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See also - Unskilled and unaware of it - How difficulties in recognising one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments

http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

I have been using Vonage for several years (About a week after it was available in my area).

It has it's issues. Usually my problem is my ISP (NOT VONAGE). Sure telco is responsible from end-to-end. Sure Telco costs more for that "infrastructure". It is not fair that I was paying $100 for the same copper that was installed and paid for itself many times over all ready. But - honestly, Vonage is the only reason I still have a home phone.

My wife and I each have cell's. Why a home phone? No idea - but for $25 -vs- $100 why not keep one???

Having teenager, on the other hand, shows you the difficulty (futility?) of trying to give wisdom to those who lack experience.

First off, I'm glad to see people out there thinking hard about education and how their aspects of education tie in with other people as well. There was a lovely paper by Reed Stevens and others not too long ago that comes at your idea from a different direction. (link)

Not precisely my field, but there's lots and lots of work being done in all aspects of integrating science and math with reading and writing. Visit your local friendly PsycInfo database for starters. I find it more useful than google scholar, but if you're at a school and don't have access to PsycInfor through a university, google scholar can help too. Depending on how theoretically-minded you are, ERIC (run by the US government) is also a good repository to search through. It tends toward the less theoretical.

I suggest you look for "Writing across the curriculum", "content-area reading / literacy", hmmm... "Science (scientific) Discourse", the works of Jay Lemke, Ann Brown for a start. There's a ton of stuff out there. Actually, you may want to search the back issues of Review of Educational Research (RER) and Review of Research in Education (RRE)

You should also problematize your assumption: that science is all about lectures and (by connotation) cookbook labs. There's a ton of work out there saying that teaching school science shouldn't be like that, but it has a hard time penetrating the actual practice of everyday teachers. But for a good read on what we'd like science to actually be, I recommend Taking Science to School. It's targeted to grades k-8, and it's somewhat US-centric (and I've inferred from your request that you're not a USian), but it's still a great read, and you can read the whole thing for free online (one PDF page at a time, though, which was enough of an encouragement to me to actually buy it.)

My last warning - you're venturing into the zones of thought which usually drive teachers into graduate school. I started down similar roads, and now I'm a professor. The challenge is getting people to really think along these lines, but remain a practicing teacher.

Actually, you are quite correct about the intelligent person versus the "idiot." Take a look at this article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments":

http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pd f

Well then, with the exception of #7, this hits the nail right on the head. (Even #7 I can see as quite useful.) The problem with Linux has never been lack of applications or lack of effort. It's always been lack of professional polish and lack of consistent direction. I'll agree with most of the other posters that trying to emulate the Windows environment is a pointless endeavor, but Linux will never achieve high desktop penetration without emulating the one thing Windows has always been good at: consistency.

Microsoft ships a new OS about every 5-7 years. That's plenty of time for ISVs to recompile their applications, and fix the few APIs that have changed. Linux, on the other hand, comes out with a fad new distro seemingly every year, all of which want to completely shake everything up with a fresh set of new-hip-fad system libraries that are completely incompatible with any existing systems, and they all release a new version (usually completely overhauled yet again) every 6 months.

If you want Linux to seriously take off for desktop usage, then the parent's list is a great start, but in order to even achieve that with any measure of success, a real standards body would have to be formed, and it would have to (through some fairy tale pixie dust magic) garner the respect and compliance of every major distro on the market. Basically you'd be taking the 10 major distros and compressing them down into a single base image, and the only differences between them would be purely cosmetic, all underlying APIs being completely compatible on a binary level.

If somehow (as a community consisting of everyone always wanting to be the hero, developing the hottest new incompatible doo-dad that does the nifty cool thing everyone will hopefully want so we can all raise ourselves to independent stardom) we can agree on one fucking way to do things for an entire 2 years, the leaps and bounds of progress would be mind blowing. In the end we'd end up tackling pretty much everything on the parent poster's list, plus more. But, unfortunately, it won't happen. The community is far too proud and fickle to ever allow itself to be told how things are supposed to work, even if the standards were created and governed by members of the community itself.

