Slashdot Mirror

Fortunately, popular opinion does not decide what the truth is. What am I in the minority of in human history, anyway? If we're looking at all humans who have ever lived, no religion can claim to be a majority. Even within large, organized religions that rally together under a single label, there is considerable disagreement over what happens to a person after death. There has never been a majority consensus on the subject.

Also, you may change your mind when you are actually faced with death. Many people who believe like you very much think about it when death actually is imminent.

No, that's unlikely and also not true.
Here's some reading material.
I'll give you the short version: facing death typically only reinforces somebody's existing beliefs. Also, even if somebody does change their beliefs when they are scared and irrational, that does not mean their previous beliefs are wrong -- people frequently make poor decisions when scared and irrational. Also, you're really just reiterating the old "no atheists in foxholes" statement, which is insulting, condescending, and false.

Regarding base load: you don't need base load. That's a myth. You need a large grid, multiple power sources, an abundance of plants and some amount of storage, e.g. hydro (pumped isn't necessary, you just need to be able to have a buffer) or natural gas, could be biogas. I've seen three independent studies come to this conclusion.

The primary problem with nuclear power is cost. It's really expensive. There was an article in Bulletins of Atomic Scientists that covered this in depth, "How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing":

http://bos.sagepub.com/content/69/2/12.full

Since it's so expensive, it has to be operating 24/7 which makes it hard to integrate in a power grid with intermittent power sources.

> Open articles. Ctrl-F "Controling" No results. Close tab. Nothing of value.

It does. It is abbreviated as "RGSC" on the article. Look at Figure 2 to see the model graphically and you see that RGSC is featured prominently on the top. Also, if you look at Table 2, the authors acknowledge the link between SES of origin AND math / reading abilities. But this paper shows that the math & reading abilities at 7 years old do predict mid-life SES above AND beyond the SES of origin.

Internet smartypantses talking down peer-reviewed research having their asses handed to them is one my favorite sources of schadenfreude. You made my day, thanks :)

> Open articles. Ctrl-F "Controling" No results. Close tab. Nothing of value.

It does. It is abbreviated as "RGSC" on the article. Look at Figure 2 to see the model graphically and you see that RGSC is featured prominently on the top. Also, if you look at Table 2, the authors acknowledge the link between SES of origin AND math / reading abilities. But this paper shows that the math & reading abilities at 7 years old do predict mid-life SES above AND beyond the SES of origin.

Although the third-party blurb suggests some interesting conjectures, the article itself is hidden behind a paywall. It's hardly worth speculating on its content or statistical robustness or experimental rigor - other than noting that the social sciences tend to be less robust in their methods and mathematics than the physical sciences and engineering.

I don't find your paranoid persuasive. Care to share any of your sources?

http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/6/81.full.pdf+html

This is discussed in TFA:

Those who have not followed the development of competitive power markets over the past 35 years sometimes blame the collapse of new nuclear orders on a loss of public confidence and a surge in costly overregulation following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. If these were the true causes, the remedies might indeed lie in more political support and a streamlined licensing process, but neither evidence nor experience supports this scenario.

How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing

(I'm not going to repeat the long explanation afterwards backing up the above claims.)

Hey, if you are interested in nuclear power, do read the article Unknown Lamer links to: How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing. It has nothing to do with Japan, but offers an explanation to why there's little development of nuclear in the US. Excerpt:

In phase two, from roughly 1978 to 1990, rising nuclear construction costs met falling fossil fuel prices, emerging energy efficiency efforts, and the success of independent power generators enabled by the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. The result was an end to nuclear construction in the United States.

And:

Those who have not followed the development of competitive power markets over the past 35 years sometimes blame the collapse of new nuclear orders on a loss of public confidence and a surge in costly overregulation following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. If these were the true causes, the remedies might indeed lie in more political support and a streamlined licensing process, but neither evidence nor experience supports this scenario.

Greenland has never had significantly less ice than it has now in at least 6 or 7 thousand years

For various definitions of "significant", of course. In this context we're comparing today and the MWP.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/voyage/subset/greenland/archeo.html

I live in Scandinavia and as far as we're concerned the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period were warmer than we are currently. Thus, likely less ice in Greenland as well.

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.html

http://www.wsl.ch/fe/landschaftsdynamik/dendroclimatology/Publikationen/Esper_etal.2012_GPC

http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/26/0959683612460791.abstract

there is much less outright AGW denial on slashdot

Anyone who believes there exists such a things as "denial" (and that there's oil funded denial "machine") is not doing science but is following a religion. Apparently one Slashdot editor is as well, since each and every "the sky is falling" study gets reported here - but not the multitude of published scientific evidence that points to all existing models having overestimated the actual feedbacks.

I like this study, by Keith Briffa. A previous study of his was used in creating the latest "IPCC hockey stick", and has been well publicised all over the world. Briffa himself has now released that there were errors in the previous study, and now that he's updated it with proper math the hockey stick is gone.

http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/26/0959683612460791.abstract

The way to differentiate people doing science from those following a religion is in how they react to what I just wrote above. A scientist goes "hey, that's interesting". A religious fanatic starts spouting things like "denier!" and "it's worse than we thought ANYWAY".

