Jamaal Charles Talks Tech
A Conversation with Dr. Francis Collins
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Continued from page 112
When you play games is Madden usually your game of choice? Yeah. I love Madden. And right now I’m playing Grand Theft Auto V. I’m addicted to the Heists mode and play online with my friends. It’s great because you don’t need a cell phone. We’re just talking to each other on the headset playing GTA V. It’s pretty cool.
I&T Today: That’s something I’ve heard described as projectbased learning where you capitalize on the curiosity of the kids and connect their learning to the real world.
What do you feel Next Gen consoles have brought to the game? It’s pretty good what you can do with the Xbox One, where you can control it through cable and speak to it, and it has some of the hot topics on the window. One time somebody had me pop up on the screen when I had all those touchdowns against the Raiders. It was popped up on their screen. Back in the day when I was a kid I had to use the cable wire and try to fix the TV. Now everything is just perfect. What advice would you give to someone who is playing as the Chiefs in Madden? Oh, man, run the ball with me left and right. Throw the ball, screen plays, I mean I think they do that already. They know that. What are your thoughts about how realistic Madden is, especially with the real play books now? It’s real realistic. I’m like, “Wow, these are some of the plays that I see in my playbook.” I’m like, “Man, I don’t think we should let other people see what our plays are because they’re going to catch on to what we do.” But it’s real nice to have plays on because when I pick the plays I like, I run the ball well on there. How does technology help you as an athlete, whether in training or just preparing for the NFL? Technology keeps your brain moving. If there wasn’t technology, I don’t think people would be thinking. People would be just frozen. But now people come up with technology that keeps you thinking and keeps your brain active and moving all these different pieces and reacting because you need that. You need your hand-eye coordination. That’s what Guitar Hero is doing. You got to move quickly and multitask. I love technology. I hope I can come up with or find me a good person I can invest in with technology because that’s the next biggest thing. We’re also seeing advances with smartbands and smartwatches. Do you wear one? I have a Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 watch that tells you your heart rate and tracks how many steps you take. I’ll listen to MILK Music while I’m working out. And the team has technology that tells us if our bodies are hot or cold. It’s crazy when you think about where technology is going in the future. I just want to see what’s going to happen in the next 10 years. Samsung has a Galaxy VR headset and Sony is bringing virtual reality to PS4 with Morpheus. What do you think VR will bring to video games? I don’t know, man. It would be interesting to see that. It’s moving so fast. Everybody has HD TVs in their house now and I remember when everybody used to have those old-school TVs. People are driving smart cars. They’re coming out with cars that drive themselves. It’s crazy man.
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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | SUMMER 2015
FC: What was it that W.B. Yeats said? That education is not the filling of a pail, it’s a lighting of a fire? A lot of our education seems to be filling pails! I&T Today: You mentioned in your X-STEM talk when you were working on the human genome project that because of the time constraints, you developed new innovation and tech. What are important conditions for an environment that’s innovation-friendly? FC: So you’re quite right, that there’s nothing like a really important project that’s hung up all on a particular obstacle to try to get people motivated to think more creatively about how to get around that. For the Genome Project, what really made a big difference was having that project become populated with lots of experts who would not have ever really thought of themselves as biologists or even interested in life science. They were technology developers. They were computer experts. Yet their skills were absolutely essential to get this enterprise to work. And I think that’s another conclusion that’s been demonstrated over and over again: that oftentimes the
place where the most surprising rapid development happens in science is at the intersection of disciplines that had been travelling on parallel paths and then collided. I&T Today: So, there must be a balance you have to strike between needing to get things done in a timely manner and trying new things. But there’s a paradox because there has to be a certain amount of freedom to try new things. FC: And that includes the freedom to fail. In fact, in many ways in the private sector we increasingly think that failure is a badge of a certain sort – that you went out there and tried something risky. But you tried it. And as long as it wasn’t completely doomed from the beginning and was an idiotic thing to try, if it had a chance of success and yet it blew up on you, that’s not something to feel bad or ashamed of. That’s the badge of an entrepreneur. I&T Today: I wonder if that’s something that’s missing in some of our schools, too, when you’re focusing on filling that pail… FC: Yeah, I don’t think we get a whole lot of that information into the curriculum. And part of being a scientist is to recognize – what’s an important problem? What’s an innovative way to approach it? And then, what’s the expectation most of the time that this is going to pay off? And if you’re not failing most of the time, you’re not working on an interesting problem.