The whole Linux community is built upon the concept of anarchy. With no direction, boundaries, or limitations, you will undoubtedly achieve great progress in coming up with new ideas and ways to do things, and you'll also get 10,000 copy-cats, slight alterations, feature additions that don't belong, and a market so flooded with options that no one can ever decide on which one to use. And yes, you can in fact have too many choices, and Microsoft, Sun, IBM, et al, already know that. (These guys are scared of Linux in the server room, not Linux on the desktop.)

And who's fault is all this chaos? Not Linus' for making Linux, and not even Stallman's for the GNU system (which is where the root of this complete chaos actually exists).
It's your's.
You all took a good idea, and blew it so far out of proportion that you can't even properly work together as a cohesive unit. Everyone wants to be the exotic researcher, and no one wants to be the grunt in the cubicle trenches that actually makes the shit the researchers come up into a usable product. So while I would love to see Linux rise above all of this selfish behavior and actually start to penetrate the desktop domain, I just don't see it happening. Call me a realist, or call this whole post flamebait, offtopic, whatever, but I'm going to keep using Linux for servers, and Windows, OSX, and Solaris for desktops. From the way things are now, how they've always been, and the lack of any real change on the horizon, doing anything else is just stupid.

So you equate "targeting explosive ads at children" with "throwing dynamite at a kid" ? In that case, maybe you should compare it with "beating kids to death with a stack of Doom 3 CD-ROMs".

It's perfectly possible for kids to handle explosives (or guns, alcohol, etc.) correctly. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to advertise and sell those things directly to them.

As to your claim that "exposing kids to violent games does not harm them", good job posting all those supporting links.

Study after study has demonstrated that violent games make children and teenagers less sensitive to violence (not necessarily more agressive, assuming they're stable to begin with, but less likely to intervene in situations where others are victims of violence, and more likely to consider violence as an appropriate solution to problems). It has also been shown that more agressive people are naturally drawn towards violent games, which means the games can be used as an early warning sign - if the parents know their children are playing those games (which is the whole point of a law banning direct sales to children).

Here:

http://www.apa.org/releases/videogames.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8449
etc.

On top of that, the time that kids spend playing Doom 3 (for example) is time they do not spend doing other, more intellectually stimulating activities (which can include playing other videogames, coding, reading, playing sports, plotting world domination, etc.). In my personal experience, people who play FPS games obsessively and exclusively tend not to be very smart. Maybe they play FPS games because the other games are too complex for them, or maybe it's the other way around. More liklely, it's a self-reinforcing loop.

While I wouldn't have any problem with my kids playing FarCry, I definitely want to know that they're playing it, and I do not want marketing departments and retailers conspiring to undermine my parental responsibility just so they can increase their profits (at my cost, no less). I don't have any problem with kids being "exposed" to violence, but I do have a problem with companies trying to shove it down their throats.

I'm aware there are video game ratings. Maybe you missed the part I wrote where I said, "holding vendors accountable for sales according to those ratings."

Actually, no. Your knowledge of such issues seem to be about as dated as your lack of knowledge of the fact that the ESRB has been around since 1994.

Really? Here are the first handful of hits in Google when you search for "are video games harmful?":

http://www.apa.org/releases/videogames.html

http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers /freedman.html

http://www.psychologymatters.org/videogames.html

http://www.psychologymatters.org/mediaviolence.htm l

http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/familyresources/a /vidgameviolence.htm

http://www.psu.edu/dept/medialab/research/vgviolen ce.html

You'd better get back to class there, professor.

So they're basically making a V-Chip for the internet? The real reason why teenagers are sexually abused by predators online is, essentially, bad education. http://www.apa.org/releases/online_sexabuse.html Though my favorite is this: http://rotten.com/about/obscene.html "Certain people (including parents and schoolteachers) have complained to us and stated that rotten.com should not be "allowed" on the net, since children can view images on our site. One US schoolteacher wrote us a very angry email that complained some of her students had bookmarked images on this site, that our site shouldn't be on the net, and other claptrap. This is our response. The net is not a babysitter! Children should not be roaming the Internet unsupervised any more than they should be roaming the streets of New York City unsupervised. We cannot dumb the Internet down to the level of playground. Rotten dot com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong. To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society. "

Psychology Today is a pop-culture magazine not respected by any professional psychological association. It is essentially a tabloid and should be considered in the same class as the '10 ways to tell if your boyfriend thinks you are fat' magazines. If you want actual, scholarly articles on human nature, check out the many publications of the American Psychological Association.

