Monthly Archives: July 2017

It has been more than three years since The Fullbright Company's game Gone Home captivated audiences, swept game of the year awards and sparked a debate about what it means to be a video game.

This week the studio releases Tacoma, its second game, to an audience which, to some degree, still seems hung-up on that singular definition. Fortunately, Fullbright's Tacoma looks like it wont make that question any easier to answer.

As with Gone Home, the game is a narratively-driven experience powered by emotion, evolving relationships and a solid mystery.

Gone Home told the story of a daughter returning home to an empty family house and the threads of story she finds there as she explores its familiar rooms.Tacoma takes the audience to outer space.

The new game opens with technician Amy Ferrier docking at the lunar transfer station Tacoma. She's there to figure out what happened at the station to cause it to be evacuated. Her only company is a malfunctioning artificial intelligence named Odin and the augmented reality recordings of the six evacuated crew members time on the station.

Player's float through the station, untethered from gravity, searching for clues and signs of the AR recordings.

The recordings play back the audio of conversations, substituting the now absent crew members with ghostly, colorful apparitions going through the recorded motions of the crew. The playback can be paused, rewound, fast-forwarded and watched from any angle in the ship.

Detached from time or sequence, these snippets seem as adrift in time as you are adrift in space. It's up to the player to reassemble the pieces of time into something that makes sense and sort out what exactly happened.

As with Gone Home, dropping into a mysteriously emptied living space, Tacoma manages to deliver an ever so slight sense of creeping dread without ever having to scare the player or deliver anything overtly menacing. Instead, it creates a vacuum within which the players own doubts and fears can reside.

While the Fullbright team worked to expand upon the core conceits of the original game, co-founder Steve Gaynor explainsTacoma isn't really meant to be an evolution of Gone Home's style of play.

"If you think of Gone Home as a foundation, our direction isn't to make the foundation bigger, nor is it to have a foundation of a ranch house and then add a Victorian on top of it," he tells Rolling Stone. "We have a foundation and it has these constraints."

Nor is the game meant to really be an expansion of those original ideas, says Fullbright co-founder Karla Zimonja.

"We think of it as a layering," she says. "We made Gone Home as a foundational game for what we do. Then we thought, 'What can we add to this? What can we lay on top and what can we tweak?'"

Where Gone Home received some criticism for being so light on meaningful, direct interaction, Tacoma has moments that offer challenges more akin to traditional puzzles. It still, though, hinges entirely on unraveling a mystery.

Fans of Gone Home will likely find more to reflect on in the way Tacoma delivers its story than its gameplay.

Because the player is left to wander the space station and find snippets of interactions, it feels less like the sort of storytelling found in a novel and something closer to the sort of performance art found in immersive performances such asSleep No More. This unusual presentation pushes the use of narrative forward but doesn't really tinker too much with the non-storytelling elements of the game.

This way of presenting story seems a better fit with what mostly motivates Zimonja, Gaynor and team: examining relationships. That focus on relationships also lends itself to creations by Fullbright that tend to feature a more diverse cast of characters.

"We are interested in people and relationships with one another," Zimonja says, "and there are a lot of people out there to explore. So it's satisfying to us to try and branch out."

According to Gaynor, that diversity in cast also tends to make for better story.

"It is always the most interesting for us to explore a variety of perspective and character types, people of different sexual orientations, different class backgrounds," he says. "We want to look at how people from different perspectives all relate in the fictional world we are creating. I think that primarily comes from me and Karla, from a story team being interested in wanting to talk about more and different kinds of people."

The team doesn't start a game by casting it, despite the importance they place on that cast.

"It's, 'What is our universe? What is the story?' and then we populate that with characters that our interesting to us and relevant to the experience," Gaynor says.

The hope, he says, is that players will get to know these characters and care about them. "Our goal is to take someone who is not invested at all in the game and its story and by the time they have played for awhile they don't want to put it down," Gaynor says.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Gone Home and Tacoma is where the team was coming from during the development of the titles.