Commenting Anon to avoid undoing moderation.

Your correct about the training being the issue. Training and handling aspects are going to be very important when deciding if the dog and handler are 'doing their job'. The evidence for various breeds of canine having sufficiently developed nasal senses and intelligence to be trained is hard to refute. From centuries of hunting and tracking dogs as anecdotal evidence, to the long recognized work of bloodhounds for tracking people on the run ( including a well demonstrated mythbusters episode ), through to the scientifically analyzed work in medical testing and other more rigorous modern study. I have seen plenty of scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of dogs to smell several kinds of cancer and other assorted chemicals. A selection of Citations to show I'm not talking out my ass, and exonerate the humble canines sense of smell. One, Two, Three, Four,Five,Six.

Now the issue is clearly not the dog itself. Its the handlers. Handlers are fallible humans who need to be tested with a specific animal. If a handler over time trains his dog to signal at the wrong times, its the handlers fault, unfortunately it can be very hard to un-train this behavior and thus the animal is now a less effective tool for the job it was trained for, and the employee either needs to be reprimanded or given other duties. The application of an external performance pressure to the task, the handler 'wanting to find', is the root cause of the issue. Dogs cant be reliably used when their handlers get bonuses, prestige, or any kind of incentive that could bias the handler.

The short version of this is that organizations using sniffer dogs are clearly degrading the effectiveness of their sniffer dogs based on poor management practices either implicitly or explicitly encouraging the handlers to skew the behavior of the dog.

An example I can recall of good management (may not be an 100% correct recitation, since I heard it some years ago) is that the Australian Customs & Border Protection Services have a required level of accuracy, not exceeding thresholds set for both false negatives and false positives during training and on the job. Keep pulling over the wrong guy, you might loose the job. And they also have a degree of separation between the dog handlers and the people that do baggage inspections and other security tasks, a dog handler is primarily a dog handler, his job is to handle the dog as part of a team.

Commenting Anon to avoid undoing moderation.

Your correct about the training being the issue. Training and handling aspects are going to be very important when deciding if the dog and handler are 'doing their job'. The evidence for various breeds of canine having sufficiently developed nasal senses and intelligence to be trained is hard to refute. From centuries of hunting and tracking dogs as anecdotal evidence, to the long recognized work of bloodhounds for tracking people on the run ( including a well demonstrated mythbusters episode ), through to the scientifically analyzed work in medical testing and other more rigorous modern study. I have seen plenty of scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of dogs to smell several kinds of cancer and other assorted chemicals. A selection of Citations to show I'm not talking out my ass, and exonerate the humble canines sense of smell. One, Two, Three, Four,Five,Six.

Now the issue is clearly not the dog itself. Its the handlers. Handlers are fallible humans who need to be tested with a specific animal. If a handler over time trains his dog to signal at the wrong times, its the handlers fault, unfortunately it can be very hard to un-train this behavior and thus the animal is now a less effective tool for the job it was trained for, and the employee either needs to be reprimanded or given other duties. The application of an external performance pressure to the task, the handler 'wanting to find', is the root cause of the issue. Dogs cant be reliably used when their handlers get bonuses, prestige, or any kind of incentive that could bias the handler.

The short version of this is that organizations using sniffer dogs are clearly degrading the effectiveness of their sniffer dogs based on poor management practices either implicitly or explicitly encouraging the handlers to skew the behavior of the dog.

An example I can recall of good management (may not be an 100% correct recitation, since I heard it some years ago) is that the Australian Customs & Border Protection Services have a required level of accuracy, not exceeding thresholds set for both false negatives and false positives during training and on the job. Keep pulling over the wrong guy, you might loose the job. And they also have a degree of separation between the dog handlers and the people that do baggage inspections and other security tasks, a dog handler is primarily a dog handler, his job is to handle the dog as part of a team.

There is little evidence that using Adderall, etc, actually improves academic performance. The few studies whcih have been done actually correlate worse academic performance with unprescribed stimulant use. Perhaps you could argue that it is the weaker students using them to begin with. PDF Warning (see page 8 for correlative overview): http://mss3.libraries.rutgers.edu/dlr/outputds.php?pid=rutgers-lib:38417&mime=application/pdf&ds=PDF-1 There is a growing body of evidence that those who do benefit may actually be self-medicating undiagnosed attention defficit symptoms: http://jad.sagepub.com/content/15/4/263.short http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15433714.2010.525402

The two names they used in the study were John and Jennifer, which are apparently equally likeable, where they cite this study here: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/19/3/268.short

If you could text while driving by never touching the device, and not having to look at it, it may well prove that it isn't that dangerous.
Those systems are just now coming into common manufacture and usage, as Voice Recognition technology is just now becoming up to the task.
Even initiating a voice recognition text message on modern cell phones requires at least one hand, and both eyes. Some in-dash systems in cars
can send a text strictly with voice input, often not even requiring looking at the in-dash display.

So the jury is out on that.

The present studies all are based on manual manipulation of a hand held device which requires both hand and eye be focused on the device in order to send a text message. Touch screens almost necessarily require two hands and two eyes to send a text message.