Linking to Psychology Today is embarrassing.

No, you're postulating that they're misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries.

I never said they were incorrect. You did. I simply said they weren't an appropriate resource to consult for the purposes of this discussion because they use simplified definitions. The definition of 'homicide' was simplified to the point of incompleteness for pedagogical purposes. I never said murder wasn't homicide. I said not all homicide is murder.

They're advertising that they're including simplified defintions. Simplified defintions are not necessarily incorrect, and they certainly are not when the purpose of the dictionaries is *teaching*, which by definition requires the information to be correct and accurate.

But not complete.

You're desperately trying to argue that a publisher as established as Cambridge Press would compromise their professional integrity and create dictionaries with inaccurate definitions for the purpose of teaching, because it's supposedly easier to teach things that are incorrect. That's just absurdly ridiculous.

No, that's not what I'm trying to argue. Your inability to comprehend basic English leads me to suspect you've used one of their dictionaries for academic purposes.

You're grasping for straws here, and it's pretty sad.

Classic Troll projection. This might prove to be useful to you: http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pd f

Even if you are right about most people finding this cathartic, we need to be concerned with statistically abnormal people. If we find that a non-zero fraction of the population will snap and resort to deadly violence, what should we do as a society? I certainly do not want to 'blame society' when an individual acts unethically. But, if we have reason to believe (for the sake of argument) 1 person in a million will snap and kill an average of 4 people, shouldn't we balance that risk of death against the value of the game? If being able to play games is worth a risk of 4 deaths per million, then we should allow games. If the will of society is that this small but quantifiable risk is not with the enjoyment of playing games, then it seems reasonable to ban games.

If we can significantly reduce the risk of violence by preventing children from playing the games, then adults can still enjoy the games. I don't know if you or the American Psychological Association is correct, but I don't understand the nearly reflexive action of slashdotters to condemn any attempt to prevent children from playing some truly disturbing games. I hope that you are right, but it doesn't seem like the evidence supports you.

Yes. http://psycinfo2.apa.org/psycarticles/welcome and pubmed.. This assumes you have access to a University Library with access to these databases.

You're a scientist and a researcher working at a (public??) university but can't speak about what you do.

That's an overstatement. The poster was referring to a specific study that has been submitted to a journal. Journals consider their mission to publish original data and findings, and won't accept stuff that has been previously published. Some interpret "prior publication" quite broadly to include many forms of dissemination of findings, including stuff posted on the web. (This is prevalent in psychology, where there is no equivalent to arXiv.org for preprints.) It's not right, and it's changing slowly, but until it gets better researchers have to play along.

Moreover, there are potential ethical issues with disseminating findings that have not yet been subjected to peer review. Many scientists consider peer review to be an integral part of the scientific process, because it provides a form of quality control and ensures a minimum standard for findings and conclusions that the scientific community will communicate the the public. Some publicity-hungry researchers violate this, but many others do care about it.

Once the study in question has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, I'm sure the poster will be happy to tell you all about it.

Interesting point. IANAP (I Am Not A Psychologist), so, who (or which organization) dictates that it's unethical to expose people to pornography ala. actual scientific research?

IANAPBISPAU (I am not a psychologist but I studied psychology at university.) Pretty much all universities have their own ethics committee whose job it is to come up with very pedantic rules for how any experiments should be done so that no-one is hurt or distressed. Getting permission from these groups can be incredibly difficult and they will often hold up grad students' research for months.

Going another level up, the APA (American Psychology Association) is the dominant body with regard to psychology (around the world, not just in the USA). They have an ethics committee which set a best practice policy on what other ethics committees should think about.

While I agree that it would be nice to be able to study anything without having to worry about the ethics, the can lead to interesting, yet morally flawed experiments such as the Stanford Prison experiment or the Milgram experiment, which were informative, but quite traumatic for participants. As a rule psychologists don't like to leave people more messed up than when they got them, so they tend to view overly cautious ethics committees as a necessary annoyance.

While individual accomplishments are important, I don't think schools remove achievement rewards with the sole reason of avoiding offense. In many cases, rewards undermine motivation. On the other hand, I agree that removing grades can be a bad move. Positive feedback, when done right (giving relevant information to the student about their work), has the potential to improve motivation. So does co-operative learning. A quick search on google scholar search turned up this... http://content2.apa.org/journals/bul/125/6/627

Yarr, me link be taken by ninjas!