Gone Home was a small passion project created by a team of developers who wanted to make something more personal, more intimate than what makes up the bulk of video game sales. It came out of nowhere, winning over players and critics alike with its unusual approach to gameplay and storytelling. The same can't be said for Tacoma: All eyes are on this, Fullbright's second game, and the studio knows it.

"More people are paying attention before we launch, Gaynor explains. "There's more pressure. All of that pressure is there, for sure, but we feel good about the game."

That pressure hasn't changed the team's design philosophy, Gaynor adds, instead it has inspired the team to see how they can take the success of Gone Home and push that into new territory that they haven't explored before. "And then hopefully, execute the game in a way that players will be excited about."

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'Tacoma' Creators Talk Diversity, Evolution and 'Gone Home' - RollingStone.com

Sporting rivalries are at their best when the protagonists offer a sharp contrast in their winning ways. The Jackie MacMullan-edited book When the Game Was Ours is an ode to the sharpest rivalry in professional basketball, between Larry Bird and Earvin Johnson, whose teams, the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers shared seven National Basketball Association championships between 1980 and 1987 (the Lakers won four).

Bird and Johnson are co-authors of the book; they recollect how each of them drove the other to competitive heights during their careers beginning from their college rivalry to their respective stints in the NBA. By the end of their competitive careers, they had become close friends, underlining how much respect they had for each other. The garrulous Johnson, known as Magic, was a speedy, effervescent and restless passing savant who was unusually effective as a point guard despite being 6-feet-and-9-inches tall. Bird offered a sharp contrast he was introverted, was somewhat slow in his lateral movements, but he was highly effective as a shooter and offered clutch scoring, rebounding and passing skills as a 6-feet-10-inches forward.

There was the other thing that differentiated them race. Magic was an African American born to an urban worker in the industrial State of Michigan. Bird was born in a poor rural family in French Lick, Indiana. Their rivalry excited a generation of Americans to take to basketball as a vocation and expanded its scope as a spectator sport. The NBA took off as a profitable venture in the 1980s during the Bird-Magic era.

Soon, basketball in the NBA became a globalised sport, with scores of foreign players plying their trade in the league and millions of viewers glued in to watch the best of the games on TV the world over. Much of it is due to the influence of one show-stopping athlete, Michael Jordan, whose spectacular brand of basketball as a shooting guard gave the NBA the fillip to garner worldwide viewership. The best analysis of his career was provided by David Halberstam in his book, Playing for Keeps .

Today, the NBA has reached its epitome of professionalism It is no longer just a spectator sport that thrives solely on athleticism and superstardom. It has undergone an analytics revolution with the influx of studious statistical-minded talent to aid teams to optimise hiring of talent and in strategising. Basketball on Paper , by Dean Oliver, one of the pioneers in basketball analytics, is a good place to begin to understand the moneyball-isation of basketball.

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Of rivalries and evolution - The Hindu

An opinion piece was recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine with the provocative title: No wonder no one trusts us. The writer, a doctor, imagines a dialogue with a patient Mr. Jones based on the shifting recommendations of the US Preventive Services Task Force about prostate cancer screening.

Mr. Jones, receiving updated advice from his doctor that differs from the updated advice he received last time, grows predictably exasperated. (In case you are wondering, the current task force position on prostate cancer screening is: Grade C. This means there is a close balance between potential benefits and harms, and clinicians should discuss prostate cancer screening with patients, and reach individualized decisions together.)

The writer is not so much complaining about the task force as about the challenges of turning the evolving state of medical evidence into guidance patients can both understand and trust. The piece is tongue-in-cheek in any case. But still, there is a complaint being lodged, and fundamentally, its about the nature of science and the publics relationship with it.

Science evolves. And maybe thats a particular problem for Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith and their countless counterparts in our culture because we so blithely, selectively dismiss science and replace it with GOOP as the spirit moves us. Maybe we cant disparage, dismiss and deny the science of climate change, immunization, nutrition and evolution, for that matter and appreciate the evolution of science.

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Science is something of an in for a penny, in for a pound proposition. What I mean is, you either accept the value of the scientific method, and the voluminous evidence that it works, and thus pay attention to it even when you dont like what it has to say or you really should disavow the voluminous evidence that it works. Lets be clear about that choice: disavowal means no planes, or trains or automobiles; products of science, all. It means no antibiotics or microwaves; it means no radio, television or internet. It means, quite simply, that it should not be possible for you to be reading this now.

