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Pokemon Go Could Add 2.83 Million Years To Users' Lives, Says Study (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: A new study from Microsoft Research found that the most interested Pokemon Go players took 26% more steps than before using the app. The largest behavior changes were seen among sedentary users. No matter their gender, age, weight or lifestyle, Pokemon Go users began to move more -- taking an extra 194 steps a day once they started using the app. (That's the equivalent of walking roughly one tenth of a mile.) The researchers estimate that Pokemon Go has added 144 billion steps to U.S. physical activity. That's 143 roundtrips to the moon. The study was published online this month in the Cornell Library University. Since activity reduces mortality risks, the researchers estimated that Pokemon Go could add 2.83 million years to the life expectancy of an assumed 25 million U.S. users. Based off research that showed walking reduces mortality, the researchers calculated that Pokemon Go users who continued to walk an extra 1,000 steps a day would enjoy 41.4 days of additional life expectancy. The Microsoft scientists examined data shared by 31,793 users of Microsoft Band, a wearable device, and Bing, the company's search engine. They compared the movement data from the wearables with users' web search queries. Pokemon Go players were identified by web searches that indicated they were playing the game. The Microsoft team also looked at four of the most popular health apps on Apple and Android devices. They found these apps had little impact on a person's behavior. The activity levels of Pokemon Go users changed far more.
Do you really want to live a long life??
Don't eat animals. Heart disease is caused by fat building up in the arteries over the life of an animal eater. That's the truth. Eat a vegetable-based diet and you'll life a lot longer.
The only reason Westerners eat animals is habit, taste or convenience, which is NOT reason enough to kill an animal.
If there's an award for the most misleading title on a Slashdot post, this one has to be in the running. It could have at least said HOW MANY users' lives would be enhanced to the tune of 2.83 million years. I suppose people won't read articles unless they contain a ridiculous amount of exaggeration.
Did the study also consider that people might be using a fake positioning system to just virtually walk around?
Let's subtract all the people who get shot, mauled or otherwise physically harmed for hunting Pokemon where they shouldn't, along with those smart individuals who become victims of accidents because they wanted to hunt some Pokemon where no smart human would willingly go (like, say, the middle of a busy interstate). How many years older do we then get?
Or is that ok because it only weeds out the ... let's say less viable individuals?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm here to tell you, in three million years you'll be dead.
Will I really? Well what do you suggest? Give up white bread? More rougage?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Great ... I'll let you know if it's true in the year 285050 o there abouts
This also means more wear on shoes, I'm going to buy shares of Nike and similar.
shove a burning cross up their ass.
Gee ... ...
Eee
Ooo
Are
Gee
Eee
Ooo
Are
Gee
Eee
never ends!
They were focusing sendentary people. How about a study of regular exercisers who stopped to play Go?
Pokemon Go! Reduces life expectancy and makes people fat - would be the headline.
Science reporting is just pathetic.
Did the researchers take into account how many Pokemon Go morons walked in front of cars, buses, and other vehicles while playing the game.
I personally saw a Pokemon Go idiot fall down a flight of stairs. She twisted her ankle and injured another innocent bystander.
Did you get the number of that donkey cart?
post?
sure
how?
like this
why?
so more people will see it
okay
It's a dialogue. How would you propose I should post it sensibly so I needn't add an explanation to the joke?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sounds right up there with the research on the fitbit.
More Microsoft junk research.
I prefer my vegans to be free range and grass fed organic.
Also, crappy summary and title.
"Based off research that showed walking reduces mortality" ... really, that means some folks won't every die ... interesting.
Reduces early mortality ... maybe.
... but I don't want to live 2.83 million years.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you divide the distance walked by the number of days since I started playing... which includes many days where I didn't play, and some where I played 8 hours. ;) :D
Lost 15 lb and slimmed down considerably!
Also met two really cute geek girls who were happy to let me play with their, ahem, pokemon!
Grab them by the pokemon I say!
How about a study on how many people have died because of Pokemon? You have to take the good with the bad. Those "extra years" come at a price.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
When Niantic decided that all players with rooted devices were no longer welcome, that pretty much ended the game for me. I was playing it with my spouse, and getting more exercise, but I shouldn't have to jump through yet more hoops to use this product. I'd do just as well reading a book while walking.
Some devices are rooted by default, some by choice. That alone is not an indicator of cheating.
People living longer is the last thing we need right now...
Social security is already going bankrupt.
Best thing you can do for society right now is just up and die... preferably in a very cheap manner.
Because, if you haven't read the 'Game of thrones' books at age 90, those 41 days will be a real game-changer. This is like reality game-show television: Where we should be excited to watch a stranger renovate a bathroom.
Who's going to pay for all that extra Carbon Dioxide ???
People ! PLEASE!! Think of the baby dolphins before you Pokemon Go.
Well, there may be a small health benefit to walking 1/10th of a mile. But, interest in the app will fade (HAS faded), and even that little bit of walking will subside. Getting and taking care of a dog will have a person doing a LOT more walking, AND will encourage social interaction... unlike Pokey-Go, which keeps users focused on their devices. I want to see some stats about the rate of Pokey-Go users becoming victims of crime... as the first rule of personal safety in public spaces is to maintain situational awareness, which these players are sorely missing.
it
doesn't
matter
because
people
will
do
what
people
do.