Please tell me your comment is a joke. Actually, I'd prefer if this whole thread was a joke. And on some days: that Slashdot itself was a joke.

But to state some of the obvious aspects, in response to you and other commenters:

1. That some (a small minority, even, if you actually read the study) gifted people listen to metal doesn't mean listining to metal means you're smart. You can still be dumb as a brick. And indeed, most metalheads I've ever met are.
2. That you, in particular, listen to metal doesn't mean the conclusion of this study "is entirely true". That you would even consider drawing such a conclusion makes me strongly doubt that you're even of normal intelligence.
3. Metal deals with "social and political issues" in an intelligent matter? Yeah, whatever. There's not even any point in replying to such obviously subjective, and, IMO, patently ridiculous, sentiments.
4. Metal is more "musically advanced" than "the average Britney spears kind of crap"? Whatever you may think of the aesthetic quality of music of that kind, denying that it's more difficult to create than the kind of pseudo-intelligent "a Phrygian scale and 7/8! Look how talented I must be!" crap metal is so infamous for just displays utter ignorance. The stuff that might be called "advanced" in metal is trivial to anyone with a musical schooling, the stuff in Britney-like music, on the other hand, isn't, because it relies heavily on production, most of which is incredibly sophisticated. Don't believe me? Ask any music professor.
5. This study has obvious flaws, but what am I not surprised that this doesn't prevent the usual Slashbots from using it to validate their choice of music? Amusing how stuff like this is taken at face value, but any study by, say, MPAA, would be picked apart in minutes.

In related news, a paper you might find interesting.

Subjects were randomly assigned to play racing games (vs. control games). Statistical Relation + Random Assignment = Cause. Read all about it.

According to the journal article, in 2 of the studies the participants were randomly assigned to play driving games vs. a control (other kinds of games). In the other study, gender and age were statistically controlled. So your criticism was completely ruled out.

From the journal article:

The main dependent variable was a standardized and widely accepted test called the Vienna Risk-Taking Test, which is a module from the Vienna Test System (Schuhfried, 2006) and measures--on the basis of reaction times--individual willingness to take risks in road traffic. This test is mainly applied in traffic psychology and requires a computer system with a monitor to be conducted. The theoretical background for the test is provided by Wilde's (1994) theory of risk homeostasis. Participants sit in front of a computer monitor and learn that they will be confronted with 15 different videotaped risky situations in road traffic (driver's perspective), such as planned overtaking maneuvers and arrival at railroad crossings that have begun to close. First, the specific traffic situation was described verbally. Then participants saw the critical situation two times. The first time, participants were instructed only to watch the situation. The second time, they decided when they would abandon their maneuver by pressing a key. The time that elapsed between the start of the sequence and the decision to abandon it was used as the dependent variable as an indicator of risk taking (the longer the reaction time, the higher the risk taking). The whole test procedure lasted about 10 min. According to its publisher, the reliability () of the basic test is .92. The construct validity of the test has been shown in three independent studies (e.g., Scheiblechner, 1985). A study by Sommer, Arendasy, Schuhfried, and Litzenberger (2005) revealed that the test correctly identified 89% of accident-free drivers and drivers who had multiple accidents (criteria validity: R2 .636). Unlike the cars and traffic environments in racing games, these situations were "real" videotaped situations, not produced by computer graphics. Moreover, the task that the participants had to perform was entirely different: Playing racing games involved using a typical video console joypad, whereas responding to the risktaking test involved pressing a button on the computer keyboard So the environment as well as the task facing the participants and the response action required in the risk-taking test were not so similar to the gaming environment as to make transfer inevitable and, thus, produce some kind of demand effect.

Why don't these "researchers" understand the importance of self-selection?!?

Believe it or not, they do. In the second and third studies reported in the paper, subjects were randomly assigned to either play a driving game or a neutral game. Random assignment eliminates self-selection effects.

Here's a link to the actual journal article.

Or, you have brain damage to your prefrontal cortex

http://www.apa.org/releases/sarcasm.html

Honestly, the statement "fundamentalist shills like the world bank" was so obviously sarcastic to me I assumed you and everyone who modded you up were not native English speakers. I enjoy a clear debate, but that one WAS clear to me. If he had said "according to the world bank, which, by the way, is actually quite the opposite of a fundamentalist mouthpiece" he would have lost readers because he is stating the obvious in a boring way...

