Getting a Ride for Gaming

Leave a reply

We’ve become accustomed to the idea of people getting college scholarships for playing games like basketball, football, soccer, etc. but we’re probably going to have to adjust to the idea of people getting scholarships for playing video games:

Robert Morris University, a small, accredited private school whose main campus is in downtown Chicago, has taken a different tack—boosting the number of athletic scholarships to more than 700, from 150 a decade ago, in a bid to stem declining enrollment…

Kurt Melcher, the Associate Athletic Director at Robert Morris, dreamed up the idea of a videogame scholarship this past spring when he came across a game called “League of Legends,” Mr. Bensema’s specialty. The online game of strategy and teamwork pits teams of five players against one another in a battle for domination that is sort of like a high-speed digital version of capture the flag.

“I just couldn’t believe how elaborate it was,” said Mr. Melcher…

In October, the League of Legends world championships drew 32 million viewers online. An additional 18,000 fans packed the Staples Center in Los Angeles to watch two teams of five skinny young men click away on their mice—as the game played out on huge screens overhead. When a player died, fans screamed as loudly as if Kobe Bryant had just launched himself from the free-throw line and thrown down a two-handed dunk…

In April, Mr. Melcher submitted a one-page proposal to field a League of Legends team. Two weeks later, the president’s council came back and said they wanted to offer 60 scholarships of up to 50% off tuition and room and board.

“We saw this as a chance to reach kids who might not have otherwise considered us,” said Provost Mablene Krueger. For the school, a significant short-term cost of the program is the new esports arena, a retrofitted classroom with 36 gaming stations that will cost the school about $100,000.

The school received a handful of responses when it posted the announcement on its website. Then the owners of Riot Games, which created League of Legends, posted it on the game’s website. Within 48 hours, the school got 2,200 inquiries from as far away as Gambia, in West Africa. Almost all of them were from males.

A few thoughts:

  • Holy crap, it’s still shocking for a guy like me – prototypical middle aged fantasy football dude – to see the numbers involved with video games. Of course it would make sense to create competitive teams to represent the school, for the same reason it makes sense (if it does) to field basketball and football teams.
  • I’d imagine that the demographic this will reach is an attractive one for schools. 
  • I wonder how long before we see this idea spreading to other schools, especially small schools that can’t afford the millions of dollars it takes to field a football team.
  • While we think of gamers as guys, because you know we don’t often think of girls sitting in the basement eating Cheetos while slaying some Russian kids avatar, there’s no real reason that you couldn’t have coed teams which helps alleviate any need for two teams to conform with Title IX requirements.

Totally selfish thought: if this idea takes off our youngest might be able to get a ride somewhere since he has some serious gaming skills.

Paying for Chicago, New York, LA, etc.

Leave a reply

We North Carolinians seem to be taking Southern generosity to an extreme:

North Carolina taxpayers could spend more than $10 billion by 2022 to provide medical care for low-income residents of other states while getting nothing in return, a McClatchy Newspapers analysis shows.

Pennsylvania was trying to be just as nice, but then they changed gears:

Pennsylvania, which originally said no, got approval last week to use federal money for its own variation on Medicaid expansion, one that extends subsidies for private insurance to cover up to 600,000 of the state’s poorest adults. Arkansas and Iowa are using a similar approach.

But our fearless leaders in Raleigh seem to be working their way towards a redirection of our redistribution of wealth:
 
Don Taylor, an associate professor of public policy at Duke University, has been quietly pushing his own version of that plan for North Carolina. He says refusing the federal money results in “the redistribution of money from poorer states to richer ones, an outcome imposed by the poorer states upon themselves.”…

In North Carolina, “there will be an opportunity for a political deal,” Taylor says. “State flexibility in the ACA is a feature, not a bug.”

The Locke Foundation, which tends to land close to GOP leaders’ views, wants the federal government to award Medicaid money to states as a block grant, with North Carolina using it to support “a universal, refundable tax credit” to cover premiums, along with government contributions to individual health savings accounts.

