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Saturday, September 22, 2012
Why Bother with Self Help, Self Improvement, And Personal Growth ...
Attention to self help, self improvement, and personal growth is lacking in many individuals. For many, each day entails barely more than going to work and coming home tired enough to fall into bed, just to do it all over again the next day.
A Note About Our Reviews of Sports Video Games
I like giving readers an opportunity to see how we decide things at Kotaku, so, what follows is my and Owen's e-mail exchange about how Kotaku reviews sports games. We've done a tiny bit of editing for readability. Otherwise, this is the exchange.
The sidebar is the byproduct of this exchange and represents our editorial stance, going forward, for any of our sports game reviews.
From: owen@kotaku.com
To: stephentotilo@kotaku.com
Date: Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 12:15 PM
Subject: Some thoughts on reviews of sports video games
When we get to the end of this year's sports video games (which will be after WWE '13 in November) I'd like to know your thoughts on exempting sports video game reviews from the "Should You Play This Game?" call going forward.
If you look at all of my reviews of sports video games, they have all been Yes. This is not good, and makes me appear to be a shill or critically shallow. But in answering the question "Should You Play This" I feel I'm answering it honestly. It's a gameplay question, not a consumer question, and I have understood this to be deliberately the point of asking it (as a contrast to the gut check experiment of last year).
To answer "no," to "should you play this," to me communicates that the thing is even worse than "do not buy," which is the ultimate standard in sports video gaming, thanks to its annualized nature. To answer yes to "should you play this," likewise can send a disproportionate message of approval in an annualized genre?and it's different from Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty in that this is more of a continuation or a refinement of the previous year's game, not a different chapter in a longer-running story.
Today, with F1 2012, my personal feeling is, no, I'm not a Formula 1 fan, I'm not really interested in playing something this technical and demanding. But I can't find it in me to impugn the overall work of Codemasters and its studio on what is, for those who truly are interested in Formula 1 racing, a very solid simulation that engages its fans on whatever level of interest they have in that sport.
For another frame of reference, see my review of NHL 13. As a fan, I have no affection for ice hockey or real knowledge of how the sport is played. That's not the type of person reading this review (even if it is offered for general consumption to all of our readership).
To give that a "No," is to place my personal, even private entertainment priorities above those of the broader constituency to whom I am speaking, who in this case are assumed to be race or hockey fans. Nor am I prepared to take the heat from them in a subject where I am demonstrably out of my depth no matter how much I play this game. There's a real world knowledge that can be used endlessly against my opinion here that does not factor into other types of reviews.
Do you see what I'm getting at? This sort of calls back to my column last year on whether sports video games are worth reviewing, as they're annualized, typically only one has a league license, and it's basically, yeah, if you want to play Major League Baseball on the Xbox 360, then MLB 2K12 is worth playing, all of its faults notwithstanding. NCAA Football 13 came in short of expectations, and I said so in the review text, but, still I can't sit here and say the whole thing is such a waste of time it's not worth playing.
All of this is compounded by the fact sports video games have now two, three or even four discrete modes of play that could be considered games unto themselves?multiplayer competition, singleplayer or franchise career, and now you have online careers and ultimate teams and such.
The reason The Wall Street Journal's review of Borderlands 2 generated so much heat in the core gaming community is because the guy really did place his narrower personal interest over a broader critical responsibility. I feel like "Should You Play This"?as it is applied to the sports genre?sets up a situation that doesn't say much of anything, until it says something totally uncalled for. The problem is, when we make an exception for a class of game, we risk diluting the overall integrity of the review process. I understand that.
I'm not sure what the answer is but I just wanted you to know I'm pondering all of this, and have every intention of proceeding forthrightly under the current standard, but I worry about its sustainability in the area I am called upon to judge.
OSG
The Tendency Toward 'Yes'
Beside every video game review Kotaku makes a judgment on whether it is worth playing. Yes, No, or Not Yet are the responses, and in our unscored reviews, it seems to present a pass/fail proposition on the game's entire merit.
Sports video games, on the whole, show some kind of improvement every year, making them very likely to receive a "Yes" if the worth-playing question is answered honestly.
What forms the spine of a sports video game's critical reception is how much it improved over the last year. A yes or a no to "is this game worth playing?" does not answer that. Still, we think it's vital to have a uniform review standard, and annual sports video games will be held to it.
So even if most titles are likely to receive a "Yes," that should only be considered the starting point if not, frankly, a fundamental expectation.
