by Stone Marshall | Apr 25, 2016 | Minecraft News |
From outside the door to their command and control center, I discreetly observed the team, taking care not to disturb them. They stared intently at the moonlit landscape littered with hidden traps and vertiginous fjords displayed on the large console in front of them, tracking their own progress and that of 10 other far-flung teams as they collectively navigated through the complex virtual environment toward a common goal.
When one team seemed to get lost or momentarily confused, a colleague on another team would grab her smartphone and offer concise video guidance. It was a remarkable demonstration of using technology to coordinate teams in complex tasks without prior training.
Even more remarkable, no team member was older than 11. The software they were using was Minecraft, the virtual reality navigation game that has addicted millions of users worldwide.
I was filled with envy for these middle schoolers — and not only because what they were doing looked like so much fun.
I’ve spent my career working in some of the world’s most advanced hospitals, and now chair Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics. I can tell you with assurance that the use of team technology in the American health care system lags decades behind the seamless coordination that Minecraft players take for granted.
How often, in your experience as patient, family member, doctor, or nurse, do all the members of the care team actually know what the current plan is, and who else is on the team? How easily can all team members monitor activities, figure out if the care is on the right track, and instantly conference to organize a course correction if needed?
Modern electronic health record systems don’t come close to this functionality. The typical medical record amounts to a dry diary of a patient’s care. Had it been built by Minecraft, it would show the likely trajectory of the disease, who is on the team, and what each team member — including the patient — could do to fight the disease. And it would even let team members interact.
Can we make our health care system more like Minecraft? Right now we face three substantial obstacles.
Unique systems. We’ve convinced ourselves that the information technology we need to care for patients must be unique. To that end, we have created cumbersome solutions that are less secure, less versatile, and more expensive than they need to be, and that often have trouble communicating with each other. This has stifled innovation that could transform clinical teams and their relationships to their patients.
Billing gets in the way. Our medical records conflate billing with clinical care. The current model of reimbursement puts a premium on scrupulously documenting what has been done so providers can request reimbursement for their services by health insurers, rather than emphasizing improved communication and decision-making.
Clinicians only. Patients have largely been excluded from the decision-making process, even though pioneering initiatives, such as the OpenNotes project at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, suggest that care actually gets better when patients read their medical team’s notes.
Fortunately, there are big-picture solutions underway. Several national initiatives are heading in the same direction. With names like the Blue Buttonand Sync For Science, they extract patient data from the health record, freeing it to be processed in innovative ways that will allow Minecraft-like visualizations and interactions. (Faculty members from my department have worked on both of these initiatives.) Once clinical data is freed and under individual control, an entire new industry will spring up to serve our needs, much as an ecosystem of applications grew once consumers were able to directly access their own financial data.
By getting involved in these apparently arcane national initiatives, you — patient, clinician, payer, or policy maker — can alter the future.
Both the Blue Button and Sync For Science have the support of and funding from our government. But if they are to succeed, all of us must actively help. Patients should ask for their data delivered not as a stack of paper but as an electronic package under their control. They could share it with clinicians for their care, or donate it to research projects they choose to participate in. When patients are transferred from one health care institution to another, providers should demand that they be accompanied by their full electronic health records, not just verbal or textually summarized handoffs. Electronic health record system vendors should make their software packages as complete and comprehensive as possible. Payers should insist on comprehensive data flow — including to the patient — as a condition for reimbursement.
The technological bar to succeeding in these initiatives is not high. Instead, institutional inertia is the big hurdle. If we overcome this inertia, there will be no reason that a patient’s history, diagnoses, and next steps can’t be presented in a way that makes as much sense to adults as Minecraft intuitively makes to 11-year-olds.
What Minecraft can teach the Health Care system
by Stone Marshall | Apr 24, 2016 | Awesome Book News, Minecraft News |
Minecraft Pocket Edition is once again getting a huge update that will bring the mobile version of the game closer to its PC counterpart.