You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to, whatever. Let’s just figure this thing out so we can cover our own butts, not just those wackos up north and out west.
 

Tennis and Life – A Wonderful Story

Leave a reply

Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay has written the finest story involving tennis you’re likely to read:

For 40 years, my father, Ward Gay, was a tennis coach, at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge, Mass., the city where he grew up. When he started, rackets were wood. The No. 1 men’s player in the world was Ilie Nastase. My dad studied tennis bibles written by Rod Laver, Bud Collins and Harry Hopman, and taught himself the rest through years of little victories and mistakes.

He liked natural gut string, one-handed backhands, the serve-and-volley, the chip-and-charge. He was also a science teacher at the high school, and he enjoyed how tennis was a game that rewarded mental acuity as well as physical skill. His favorite tennis maxim was the well-known adage he borrowed and passed on to every player: You’re only as good as your second serve…

My dad admired the pristine grass at Wimbledon and the red clay at Roland Garros, but the kind of tennis he really adored was city tennis. Cracks in the hard court. Rusty chain-link fences. Holes in the nets. Trucks howling by on the street. Country clubs weren’t his thing.

Tennis was for everybody, he felt…

In early March, just days away from the first tennis practice of the season, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

He resigned from coaching the team. He told me about it matter-of-factly, but stepping away after doing this for so long had to have been devastating. Spring afternoons on the hard court had been a ritual for him, a sanctuary…

Last Thursday, Aug. 21, in a Boston hospital that overlooked a pair of beautifully ragged tennis courts on the Charles River, my dad died. He was 70 years old.

The next day, my brother and I walked down the street to the courts we grew up on. We pulled out a couple of our father’s old rackets we’d uncovered in the garage, and hit like we used to hit when we were young. Dad had given us and so many others a sport we could play for the rest of our lives, but his reach was much more than that. We ran with our rackets back, ready for anything.

Don’t Cry for College Textbook Publishers

Leave a reply

Anyone who’s attended college or has kids attending college will not likely shed a tear for the struggling textbook publishers out there. You’re not going to have warm, fuzzy feelings for any industry that causes you to spend the equivalent of a month’s rent, or more, on books that you know you’ll only use for four months and then not be able to re-sell because a new version is already in the works. And you have to do it twice a year for the four years you’re in college!

That’s why reading this story in the Wall Street Journal on the struggles of the textbook publishers brought on a wave of schadenfreude like none I’ve felt in years:

Some opt instead to download textbooks illegally. A report last month by the Book Industry Study Group, an industry trade group, found that 25% of students photocopied or scanned textbooks from other students, up from 17% in 2012. The number of students who acquired textbooks from a pirate website climbed to 19% from 11%.

Those trends come at a time of steadily rising textbook prices. The price of new printed textbooks has jumped an average of 6% a year over the past decade, triple the rate of overall inflation, government figures show, making textbooks among the fastest-growing consumer expenses in the U.S.

Rising prices and changing buying habits have taken a toll.

Sales of new printed textbooks made up 38% of McGraw-Hill Education’s higher-ed revenue in 2013, down from 71% in 2010, said Chief Executive and President David Levin.

This hits close to home because in our house we have three college students right now. Thankfully we’ve been able to control costs by renting books through the school bookstore or through Amazon, or buying used books when possible through Amazon. Every once in a while the book will only be available from the school, and generally those are the most expensive, but still we’re talking $100-150 per book versus the $250-350 list price for many of the books for which we found rental/used alternatives.

The cost is patently ridiculous when you consider what is freely available online. In fact we should find a way to give professors incentives to utilize the information in the public domain whenever possible. It’s surely more work for them, but imagine the savings it would provide their students and how much less debt most of those students will have when they graduate.

