PSU TLT

Kind of wild...TF2 now has the ability to not only record your in-game footage, but now edit it as well with some custom tech. Even more interesting, you can toggle the camera from FPS view, to 3rd person view, to a 'free roam' view, allowing you to get different angles out of replay. Figures they also have direct links to YouTube, tied the video making/editing to achievements, as well as offering special in-game items if youtube vids hit certain view thresholds.

"The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. Players are given a puzzle design-an RNA molecule in the shape of a star or a cross, for example-that they must fill in with the components, called nucleotides, to produce the most plausible solution. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab. The Stanford researchers select the highest-rated blueprints and actually synthesize them. The scientists then report back the results of the experiments to the crowd to inform future designs. The crowd-sourcing has produced results that tend to be more effective than computer-generated arrangements. "Computational methods are not perfect in making these shapes," says Mr. Das, "and as we get to more and more complex ones, they essentially always fail, so we know that there are rules to be learned." Players are figuring out these principles on their own, says Mr. Treuille. He says that while they're more like a grandmother's instructions on baking a cake than a strict scientific formula, they work remarkably well in practice. "EteRNA players are extremely good at designing RNA's," says Mr. Treuille, "which is all the more surprising because the top algorithms published by scientists are not nearly so good. The gap is pretty dramatic.""

Interesting example of crowdsourcing to work on scientific issues.

This kind of visualization not scalable yet, but will it be soon? "Thanks to increasingly cheap, fast and efficient computing power, scientific simulations are now a crucial tool for researchers who want to ask once impractical scientific questions or generate data that laboratory experiments can't. "The human eye can pick out patterns in simulations that are are otherwise hard to describe, and they can do it better than any computer," said visualization scientist Joseph Insley of Argonne National Laboratory ."Plus, with the incredible amount of data gathered these days, it's difficult to analyze it any other way."

Some interesting notes from Gabe Newell's keynote at Games for Change. This is interesting because it's the first time a president and figurehead for one of the biggest game developers out there has really put a stake in the ground for using games as educational tools.

Government response to social media during social unrest is paranoic. Or not? Tough ethical question for everyone not living under a rock.

This is an initiative of the Obama administration and is meant to be a hub of resources for those who deliver digital literacy training.

Average age of gamers continues to rise (now 37). Female population continues to rise due to casual/mobile games (42%). Who buys most games? 41 year olds (was 39 last year). Males average 13 years of gaming, females 10 years. Lots of good data points, but they ALWAYS fail to answer a huge question about methods: how do you define a gamer? Depending on how you define a gamer dictates who is included/excluded in these types of studies and drastically impacts all the age/gender data.