are now in California). See if this comes through (note it has the file extension .jpg)

11 Sharing pictures with us!

Message no. 11 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, January 22, 2007

2:19am

Subject: Sharing pictures with us!

Hi guys,

Please note that when you post a discussion message, you can attach pictures using the "Attach file" button below. Another way to do it is to embed them in an html file, if you know how to do that. That way they will appear in the middle of discussion post, like this:

To do that, what I do is upload a picture to my blog, then copy the html code out of my blog and paste it into this discussion space. That way I don't have to write any code myself!

(The above is a googlemap picture of the neighborhood in Chicago where I grew up. I was a couple of blocks north of the Museum of Science and Industry, where the World's Fair in the late 1800s took place. I called it "the Museum of Science and Interesting". A beautiful place to grow up!)

Messages 8, 9 and 10: Using Google Earth to Explore Your Environment

Message no. 8

Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, January 22, 2007 12:15am

Subject: The Discussion Area

Well here we are -- in the land of virtual discussions. In this environment the psychology of our behavior will be to act as though we are all more or less in the same room, having a cup of tea and talking about what we have been reading and thinking about in the realm of Environmental Psychology. So start writing and posting!

Message no. 9 Posted by Anonymous on Monday, January 22, 2007 12:19am Subject: A place to keep your notes as you read!

In the world of cutting and pasting, it makes alot of sense to take notes on your computer. But often it is hard to keep all those notes organized.

And wouldn't it be nice if you could retrieve those notes from any computer, anywhere on earth, even from an email cafe in Botswana? Then you could really use the on-line class to advantage, and travel all over the world without missing a thing! What a life!

And wouldn't it be even nicer if all your friends, colleagues and peers could benefit from the notes you took, and you could benefit from theirs? Well here is a chance to make that a reality. Use this thread to take notes and post them for everybody's advantage. No sense in ever re-inventing the wheel, eh?

In this way we can all grow smarter and more efficient together.

Message no. 10 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, January 22, 2007 2:09am Subject: Google Mapping your environment - how the landscape surrounding us affects our lives.

This is the email I sent out to all of you Sunday night before the course began. It begins our first discussion of how our personal environment affects our behavior. Please join the discussion by answering the questions I have posed below as part of this thread, and add your own questions for each other. Once you have all shared your google maps (bird's eye view) and your "forward up equivalence" (ego point of view) photographs , you can ask even more meaningful questions about each other's environments.

First, here are my questions for you, again:

Esteemed student explorers of the ever more rapidly changing environment,

It is Sunday night and the course content area for our program is rapidly taking shape. If you have been visiting before tonight, please note that there have been major revisions, so you will definitely want to revisit any pages you may have stumbled upon while I was writing and editing them.

On the eve of the commencement of our course (the launch of our ship of discovery, if you will!) I would like to offer you some suggestions for how to make the most of you first assignments this week, which, in addition to reading chapter one of the text, and joining the discussion of "how your environment shaped you" (see discussion area) are to prepare a few cognitive maps of your environments (real and virtual) so we can get to know where you live and how you interact with and feel about your environment(s). (Note that in this course the term "The Environment" is rather meaningless. We speak of "environments" -- plural -- and more specifically of "my environment", "your environment" , "his environment", "her environment", "their environment" etc. The idea of "saving THE environment makes no sense... one must always specify...).

Since this course is about the psychology of behavior insofar as it relates to our environments, here are some very specific and personal ideas of how you might go about describing YOUR environment:

Adrienne: It would be fascinating to know what relationship you have with the riparian forest environment of Sandy Run Regional park and Lake Ridge Park. How does it feel to live on a meandering stream? Have you experience with flooding? Does living near wilderness give you a utilitarian or romantic approach to your environment? Does your ancestry influence your attitude toward the landscape? Those sort of questions would be interesting for us to know.

Angelina: Which areas have more of an effect on your psyche -- the forests around Tibbett's Lake or the baseball fields? The Yonker's Raceway or the Hillview Reservoir? Which do you think provide better environments for children growing up and why? Do you have memories of those specific environments you would like to share?

Daniela: Do the marine resources of Eastchester Bay have any significance for you? Have you ever gone boating, swimming, snorkeling or scuba diving there? What kind of wildlife can you see from City Island or Hart island – giant horseshoe crabs, dolphins, whales, seabirds? Are the island communities and beaches world’s unto themselves, places where only privileged rich folk with yachts and sailboats have access to the natural environment, or are they open to the public? Is the Bronx zoo and the forests along the Bronx River Parkway the best way to “get away from it all” in your neighborhood? Is there adequate public transit to get from the Morris Park/Westchester residential areas to places like the Botanical Gardens or is it too much of a hassle?