Mental focus shifts in milliseconds. In fact people can do more than on thing at a time. Often concentration and performance is improved by having a mostly autonomous background task happening at the same time. So I don't agree with your assertion that mental focus is harder to shift. The research doesn't support that fact.

Actually, violence against women in Norway is a major health concern according to an important study done there.

From the study: Results: "In total, 26.8% of 2,143 ever-partnered women had experienced any violence by their partner during their lifetime, and 5.5% in the year before the study."

These rates are on par with most of the developed world. Given these stats (One in four ever-partnered women battered within their relationship) I don't think the Scandinavians are going to get a pass on rates of rape -- insofar as it is defined to include spousal rape, date rape and other forms of coerced sex. If anyone has stats on Scandinavian rape rates (could not easily find any) it would be instructive to post them. I doubt they are much different from those in the developed world. Certainly not one in ten. Where did that figure come from?

As much as many Scandinavians would like to believe that their feet don't stink, it should come as no surprise that their feet do, indeed, stink. Almost as much as mine do.

Headache/bad headache != migraine headache. I wish people would really stop saying they get migraine headaches all the time. A migraine head ache is one that is at least 3 days long. Unless your headache was at least that long, it was not a migraine.

Umm... wrong. Anything from 4 to 72 hours. See http://cep.sagepub.com/content/24/1_suppl/23

Good point. I just gave the first link I found.

Here are three peer reviewed studies. Had I spent more than 2 minutes with Google Scholar, I could have found more.

I do stress that this is emerging evidence, and a lot more work needs to be done. But even if there's no link found, the simple fact is that porn is not information about sex, it's misinformation about sex.

And all that will still leave the system worthless for anything other than emergency response.

Video surveillance is useless for identifying people because (1) compression impacts exactly those spatial frequencies needed for face recognition and (2) humans are bad at identifying faces (unless they are very familiar). Even if a face is not present in a lineup, people say it is 70% of the time.

[1] Video Surveillance is Useless (presentation) http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~pk/Research/VideoIsUselessANZFSS/
[2] Video Surveillance: Legally Blind? http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~pk/Research/pkpapers/legallyblind.pdf
[3] Face Recognition in Poor Quality Video http://pss.sagepub.com/content/10/3/243.short

The 'free, downloadable PDF' link in the article goes to an HTML page wrapping the PDF. Saving this page won't get you the PDF.

Here is the direct link to download just the PDF.

I'm looking forward to reading the entire article when I have time.

I see a need for .xxx

If the objective is to keep kids from seeing Pr0n, the better approach is a .kids TLD. This way you can have contractual requirements (and penalties) that the content there must be kid-safe. Of course that opens the debate as to what is "kid safe"... I don't want my kids exposed to evangelical Christian propaganda anymore than the religious retards want their kids to find out about birth control and evolution.

It's never going to be safe to let your kids out on the wild, wooly .com internet without supervision. It's a pipe dream by lazy parents, a textbook example of the low-effort thinking that promotes conservatism.

Here are a handful, there are lots:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1750946710000498
http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/31/3/264.short
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1985.tb01641.x/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1310767/

And so on. The list goes on and on really, there are literally hundreds of studies on IQ and how to improve it. IQ scores as a metric of pure cognitive ability divorced from education is just fundamentally debunked, and actually has been for some time.

How about the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.. estimated 1000 extra cancer deaths

Out of the two million people who live within a 50-mile (80-kilometer) radius of the Fukushima plant, about one million live in areas contaminated with cesium-137 to levels greater than 1curie per square kilometer.2 Scaling to the six million people in areas contaminated to similar levels by the Chernobyl accident, one might expect around 1,000 extra cancer deaths related to the Fukushima Daiichi accident, that is, a 0.1 percent incidence rate.

Pretending that all of those people exposed to radiation from Fukushima don't count because they haven't died yet, is dishonest at best.

While it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the incidence of cancer will be similar, it is downright absurd to assume that the death rate will be the same.

We now know what type of cancers to expect.
We have better screening so early detection is much more likely.
We also have better treatment than we had nearly 30 years ago when Chernobyl happened.

How about the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.. estimated 1000 extra cancer deaths

Out of the two million people who live within a 50-mile (80-kilometer) radius of the Fukushima plant, about one million live in areas contaminated with cesium-137 to levels greater than 1curie per square kilometer.2 Scaling to the six million people in areas contaminated to similar levels by the Chernobyl accident, one might expect around 1,000 extra cancer deaths related to the Fukushima Daiichi accident, that is, a 0.1 percent incidence rate.

Pretending that all of those people exposed to radiation from Fukushima don't count because they haven't died yet, is dishonest at best.

I'll try to resume some data in this message.

Vitamin D supplementation was found in years-long, randomized interventional trials, to slash cancer incidence - by, for example, 77%. ( http://www.ajcn.org/content/85/6/1586.short [ajcn.org] , http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/7/451.short [oxfordjournals.org] ) Even mechanisms of action are known ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076010001822 [sciencedirect.com] , http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.24762/full [wiley.com] , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20936945 [nih.gov] ), althought not all are fully understood.