Who To Trust

Leave a reply

One of the real problems we have in the Information Era is that so much information is just, well, wrong. Back in the pre-Internet dark ages we used to be able to easily identify the folks who distributed craziness as news, and just as importantly, the people who accepted that craziness at face value. We simply looked around us while in line at the grocery store and if we saw someone reading the National Enquirer, or one of the other tabloids, and he wasn’t laughing then we knew that was someone who shouldn’t be trusted to walk and chew gum simultaneously. Now things have gotten a little more complicated.

Case in point is how a blogger/nut-job could post a completely unfounded story related to the Ferguson, MO protests and in short order it morphed into a story on a national “news” network (Fox):

In short order Hoft’s story spread throughout the right-wing blogosphere. The right-wing media machine was cranking up. Early in the afternoon of Aug. 19, the right-wing libertarian site Before It’s News cited Mark Dice’s YouTube report, which in turn cited Hoft’s story…

Soon the story had been picked up by pretty much all of the right-wing noise machine, including Matt Drudge, Breitbart, Right Wing News, the Washington Times and the New York Post.

Now that the story had broken into the wild and had been reported by numerous sources — all citing Jim Hoft’s original report as well as each other — Fox News decided it had enough cover to report on Hoft’s bogus story.

They ran the story every half-hour with a flashing “ALERT ALERT” image at the bottom of the screen and cited , yep, Jim Hoft’s report.

Say what you will about the “mainstream media” at least back in the day there was an effort made to be a reputable news source and to prove to readers/viewers/listeners that the news being reported was accurate and had been confirmed by multiple primary sources. There was actually angst about using unnamed sources, and it was done only when absolutely necessary. Were the news outlets perfect? No, but for the most part you could expect that behind whatever editorial slant an outlet might have they were at least supported by verifiable facts. Unfortunately those days seem to be gone.

This is not just a national story. Right here in the Piedmont Triad there’s an increasing level of concern about one local newspaper’s lack of diligence in policing its Letters to the Editor for at least a modicum of accuracy, and quite frankly the quickening demise of local newspapers is more frightening than anything because they have traditionally been the only source of coverage of local governments. Without them who’s going to be the Fourth Estate?

All this brings to mind something my kids learned when they were doing research projects in school. Times had changed from when I was in school. In my day we had to go to the library to review books, encyclopedias, magazines and articles on microfiche (if you’re under the age of 35 look that up and be amazed) for our research. You could be pretty confident your sources were solid because a librarian had vetted those materials, but still we were taught to use multiple sources to support our thesis. Then the internet happened and all of the sudden kids had the ability to do research from the comfort of their own homes, but without the protection of a librarian vetting their sources. So guess what? A big part of their lesson was in learning how to identify good sources of information, and subsequent to that, verifying that information by finding multiple sources. I’m thinking that should become a required course of study in our society, because without it our populace will be led around by its noses by a bunch of charlatans. It’s already happening and it will only get worse.

 

Face of Poverty in the Piedmont Triad

Leave a reply

This article in the Greensboro News & Record has a lot of disheartening statistics:

In the past 10 years, the state (North Carolina) has gone from the 26th-highest poverty rate in the country to the 11th. One in 4 children are living in poverty.

At the same time, 1 in 5 people in the city of Greensboro live in poverty — that’s considered to be having an annual income of less than $24,000 for a family of four…

Of the Second Harvest Food Bank’s 400 partner networks, 90 are in the greater Greensboro area, including the Greensboro Urban Ministry. Second Harvest is one of a handful of regional food banks in the state.

In 2009, the group distributed 7.9 million pounds of food. This past year, the group distributed 25 million pounds of food.

You might be tired of reading about the food drive to benefit Second Harvest at my day job, but when given the state of affairs around here it would be immoral not to remind everyone that there is a readily available way to help.