Dana: Do you consider the Bronx Zoo to be within walking distance? Is the route pedestrian friendly? Are there bike paths? Is it easy to cross the railroad tracks and the Bronx River Parkway, or do they act as “impenetrable rivers of iron and concrete” separating residents from recreational opportunities? Can you hear the sounds of exotic animals calling from “Jungle World road” in the twilight and at dawn? If so, how does that make you feel? If “animal rights” activists forced the zoo to close down, do you think this would take away a major source of enjoyment or pleasure for the kids you know? If the avian flu were to mutate to be passed from human to human and an epidemic hit the East Coast and most people were too weak to care for or feed the animals at the zoo but you were immune, would you free the animals so they could roam the city and survive (like in the movie 12 monkeys with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt?) Do you think there is enough green space in New York for large animals to survive without our help?

Dawn: Do you ever hike around Lyonsville pond, or is that considered too far out of the way or too trivial a landscape feature? How did all the construction around Hurley Mountain road affect you, if at all? Was wandering around the river near High Falls ever a part of your behavioral repertoire, or did you prefer to go further east to the mighty Hudson itself? Do you consider the reservoir out by Olivebridge to be a romantic or recreational location, or just a utility to get water to the municipalities?

Janita: What does the Woodlawn Cemetery mean to you? Is it a place of reverence or recreation? Or does it conjure up Halloween images of vampires and zombies? Does the Moshulu Golf Course make you smile with thoughts of placid mornings socializing with your peers and improving your par, or does it represent an exclusionary zone open only to the leisure class? Is Van Cortlandt park a place of picnics and sports and a landscape of mystery and imagination, an urban wilderness near the Big Apple? Did you ever play softball between E233rd street and the Major Deegan Expressway, and did the noise of the traffic disturb you?

Kathleen: Do you consider Lake Tonetta a real lake worth preserving for its recreational opportunities? Have you ever gone boating there? Is it a place you would run to after school? Or would you prefer to go to the beach-like shoreline of the Bog Brook Reservoir? Were you allowed to go swimming or walk a dog around the reservoir, or do the police chase you away since it is meant to provide water for municipal utility companies? Do you consider the shopping mall by the Clocktower Commons an eyesore and blight on the landscape, or a convenience that you are glad to have close by?

Kenisha: How much time do you spend by the Hudson River? Do you consider the waterfront by Water Grant Street and River St. to be adequately developed for the enjoyment of Yonkers residents, or do folks in Hastings or Dobbs Ferry or Irvington get a better deal? Do Sullivan Oval Park and Fleming Park provide adequate recreational and relaxation facilities within walking distance of your home, or do you feel the built environment around Nepperhan Ave and Yonkers Ave to be too congested and access to the parks difficult? Does Cerrator park offer anything of value to you? How would you rate Yonkers as an urban setting – does it offer vibrancy and opportunities, or is it do you prefer Manhattan or White Plains?

Michelle: What does the Litchfield Golf and Country Club represent to you? Is it an oasis of managed green tranquility or a sterile manicured abstraction? Do you prefer exploring the wildness of the muddy river and its marshland streams to the West, or do you prefer to lounge on the white sands of Litchfield Beach? Do you find your home to be pleasantly away from it all, and want to defend it from further development or do you experience it as too remote, and welcome developers?

Patricia: In a world of suburban tracts and cul-de-sacs, do you find the Leonard Johns Community Park to provide adequate green space to offset the housing sprawl in the region? How do you feel about the size of the parking lot there, given that it is as large as the lawn by the pond and half the size of the pond itself? If the regional planning authority decided that the open land West of you betweenMorriss Road and Long Prairie Road should be sold to a housing tract developer and turned into the same sort of environment as you find up by Prescott Circle or Spring Meadow Lane, would you be for it or against it? How would it affect the real estate value and aesthetic opportunities of your own home? Do you think the forest fragment at the end of Dendron Drive has any impact of wildlife survival? If it were severely diminished in size would that make a difference? Are deer ever killed trying to get across Morriss road?

Tanya: What role, if any, does Lake Mohegan play in your life? Do you spend more time at the park off of Stoney St. and Line Ave, or the one down past Amelia Drive? Does the forest buffer around the parks shield you adequately from the sound of traffic from the Taconic? Does all the free parking space at the Cortlandt Town Center create traffic jams on Main street? Does the convenience of having a big shopping mall so close to home justify its proximity to the lake? Where does the sewage from such a big facility go? What about oil-laden surface runoff during a big rainstorm? Does anybody talk about these issues in your community?