Vitamin D RDA was 200 IU, which is a joke, almost the same thing as nothing. Specially if we consider the human body will produce 10.000 IU in a 15-minute tropical noon-day sun full-body exposure ( http://0101.nccdn.net/1_5/3a0/1e8/00e/Cannell-Vitamin-D-study.pdf [nccdn.net] The FDA was faced with this new Vitamin D pleiotropic effects, and given that the RDA was old and obviusly innadequate, it asked the IOM (Institute of Medicine) to review it. They dismissed a Vitamin-D -cancer connection in a completely biased, and non-scientific report, cherry picked some articles, ignored many articles. It shocked the vitamin-D research community, as this link is more than clear. ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.328/full [wiley.com] , http://brn.sagepub.com/content/13/2/117 [sagepub.com] ). The committee had conflicts of interest, and deliberately suppressed the favourable studies ( http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8225367 [cambridge.org] , http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/today-the-food-and-nutrition-board-has-failed-millions-111112159.html [prnewswire.com])

It's interesting to note that people in the committee were hand-picked to have conclicts of interest and are developing vitamin D analogs (that work the same way, but are patenteable), so their best interest is to keep natural vitamin D the lowest level possible. Like Glenville Jones, from Cytachroma, developing CTAP101, a medicine to treat vitamin D insufficiency. Or Hector F. DeLuca, that has 101 patents of vitamin D analogs. Or J. Christopher Gallagher, working for GlaxoSmithKline, that develops Sirilux, a vitamin D analog to treat psoryasis. There are other to cite, but you got the point.

Links or it didn't happen.

I'll try to resume some data in this message.

Vitamin D supplementation was found in years-long, randomized interventional trials, to slash cancer incidence - by, for example, 77%. ( http://www.ajcn.org/content/85/6/1586.short , http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/7/451.short ) Even mechanisms of action are known ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076010001822 , http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.24762/full , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20936945 ), althought not all are fully understood.

Vitamin D RDA was 200 IU, which is a joke, almost the same thing as nothing. Specially if we consider the human body will produce 10.000 IU in a 15-minute tropical noon-day sun full-body exposure ( http://0101.nccdn.net/1_5/3a0/1e8/00e/Cannell-Vitamin-D-study.pdf
The FDA was faced with this new Vitamin D pleiotropic effects, and given that the RDA was old and obviusly innadequate, it asked the IOM (Institute of Medicine) to review it.

They dismissed a Vitamin-D -cancer connection in a completely biased, and non-scientific report, cherry picked some articles, ignored many articles. It shocked the vitamin-D research community, as this link is more than clear. ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.328/full , http://brn.sagepub.com/content/13/2/117 ). The committee had conflicts of interest, and deliberately suppressed the favourable studies ( http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8225367 , http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/today-the-food-and-nutrition-board-has-failed-millions-111112159.html)

It's interesting to note that people in the committee were hand-picked to have conclicts of interest and are developing vitamin D analogs (that work the same way, but are patenteable), so their best interest is to keep natural vitamin D the lowest level possible. Like Glenville Jones, from Cytachroma, developing CTAP101, a medicine to treat vitamin D insuficiency.

Or Hector F. DeLuca, that has 101 patents of vitamin D analogs. Or J. Christopher Gallagher, working for GlaxoSmithKline, that develops Sirilux, a vitamin D analog to treat psoryasis. There are other to cite, but you got the point.

And the evidence even showed up on Slashdot on February 27.

The link you should have provided is either to Human and Experimental Toxicology or pubmed. Copyright infringement is just plain stupid when there's already a free, legitimate, and superior source.

These guys have a strong statistical link (remember correlation does not imply causation) when they look at the data in certain ways. They thought about possible biases and commented upon them, such as:

Ecological bias occurs when relationships among individuals are inferred from similar relationships observed among groups (or nations). Although most of the nations in this study had 90%–99% of their infants fully vaccinated, without additional data we do not know whether it is the vaccinated or unvaccinated infants who are dying in infancy at higher rates.

Now they give some reasons why possible ecological bias should be discounted, but this paper is certainly not a proof of any kind. What it does do is ask some tough questions that require direct research. They do not address a number of other variables between the US and Europe (and other lower IMR countries). We need to look into this further, but it is no reason to suspend our current immunization scheme as it is. If a parent is overly concerned they can elect to wait an extra six months or so for the regimen.

I got to interview a couple of the authors on this study -- Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick -- for my book, Brain Trust. In fact, online dating is only a piece of their exploration into romantic interactions. They've got an awesome paper out titled Smooth Operating: A Structural Analysis of Social Behavior in which they pick apart the words, actions and mindsets that create "smooth" initial romantic encounters. (One finding: you shouldn't be too passive or too aggressive in the way you steer conversation topics.) They also looked at speed dating , finding among other things that people who rate everyone highly are themselves rated low (liking everyone comes off as desperate), and that the sex that sits is more liked than the sex that rotates. Ack! If only I'd known this in middle school!

I, for one, am an Aural learning type.

This review of the literature finds no support for the notion of matching instruction to learning styles. The whole thing was hogwash and wishful thinking.

Another issue here is that although the article is specifically about learning physics, you seem to be talking about learning in general. There is very strong evidence that lecturing is simply an ineffective way to teach physics in particular.

You could also list them as a deterrent to criminal activities

No. It just means that the criminals will be carrying guns as well, and will try to shoot first.