But, whatever, at least you got some well-deserved karma. That wasn't sarcasm. Neither was that. Nor this one and the next one. This is the last one. Wait--

Your post has to be the silliest, most asinine, pathetic and pitiful post I have EVER seen on slashdot, including the worst of GNAA trolls.

Having read a few other of your posts in this thread, you appear to be a true luddite and a fundamentalist environmentalist bully who repeatedly fails to convince clueful people of the supremacy of your religion. So what do you do? In true jihadist fashion you try to intimidate a free and practical thinker by resorting to threatening him with a fistfight.

Grow up.

You have a serious psychological problem. Perhaps it's too many hours on the Internet, or a lack of experience with a diversity of people or viewpoints. In any case you need to get help.

I've followed debates on environmental issues with a modest interest, but often it's striking to me how skepticism and tolerance are no longer tolerable whilst alarmism and groupthink and intimidation rule the day.

You are polluting slashdot with your poisonous posts, effectively shitting in the pool the rest of us are swimming in, yet argue for environmental responsibility. Indeed! What a colossal hypocrite.

his obnoxious tone

My tone was not (intended to be) obnoxious.

Research has shown it to also hold true in sales.

If you present users with too many choices, they're more likely to not buy anything. (one experiment was done by offering jams for sale, with either a limited number of choices, or a whole lot).

The theory is that when people can't decide which is best, they'd prefer not to risk making a non-optimal choice, and so decide not to buy anything at all. (as opposed to software sales, which try to get people to not make the choice by buying the most expensive 'enterprise' version, so they don't have to decide which features they might need).

I would like to point out one hole in your theory. You state that your engineers speak a different body language, i.e. they are competent in body language but "differently abled". I'd like to draw your attention to some scholarly research on the subject: here.

The point of the article is that even if you perceive yourselves to be competent in a thing, the less competent you indeed are, the less likely you will be to judge it accurately.

Included are such gems as "American students are much more confident about their math abilities than Singaporean students" and "But even the least confident student in Singapore outscores the most confident American student!" Food for thought.

Prediction 1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.

I'd wager the average geek is smarter than 'average'.

This might very well be the case. But maybe it doesn't matter so much since everyone regard themselves above average anyhow, even when they are unskilled (link and link)?

There are numerous studies, that show married people are generally happier and live longer.

I screwed up the URL's sorry.....here they are corrected

http://www.family.org/cforum/briefs/a0041644.cfm
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Depression/story?id=2 298049
http://www.apa.org/releases/married_happy.html
http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=1

There are numerous studies, that show married people are generally happier and live longer.
http://www.family.org/cforum/briefs/a0041644.cfm/
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Depression/story?id=2 298049/
http://www.apa.org/releases/married_happy.html/
http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=1/

It is interesting that you brought it up, but it's true that consumers like having a few things to choose from, but not too many. It reminded me of a recent study that showed that too many choices would hinder a consumer's decision. Similarly, I think that a blinding array of options in an application intimidates the average user. There is no reason not to offer the options, just keep them out of the way for the most part.

I found the 'hidden menu items' feature on MS Office software annoying to the point of distraction, so I always set the option to show full menus. Almost all my co-workers, however, don't seem to mind.

...I wait for Slashdot to report the news again! *ducks*

In all seriousness, it's always a good idea to have this information all in one place so you don't have to look for a million results. One thing I liked about my university's library is that they had a portal where you could search all their article databases from one point: You'd get back Lexis-Nexis results, web searches, etc. If Google can do this and tie together trade and scientific journals (say, the APA and thousands of others), then we'll be on our way. Right now one of the other option I can think of is LookSmart's FindArticles, although it seems small at only 10 million articles.

Some customers are unskilled and unaware of it (PDF link, 254kB). There is nothing you can do. In these people the level of incompetence is high enough that they cannot recognize their own inability. The only thing you can do is stay away from them. Don't explain, don't try to make it right. You cannot. Limit your losses and get rid of them. If nothing else helps, take the device back and give them a full refound.

Hands-free cell phones might not be as safe as you think.

if he became disbarred, lost his fandom, and studies were released proving that there is no link between videogames and violence... that would be a fate for him worse than death.