And, as usual, Mojang has teased a bunch of new features through the majestic medium of Twitter. Some are “hey we’re doing this in the next update” while others are “this would be cool I guess?”
And all that leaves us with a list of features that maybe kinda sorta possibly might end up in 0.15. We’ll find out.
Resource packs
Way back in February, MCPE top dog Tommaso Checchi was already teasing possible new features for 0.15. And it all started with a tweet that said…
“I’ll be in Seattle for a while to plan out 0.15, too, and there’s a lot of cool stuff coming up… resource packs anyone?”
Resource packs allow players to easily customise textures, models, music, sounds, fonts and more, just by downloading and installing a few files.
Who knows whether they will be like resource packs on PC where players can freely distribute and download new files, or more like the mash-up packs on console where Mojang sells themed packs of resources as DLC.
Pistons
Pistons are an important part of any redstone engineer’s toolbox. You can use these components to push blocks around, letting you build handy factories or traps.
Mojang dev Daniel Wustenhoff tweeted a video of pistons in action back in March, which means they’re likely to appear in the game’s next major update.
Realms
Realms are the big new addition for 0.15, and are already available in the update’s first alpha test.
According to Mojang itself, “Minecraft Realms is a paid multiplayer server hosting service, provided by Mojang, designed to be easily set up and used by up to ten players at a time”.
You can already make an online server in MCPE but it’s a bit of a pain – Realms will make the process painless, in exchange for £5.59 per month.
Taller worlds
Mojang is also working on worlds that can be 256 blocks tall. The first attempt was, ahem, not a success. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if the team can fix those bugs in time for 0.15.
Trading with villagers
Right now, villagers just walk around, look at you suspiciously, and sometimes make a weird honking noise. Well that’s set to change!
Checchi teased the possibility of trading with villagers – and more – in a tweet that says “Today’s idea: a NPCComponent you can give to any mob to have a dialog tree with them”.
That would certainly allow for trading, but maybe other possibilities too. Could you make a text adventure in a Minecraft world for other players to experience?
This one sounds super vague right now, but maybe start saving up those emeralds. You might be able to use them to trade with villagers sooner than you think.
Fire Charges
Only eagle-eyed viewers will spot what’s new in Minecraft developer Jason Major’s screenshot.
It’s the Fire Charge, of course. This item lights blocks on fire when used. It’s not quite as good as the Flint and Steel but charges are renewable and stackable.
Plus, chuck one of these in a dispenser and it will shoot out fireballs. Bang, you’ve now got your own version of Bowser’s castle.
Horses
In that same screenshot, you might also see an extra spawn egg (used in creative mode to magic up a mob of your choosing) not currently in MCPE.
It’s barely even visible, so take this with a grain of salt, but the colours match up to the horse spawn egg from Minecraft proper.
If they were added, you’d be able to tame and ride horses to cross great distances in no time at all.
New archers
A brand new mob has been teased for Minecraft 1.10 and MCPE 0.15.0. They look like scary wraith-like archers who are gonna mess you up, son.
The game already has archer units of course, in the skeletons with bows. Who knows how these guys will differ.
Command blocks
Command blocks essentially let you write programming code in Minecraft. With some of these blocks and some redstone, you can make crazy tools like teleporters and mob spawners.
They might not appear in 0.15, but Minecraft boss Jens Bergensten told CNET “our ambition is to reach feature parity as soon as possible, including command blocks.”
Checchi added “Don’t expect all of that to be as powerful as PC for a while, because we’ll start small. But that’s the direction!”
Mutton
Cows, rabbits, pigs, and chicken all drop meat that you can eat or cook. But sheep just give you wool. You can’t eat wool. Well, you can but it’s not very tasty.
So it looks like sheep will soon drop raw mutton that you can cook for sustenance. We don’t know if, like in other Minecraft versions, it can be used to breed and heal tamed wolves.