If nobody of the regular public has guns, then a lot of the reasons for criminals to carry them go away as well. No death penalty helps here as well. The only criminals who carry a gun are those that are planning to use it, mostly against other criminals in such cases. But even there other methods like a bomb might be preferred.

In numbers:
USA murders per 100,000: 5.5 (3.5 with firearms)
Netherlands murders per 100,000: 1.4 (0.4 with fireams)

http://hsx.sagepub.com/content/5/4/293.refs
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html

http://euc.sagepub.com/content/5/2/217.abstract

http://www.mendeley.com/research/striking-roots-crime-impact-social-welfare-spending-crime-during-great-depression/

http://www.allbusiness.com/government/international-organizations/13622477-1.html

Of course there are many more articles covering the exact same thing, the direct correlation between social welfare and reduced crime rates. The only unfortunate thing is that there is lag between increasing social welfare spending and reducing crime, the damage has been done and it takes time to re-integrate the disaffected all because of greedy screaming right wing asshats.

Assuming that the risk is proportional to dose (the linear no-threshold hypothesis), a 10-rem whole-body dose would bring with it a risk of cancer death later in life of about half of one percent.

The very high thyroid doses from the Chernobyl disaster were due in large part to the failure of authorities to block the consumption of milk produced by cows grazing on contaminated grass. By contrast, in Japan, shipments of raw milk and vegetables from Fukushima and three neighboring prefectures were blocked on March 21, six days after the large release that caused the high contamination. Screening of produce for radioactivity began the next day

Very little potassium iodide was distributed in the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl accident. In Poland, however, more than 10 million children, 16 years of age and under, and approximately seven million adults received at least one dose of potassium iodide, reducing their thyroid doses to “negligible levels”.

Finally, it is important to note that, if not dealt with properly, the psychological consequences associated with accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima could damage many more lives than the cancer consequences.

My "belief system" include bringing data together from different sources. For example: comparing doses received by residents with typical CT or X-ray.

After Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6032/908.full

He thinks the reaction to low doses could be quite complex. “There's not going to be a uniform response of all biological functions to low levels of radiation,”

Some researchers doubt that any study in Fukushima, no matter how well devised, will reveal much. The radiation exposure of the general population “is too small to give a statistically significant increase in stochastic effects such as cancer,” argues Ohtsura Niwa, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Kyoto University.

We need power or people will die from malnutrition, hypothermia and diseases (just like in developing countries right now) in much higher numbers than even those caused by coal burning, as no other technology has proved itself in high-scale power production, we can make it only from fossil or from nuclear. You have not provided any source stating that nuclear is less safe than fossil. If you want to live in developing country, then please, do so. You may take your Greenpeace pals with you. In the meantime, by using coal electricity, you're responsible for more deaths than it is necessary.

Also let me ask the obvious question : what would it take for you to change your mind about this ?

Evidence. Nice, simple, evidence. You continue to say that I'm disagreeing with long accepted theories, that "majority of studies" find "significant increases in violent behavior". Yet you continually have no evidence to back up your claim. You are convinced that games definitively do increase violence yet have provided not a shred of evidence. The people who performed the study this article is about claimed that they only saw an increase in competitive aggression, and it was not limited to the violent games. Now you say the study itself is not freely readable. Well, then I'll take their word for the results of the study and not yours, if you don't mind.

Then please explain why you know better than 40 years of psychological research.

I never said that I did. I only said that after that 40 years of psychological research, the people who are performing the studies STILL don't agree with each other. Some remain steadfast that they increase violent behavior, others don't.

You disagree with long accepted theories, without any explanation, and without doing any research of your own (and despite agreeing that "there is an effect" whatever you mean by that).

What long accepted theories am I disagreeing with? I'm merely agreeing with one set of studies, and you agree with a different set of studies. The fact that so many studies can have such wild variety in results when studying the same thing means someone is making mistakes somewhere either in interpretation of results, methodology, or whatever. But what it does mean, is that there is no "accepted" theory yet. There are merely a few different theories that each have their own following of small numbers of people. I've done research of my own! :)

There's two studies here, complete with hypotheses tested, studies carried out, etc. The first study was to determine whether short-term aggression in a laboratory environment could be replicated for violent vs non-violent games (hmmm, sounds vaguely familiar). They determined that males were more aggressive than females. However ther was no evidence to suggest that people who play and prefer violent games are innately more aggressive than those who do not, aside from the biological effect of males being more aggressive than females. The second study examined whether video game violence exposure retains a predictive value regarding violent crime (controlling for family violence exposure, trait aggression and gender). Turns out it doesn't.

Here's a lovely paper about the overinterpretation of these "studies" and the myths about video game violence.

This one is a meta-analysis of a few different studies, showing some flaws in both the methodology, conclusions, and how these could be fixed to get better, more accurate studies. In addition, adequately explaining certain variables and theoretical questions that need to be addressed before any study could adequately explain the effects of violent video games.

I can provide more if you like. If you'll actually read them or care what they say. Essentially, there's a publication bias to keep producing studies and papers that claim video games cause violence. While there's also a publication bias to keep producing studies and papers that say they don't. So far neither side has conclusively proved anything. This one covers that angle and also talks about the limits to the ability of actually testing and measuring violence and aggression caused by video games.