Umm...Generally when something is published by your own school's library, that's what's known as a vanity-publication. That means this study did not undergo peer review. Add the fact that it's funded by Microsoft, who has a massive potential vested interest in the future of AR gaming. Something tells me there's gonna be some gorgeous cherry-picking of data and referenced sources going on in this thing.
All of which is quickly negated when the accessories are used.
http://amzn.to/2dJ5az0
Pokemon Pokeball Grinder for Spices, Herbs, Tobacco
I though this was a joke at first but nope.
Apparently some people need to grind their "herbs and spices" while tromping though yards looking for Pokemon.
"buyer - just had to buy it. I played Pokemon since it first came out and still love it to this day. it had metal shavings in it but meh... gave it a quick rinse and wiped the pieces out with a paper towel afterwards. pretty solid, weight wise"
The real news here is that Americans are so sedentary that an extra 194 steps a day is "significant."
Or your knees will need replacing 41.4 earlier.
I hate to break it to the last 1000 players, but everyone else already quit.
Look up for a second, the crowds have disappeared. Everyone went back to work/life.
The summary states, "Go users ... (take) an extra 194 steps a day...".
It goes on to state that the Microsoft Research researchers, "calculated that Pokemon Go users who continued to walk an extra 1,000 steps a day would enjoy 41.4 days of additional life expectancy."
Um, those both may be true, but how does +194 steps equate to +1000 steps? Does the added life expectancy scale linearly (each user living an extra 8.03 days on average)? And, as others have noted, shouldn't they subtract the time spent playing it?
Same here. I'm still not sure why the decided to kick out the rooted users. Some people speculated it had to do with cheaters, but there's no way that's the case since most of them were running stock. Ah well, freed up some space on my phone for games developed by better devs.
we have nothing. You get nothing. You've wasted my time. Hopefully I can waste yours. Thank you editor. What happened to Slashdot? I've seen some questionable stories here before, but...
... the ones who could probably profit the most from the additional steps will most likely find it too tiring and will use GPS spoofing instead. ...
Also the study doesn't take into account the added risks to people not used to being in the actual world and moving about, which will as a result to the strange and dangerous surroundings fall prey to all those dangers present there. Like cars, bikes, air,
That is a serious interpretation of data. It's great people are moving around (not so great that they are doing it in a fashion hat makes them utterly unconscious IMHO), but enough with the hyperbole. ANY kind of movement would have the same impact. The fact that people require a game or a gadget to achieve this is is actually just more evidence in support of the fact of how lazy people have become the rest of the time. See? We can interpret data, too. ;)
These are users who are already using and wearing Microsoft Band before they started playing Pokemon Go, so they were already worried about their fitness, and already had a device to monitor this
So playing Pokemon Go encourages people to walk more than a fitness monitoring band... and so these are useless ...?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Even if walking correlates with longer life,
more walking will not necessarily cause longer life.
Now I just need to figure out how the spend the 2.37992 million years of my new improved lifespan.......
It's pretty sad the amount of negative, hateful and bitter comments from the users here. We get so many negative news nowadays and in the end all some people do is focus on the negative.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No Pokémon Go for me. (BTW, it's é, not whatever unicode character you tried to use in your subject line) I have a Windows 10 Mobile phone.
And the fact that they never made the game available for W10M makes it even funnier that Microsoft is releasing these results. They have no real data about the game other than speculation based on possible behavior matches from bing search data. Except at the height of the craze, even I searched for information about it a few times, even with no way to play the game. And, yes, I probably used bing, since that's what Edge on W10M defaults to.
They've severely limited their audience by their own choice. I feel no pity for Niantic now that they've lost their player base.
I was hoping it was a momentary flash in the pan that outlived it's buzz about a month ago. Does anyone out of junior high school play pokeman? Anyway, sign me up for another 2 million years of life! Sure beats drinking synthetic blood and sleeping all day....
I remember reading that sometimes exercise extends your life for the same period as doing the exercise. So in a sense yes, you could live longer but at the same time it's not really anymore time especially if you don't like exercising. So if playing Pokemon Go is fun and enjoyable for you and it extends your life by the same amount, that's pretty much a win win in my book. Note, I'm not a Pokemon Go player myself (don't want a dataplan on my cellphone) but I don't find Pokemon Go players on average annoying, just amusing. If it makes you happy and you live longer, that can't be a bad thing right?
Doc, how can I live longer?
You drink?
Nope
Smoke?
Nope
Eat red meat?
Nope
Screw around?
Nope
Then why the hell do you want to live longer?
Those are artificial highs -- temporary and often harmful. There are plenty of natural highs that are worth living for.
Such as?