It should be stressed that "Is this game worth playing?" also doesn't answer whether it is worth buying, which is a question that animates so much of the discussion behind annualized sports titles. Kotaku's reviews evaluate a video game on their critical merits, leaving out questions of their worth as a full-price purchase, as a used or discounted purchase, or where it may fit into a gamer's crowded budget.
There's going to be a big green Yes on a lot of licensed sports video games unless they have regressed to unplayability. Given the genre's iterative nature, and the industry's aversion to reinventing a series with so much licensing money at stake, such cases should be rare.
The Yes/No answer to a sports video game's playability may not fully appraise the game's merit. But patronizing the genre and its constituency by creating exceptions or exemptions in our review policies would not help matters, either. We ask that you read the entire review and use it to inform your expectations of this year's edition.
From: stephentotilo@kotaku.com
To: owen@kotaku.com
Date: Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 6:34 PM
Subject: Some thoughts on reviews of sports video games
Owen,
This is a really smart e-mail. My thoughts:
1) You're right. Most annualized, licensed sports games, based on the standards we're using, will merit a Yes.
2) The Yes (or the No or the Not Yet) is, obviously, not the only assessment we're giving in our reviews, so I don't think we should worry that it excuses a game's faults and prevents us from offering a nuanced assessment of the game. The Yes tells people it's worth playing. Most of the rest of the review explains why and notes caveats. The Yes is simply a more natural way of telling people the game is worth playing than any number we could put on the review.
3) If there was more competition in sports gaming, I don't think this would be an issue. That's why this feels like a valid edge case to our review system. Should we see alternate NFL games crop up, we could more easily guide people with a Yes on one and a No on the other. It's just not the case at this moment in history. So I'm fine with treating sports games a little differently now, but not ok with excusing them from our system and thereby never being able to gracefully get them back in our review system.
4) So... I'd like to have you retain the YES/NO/NOTYET system for these games. I want this, in part, because the Not Yet is an important tool for us to use for buggy games that cannot be fairly assessed at launch but might be better once patched. But I'd like you to note, in your sports games reviews, that we have a Sports Game Exception or whatever you want to call it. That notation should link to an explanation of how we assess sports games.
5) Our Sports Game Exception is essentially outlined in your e-mail to me, so let's go ahead and publish this exchange on Kotaku for all the readers to see. Are you ok with that?
-Stephen
Owen was ok with me running these e-mails, so now you all can see how we hashed this out. He wrote the sidebar, which we decided not to call an "Exception", because we decided that was too extreme a label.
We both hope that competition will eventually return to licensed sports games and that all of this will therefore become moot.
Source: http://kotaku.com/5945183/a-note-about-our-reviews-of-sports-video-games
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Friday, September 21, 2012
AT&T LTE goes live in eight more locations ahead of iPhone 5 launch
Just like Verizon, AT&T has been exapnading their LTE coverage that will certainly help new iPhone 5 owners attain the speeds they're expecting. In total, eight new areas have now gone live for AT&T.
- Detroit (metro area)
- Portland
- Honolulu
- Seattle
- Pittsburgh
- Sacramento
- Birmingham
- Memphis
In addition, AT&T has also expanded its LTE network in Miami-Dade County, continuing to bring it to more customers in south Florida.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/5rAeyve2-YE/story01.htm
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As Scientists Question New Rat Study, GMO Debate Rages On
Enlarge Paolo Giovannini/AP Italian farmer Giorgio Fidenato picks up what's left of his genetically altered corn after anti-GMO activists trampled it, back in 2010.
Paolo Giovannini/APItalian farmer Giorgio Fidenato picks up what's left of his genetically altered corn after anti-GMO activists trampled it, back in 2010.
The headlines on the press releases that started showing up yesterday, here at The Salt certainly got our attention. Just one sample: "BREAKING NEWS: New Study Links Genetically Engineered Food to Tumors."
The reason for all the excitement was a study published this week in the well-respected journal Food and Chemical Toxicology. The French scientists who conducted the study basically concluded that rats fed a diet of genetically modified corn and small amounts of herbicides got sicker faster than their counterparts eating regular corn and no herbicides.
Based on the study, several anti-GMO groups are calling for a ban and the French government is calling for more investigation, but many scientists met the research with a heavy dose of skepticism.
?The study describes an experiment in which scientists fed 18 different groups of rats (ten rats in each group) various concentrations of a genetically engineered kind of corn and/or small amounts of the herbicide Roundup. (Roundup is widely used in combination with genetically engineered "Roundup Ready" crops.)
Two control groups got a diet of non-modified corn and no Roundup. The experiment went on for two years, an unusually long time. Most experiments with rats that attempt to measure the toxic effects of chemicals last only 90 days.
