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Like all shooters games, shooters are just puzzles to be figured out, with competition, rules and strategies to make them winnable. This is a really brilliant piece of thinking.

Tom Bissell reviews Spec Ops: The Line and explores the reasons why we play shooter games. - Grantland.

Original Article

Techno flashback time, here’s The Cure, with their big hit “Just Like Heaven.”

It’s an impressive mix, but electronic music should have a good mix. Decades before the really heavy techno and house productions brought in booming bass and robotic beats, the guitars and bass and drums of The Cure might not sound overly produced to today’s ears. But those chorus keyboards, high and lofty above the mix are the pioneering sounds that put them in the synth pop bin back in the day, right next to The Eurythmics, Depeche Mode and The Pet Shop Boys.

This song’s intro starts right off with a huge drum hit and the bass line. The bass holds it all together while the rest of the band lays in. Each instrument appears up and then fades back into the mix as the next instrument joins in, the acoustic strumming, the high synth voices, until the final guitar riff catches them all and starts winding around them.

By the time Robert Smith starts the vocal, the whole band is in. All the voices are fit in their frequency bands, each riff hitting in the right spot with plenty of space. It is a really great mix, and a great way to think about putting a whole mix together. The bass and drums form the spine of the song, but various voices hold the ear while they come together.

It would be a great sound check song to mix a live room once all the levels are established.

Original Article

We used to say that content was king. Really, it is the user who is king and always has been. The user is the sole, undisputed and perpetual ruler of their own time and attention. In social media, it isn’t the content that’s at the center, it is that the user who liked the content or shared it that is at the center. In social traffic driving, it is that relationship between the sharer and the story that makes us check out the content. We observe first and then look to get information about why our friend thought it was worthwhile. We consume all or part of it along the way, but the users are still kings. They are, after all, the product that publishers try to get advertisers to buy. Advertisers don’t buy stories, they buy the people that look at them - the users.

Original Article

This past weekend, I was priviledged to be included in a two-day conversation about how universities are producing news sites. This blog post does a really great job summing up a number of the sites represented and discussed at the meeting.

These university-sponsored news sites feature interactives, videos, photo slideshows and social media journalism; but need improvements in web writing and photography.

This post analyzes 12 news sites which are sponsored by or affiliated with universities or journalism schools, and mostly feature student works. These sites are collected from a conference on university news sites, which was attended by representatives of these sites. This conference, organized by J-Lab in June 2012, focused on trends and practices of the emerging university news sites. The conference organizers wrote an article about key issues found with such news sites.

via J-Lab university news sites #jnewslab.

The sites all face similar and unique challenges in educating students via a practicum and experiential learning process.

The idea that students paying tuition can meet information needs of communities - defined either by geography or interest - outside of the university community is something that is kicking around. That this would be in some kind of business structure is bundled in, because that is our conception of what the news media looks like. A big part of the discussion is how appropriate that expectation is, and how fair is it to the student to semantically shift in other, external priorities.

Universities are communities in and of themselves, they are gathered around knowledge, they serve and service knowledge, seek it, create it, discover it, share it, disseminate it. Universities have existed, with their own structures of governance and society and culture, in a rather continuous form since the medieval period… through the rise of nations, through changing religions, through all revolutions of technology and politics. There’s something there that works.

The product of journalism is information, which is part of knowledge. There is something potentially here. Eric Newton of the Knight Foundation has described what he considers a clinical approach, drawing inspiration from teaching hospitals.

The primary product of a teaching hospital is also knowledge, evidence by the fact that many, if not most, teaching hospitals draw major funding from grants to do clinical trials and research. There are patients served at university hospitals, but that is not their whole purpose. Student novices do not operate and learn how to operate by working on live patients in need as a common practice, and for very, very good reasons.

To pick up a local news operation and move it into a university would be more like an extension service. Land grant universities have extensive offerings that are practical hybrids of some kind of possible model, but that model would only be a starting point for exploring how to strike a balance. The point is that the student interaction in extension services is pitched where the staff of the service is needed to make it work at a scale for the students to get some kind of minimal benefit via work study positions and other association that is not really a classroom for credit kind of experience.

In fact, just to return briefly to the teaching hospital as a service entity for scale and context: Georgetown University Hospital, a modest teaching facility, has around 1500 faculty members to serve about 750 student doctors - and the size of the support staff is orders of magnitude higher.

Let’s think about bringing an ad-driven 24-hour local news television station into a university and play with those numbers. Is the thinking that the university offers a cost buffer to the business? Are professional journalists at this operation expected to act as research fellows? Do granting institutions pay for clinical trials and research at the tv station - knowledge that informs a large purpose on a scale of developing a drug to cure a disease? Is daily or even investigative journalism on that kind of scale of knowledge? Do news stories implement a scientific model of experiment, methodology, results, and analysis and work with new theories and paradigms? Is the information unique and does it have potential application in a larger process, such a finding the benefits of a sodium flouride with tooth decay or mapping a genome for genetic engineering?

