Hopefully being fast on two wheels translates between sports for Ben Spies. The MotoGP star and former AMA and World Superbike champion has started his own cycling team, . Ben’s passion for racing on two wheels has lead him to found a cycling team with the goal of developing new riders and supporting local children’s charities through outreach programs, awareness, and donations for his home state of Texas. Look for Ben in your local crit, US National race or UCI event.
Tonight is President Obama’s second State of the Union address before Congress. The White House has been promoting their where you’ll be able to watch what the President’s address while also getting the benefit of additional supporting material that will help illustrate the points he makes.
The Obama White House has embraced participant media more than any other presidency before. They have made an effort to create fully featured websites many of the issues the White House has been focused on, starting with the through to the , from addressing crises like the to major policy initiatives like . Each of these websites, and itself, have featured blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages and YouTube channels.
The problem is, despite the White House working hard to be active in new media, they haven’t fully comprehended the participatory part of participatory media. Getting a is great, but the staffers there are still thinking of the internet as a broadcast medium where they say what they wish without feedback or a give and take. They have not made their politics a conversation.
There has been some discussion of , but the biggest problem is that the White House gets all these . In fact, there is too much noise and not enough signal being received by the White House. To make participatory media work on such a large scale, there needs to be a better way for people to organize themselves in order to raise their voices above the level of the constant din.
Computer games have become very good at getting a lot of effort out of players. Many games, when described to somebody who doesn’t play, sound like a lot of boring, tedious work. If you take World of Warcraft as an example, players spend hours at a time working together in highly coordinated attacks to kill bosses in order to gain experience and in-game equipment to improve their characters. For these little rewards that have no intrinsic value and cost nothing to create, players are willing to put in effort and work to earn them.
Quite a few people have started to think of ways to use these in-game type reward systems to motivate people to accomplish meaningful tasks. In the comic above, the . In many ways, this isn’t that different from the rewards systems already offered by credit card companies for using their cards. However, many people have realized that they don’t actually get much from the credit card companies since the ruleset isn’t clearly defined. They do the best they can to obfuscate their rewards so you feel like you’re getting something without the company having to give up much of value.
It’s this disconnect between effort and reward that’s different between the real-world systems that we have today and the in-game systems people enjoy using. :
Here’s the big idea. For active online gamers real life is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. Effort isn’t connected to reward. The path forward is confused, convoluted, and contradictory. Worse, there’s a growing sense that the entire game is being corrupted to ensure failure. So, why play it?
They don’t. They retreat to online games. Why? Online games provide an environment that connects what you do (work, problem solving, effort, motivation level, merit) in the game to rewards (status, capabilities, etc.). These games also make it simple to get better (learn, skill up, etc.) through an intuitive just-in-time training system.
However, people are thinking through this problem to try to effectively leverage these systems for real-world use. Over the holiday’s .
I was walking over the bridge to Splash Mountain, and I saw a man clad in white overalls, carrying a long-handled dustpan and brush, peering over the edge of the bridge at the water below. “Man, when are they going to clean that up?” he said to himself, and loudly enough so I heard too as I passed.
He was looking at the water below the bridge – a bit murky, a few maps floating in it and a coke bottle or two. Very bad for Disney, very unusual, but more interestingly: this guy was a cleaner, and yet “they” had the job of cleaning the water. Who were They? Another cleaning group, presumably, probably one with waders, and different equipment. Perhaps some extra safety training?
Which got me to gameification. Not points, but simple systems design. Could this guy level up through the Cleaning Guild hierarchy, or complete the Cleaner tree of skills, perhaps? It’d be great if this person – who clearly cared a lot about his work – could simply fix the problem he was looking at, or if not, to know easily and simply what the next level of training and equipment is required. It made me think of , and mobile chores apps like , and for training & development. That would be a seriously fun problem to solve. What would Disney do?
People are also trying to take the system one step further, to solving the world-wide challenges we now face. Jane McGonigal is trying to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in a game.
Kathryn Aurora Gray of Fredericton, New Brunswick, spotted the exploding star, dubbed supernova 2010lt, on Monday from an image taken on New Year’s Eve by a telescope belonging to amateur astronomer David Lane in Stillwater Lake, Nova Scotia. The exploding star is in the galaxy UGC 3378 in the constellation of Camelopardalis.
The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) says Kathryn is the youngest person ever to discover a supernova.
As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department’s aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down.
So the Texas agents did what no state or local law enforcement agency had done before in a high-risk operation: They launched a drone. A bird-size device called a Wasp floated hundreds of feet into the sky and instantly beamed live video to agents on the ground. The SWAT team stormed the house and arrested the suspect.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been using larger drones for patrolling the US/Mexico border for the past couple of years, despite there . However, until now, no local law enforcement agency had used a drone for surveillance in such a fashion.
Drones carry large risks to planes and helicopters using the same airspace. The drone operator only have a small sliver of visibility available to them through a camera and drones of this type are so small pilots cannot see them in time to avoid crashing into them.
And then, there are all of the privacy concerns associated with the law enforcement community’s use of drones to monitor people that the Washington Post article describes in great detail. Drones have the potential to become roving, following surveillance system that takes the CCTV cameras that have become so popular in our cities onto the next level.
