Sure, the vast majority of people who watch violent TV or play violent video games are not a threat to society. The claim that violent media are as dangerous as smoking is foolish, and not what the article actually said. But overwhelmingly research does support the contention that people can learn behaviour from watching programs and playing games, and that can make people more violent than they would have been if they'd spent their time some other way. What's remarkable is how people can dismiss all the research, much of which is painstakingly performed by experts in the field, just because they dislike the results. (Or maybe that's not remarkable, depending on how cynical you are about people's rationality.)
An article I read earlier this year really changed my opinion on this subject. From issue 2600 of New Scientist magazine, 19 April 2007, page 33-37:
The overwhelming majority of studies about modern media and the mind, however, have focused on violence on and off the screen. Although there has been more than 50 years' worth of research, most people seem to have the idea that, while these studies suggest there might be a small link, the jury is still out. Wrong, says John Murray, a developmental psychologist from Kansas State University, one of the editors of the book Children and Television: Fifty years of research and author of US government-sponsored reports in 1972 and 1982. Murray is exasperated by this kind of ambivalence. He says it is impossible to conclude anything other than that violence on TV has raised the level of violence and aggression in our society - and while research on computer games has begun only recently, what there is suggests violent games have an even stronger effect....
Not everyone is affected, and we are not all affected in same way, but overall, media violence does affect viewers' attitudes, values and behaviour, Murray says. Hundreds of studies demonstrate this, so why the doubt?
One reason is that media reports tend to give equal prominence to the naysayers. The debate also has its hired guns, with industry organisations such as the Motion Picture Association of America sponsoring prominent books arguing against any links....
The effects fall into three categories, says Murray. There's a kind of imitation effect, where we seem to learn by example how to behave in certain situations. There's desensitisation, which means we become less shocked by and more tolerant of violence. Finally, there is the "mean world" effect, where people feel more vulnerable after seeing images of bad situations.
These effects are not always bad. Take desensitisation - if you're training medical students you want them to get used to gore, rather than vomiting when they see blood.
Our values, attitudes, family and education also work to mitigate the effects. Home life has a very big impact. If your family portrays attitudes that differ from the violence on TV, that really lowers the risk, says Joanne Cantor of the University of Wisconsin. "If you live in a violent area or abusive home, it increases the likelihood that violence will have an effect. But even kids with good things in life are affected. Maybe they will not be more violent but perhaps more hostile in their interpersonal relationships."
The big picture is clear. Modern media such as TV and computer games are changing our minds, and the more we are exposed to them the greater the changes. They are making us smarter and better at some tasks, but worse at others. And there is no getting away from the fact that on-screen violence fosters off-screen violence.
If anyone is thinking of replying to this, let me save you some time by preparing some responses.
But the article doesn't repeat all these hundreds of studies, so they must be made up!
And those studies must be by paid shills of the powerful liberal anti-gaming conspiracy/my mom!
If all these studies show the same thing, that just shows how biased they are!
And also most mobile phone tariffs in Australia now charge the same rate to call a mobile or fixed line anywhere in the country, so it doesn't really matter.
Giant magnetoresistance got its day in the sun when it won the Nobel Prize in physics last week--and when Hitachi rode that spotlight by announcing they'd have a 4-terabyte desktop hard drive by 2011.
Oh my god! Four terabytes of sentences like that would contain over 6 x 10^10 mixed metaphors. Crammed into a single 3.5" drive bay the figurative density would be so great that the drive would collapse into a metaphorical black hole, sucking in all nearby figures of speech, similes and allusions. Somebody stop them!
OK, patent stories on Slashdot are sensational and poorly researched, and no one understands the patent language anyway. All true.
But a checkbox has two states. Is there any possible useful method of changing the states of a "multiplicity of checkboxes" that is not obvious and trivial to develop?
Those who would otherwise be committing crimes in full catchable view of the cameras are no longer doing so.
I've posted this before on Slashdot, but when I lived in Cambridge (UK, not Mass.) my then girlfriend was doing a PhD in criminology and did some work for the Home Office and city council on evaluating the effectiveness in deterring crime of CCTV cameras in and around carparks. I helped out with the surveys, etc. The results showed that cameras initially deterred or displaced crime, but then people forgot they were there and crime went back up to normal levels again. The researchers considered this to be a pretty normal pattern. But they did suggest that crime clearup rates (prosecutions) were higher in areas with cameras, which this new study seems to contradict.
No one is going to pay a barrel of money for aircraft and not adapt them for their needs.
You might be surprised how restrictive the contracts for military hardware are if you're just a humble purchaser, and not involved in development. On a contracting job once I met the head of engineering for the company, and he told me that when he was in the (Australian) army he ran groups doing maintenance work on Leopard tanks. They had a problem with drivetrains failing, which was caused by a simple manufacturing fault. (A small segment had been cut out of a particular part with square corners instead of rounded ones. Cracks would propagate from the corners and the part would break.) The team just made replacement parts without the fault and replaced the bad ones. When the German manufacturers found out they were furious! Under the terms of the contract, the Australians weren't allowed to make any changes at all. They were supposed to take out the whole drivetrain, which weighted about a tonne, and stick it on a plane to Germany to have the part replaced, then have it flown back, and put the damn thing back in the tank. The guy got an official reprimand for saving vast amounts of time and money while fixing something that wasn't his fault. But he got an unofficial commendation too.