Note that these questions could be asked of and apply to each and every one of us, but the point of this course is to personalize our experience with our environments. I hope that you will take this questions as a kind of launch pad into deeper and deeper discussions about our environmental behavior. As you work on assignment 1, see if you can provide us all with pictures of the environments around where we live, along with stories and anecdotes.

And please remember – by “environment” I do NOT mean just places with trees and greenery and cuddly animals. Parking lots, buildings, offices, cars and homes are all environments. The issue is “which environments make you feel most at home; which environments bring out the behaviors you value most about yourself. Which environments mean the most to you!”

Hope that helps get you started thinking about Environment and the Psychology of your behavior!

Now, go to Google Maps and start taking a bird’s eye view of where YOU live, and share with the rest of us!

Sincerely,

T.H.

PS: You can look at the attached pictures of my home environment in Egypt and ask me similar questions!

5 Getting to know each other!

Message no. 5

Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, January 22, 2007 12:09am

Subject: Getting to know each other!

Howdy y'all! To get things started and get to know each of us better, I suggest we start our discussion thread by telling each other how we came to inhabit the environment we now reside in! When you finish assignment one we will hopefully get to see views of the environments you inhabit that affect your behavior and which your behavior affects. When you finish assignment two we will hopefully get to see the kind of virtual environments you are exploring. But it would be nice to get some background, and that is what this thread is for. Let me start it off:

My phenotype-forming environments were, ancestrally, the Middle East and Northern Europe. My mother comes from Assyrian Iraqi and Phoenician Lebanese (Greek Orthodox) roots in arid montane and coastal environments. The thousands and thousands of years our people spent there contributed to genetic characteristics that now give me my larger nose, bushy eyebrows, dark hair and olive skin that make me racially identifiable as a "Middle Easterner". My father, however, comes from Irish and Alsatian (French/German) roots, with a predominance of Irish island environment effects shaping the genes that got passed on. Consequently I have green eyes and ruddy cheeks and the possibility of having fair skinned red-headed children if the recessive genes I've inherited from those ancestors of northern climates combine with similar genes from my wife.

I was born in a cold northern temperate zone environment in what is now the United States of America, in the city of Chicago, Illinois. I was born in a noisy part of the city, not far from lake Michigan, at a time when racial tensions and idealism were both high in America. My mother worked in the inner city at Headstart and my father was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News.

As a consequence of these physical and social environments I became very interested in finding ways to improve both the built environment and the social environment, deciding at a very young age to devote my life to "making the world a better place". Growing up by Lake Michigan, which is large enough to have waves and appear as an ocean to a child, made me fond of seashores, while the nearbye Museum of Science and Industry and Shedd Aquarium gave me a fascination with technology and biology.

At the age of 8 we moved to Dobbs Ferry, New York, into apartments next to the Mercy College Woods, a riparian forest valley that led to the Hudson river. This environment made me fall in love with wildlife and tree filled wilderness, and led me years later to do field research in the rainforests of Borneo and Guatemala.

My middle and high school environments were, for the most part, dismal collections of sterile classrooms and meaningless exams, and taught me that the worst environment for a human mind to grow in is a traditional classroom. This is why I enjoy on-line education!

My undergraduate experiences at Harvard University's "elite ivory tower environment" taught me that there are no people smarter or better than anybody else, just people with more money or privilege who like to act superior. This led to me to be a crusader for educational reform who believed that if we change the environment in which learning occurs (or is constrained) and change the behavior of teachers, we can make the world a much much better place. Yes... I blame the school environment for many of our social ills and world problems!

My years of experience in the "gang" environments of impoverished inner city South Central Los Angeles, and in poor villages and slums of Central America and the Middle East, taught me that there is great dignity and skill and ambition in the world of the less fortunate and that we must improve the physical and economic environments of the poor if we want a world in which everybody can reach their highest potential.

Briefly then, those are the environments that shaped me.

How about you?

Superhero Simulations for training the "transhuman": A way to explore virtual environments and increase your range of behaviors

I'll get more philosophical later. For now I just want to record some helpful tips I've learned when trying to set up various simulations on the PC.