Science works, and we all know it because we are beneficiaries of its effectiveness every day. You really cant beam well-behaved electrons through cyberspace and throw shade at science while doing it. Pick one! How easy, though, to embrace the products of science we like and renounce the conclusions we dont.

In a display of serendipity, a deadly serious opinion piece in the Annals of Internal Medicine followed the facetious one in JAMA Internal Medicine by a mere day. This one was entitled Statin Denial: An Internet-Driven Cult With Deadly Consequences, and was about the deadly consequences of statin denial. Statins are the most popular drugs for lowering LDL cholesterol, are highly effective and when used appropriately, decisively reduce mortality. In other words, they save lives.

As the commentary suggests, there are all sorts of alternative realities online, raising doubts about the benefits of statins, the value of lowering LDL, and the relevance of elevated LDL to heart disease risk.

One readily finds debate about the cholesterol hypothesis online but finds virtually no such debate among cardiologists. These alternative realities are alternatives to reality, and the commentator is right to point this out as an urgent matter of life and death. As a lifestyle medicine expert, I hasten to note that diet and lifestyle can do the job that statins do, and there are strong arguments for a lifestyle approach but thats a topic for another day. The effectiveness of lifestyle in preventing and treating heart disease does not obviate the corresponding effectiveness of statins.

That more Americans believe in angels than evolution may seem a matter of inner philosophical convictions, disconnected from real world consequences. But that is not so. Selective disrespect for science poisons the well of it, and proves toxic in surprising and intimate ways; as intimate as ones heart, prostate or uterus.

Medicine is ineluctably a bit of art, but is or should be a whole lot of science. There is no way for patients to participate as they must as key partners in the stewardship of their own health if they dont understand the basis for important decisions.

Its bad, in other words, that people dont know or respect the incontrovertible science of evolution. But that problem tends to be at least somewhat remote. Its arguably worse that people dont know or respect the incontrovertible fact that science evolves and that the evolution of science will cause medical practice and advice to drift and shift over time. Doubt and discomfort born of that is consequential up close, quite personally, and in our most intimate parts.

Dr. David L. Katz;www.davidkatzmd.com; founder, True Health Initiative

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Dr. David Katz, Preventive Medicine: Trust the evolution of science - New Haven Register

Okay, I admit I was a bit freaked out when microwaves came along. People praised them as being so quick and easy, so convenient. And, admittedly, they seemed to be.

The machines could boil water at an amazing speed and cook things so fast it was really hard to believe. Yet, I could not initially bring myself to use one.

Thats because I didnt understand how they worked. What was going on in that contraption that caused the food to get hot?

I did some research and learned about the radiation and the speed of the molecules, all of which was mambo-jambo (I know that expression is not spelled the traditional way here, but I like it) to me.

So it still made no sense, especially when I saw the word radiation, which during the Cold War sparked fears of a nuclear war.

Would food be somehow altered to the point of being dangerous to eat? Would the flavor be retained at all? Was it some sort of plot by an evil madman intent on world domination (I loved James Bond books) to poison the minds of everyone?

So I did not immediately use one, being cautious, waiting to see if any discernible side effects started showing up.

Like people starting to drop dead for no apparent reason or hospital emergency rooms being flooded or everyone who used them starting to act like alien pod people. I had seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so I knew it could happen.

Of course, none of that did happen and eventually I started using them. The darn things were so convenient and quick it was hard to resist.

But I did notice the flavor was not the same, or it seemed different anyway. I just didnt like the texture of the food and the flavor was muted somehow. Or I thought so, wondering if it could just be my imagination.

I wasnt alone in my worries. Others had the same fears, including Aunt Ebb.

She started using one, though, because she didnt cook and loved the convenience. And she concluded my fears were unfounded, that food was fine and tasted the same.

But then one day she told me a story, making me realize something that came out of the blue and very unexpected.

I had become my grandmother.