On average, the rats that ate GM corn or drank water laced with Roundup did worse than the control group. Tumors showed up earlier (at least in some of the groups) and more rats died than in the control groups. The contrast was most stark among female rats.
So is this solid evidence that GM corn (or other crops) are bad for you? The author of the paper, Gilles-Eric Seralini, who has been campaigning against GM crops since 1997, says yes. Definitely yes.
Other scientists say, absolutely not.
Some of their complaints about the study are aimed at the study's methods. Critics point out that the type of experimental rats used in this study are particularly prone to tumors. So if you divide up 200 of them into twenty groups, as this study did, you are likely to get very high tumor rates in some of the groups. And the fact that such clusters of tumors didn't show up in the two small control groups could easily be due to random chance.
One particularly irreverent critic, Michael Grayer, a medical statistician, pointed out that the study included 18 groups of rats that were exposed to GMOs or Roundup (nine each for male and female rats), compared to only two control groups. "The potential for cherry-picking the nice positive results here from a sea of boring null ones is immense," he wrote on his blog. "Not saying they did it, of course, but it's certainly a concern."
Also, if this experiment truly showed a link between genetically engineered food and tumors, one might expect the rats that ate more of the GM corn to develop more tumors. In fact, the opposite happened. The rats eating a diet of 33 percent GMO corn stayed healthier than animals eating food with a GMO concentration of just 11 percent.
Seralini, for his part, says that this simply shows that GMOs are toxic in a different way. They merely need to rise above a certain threshold level to have harmful effects; increasing the concentration doesn't increase the harm.
Some scientists were inclined to dismiss the study simply based on Seralini's history of anti-GMO claims. "I know this guy. He has published a lot of rubbish," says Harry Kuiper, a Dutch scientist who used to be in charge of the European Commission's research program on the safety of genetically modified foods. That program sponsored many previous studies, including animal feeding studies, which came to less alarming conclusions and got much less attention than Seralini's.
In fact, Kuiper and many of his colleagues don't even think that animal feeding studies are a very good tool for studying the safety of GM foods. If there was a harmful chemical hidden in GM corn, they say, such studies wouldn't be likely to catch it, because rats can't eat enough corn for them to get a harmful dose of the toxic or cancer-causing substance.
But apart from methodological concerns and personal animosity, there's a deeper reason why scientists like Kuiper give little credence to Seralini's studies. There's a saying in science: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For most of the scientists who have been studying the safety of GMOs, it's an extraordinary claim, at this point, to assert that the current generation of genetically modified crops are harmful to human health.
There's no apparent reason why that should be true; No one has found new toxic substances in these crops. And the giant feeding experiment that's been going on for the past fifteen years ? hundreds of millions of Americans consuming GMO ingredients ? hasn't produced evidence of harm, either.
It would take a lot more evidence that the results of this study to change their minds.
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HP retools its Envy Phoenix h9 desktop, says the new version will go on sale October 26th
It was just a few months ago that HP refreshed its Envy Phoenix h9 desktop tower with Ivy Bridge processors, and now it's gone back to the drawing board to re-tool the design itself. In its latest incarnation, it has an "armor-plated" design and toolless hard disk bays that can support up to three drives. HP says it also fine-tuned the cable dressing to improve airflow and cooling performance. As ever, the machine will be offered with third-generation Intel Core processors and your choice of NVIDIA or AMD graphics. Solid-state drives are also an option. Curious? You'll have to wait until the Windows 8 launch on October 28th to get one. An odd move, if you ask us, since the h9 isn't a Win 8-optimized system, and the changes here appear to be purely hardware-related.
HP retools its Envy Phoenix h9 desktop, says the new version will go on sale October 26th originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sunday, September 2, 2012
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Yale Bids Farewell to a Complicated President
Yale's resigning president won't be remembered for inspiring students or taking bold moral stances. His risk-taking was of an altogether less glamorous sort.
As an undergraduate at Yale, I was always jealous of other universities' presidents. Harvard had its first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust, with her bestselling Civil War books and her magnificent name; Princeton had the molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman, also its first woman leader; Brown had Ruth Simmons, beloved by students in addition to being the Ivy League's first black president.
Meanwhile, we had Richard Levin, a soft-voiced, dough-faced economist remarkable for his blandness. He was both white and male, in that way resembling every other Yale president (save for Hanna Gray, who served a year-long stint as Yale's acting president in the 1970s before moving to the University of Chicago, where she became the first official female president of a major American university).