Your move, if you decide to respond. I've provid

Um, okay. Let's look at the results:

1) A link to a school policy explaining teachers' responsibilities with respect to student fights.
2) A story about a family criticizing a teacher for NOT breaking up a fight.
3) A teacher being sued by an adult university student for injuring her while breaking up a fight.
4) A dupe of #2.
5) And another.
6) An article about teachers being urged to tolerate swearing (has a comment near the bottom by someone claiming to have been sued for breaking up a fight; no details provided).
7) Information about avoiding being sued while working.
8) Video of a teacher breaking up a fight and some random anonymous commentary in which someone speculates that the teacher will get sued.
9) A teacher does nothing while an impromptu boxing match occurs in the classroom.
10) A teacher suffers a miscarriage from breaking up a fight. Again, some random commenter speculates that she risked getting sued by breaking up the fight.

I'm seeing lots of claims of these lawsuits. Not a whole heck of a lot to back up those claims. The only actual lawsuit involving the breakup of a fight was the one where the student, an adult, was allegedly injured. The teacher/student factor is irrelevant in that case. If an adult injures another adult, a lawsuit is a real possibility.

From a study done by the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University commissioned by the Home Office in 1999: http://members.multimania.co.uk/lawnet/SENTENCE.PDF

The report concludes that the studies reviewed do not provide a basis for inferring that increasing
the severity of sentences generally is capable of enhancing deterrent effects. ...

Correlations: Severity Effects. In the Farrington studies just mentioned, the statistical
associations between severity of punishment and crime rates were much weaker. Such negative
correlations between sentence severity and crime rates as were found to exist generally were not
sufficient to achieve statistical significance. These patterns, which are consistent with those found in
earlier studies, provide little support for an hypothesis of marginal deterrence with respect to
severity of punishment. One of these studies, Farrington, Langan and Wikstrom (1994), provides
calculations that compare the English and America (as well as Swedish) trends. The absence of a
finding in that study of strong correlations for severity is notable -- because U.S. penalty levels have
been substantially higher than English levels during the periods studied.

Then there's this study from 1993: http://jrc.sagepub.com/content/30/4/445.short

Increasing evidence shows great diversity in the effects of the criminal sanction. Legal punishment either reduces, increases, or has no effect on future crimes, depending on the type of offenders, offenses, social settings, and levels of analysis. A theory of “defiance” helps explain the conditions under which punishment increases crime. Procedural justice (fairness or legitimacy) of experienced punishment is essential for the acknowledgment of shame, which conditions deterrence; punishment perceived as unjust can lead to unacknowledged shame and defiant pride that increases future crime. Both “specific” defiance by individuals and “general” defiance by collectivities results from punishment perceived as unfair or excessive, unless deterrent effects counterbalance defiance and render the net effect of sanctions irrelevant. By implication, crime might be reduced more by police and courts treating all citizens with fairness and respect than by increasing punishments. A variety of research designs can be used to test, refine, or reject the theory.

And another study from 1975: https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=27596

Nine relevant attributes of legal punishment are noted by the author: objective certainty, perceived certainty, perceived severity of prescribed punishments, perceived severity of actual punishments, presumptive severity of actual punishments, objective celerity, perceived celerity, presumptive celerity of prescribed punishments, and knowledge of prescribed punishments. The author's critical review of purported tests of the deterrence doctrine shows that only three of the attributes of punishment have been considered and that the investigators ignored possible preventive consequences of punishment other than deterrence. Nine such consequences (incapacitation, normative validation, etc.) are analyzed in this book. The author maintains that all of the attributes of punishment and their possible preventive consequences are crucial in considering contending penal policies. The author notes that legislators are preoccupied with the severity of statutory penalties; however, that attribute of legal punishment is of questionable significance. Moreover, he states that a defensible penal policy is precluded unless policy makers recognize three t

It's a Japanese company so the level of compensation for executives is not as obscene as here in the U.S. http://cbr.sagepub.com/content/35/3/68.abstract. I fact they make about 1/3 of what executives here do http://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1355&context=harvard_olin&sei-redir=1http://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1355&context=harvard_olin&sei-redir=1#search="japanese+executive+compensation+vs+us"

Not saying that it couldn't be done but a boycott might be a bit of a problem since these are three of the biggest peer-reviewed journal publishers. Consider the following lists of journals:

Cambridge
Oxford
Sage

The transition would also be met with an extreme amount of resistance from the professors working towards tenure. If they do not publish due to the boycott then suddenly you have another problem in the system that must be addressed. For doctoral students, they suddenly run the risk of not having access to seminal articles along with the latest upcoming research. That would have a significant impact on their ability to conduct high quality research and subsequently find a job after graduation.

Sure, many of those problems could be addressed but a united front in academia, oftentimes an egotistic political train-wreck, is unlikely.

Glad you read the chapter!

By video game tech standards, it's pretty dated (2003), and they suspect that's part of the limited effect size. Looking for violence effects from games that involve killing the grey blob with your blue blob (a not-too-uncharitable description of 8-bit gaming) created a lot of earlier studies with a more limited effect size. It's less obviously relevant to real life than film or TV footage of real people committing much more realistic-looking violence. That's NOT the same thing as finding no effect--just a diminished effect. They provide citations to the best, most relevant lit to that point.

