This online simulation game (http://www.indiana.edu/~istdemo/) created by the University of Indiana, has at its heart, the premise of exploring how information is transmitted across a network. By using a created narrative of getting different teachers at a fictional high school to adopt a new pedagogical technique, it focuses many topics of discussion including the way information is transmitted, the importance of how it is transmitted and the role that people who have already adopted it play in its propagation. However, what interests me more than perhaps the game as an exploration of the effect of these phenomena, is the notion of being able to translate a qualitative effect into a quantitative values. The question for me that arise is how does one translate human behavior as seen in the “wild” into a strictly defined set of rules for a program to then generate answers from. While I cannot begin to discuss the mechanics of how this information is then modeled into a computer program, the ability of a computer to do this brings up questions as to what defines us as humans. If a computer can be programmed to act as a human would act, or at least be able to predict how a given human would react to certain information, does that make the computer human, or does it make us simply computer programs running simultaneously. These ethical or ontological questions that arise from the translation of the concepts learned in this class into practice are ones that, in and of themselves, could fill up another semester. The helpfulness of the simulation, which is in my opinion, excellent, in transmitted the concepts is not the issue I want to bring up, but rather, how the advance of this types of simulation affect the way we understand our place in the world around us. As computer seem to take over various aspects of over lives that we once under direct human control, it allows us time to explore other realms of our existence. While this increased “technologification” is something that we should not (or perhaps cannot) stop, the problems it brings up run deeper that the pure mechanics of how to make it a reality. It in fact seems that, as this program is for me an example, that due to the ability of technology to increasingly models complex “natural” phenomena while at the same time take over tasks that once occupied our time, a redefinition of what our place in our context is in order.