As an idealistic undergrad whose experience of Yale was confined to my liberal arts classes and the student magazine I edited, I was skeptical of (and, admittedly, bored by) Levin. Following his forgettable convocation speech my freshman year, I was at first only aware of him via his efforts to fortify the university's global brand. He brought Chinese President Hu Jintao to speak on campus, which I remember chiefly for the angry mobs of protestors who blocked my dorm. He announced plans to increase Yale's enrollment by 15 percent and to build two new residential colleges to absorb the overflow--a decision criticized by many students and alumni as commercially motivated. Levin was a corporate shadow, irrelevant to daily life in my tiny campus subculture yet ever present in his representation of Yale as the financially sophisticated global institution we often forgot it was.
Beginning in my junior year, though, general indifference to Levin turned, among certain groups of students, to active hostility. Levin became a frequent target of frustration--for his rumored sensitivity to negative publicity, for his reliance on a never-ending stream of committees and reports and other mainstays of academic bureaucracy to respond to controversy, and most of all for his seeming indifference to what felt, to many students on campus--and, as time went on, to me--like institutionally tolerated misogyny.
The turning point for many students was his handling of a now notorious incident. In January of 2008, a group of fraternity pledges circulated a photo of themselves posing outside the Yale Women's Center, flashing gang symbols and brandishing a sign that read, "We love Yale sluts." Student activists lobbied the administration to censure the fraternity, but Yale's response was slow and typically opaque, resulting in little more than few new committees to review Yale's sexual misconduct policies.
I wrote my senior thesis placing this incident and its administrative aftermath in the context of Yale's legal history with sexual harassment. I spoke to students who had been victims of harassment and assault while at Yale--both my peers and women who'd been students in the 1970s and '80s, soon after the university began admitting women. Though the way Yale talked about sexual harassment and the mechanisms it had in place to address it had improved, both the current students and the older alumni articulated a similar point: They felt that Yale had silenced or minimized their complaints in order to protect the institution's reputation.
A year after I graduated, pledges from another Yale fraternity were filmed marching around the freshman quad chanting, "No means yes, yes means anal." When the administration managed to drag its feet responding to that incident as well, a group of students and recent alumni filed a legal complaint with the Department of Education, alleging that Yale's lackluster policies on sexual harassment and assault amounted to a violation of Title IX. Yale had been privately working on various reforms for years, but the national scrutiny brought on by a federal investigation sped up its implementation timeline.
The investigation was concluded earlier this year without any finding of wrongdoing, and Yale has revamped its policies in ways that I believe are a big step forward. But I remain disappointed by the fact that Levin didn't use the national media coverage of Yale's problematic sexual culture as an opportunity to lead a conversation about sex and gender--to make Yale a national leader in implementing a forward-thinking approach to sex on campus.
Three years removed from my self-congratulatory identity as a campus muckraker, I began to cobble together a new picture of the man I had alternately ignored or resented: a loyal Yale soldier whose flat persona--the very quality that apparently worried the presidential search committee that eventually settled on him--also made him one of Yale's most effective leaders and, in many people's eyes, the university's greatest.
Levin may have assiduously avoided scandal, but he was also an unlikely risk-taker. Expanding Yale's enrollment (a move that is still several years and $300 million away from implementation) was a hugely controversial decision, but also one that acknowledged the financial realities the university faced. Four years into the recession, when many Ivy League endowments have sputtered, Yale's is the second largest in the country, having grown from $3 billion to more than $19 billion during Levin's 19-year tenure. Arguably Levin's biggest risk was partnering with the National University of Singapore, a move that was protested by faculty and students as implicitly condoning Singapore's autocratic regime.
As university presidents go, Levin was far from a charismatic or inspiring leader. He chose to outsource this form of leadership to lower-level administrators, who interact closely with students through Yale's residential college system. He focused instead on the less glamorous side of contemporary academia: leveraging a school's brand to appeal to global audiences and to attract new revenue sources. He did an irrefutably successful job with this, leaving Yale a far more globally established and financially stable institution than it was when he assumed office.
As a student, I craved moral and intellectual direction from my school's president--if not through a revolutionary reform agenda, then at least through example. I knew little of where Drew Faust and Ruth Simmons were leading their schools, but I assumed it was farther forward than wherever Rick Levin was leading us. Now, though, I recognize that Levin's leadership was bold and brave in its own way. He led Yale in a direction that I'm still not entirely sure I'm comfortable with (and, for what it's worth, that many of my college friends also harbor mixed feelings about) but there's no denying that he led it there with persistence, clarity of vision, and great competence.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Best-Of-The-Atlantic/~3/VmxUFlYfnYY/story01.htm
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