Biome-based villages
Villages look the same everywhere you go. Bergensten says the team is testing an idea where villages would change depending on what biome they’re found in.
That means villages in jungles or mesas or deserts could be built from different materials. Neat!
You might also get new biomes – depending on if you would “hate if we made a new world generator with new biomes, but you need to create a new world to get it”.
More options
Expect more ways to tweak your Minecraft experience – including the ability to set the level of anti-aliasing if you’re playing on Windows 10 or VR. “Not as needed on phones because they have insane DPI,” says Checchi.
Everything that’s been teased for Minecraft Pocket Edition’s 0.15 update
by Stone Marshall | Apr 24, 2016 | Awesome Book News, Minecraft News |
You now need a Prime subscription to buy games such as Grand Theft Auto 5, Rainbow Six: Siege or FIFA 16 direct from retail giant Amazon.
The bizarre change, spotted by Videogamer, appears to have quietly taken effect overnight.
But there’s a big caveat to the above. All of these games are still available to buy via Amazon through third-party sellers, whether you have Prime or not.
To many customers, little will actually change.
Note the new warning box on the right, but also the third-party sellers which are still available, and cheaper than Amazon itself.
Amazon uses third-party sellers extensively itself, listing many as being the option it uses to fulfill orders. Again, these are still available to non-Prime subscribers.
Still, the change is notable for the worrying precedent it sets and because it appears to be targeting a very specific section of its customer base – those who play video games – at least initially. It’s not hard to imagine a future where some games are locked behind Amazon Prime completely.
Other games affected by the change include Minecraft, Far Cry Primal, Dishonored: Definitive Edition, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Elder Scrolls Online, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, Battlefield Hardline. Even Farming Simulator.
An Amazon Prime subscription currently costs £79 per year.
Amazon marks GTA5, FIFA 16, Minecraft and more as “exclusively for Prime members”
![‘Minecraft’ News, Updates: Education Edition In The Works; No More Mods? [VIDEO]](https://www.stonemarshall.com/wp-content/uploads/an-image-from-minecraft-of-microsoft-that-is-about-to-get-an-education-edition.jpg)
by Stone Marshall | Apr 23, 2016 | Minecraft News |
Since “Minecraft” is already a big hit in schools and universities, Microsoft intends to release another update of its building block video game in order to be suitable for education. In May, hundreds of schools will commence testing the Education Edition of the game.
However, the tech giant did not reveal how much the schools will cost final version, or when it will be released. Microsoft creates the software as well as the projects to teach the instructors to use it.
Microsoft revealed via Cnet, “During the summer months, we are also going to be focused on working with educators on building out lesson plans, sharing learning activity ideas and creating reusable projects.”
One factor that made “Minecraft” suitable to almost everything from computer, programming to art and history, is its “endless possibilities.” Particularly, students take their own initiatives to study the game by themselves, Education World reported.
This development for “Minecraft Education Edition” is a slice of the giant leap for the game. Mojang, Swedish developer started by utilizing Java programming language for the said project. That has been known for people who like to create changes, named mods that modify how “Minecraft” works. On the other hand, “Minecraft” Pocket Edition that operates on Apple iPads and iPhones, tablets and smart phones powered by Google’s Android, are encrypted in the C++ language, Tech Times reported.
The game’s Education Edition will utilize the same language, according to Micrsoft. This implies no mods. Microsoft plans to include command blocks and mods, which is next to the C++ version. This will need Apple’s OS X 10.11 El Capitan and Windows 10.
The C++ foundation is also used in the updated Microsoft’s reality headset, Hololens and Facebook’s Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.
Are you excited for the Education Edition of “Minecraft”? Let us know what you think by leaving your comments below.
‘Minecraft’ News, Updates: Education Edition In The Works; No More Mods? [VIDEO]
RedditSome smart-alec built a fully functioning, playable version of “Pokemon Red” in Minecraft.