That many universities have public broadcasting licenses, which they have not primarily used as a contact experiential teaching zone but largely operate as community services as part of the larger public broadcasting network is telling. American University owns the license for WAMU, one of the largest NPR stations in the country. And our students work there and derive some benefit from being associated with it, but they are not in the station all day every day as  a living laboratory of teaching journalism and broadcasting.  Something there doesn’t really work the same.

Would it be a good fit if American University developed a close model with our neighbors, WRC NBC 4, and began operating a 24-hour news operation that would be a working service for the larger community while still serving the students who pay a premium tution? That’s certainly food for thought.

Original Article

A professional isn’t just someone who wears a suit to work. Stephen King has asserted that a person isn’t a writer unless they have been paid to write. We call people who are great at what they do “pros.” Sometimes we think the things we see look “amateurish” because they are not slick and polished as we’d expect from a professional standard. But what are the differences?

We tend to consider the difference between a professional and an amateur as such that the professional is paid and the amateur, no matter the level of talent, knowledge, skill or ability, doesn’t do an activity as their profession. All professionals are still students, however the higher they progress in their area and the farther they explore from the state of their art, the more they need to be self-learners. Novices and avocationals benefit from learning from more experienced practitioners.

The major difference between the professional and the novice is that the professional can visualize how they want something to come out and quickly apply the necessary tools to achieve that vision. A novice, on the other hand is more apt to search for results with less direction. The more product a person produces, the easier it becomes to achieve particular results in less time. Practice is the best way to improve skills, exploration is the best way to expand them, collaboration is the best way to acquire.

While experience, devotion and compensation are all key factors in being a professional, these are not really qualities of assessment of a person’s actual likelihood to make something of professional quality.

Talent - Your natural abilities are what they are. You can sharpen and hone your talent and grow it, but you can’t just become talented. Some people can just pick up a pencil and draw photographically, but people who can only draw stick figures can be taught how to visually measure, create perspective aids or grids, and how to use a pencil to get a variety of shades and lines. That dedicated person may never be able to capture and render what the gifted artist can, but they can in time become competent and may enjoy their work more than the person who takes their talent for granted. The child prodigy that just sits down at an instrument and is suddenly a virtuoso is a great story, but largely because it is so rare it is almost a fairy tale. Prodigies become great because they take that amazing natural gift and then work very, very hard at it. There’s really no handicapping talent, raw intelligence, or natural physical adeptness. It is hard to play in the NBA if you aren’t agile, tall or fast. People are born with it. But not everyone who is tall gets into the NBA, either.

Knowledge

Professionals study their craft, forever. The learn from each other and share knowledge with each other. All fields are constantly changing and advancing with new ideas, new tools, new approaches. New and old problems are puzzles that professionals work to solve and resolve. Knowledge is gained through study, interaction and experience. It takes time to acquire.

Skills

Skills are the result of practice. You can’t practice what you don’t know, so knowledge informs skills. Skills are valuable, largely because they can be scarce. Not all people have them and in increasingly complex projects and systems, people need to have various skills sets to achieve results. A skilled craftsperson can achieve results that people outside and inside the craft can admire and appreciate. Professionals are so skilled that other people will pay them to use their skills. Skills can be taught and they can also be discovered.

Abilities

Abilities indicate how well you can practice your skills. You can have knowledge of something but can you actually make that thing, and how good is it? Once study and practice have reached the level where someone is able to consistently deliver high quality results, a person is considered able. On the high seas, the rank of able seaman meant that a sailor was worth their salt. Abilities require constant attention and maintenance if a person is going to keep up with the latest practices and be consistently capable. We can increase our abilities by recognizing new tools and techniques to achieve better results.

Opportunity

This isn’t just luck, but being able to recognize when the break comes and then put in the hard work it takes to realize the advantage. You can be in the right time at the right place, but that’s just the start.

It looks easy for the pros because they’ve practiced and studied and worked hard. They started with talent, learned the field, practiced and developed their skills and became able to create and produce the things they envisioned. Those things were so great that people valued and appreciated them with their time and money.

Professionals do use their talent, knowledge, skills and abilities in their vocation. But uncompensated amateurs with enough talent, knowledge, skill and ability can make professional quality products, and professionals can make amateurish or low-quality products too.

This is important to accept and acknowledge, because this can mean the difference between being professional or amateur in this sense means that the professional has access to money - a job, paying clients, wide distribution, a big marketplace - opportunities that the amateur doesn’t have. If the control or access changes, the value of the professional will change accordingly.

Original Article