Today, while jogging through old Essen in Northern Germany, I found a Turkish cell phone, used DVD and computer game shop called "City Games" (Tel. 0201/1098975) and picked up a copy of "Spiderman 2: The Game" for PC to run on the Windows XP Service Pack 2 side of my MacBook Pro (using Bootcamp).

I installed the game on my 500 GB Medion HDDrive 2go (as I do all my PC games, since the partition on my MacBook is only 20 GB) and when I went to run it, it barked at me

"Negative delta time!

History: UGameEngine::Tick <- UpdateWorld <- MainLoop"

and promptly crashed the game. I typed the error message into google.de and one of my first hits was: http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=165992

Scrolling down I found the following useful information:

solution
hello, i also have the same problem with my x2 aswell. but i have found a solution.

get win2000 launcher http://www.majorgeeks.com/Win2000_Launcher_d438.html

and set up a launcher for ut and in the SMP tab only tick your first processer. a volia!

James

I did exactly as James suggested and it worked like a charm. Now Spider-Man 2 works great, so I can explore a virtual Manhattan environment from above.

Enhancements for making your exploration of virtual cityscapes easier:

The last thing you want to do when exploring various environments on your computer is have to keep finding your original CD's or DVD's -- besides the time wasted loading and unloading (preventing you from quickly changing the environments you are exploring), the constant use of the discs wears them out and subjects them to possible breakage. There are a couple of solutions to this problem. One is using GameJackal (http://www.slysoft.com/de/gamejackal.html) (30 day trial version). I've tried it for The Sims 2 and Resident Evil 4 and it works fine, but I understand it eats up harddrive space and memory. The other option is to download no-cd patches (usually modified .exe files to launch the game which you replace your original .exe with). My source for no-cd patches is GameCopyWorld.com.

For Spiderman 2:

Download

"Spider-Man 2 v1.0 [ENGLISH] No-CD/Fixed EXE" from GameCopyWorld.com

http://m0006.gamecopyworld.com/games/pc_spider-man_2.shtml

and replace the original WEBHEAD.EXE file with the one from the File Archive (in my case I had to put it in the Spiderman 2/System/ folder on my external harddrive. I backed up the original .exe in a backups folder.

Note: For GTA Vice City, if you want to explore the Florida urban environment, I suggest you use Game Jackal for your no-cd play; the no-cd .exe files (and the wonderful "save anywhere, anytime" launch .exe) unfortunately seem to cause the game to crash when you enter the ammo shop and try to purchase a weapon, or when you finish the first yacht scene. It may crash in other places as well. Reinstalling the program and running with the DVD in the drive solved the problem. Game Jackal seems to work with it once you create a profile.

Next tip:

When exploring virtual environments to learn about how they affect your behavioral psychology, you want as much flexibility as possible in your range of behavioral options. 'Playing' the game doesn't give you that flexibility as you will find yourself more concerned with staying alive or fulfilling the objectives of the game storyline than exploring your environment or options. You can waste a lot of time reading walkthroughs and learning about cheats to survive a given level, and that time is much better spent simply navigating through the environments and picking your fights and challenges on an adhoc basis.

Fortunately, for achieving this kind of flexibility there are tools out there called "TRAINERS". A trainer lets you toggle on and off parameters such as "unlimited health", "unlimited ammo" "freeze AI" (rendering the artificial intelligence driven enemies impotent and motionless so you can move around them or dispatch them) "one hit kill" (even the slightest punch or a badly aimed shot can dispatch an agressor) so that you don't have to waste your time being a marksman. With a good trainer (and there are many out there) you can go through the virtual world of the game at your own pace and decide when you want to "play" and when you simply want to explore. In effect, trainers make you a "superhero".

GameCopyWorld.com has lots of trainers for lots of games. The ones for spiderman 2 are here:

http://www.code5.de/pccheats/s/spider-man-2.shtml
http://konsolenprofis.de/downloads/download.php?id=700
http://m0006.gamecopyworld.com/games/pc_spider-man_2.shtml

Using such trainers is similar to calling up the console in Half-Life 2 and typing in
"sv cheats 1" to turn cheat mode on and then typing in "god" to enter "god mode" wherein you are immortal and invincible. Game testers use these modes to walk through their games for beta testing without getting killed by their own AI creations at every turn.

I have found that being invincible (i.e., being "superman") completely changes your perspective about the environment and how you behave in it, and raises serious questions about how much of our environmental response is mediated by our own fear of mortality or conflict.

My suggestion: run a trainer that lets you easily toggle between playing virtual games as a mortal and as an immortal, and record how the experiences affect your behavior and psychology.

Viel spass! (Good luck!)