You mean a report like this one? [Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions, written by Craig A. Anderson, PhD, Psychology.]

In a nutshell it purports:

- Violent videogames lead to increased aggressive behavior and thoughts
- High exposure to these games has been linked to delinquency, fighting at school, and violent criminal behavior
- Studies with college students have consistently found increased aggression after exposure to clearly unrealistic and fantasy violent video games.
- The effect is probably much more widespread than his report implies, just due to sample sizes.

It's an interesting read.

I am not anti-videogames, or even anti-violent-videogames. Just that there are dozens of these reports around. Seeing consistent violence, cartoonish or otherwise, does have an effect on people, especially young people. It's just that it's not often (yet) that it's manifested in someone's actual outward behavior.

Also: Thompson is a Moron. Or at least sounds like one.

ad

After 10 years experience as a professional software engineer, I can say that certainly isn't true of most programmers I've worked with. People like that, quite honestly, have no business writing code that can run in a place that may bring the system down.

Again with the "developers just need to understand threads" theory? Unless you are talking about everyone moving to some new language that significantly helps developers manage syncronization and sharing ... then I call your "theory" and raise you real the world data that OS kernel developers (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD) repeatedly have problems managing the above threading problems. Coverity has found hundreds if not thousands of threading bugs in Linux, and there must certainly be many it hasn't.

So you (and "most programmers" you've worked with) either believe that you really are much better than all of the Linux and Solaris kernels developers ... or, more likely, idiots who can't judge their own incompetance.

So listen up, exposing large parts of your entire application to run at multiple points simultaneously is really hard to do well. And if you have a real OS (Ie. not from microsoft) then doing fork() and explicitly stating which bits of data you want to share is less prone to errors, more maintainable and just as efficent/scalable.

Yes, sometimes, you'll then be required to design the interfaces to communicate between the processes instead of just hacking it ... but again, often, just hacking it with threads produces buggy unmaintainable crap.

And in case you'd like evidence to back you up, here is the actual scientific paper describing the "too stupid to know it" phenomenon. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pd f/

Most researchers of aggression agree that severe aggressive and violent behavior seldom occurs unless there is a convergence of multiple predisposing and precipitating factors such as neurophysiological abnormalities, poor child rearing, socioeconomic deprivation, poor peer relations, attitudes and beliefs supporting aggression, drug and alcohol abuse, frustration and provocation, and other factors.

And when it's pointed out to the study's author that it might just be that children who are not drawn to violence will spend less time watching violent television than children who are drawn to violence, does he say his study shows otherwise?

No.

He says

It is more plausible

Nice ad hominem. Asshole.

The problem is that you are taking a correlation (video games & violence) that is a very weak one, and trying to prove causation, i.e. that the practice of video games enhances some violent instinct.

However, in order to make this work you have to take a very tiny selective sample of violence. Most murders are committed by adults, generally urban criminals, who are not sitting around playing GTA before they go out and commit it. The murder rate among teenagers is a tiny portion of the total, and has been dropping for decades. A lot of teenagers play video games, so surprise! Most teenage murderers do too.

Again with the "most influential", although you threw in a "probably" which makes your statement meaningless. "You're doing it"? Prove it. How are they doing it? Who dies when I throw a grenade in BF2? Why is it I still can't fly a spaceship despite all these space sims.

These anti-game activists keep saying that video games increase aggression and violent behavior. However I find that hard to believe considering US Crime Rates have in fact been decreasing since videogame began getting popular in the early 90s.

• Other factors contribute to crime. That doesn't mean violent media doesn't contribute at all.
• Video games have been popular since the 80s at least.
• Very very few people say that "video games increase aggression and violent behavior." However, many psychologists and the APA do say that violent media increases aggression and violent behavior.
• There are no anti-game activists, at least not in this discussion. There are a handful of anti-violent-game activists. But mostly legislators, psychologists and parents advocate restricting the sales of ultra-violent games to minors. This is not a ban. This is parental control.