A few years ago Australia committed to replacing the Leopard with the US M1 Abrams. He said that the main advantage is that for Australia it's a lot easier to use the US supply chain than the Leopard User Nations chain.
That may be right in the US but I'd guess from the poster's username that he's a New Zealander, where awards for injury are orders of magnitude lower than in the US.
You'd make good money as a chemical engineer at the moment. When I started my Chem. Eng. degree in 1991 (in Australia) every graduate was getting a job straight out of uni. But when I graduated in 1994 the commodities price collapses of the 90s had lead to a lot of shutdowns and huge cuts in capital spending in the industry. Almost all of the engineers I went to uni. with ended up retraining for work in IT, accounting or something else. (I became a programmer... just as the tech. bubble ended. Timing is my forte!)
Of course, now that commodities are booming again there's a severe shortage of experienced engineers for new plants because a whole generation left the profession, so salaries are high again. Employers are even willing to take on qualified but inexperienced staff and train them for more senior roles, which was unheard of 10 years ago. My point is that a lot of industries are cyclical, so planning your future career by extrapolating current conditions is not the smartest thing you could do.
Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
Can I pick "all of the above"? Rolling out a new technology to a community tends to expose the limitations in the technology, and it takes another iteration or two before it really delivers on its promises. Early electric streetlights were mostly arc lights on huge towers and many early electicity grids ran on low voltage DC, but both technologies were largely replaced by more effective equivalents within a few years. I think that municipal wi-fi is the 100V DC of internet access, and will shortly be overtaken by wireless technologies designed specifically for local area coverage. (But I don't have a clue as to which one.)
No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property
Errm, apart from the fact that intellectual property can be reproduced infinitely for nothing? (I.e. is non-rival good with zero marginal cost of production.) And so should, if exposed to the same market forces as physical goods, fall to a cost of zero? I believe an organisation called The Pirate Bay is helping intellectual property achieve this level of equality.
There are very few ways to maintain a business where there is 100% penetration and the life of the product exceeds one year.
This is not really true. Consider homebuilding, car manufacture, furniture making, most capital goods (industrial plant and equipment), etc. Equipment does wear out and replacing it can be a viable business even if lasts longer than a year, or even if it lasts decades. Also, quality of many goods improves and fashions change, leading to replacement of things that don't need to be replaced. (In software this is called "upgrading the legacy system to a best of breed solution".:-) )
With regard to printers, businesses might replace them because they break, the business grows and needs more capacity, or new features like colour printing, duplexing, collating and stapling become standard. It's not the end of the business when everyone has a printer.
NASA is doing open source space exploration using Second Life. If only the RIAA and Microsoft teamed up to stop them this would be the most perfect Slashdot story ever.
When was the last time a huge security program was dismantled when shown to not deliver what was promised, or even evaluated for success?
When I was in the UK I worked on some projects to evaulate the performance of CCTV installations in Cambridge. The evaluations were sponsored by the Home Office (i.e. national government) but each project was local (run by city councils). The gist of the findings was that CCTV initially reduced crime, but then people forgot it was there and crime rates rose again. Having a video record of crimes did make it easier for the police to catch and prosecute criminals.
They also have a pretty aggressive writing team that gives no end to recommendations
How aggressive are they? Are the recommendations threatening like "LISTEN TO THIS OR I'LL COME ROUND TO YOUR PLACE AND TEAR YOUR EARS OFF!", or more passive-aggressive?
(Sorry, I failed to rein in my language snobbery.)
But again, that's a very recent phenomenon. If you picked even someone from the 17'th or 18'th century, much less a caveman, and try to tell them that somewhere there's a society where you need to beg and convince people to buy your goods, they'd think you're seriously deluded or telling them some kind of fable. The whole notion was simply alien, as the wold economy was simply always at a point where agregate demand vastly outstripped aggregate supply.
Actually advertising, at least in England, became important in the 18th century. Some newspapers started as collections of advertising in the 1700s and added news later. But it does seem that the rise of adverstising was due to surplus as you said, in this case the increase in surplus income of the middle classes, which allowed the purchase of luxury goods. See
http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/adverti sing/placeanadd.html
Actually, I think the claims of share price gains of 5% or so miss the point. If you look at the balance sheets of these companies (of those that have balance sheets), the companies are almost completely valuless. But they do have a listing and so if an unscrupulous business person happened to find themselves in control of a large block of stock (either by buying it for a pittance in an off market transaction or taking control of the board of a company with huge amounts of treasury stock) then selling it at any price is better than keeping it, because its true value is zero. So this person could open up two accounts at discount internet brokers and spend a few days selling the stock back and forth to himself at increasing prices to give the appearance of frenzied activity. Then they could send out spam to pump the stock. A few gullible or greedy punters check out the chart, see the stock is going up and decide to buy some. The spammer then sells off his stock until interest falls away again, pockets the cash and leaves. If you look at the corporate histories of these stocks you do see some serial CEOs and financiers of pink sheet companies. Either they really love running failing businesses or they've got some way of making money out of it.