All of her life, she had cooked on a wood cook-stove. When electric stoves became popular she had no interest in them at all.

Not only did she think food wasnt nearly as good, she was also worried about the heat source, not understanding how the electricity created the heat.

Nothing like a wood fire, she said. Thats the way food is meant to be cooked.

Even when Aunt Ebb and other family members bought her an electric stove, she at first refused to use it, ignoring its presence in her kitchen and being a bit perturbed at everyone for spending money on it.

As time passed, she watched my mother and Aunt Tham show her how to use it, and she eventually started cooking a few things on it because it was so much easier and quicker.

After all, no kindling to split, no ashes to dump, no waiting. The thing saved her a ton of work and time.

Just like my experience with a microwave, the convenience and speed of this new way of cooking gradually took over. And the wood cook-stove eventually became something she only occasionally used, and always seemed very proud to do so.

Of course, the truth was, by gosh, the food did taste better cooked on that wood cook-stove. No question about it. And there is no doubt food tastes better cooked with an electric stove than a microwave.

Regardless of all the gadgets used to cook, and there are many of them now, we all know that my grandmother was right.

There simply is no substitute for wood when it comes to cooking.

And I am still not sure if microwaves are healthy to use.

Yes, it still scares me when someone says, Nuke it!

What scares me even more is the occasional dreams I have of living on another planet

Charles Boothe is a reporter for the Bluefield Daily Telegraph and can be reached at cboothe@bdtonline.com

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From wood to a microwave: The evolution of cooking - Bluefield Daily Telegraph

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ON Semiconductor (Nasdaq: ON), driving energy efficient innovations, announced today that the IoT Development Kit (IDK) has won a 2017 IoT Evolution Product of the Year Award from IoT Evolution magazine and IoT Evolution World, the leading magazine and website covering Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies.

The IDK is a fully configurable platform that enables engineers to design and offer differentiated IoT products and systems for a broad range of end applications, including smart home/building, smart city, industrial automation and mHealth.

We are excited to have the IDK recognized as a top product of the year for IoT Evolution, said Wiren Perera, who heads IoT at ON Semiconductor. ON Semiconductor continues to drive the progression of IoT by providing energy efficient hardware and software elements, coupled with the node to cloud platforms to enable design engineers to evaluate, prototype, and deploy IoT products and solutions to market with greater speed and efficiency, and with fewer design iterations.

The IDK baseboard features ON Semiconductors advanced NCS36510 system-on-chip (SoC), with a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 core running the ARM mbed OS. By attaching different daughter cards to the IDK baseboard, a wealth of connectivity (SIGFOX, Ethernet, 802.15.4 based radios enabling ZigBee and Thread protocols, etc.), sensor (motion, ambient light, proximity, heart rate, etc.) and actuator (stepper, brushless motor drivers, LED drivers) options can be added to the system. This means that compromises do not have to be made and the most suitable technology for a specific application can be chosen.

The hardware is complemented by an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that includes a C++ compiler, debugger and code editor. Design engineers are further supported in their evaluation and product development via a comprehensive set of application examples, use cases and related libraries. In addition to the default cloud software platform, support for industry standard cloud connectivity protocols (MQTT and REST) allow utilization of other widely used IoT cloud service providers.

The solutions selected for the IoT Evolution Product of Year Award reflect the diverse range of innovation driving the machine to machine market today. It is my honor to congratulate ON Semiconductor for their innovative work and superior contribution to the rapidly evolving IoT industry, said Carl Ford, CEO of Crossfire Media, a co-publisher of IoT Evolution.

It is my pleasure to recognize the IDK, an advanced solution that earned ON Semiconductor the 2017 IoT Evolution Product of the Year Award, said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. I look forward to seeing more innovation from ON Semiconductor in the future.

The winners of the 2017 IoT Evolution Product of the Year Award will be published in the next issue of IoT Evolution magazine.

Visit ON Semiconductors IDK website and take advantage of the product recommendation tool to select the correct board(s) for your design, download the white paper Challenges of Implementing Industrial IoT Technology, and watch informational webcasts and videos.