Marijuana
Ho, they are good friends with "Cogeco Tivo" developper (Cogeco Tivo because i guess Tivo is now allowing rooted devices)
To get people to exercise, don't tell them to do exercise. Give them a fun thing to do that happens to involve physical activity but don't call it exercise as that's a chore. Walking to catch a Pokemon is not a chore, it's fun - and that you have to walk and walk and walk to get from one to the other, well, that's just part of the game.
Researchers estimate that Pokemon Go players have wasted 2.83 million years of their lives playing the game.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
When did we start measuring 1/10th miles as a physical achievement?
I suspect that we'd be surprised to how many people walking a few 10ths of a miles would be. When I got put on blood pressure medicine, the pharmacist asked if I could try walking and even just a few blocks would make a difference. I had to let her down by telling her I walk a mile and a half to work each way every day already. Yet, that there is attention to 1/10s of a mile or just a few blocks for ordinary walking, makes me think that it does matter for a significant slice of Americans.
We study the effect of Pokémon Go on physical activity
through a combination of signals from large-scale corpora of
wearable sensor data and search engine logs for 32 thousand users
over a period of three months. Pokémon Go players are identified
through search engine queries and activity is measured through accelerometry.
We study the influence of Pokémon Go on physical
activity through a combination of wearable sensor data and search
engine query logs for 31,793 users over a period of three months.
Within these users, we identify 1,420 Pokémon Go users based on
their search activity
What's not to love about corporations correlating search terms and health data they steal from people to perform studies on their customers.
The main study population is 31,793 US users of Microsoft products
who have agreed to link data from their Microsoft Band wearables
and their online activities to understand product usage and improve
Microsoft products.
If by agreeing you mean failing to disable a faux setting hidden away in some corner that always magically seems to "forget" what the user last set it to and doesn't actually do much to stop cloud based techno perverts from stalking you anyway.
Because rooted devices making spoofing GPS infinitely easier.
One of the problems with things like Apple Watch and other apps is that, in scientific studies, we find the existence of specific goals actually decreases exercise.
People will only do as much as they need to achieve the goal.
That said, Pokemon Go (of which I am level 23 Valiant) has a non-goal measurement. You hatch 2k 5k 10k eggs by walking distances, getting lesser amounts if you take transit ("going too fast" counts less), harvesting Poke Stops and catching wild and placed Pokemon.
I've noticed a big uptick in people hanging out at the waterfront parks to catch Pokemon, for example (it takes 400 Magikarp to evolve to a Gyardos). Or you can get Poke candy by adding a buddy (similar to the egg thing, the type of Poke buddy attracts the correct type of candy and also increases your chance of wild Pokemon of the type your buddy is).
So, the lack of a specific goal structure does obviate the usual decrease in exercise, as you are rewarded for activity but not too closely tied to specific goals.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
NIce blog
Finding Source - join the movement www.findingsource.org
...and if I did, I still wouldn't be able to catch 'em all.
This is not fake soy meat or whatever.
That's something I've never understood.
Tofu shaped like meat. It only taste like shit.
It's as if its only purpose is to be shaped like a sausage, so you don't feel outcast when you're on a diet but get invited to a BBQ, you still have a sausage-shaped object to put on the fire like everyone else.
To me this would sound just as mush stupid, if some butchers started to make redmeat shaped in the form of a red peperrni, so on the day you crave meat but were invited to a BBQ at some tree-hugin hippie vegans, you don't feel outcast and have a veggie-shaped object to put on the fire.
Stupid. Fake. Meat.
Even more so when the human culture DOES HAVE some very nice traditionnal cuisine which is tasty but is also meat-free.
(in India and in the middle east you can find quite a lot ot veggie dishes which actually taste good. Unlike the tofu sausages).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
On the other hand, the meat we eat has had to be fed quite a lot of time until the animal reached a good enough size and got slaughtered.
Thar's why more grains per kilogram of meat-food, than the equivalent grain-based dinner for the same human.
So not eating meat does decrease the amount of such harvesting accident for mice and and snakes (simply by needing less grain to feed the human, rather than needing more grain to feed the animal, until you have enough of the animal to feed said human).
(I personally happen not to eat a lot of grain (bread, pasta, and other carbohydrate food) anyway... so I can be proud to cause a little bit less combine-induced cruelty to mice and snake... at least toward them...)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
My viagra will kill me by the time I hit 90. Can you imagine living to 283 million?
Pokemon Go has probably done more for American fitness than all Presidential and First Wive initiatives put together. Yes even accounting for those that got hurt or worse playing the game where they shouldn't.
centralqq
Same here. I played every day for a few hours. When they started blocking rooted devices I tried doing systemless root with Magisk, which at first worked. Then I had to turn of Xposed and reboot first (I really don't like going without XPrivacy). Then Magisk stopped working, so fuck it. I'm done with the game. I actually put money into the game, $60 total. Really pissed. If they dump SafetyNet I'll gladly go back to playing. Until then, fuck 'em.
Anyone still plays this shit game? Like srsly... WHY?
*every* other pokemon game was much, much, much better!
This AR bullshit just adds a random limitation: Your avatar cannot move anywhere you want unless YOU too move.
This just hinders progress.
Not that pokemongo has much to do beside catching everything you encounter, which gets boring *really* fast...