It all works because in such thinly traded stocks it's very easy to manipulate the market price away from the true value. Shorting is only possible if you can borrow the stock, and this is only likely to happen when the punters buy stock in their margin accounts (many margin accounts have a condition that allows the broker to lend out any stock you hold in them), so shorting can only lower prices after the stock has been offloaded.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, the vast majority of people who watch violent TV or play violent video games are not a threat to society. The claim that violent media are as dangerous as smoking is foolish, and not what the article actually said. But overwhelmingly research does support the contention that people can learn behaviour from watching programs and playing games, and that can make people more violent than they would have been if they'd spent their time some other way. What's remarkable is how people can dismiss all the research, much of which is painstakingly performed by experts in the field, just because they dislike the results. (Or maybe that's not remarkable, depending on how cynical you are about people's rationality.)
An article I read earlier this year really changed my opinion on this subject. From issue 2600 of New Scientist magazine, 19 April 2007, page 33-37:
If anyone is thinking of replying to this, let me save you some time by preparing some responses.
And also most mobile phone tariffs in Australia now charge the same rate to call a mobile or fixed line anywhere in the country, so it doesn't really matter.
But a checkbox has two states. Is there any possible useful method of changing the states of a "multiplicity of checkboxes" that is not obvious and trivial to develop?
A few years ago Australia committed to replacing the Leopard with the US M1 Abrams. He said that the main advantage is that for Australia it's a lot easier to use the US supply chain than the Leopard User Nations chain.
The romans used short "postcard" messages a lot too. There are a load of examples scanned at http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/exhibition/index.s html.
To pick another nit on the first nit...
That may be right in the US but I'd guess from the poster's username that he's a New Zealander, where awards for injury are orders of magnitude lower than in the US.
You don't want your girlfriend/boyfriend to know what your opinions are? I'm not Dr Phil but yes, I think you might have trust issues.
Of course, now that commodities are booming again there's a severe shortage of experienced engineers for new plants because a whole generation left the profession, so salaries are high again. Employers are even willing to take on qualified but inexperienced staff and train them for more senior roles, which was unheard of 10 years ago. My point is that a lot of industries are cyclical, so planning your future career by extrapolating current conditions is not the smartest thing you could do.
This is not really true. Consider homebuilding, car manufacture, furniture making, most capital goods (industrial plant and equipment), etc. Equipment does wear out and replacing it can be a viable business even if lasts longer than a year, or even if it lasts decades. Also, quality of many goods improves and fashions change, leading to replacement of things that don't need to be replaced. (In software this is called "upgrading the legacy system to a best of breed solution". :-) )
With regard to printers, businesses might replace them because they break, the business grows and needs more capacity, or new features like colour printing, duplexing, collating and stapling become standard. It's not the end of the business when everyone has a printer.
NASA is doing open source space exploration using Second Life. If only the RIAA and Microsoft teamed up to stop them this would be the most perfect Slashdot story ever.
When I was in the UK I worked on some projects to evaulate the performance of CCTV installations in Cambridge. The evaluations were sponsored by the Home Office (i.e. national government) but each project was local (run by city councils). The gist of the findings was that CCTV initially reduced crime, but then people forgot it was there and crime rates rose again. Having a video record of crimes did make it easier for the police to catch and prosecute criminals.
How aggressive are they? Are the recommendations threatening like "LISTEN TO THIS OR I'LL COME ROUND TO YOUR PLACE AND TEAR YOUR EARS OFF!", or more passive-aggressive?
(Sorry, I failed to rein in my language snobbery.)
Actually, I think the claims of share price gains of 5% or so miss the point. If you look at the balance sheets of these companies (of those that have balance sheets), the companies are almost completely valuless. But they do have a listing and so if an unscrupulous business person happened to find themselves in control of a large block of stock (either by buying it for a pittance in an off market transaction or taking control of the board of a company with huge amounts of treasury stock) then selling it at any price is better than keeping it, because its true value is zero. So this person could open up two accounts at discount internet brokers and spend a few days selling the stock back and forth to himself at increasing prices to give the appearance of frenzied activity. Then they could send out spam to pump the stock. A few gullible or greedy punters check out the chart, see the stock is going up and decide to buy some. The spammer then sells off his stock until interest falls away again, pockets the cash and leaves. If you look at the corporate histories of these stocks you do see some serial CEOs and financiers of pink sheet companies. Either they really love running failing businesses or they've got some way of making money out of it.
It all works because in such thinly traded stocks it's very easy to manipulate the market price away from the true value. Shorting is only possible if you can borrow the stock, and this is only likely to happen when the punters buy stock in their margin accounts (many margin accounts have a condition that allows the broker to lend out any stock you hold in them), so shorting can only lower prices after the stock has been offloaded.