Sounds interesting. The html didn't work, so i am reading the pdf http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pd f thanks

Which is why she is trying to find evidence that video games are bad, than, for example, campaigning to stop children from watching television, when there is plenty of evidence and an existing consensus that TV does a lot of harm to children:

http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/yourchild/tv.htm http://www.stanford.edu/dept/bingschool/rsrchart/b andura.htm http://www.apa.org/releases/childrenads.html

Even reseachers who say TV can be good, emphasise that only applies to VERY restricted viewing:

http://www.aap.org/family/tv1.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3506854.stm

The APA is the American Psychological Association. Basically it's a scientific organization of psychologists worldwide. The DSM is a collaborative effort. While the DSM is not immune to political influence, the process is reasonably well designed to try to keep the DSM as scientific as possible. As one example, in spite of intense political pressure, when research proved that homosexuality was not a disease, it was successfully removed from the DSM (it was included as such in an early edition due to widespread assumption that had not yet been researched).

Here is the APA's website:
http://www.apa.org/

Here is the dsm-v website, which describes the research going into the next DSM.
http://www.dsm5.org/

From http://www.apa.org/about/
With 150,000 members, APA is the largest association of psychologists worldwide.

Gerald P. Koocher, PhD is the 2006 President of the American Psychological Association. He currently serves as editor of the journal Ethics and Behavior.

Dr. Koocher was elected a Fellow of twelve divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Koocher has more than 25 years of APA governance experience--spanning from his service on APA's Ethics Committee as a 25-year-old to his completion in December of two five-year terms as APA treasurer, an office that includes membership on APA's Board of Directors. He has been president of the Massachusetts and New England Psychological Associations.

The APA is the American Psychological Association. Basically it's a scientific organization of psychologists worldwide. The DSM is a collaborative effort. While the DSM is not immune to political influence, the process is reasonably well designed to try to keep the DSM as scientific as possible. As one example, in spite of intense political pressure, when research proved that homosexuality was not a disease, it was successfully removed from the DSM (it was included as such in an early edition due to widespread assumption that had not yet been researched).

Here is the APA's website:
http://www.apa.org/

Here is the dsm-v website, which describes the research going into the next DSM.
http://www.dsm5.org/

From http://www.apa.org/about/
With 150,000 members, APA is the largest association of psychologists worldwide.

Gerald P. Koocher, PhD is the 2006 President of the American Psychological Association. He currently serves as editor of the journal Ethics and Behavior.

Dr. Koocher was elected a Fellow of twelve divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Koocher has more than 25 years of APA governance experience--spanning from his service on APA's Ethics Committee as a 25-year-old to his completion in December of two five-year terms as APA treasurer, an office that includes membership on APA's Board of Directors. He has been president of the Massachusetts and New England Psychological Associations.

"Bill Gates has been quoted saying that his programmers can program for 72 hours straight," Stickgold says. "And I say-yeah, but their product is Windows."

"...to the best of my knowledge, studies into the effects of violent games have been inconclusive..."

From http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-anderson.html:

"Myth 1. Violent video game research has yielded very mixed results.
Facts: Some studies have yielded nonsignificant video game effects, just as some smoking studies failed to find a significant link to lung cancer. But when one combines all relevant empirical studies using meta-analytic techniques, five separate effects emerge with considerable consistency. Violent video games are significantly associated with: increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased prosocial (helping) behavior. Average effect sizes for experimental studies (which help establish causality) and correlational studies (which allow examination of serious violent behavior) appear comparable (Anderson & Bushman, 2001)."

One of his cited sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11554666&dopt=Abstrac t
(if you have some way to access the article... I believe the only reason I can through this site is because of a university-level subscription service or something like that, the site it links to seems to imply that it's possible to not have full access to the article)

Myth 5. Correlational studies are irrelevant.

Actually, it doesn't "debunk" that myth - it says that the military does indeed use video games to train its soldiers. Because, guess what, they do! It suggested that this isn't enough to prove a link between video games and violence because the people playing the games are soldiers.

The rest of it is essentially all trash, trying to discredit the studies. Fortunately, I had already linked to an article refuting that.

I know most Slashdotters will refuse to accept this, but anyone who has ever played video games and then actually paid attention to the way it made them act should recognize that video games do indeed create violent behavior. I know that after playing a video game, I'm much more prone to violence than after watching TV. I've watched it happen in other people. I've heard someone talk about how they almost ran a stop light because they'd been playing too much Grand Theft Auto (and then joke about how they wanted to steal a car).

Open your eyes and pay attention. It's not a joke: video games really do encourage violent behavior.