Body-Mounted Cameras and the Police

Leave a reply

An article in the Wall Street Journal focused on the impact that wearing body cameras can have on police forces:

Sometimes, like the moments leading up to when a police officer decides to shoot someone, transparency is an unalloyed good. And especially lately, technology has progressed to a point that it makes this kind of transparency not just possible, but routine.

So it is in Rialto, Calif., where an entire police force is wearing so-called body-mounted cameras, no bigger than pagers, that record everything that transpires between officers and citizens. In the first year after the cameras’ introduction, the use of force by officers declined 60%, and citizen complaints against police fell 88%…

What happens when police wear cameras isn’t simply that tamper-proof recording devices provide an objective record of an encounter—though some of the reduction in complaints is apparently because of citizens declining to contest video evidence of their behavior—but a modification of the psychology of everyone involved.

The article goes on to point out that there are some issues that need to be resolved with body camera technology – privacy concerns for victims and witnesses to name one – but with the cost of the technology plummeting some experts think it’s only a matter of time before most police departments will be using them.

Hoops Tunes from the Early 80s

Leave a reply

Many moons ago a bunch of Trouble Funk tracks were seared into my brain thanks to someone making a tape and playing it, along with Rick James, on a ginormous boombox while we were playing hoops. Other guys would bring AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, etc. so the music was eclectic to say the least.

I wasn’t a big fan of go-go, DC’s unique brand of funk, but after a while it didn’t drive me crazy either. Now it kind of bring’s back fond memories:

Gotta say, though, that I much preferred Rick James:

And more than anything I was a metal head so nothing beat a little Hells Bells:

North Carolina’s $51 Billion Gamble

Leave a reply

Brad DeLong has some thoughts about Obamacare and here in NC this one bites:

The willingness of state-level Republican politicians to hurt their own people–those eligible for the Medicaid expansion, those who would benefit from a little insurance counseling to figure out how to take advantage of subsidies, those hospitals who need the Medicaid expansion to balance their finances, those doctors who would ultimately receive the subsidy dollars–is, as John Gruber says, “awesome in its evilness”. The federal government has raised the money, and all the state has to do in order to get it spent is to say “yes”. Especially in contrast with the extraordinary efforts state-level politicians routinely go through in order to attract other spending into their state, whether a BMW plant or a Social Security processing center, this demonstrates an extraordinary contempt for a large tranche of their own citizens. And when I reflect that a good third of that tranche reliably pull the lever for the Republican Party year after year…

To that point, here’s some encouraging news about North Carolina’s non-participation in Medicaid expansion:

North Carolina’s decision not to expand Medicaid coverage as part of Obamacare will cost the state nearly $51 billion in federal funding and reimbursements by 2022, according to research funded by theRobert Wood Johnson Foundation…

It notes that North Carolina stands to lose $39.6 billion in federal funding between 2013 and 2022…

“States are literally leaving billions of dollars on the table that would support their hospitals and stimulate the rest of their economies,” says Kathy Hempstead of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The report notes that for every $1 a state invests in Medicaid, it will receive $13.41 in federal funds.

And here’s the real kicker:

The decision not to expand Medicaid coverage will leave 6.7 million U.S. residents uninsured in 2016. That includes 414,000 people in North Carolina.

Of course Obamacare isn’t perfect and Medicaid isn’t the end-all, be-all of health care insurance — DeLong himself says in his thoughts about Obamacare that “Where the Medicaid expansion has been allowed to take effect, it has taken effect. People are going to the doctor more, people are finding doctors to go to, and the only minus is one that we already knew: that Medicaid is not a terribly good way to spend our money in treating people with chronic conditions” — but it is still a better option than nothing and an improvement over the Emergency Room as primary care provider system that we’ve had.

What’s truly frightening to consider is where we’ll go from here. Without the funds our doctors and hospitals will be missing out on literally billions of dollars of reimbursement, almost 1/2 million citizens will be uninsured and will continue to use the emergency room as their primary caregiver, the hospitals will have to eat the cost and downward we spiral.