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Pass the Doritos, Scientists Develop Computer Game Targeted At Healthy Choices
MojoKid writes: Psychologists at the University of Exeter and Cardiff University have published a study that demonstrates how a simple computer game can help people lose weight. Participants in the study who played the specialized game lost and average of 1.5 pounds in the first seven days, and 4.5 pounds after six months. They also reduced their daily caloric consumption by 220 calories. Dr. Natalia Lawrence led the team of researchers that developed the computer game for the study. It was designed to train people to resist unhealthy food snack foods through a "stop versus go" process. Participants sat in front of a Pentium 3 PC running Matlab software on a 17-inch monitor. They were then instructed to press certain keys when images of things like fruits and clothes would appear, indicating a "go." But for images of calorie-dense foods (chips and cake, for example) they were instructed not to do anything, indicating a "stop" action.
I believe we already had that game. I distinctly remember, the cake is a lie.
Worst. Video. Game. Ever!
Why is it called "Pass the Doritos"?
Because "Spot the Fruit" would have been misunderstood.
... no video game at all. Put down the gadget and move your body.
I don't respond to AC's.
Dilberito (archived copy)
Related blog post by Scott
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Pentium 3? 17 inch monitor? How long ago did this happen?
News for nerds, stuff from last decade.
When I'm twerking, I can get up to 1750 per hour. But let me tell you, it's not pretty.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't think you're aware of just how power frugal the PIII is. The TDP is 27.9W, which is far less than most laptop CPUs burn these days. And given that the average load is in the 0.01 range, it uses far less. It has run fanless since 2003. Energy is not the issue here.
But a point is the reliability of larger die fabs. Can a Raspberry Pi be reasonably expected to run for 10+ years?
Also, the Pi comes with a single 10/100 Ethernet port, running on a CPU-bottlenecked USB 2.0 bus. Just dealing with a normal amount of packets puts a considerable load on the SoC CPU. And no running backups or NFS mounts at GbE speeds.
Don't get me wrong, the Pi was a fabulous little board, but it was never designed for 24/7 network related operations.
And it's certainly not a replacement for a system that doesn't need replacement.
Unfortunately the way this is presented, and the alleged hardware used makes this sound a little trite and like a silly project. I would like to say that that's probably the result of the reporting. Having flicked through the paper, IMHO this looks like a pretty interesting finding and a worthwhile bit of research.
Paper is here. https://dl.dropboxusercontent....
:
Lets mention a few things:
-Dr Lawrence has made here data available. That's something not enough people in this field have done, much to everyone's detriment.
-"Running Matlab". probably refers to the use of Psychtoolbox(psychtoolbox.org/), rather than some clunky game coded in matlab
-I could find no reference the the pentium 3 or 17" screen anywhere, The paper notes the participants performed the task at home (and the researchers laptop was involved for training). I suspect these specs were copied in error from another notable (but older) research paper. That said, some researches, working with emotion and images, may conduct work with x" screen that seems odd. This is done to be able to compare results with previous works (size of image and distance to image effect some experiments). Don't know if this was the case here.
-The results of this type of simple training are quite interesting, I would point out that participants were also filling out food diary's etc, This in itself could enhance the effect of the training software,
All said, I do have a concern though.
The control group were given a task rating household objects rather than foods. This would have made the control group keenly aware that they were in the control group. I am curious how much of the effect was the result of "increased food consciousness" caused by reading the diaries. I would have preferred to see the control group told to 'reject foods that were imported' or something that still had them filling out food diaries for a legitimate reason.
Twerking. I am old. I do not know what that is and I am not sure I want to Google it. I can not unsee things. I do know what DDR is. My daughter informed me. I am not going to ask her what twerking is. Well, I might if she is in front of a lot of her friends and it would embarrass her greatly. Payback and all that.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
My main source of knowing what "twerking" is comes from the Weird Al music video for Tacky (a parody of Pharrell Williams' Happy) when Jack Black "practices his twerking moves in line at the DMV." You are totally right about there being some things you just can't unsee.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.