About TMC

TMC is a global, integrated media company that supports clients' goals by building communities in print, online, and face to face.TMC publishes multiple magazines, including Cloud Computing, IoT Evolution, Customer and Internet Telephony. TMCnet is the leading source of news and articles for the communications and technology industries. TMC produces a variety of trade events, including ITEXPO, the world's leading business technology event, as well as industry events: Asterisk World; AstriCon; ChannelVision (CVx) Expo; DevCon5 - HTML5 & Mobile App Developer Conference; IoT Evolution Conference & Expo; Real Time on the Web Conference and more. Visit TMC Events for additional information.

For more information about TMC, visit http://www.tmcnet.com.

About ON Semiconductor

ON Semiconductor (Nasdaq: ON) is driving energy efficient innovations, empowering customers to reduce global energy use. The company is a leading supplier of semiconductor-based solutions, offering a comprehensive portfolio of energy efficient, power management, analog, sensors, logic, timing, connectivity, discrete, SoC and custom devices. The companys products help engineers solve their unique design challenges in automotive, communications, computing, consumer, industrial, medical, aerospace and defense applications. ON Semiconductor operates a responsive, reliable, world-class supply chain and quality program, a robust compliance and ethics program, and a network of manufacturing facilities, sales offices and design centers in key markets throughout North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions. For more information, visit http://www.onsemi.com.

ON Semiconductor and the ON Semiconductor logo are registered trademarks of Semiconductor Components Industries, LLC. All other brand and product names appearing in this document are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective holders. Although the company references its website in this news release, information on the website is not to be incorporated herein.

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ON Semiconductor Wins 2017 IoT Evolution Product of the Year Award - Business Wire (press release)

Does anyone remember Mario Cantone? If you do then it might mean you watched Steampipe Alley back in the day. What is that you ask? Its a kids show that had a few questionable gimmicks now and again but was otherwise a show geared towards entertaining ages eight to fifteen. What was really questionable about the show was that it had a 52% adult audience that would write in or try to contact the host, Mark Cantone. He wasnt so foul-mouthed back then because quite honestly he couldnt afford to be.

Somehow this guy is still relevant. Any ideas to how or why? Heres a few ideas.

He stopped doing kid shows.

Cantone wasnt in his element doing kid shows. The campy, high-pitched voice and goofy antics might have entertained kids and adolescents back in the day but if you watch them now theyre just flat out disturbing. If he could have let his language barrier fall then the show would have likely been one successive series of bleeps all the way through from start to finish. The filler words would have amounted to about five to ten minutes of screen time at best. At the very least the kids seemed to enjoy it and the ridiculous games that were anything but PC provided a good laugh. Of course, most of what he talked about and did in those days would likely never get past censors today.

He started doing stand-up comedy.

Once Cantone got into the type of comedy where he didnt have to hold back he seemed to have found his niche. He could talk about most anything and nothing was strictly taboo. This mean that he could talk openly about being gay, let drop all the cuss words he could think of, and just in general go off about anything that came to mind. On stage hes actually a lot more controlled than he seemed in Steampipe Alley, but at times still looks like he can fly off the hook with the best of them. So maybe, just maybe hes still worth a look.

Now hes joined the comedy cabinet as Anthony Scaramucchi.

Just a couple of days ago the Comedy Central skit showcasing Cantone as Scaramucchi aired, and boy did he let it fly. I wish I could say that it wasnt funny but it was hilarious in fact. He definitely doesnt pander any more than he ever did and just lets it fly and land where it will. Cantone is definitely an aggressive comic and pulls no punches during his roles. In fact its almost surprising that we havent heard anything yet about Trump or Scaramucchi coming after the creators of this skit in some way. The POTUS has been notoriously thin-skinned during his run thus far and theres nothing to say that the rest of his chosen cabinet wont be. But then it might be that they will ignore this or simply pick their spot when the time is right. In any case I cant be the only one that thinks that Cantone might be playing a dangerous game at the moment.

If you remember right, the POTUS isnt shy about letting his opinion be known. But whats the worst thing that will happen, hell block Cantone on Twitter?

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The Evolution of Mario Cantone: Yup, He's Still Relevant - TVOvermind