I'm not a violence effects researcher specifically (though I did my PhD at a school where everyone learns a lot about this work, and I’ve done a good bit of reading since then), so I'm not sure how estimates of effect size have changed over time. That said, the quality research in the last decade has only cemented findings of a causal effect with real-world significance. The experiments continue to provide further evidence of a causal link, and the correlational and longitudinal studies continue to find that these effects take place in the real worldnot just in laboratories.

Here is a not-necessarily-definitive list of a few more recent studies that are video game specific and come to the same conclusions:

1. Anderson, C. A., Gentile, D. A., & Buckley, K. E. (2007). Violent video game effects on children and adolescents. New York: Oxford University Press.

Obviously, buying or borrowing and reading a whole book is overkill. This contains a shortened version of the same findings:

2. Video Game EffectsConfirmed, Suspected, and Speculative: A Review of the Evidence
Bartlett, Anderson, & Spring (2008), Simulation & Gaming 42(1).

http://sag.sagepub.com/content/40/3/377.abstract

Here’s a relevant quote:

Aggressive behavior. Many methods and tools are used to measure aggressive behavior (see Bushman & Anderson, 1998; Ritter & Eslea, 2005, for a review of laboratory-based methods). Methods used to assess aggressive behavior range from observations of children at play (e.g., Schutte, Malouff, Post-Gordon-Joan, & Rodasta, 1988) to reports by oneself, teachers, parents, and peers (e.g., Anderson et al., 2007, Studies 2 and 3), to standard laboratory paradigms (e.g., Konijn, Nije, & Bushman, 2007). Results using these and other measures show strong support for the causal relationship between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior. Overall, experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal studies have all found that exposure to violent video games leads to increased physical aggression (for comprehensive reviews, see Anderson, Berkowitz, et al., 2003; Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Anderson et al., 2004; Anderson et al., 2007). (p. 382)

3. Longitudinal Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Japan and the United States
Anderson et al. (2008), Pediatrics 122(5). [Speaking of publication quality, the 2009 ISI citation analysis ranked Pediatrics as the 3rd most-cited of the 94 included journals in the pediatrics category.]

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/122/5/e1067

This is a longitudinal study of both US and Japanese youth. A significant result was found in these real-world conditions (for those of you who would dismiss experimental studies as failing to establish results that matter in the real world).

4.Correlates and Consequences of Exposure to Video Game Violence: Hostile Personality, Empathy, and Aggressive Behavior
Bartholow, Sestir, & Davis (2005), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31 (11).

http://psp.sagepub.com/content/

Glad you read the chapter!

By video game tech standards, it's pretty dated (2003), and they suspect that's part of the limited effect size. Looking for violence effects from games that involve killing the grey blob with your blue blob (a not-too-uncharitable description of 8-bit gaming) created a lot of earlier studies with a more limited effect size. It's less obviously relevant to real life than film or TV footage of real people committing much more realistic-looking violence. That's NOT the same thing as finding no effect--just a diminished effect. They provide citations to the best, most relevant lit to that point.

I'm not a violence effects researcher specifically (though I did my PhD at a school where everyone learns a lot about this work, and I’ve done a good bit of reading since then), so I'm not sure how estimates of effect size have changed over time. That said, the quality research in the last decade has only cemented findings of a causal effect with real-world significance. The experiments continue to provide further evidence of a causal link, and the correlational and longitudinal studies continue to find that these effects take place in the real worldnot just in laboratories.

Here is a not-necessarily-definitive list of a few more recent studies that are video game specific and come to the same conclusions:

1. Anderson, C. A., Gentile, D. A., & Buckley, K. E. (2007). Violent video game effects on children and adolescents. New York: Oxford University Press.

Obviously, buying or borrowing and reading a whole book is overkill. This contains a shortened version of the same findings:

2. Video Game EffectsConfirmed, Suspected, and Speculative: A Review of the Evidence
Bartlett, Anderson, & Spring (2008), Simulation & Gaming 42(1).

http://sag.sagepub.com/content/40/3/377.abstract

Here’s a relevant quote:

Aggressive behavior. Many methods and tools are used to measure aggressive behavior (see Bushman & Anderson, 1998; Ritter & Eslea, 2005, for a review of laboratory-based methods). Methods used to assess aggressive behavior range from observations of children at play (e.g., Schutte, Malouff, Post-Gordon-Joan, & Rodasta, 1988) to reports by oneself, teachers, parents, and peers (e.g., Anderson et al., 2007, Studies 2 and 3), to standard laboratory paradigms (e.g., Konijn, Nije, & Bushman, 2007). Results using these and other measures show strong support for the causal relationship between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior. Overall, experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal studies have all found that exposure to violent video games leads to increased physical aggression (for comprehensive reviews, see Anderson, Berkowitz, et al., 2003; Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Anderson et al., 2004; Anderson et al., 2007). (p. 382)

3. Longitudinal Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Japan and the United States
Anderson et al. (2008), Pediatrics 122(5). [Speaking of publication quality, the 2009 ISI citation analysis ranked Pediatrics as the 3rd most-cited of the 94 included journals in the pediatrics category.]

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/122/5/e1067

This is a longitudinal study of both US and Japanese youth. A significant result was found in these real-world conditions (for those of you who would dismiss experimental studies as failing to establish results that matter in the real world).

4.Correlates and Consequences of Exposure to Video Game Violence: Hostile Personality, Empathy, and Aggressive Behavior
Bartholow, Sestir, & Davis (2005), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31 (11).

http://psp.sagepub.com/content/

I lost the "instinctive" one long ago,

A curious statement. Unless you've been in a situation where you've had all intellectual impediments to killing removed and seen that you were in fact able and willing to kill, I'm not sure how you can assert this. Have you killed a human being?

judging from the amount of people that view/play violent entertainment,

"Viewing" and "playing" are completely different. Viewing does not train a behavior, playing does.

if at all (if it happens, there's no real evidence for it)

Remarkable how the /. groupthink simply disregards the existence of evidence on this issue. One can certainly argue that the evidence is not conclusive, but to say that it's nonexistent demonstrates either gross ignorance or a strong unwillingness to step beyond one's personal biases and look at the matter scientifically. It takes only a few minutes of Google-fu to turn up studies like these:

• "In Study 2, laboratory exposure to a graphically violent video game increased aggressive thoughts and behavior."
• An updated meta-analysis reveals that exposure to violent video games is significantly linked to increases in aggressive behaviour, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, and cardiovascular arousal, and to decreases in helping behaviour. Experimental studies reveal this linkage to be causal.
• In two experiments, we found that playing violent video games increased dehumanization, which in turn evoked aggressive behavior. Thus, it appears that video-game-induced aggressive behavior is triggered when victimizers perceive the victim to be less human.

Is the evidence conclusive? Maybe not. Does any amount of evidence that games cause an increase in aggression potential justify censorship? No. Censorship is real violence.

I think SAGE OPEN, Yet Another PLoS ONE Clone, will publish negative results in the social sciences.

Well, the independent research seems to suggest something a little different:

http://cjr.sagepub.com/content/33/2/159.abstract?rss=1

(Apologies to people who might not be able to access that article because of a paywall)

The executive summary is that this article does answer your question: a whopping 50% of the AMBER alerts issued in 2004 were cases of non-threatening custody disputes. Other evidence gathered between 2002 and 2006 indicates that AMBER alert was most likely to be successful in cases where the abducted child was not in any danger (familial abductions) and least likely to be successful (to the point of accomplishing almost nothing at all) in cases where the child was in serious danger i.e. the cases AMBER was supposed to address.

University of San Diego
http://pfr.sagepub.com/content/9/1/91.abstract

University of Chicago
http://rer.sagepub.com/content/66/3/361.abstract

To be fair, I've found a number of articles that conclude the opposite (No strong evidence of a correlation between resources and student achievement) - I.E. http://epa.sagepub.com/content/19/2/141.abstract from the University of Rochester.

I admit, you might have a point. - I don't actually have access to the full text of any of these articles, so I can't really judge them.

University of San Diego
http://pfr.sagepub.com/content/9/1/91.abstract

University of Chicago
http://rer.sagepub.com/content/66/3/361.abstract

To be fair, I've found a number of articles that conclude the opposite (No strong evidence of a correlation between resources and student achievement) - I.E. http://epa.sagepub.com/content/19/2/141.abstract from the University of Rochester.

I admit, you might have a point. - I don't actually have access to the full text of any of these articles, so I can't really judge them.

University of San Diego
http://pfr.sagepub.com/content/9/1/91.abstract

University of Chicago
http://rer.sagepub.com/content/66/3/361.abstract

To be fair, I've found a number of articles that conclude the opposite (No strong evidence of a correlation between resources and student achievement) - I.E. http://epa.sagepub.com/content/19/2/141.abstract from the University of Rochester.

I admit, you might have a point. - I don't actually have access to the full text of any of these articles, so I can't really judge them.

... And unfortunately people take Colbert seriously far too often.
The Irony of Satire: "Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements."

The poster you are replying to did not say IQ, he said intelligence. But let's for a second assume that he had said IQ. Would your evidence about someone with a 195 IQ be useful? Well, considering that this is an anecdote from a book called "Outliers" and an outlier is an extreme point in a statistical distribution that doesn't match the rest of the data, I'm going to go with that not being very relevant. And in fact there's a correlation between IQ and income. The exact correlation is unclear, with there being some evidence that there's a diminishing marginal return (that is, at low IQs slightly higher IQ adds a lot of income but as IQ gets higher, adding more IQ doesn't increase the chance of a high income by that much). See for example http://pss.sagepub.com/content/15/6/373 (that study actually looked primarily at SAT scores but they have a method of estimating a conversion between the two.) See also the work by Jay Zagorsky which found a correlation between IQ and net wealth (Unfortunately, I don't have a citation for that off the top of my head other than secondary sources such as http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm and I can't find the studies on the OSU website. They used to be at http://www.chrr.osu.edu/surveys but they don't seem to be linked there anymore. This should be good enough for a Slashdot comment.)

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/12/5/353 (2010) [pdf]

(Searching for a freely available version of this studies might pay off)

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?