The question is, does gaming improve mental agility and make you a safer driver.
That's the wrong question. A more correct question would be "Is there a correlation between gaming and driving ability?"
It could very well be the there is no causal relationship between the two, but rather they share a common cause. Perhaps those without sufficient mental acuity/coordination to drive also lack the "mad skillz" needed for gaming, and thus they don't find games to be enjoyable and therefore don't play.
It may be the wrong question, but it's probably the one they're basing their ideas on. Or this is a games-company sponsored stunt to try to reinforce the popular but scientifically groundless notion that playing games in old age is somehow good for you.
I suppose though there could be a hundred other confounding factors like playing games being a marker of biological age, being around younger family, being the kind of person that is generall aware of the world around them, etc.
Presumably nobody uses LaTeX for making charts or for performing calculations (the latter of which is really what's being addressed here).
The PSTricks package can make some really beautiful charts in LaTeX documents.
There's a book called Tex Unbound that gives lots of other ways to make charts in TeX/LaTeX that are way better than Excel output (or most other graphing packages IMO).
One of the reasons stories about how the banana is going extinct come up every few years is because the "modern" banana that most people in the over developed world can buy, are all clones! One disease can attack all the plants in the same manner.
I wondered how long it would be before someone dragged out a banana analogy.
Anyone doing this should get put in jail for a long, long time. It may not be fraud in the sense that they're publishing fraudulent results, but by not publishing results they're creating fraudulent overall data, with possibly deadly results. This needs to stop.
That's a bit simplistic - often nobody is directly responsible for not publishing results, it comes about because major medical journals are not interested in pubishing negative findings. There are of course exceptions, when the negative findings come as a big surprise or there is a lot of anticipation about them, like the reports of the Alzheimer's disease vaccination not working earlier this year.
The medical journals themselves know this is a problem, but they aren't sure what to do about it. One suggestion has been the journals should make a 'commitment to publish' for a trial based on its design and importance, and then publish the findings whatever they are, but that would of course mean they'd be publishing a lot less interesting stuff.
Also scientists can't be bothered to write up negative findings, because there are proportionally so many more of them than positive ones.
There is a problem of pharma companies suppressing bad findings or writing misleading journal articles, but that's a wholly independant issue and should be dealt with by the schemes in develpment for enforcing results to be left in public databases after the trials are finishsed. The problem with that is that not many GPs will be searching through these databases
The real solution is probably for doctors not to rely on scientific journals for information (which they often don't really understand), but to wait for advice from bodies like the National Institute for Clinical Excellence or the Cochrane Collaboration who do very thorough searches and synthesis.
Some projects require resources no matter how you look at it: e.g. labs, connections with other intelligent people, test subjects, etc. Unless you are rich or have a project that requires minimal resources, you may have a hard time doing all of the research and commercializing all of the work on your own. Now if you can do such a thing, kudos to you; but, these grants (and that is what they are) are probably meant for grand projects that bring together specialists across many different fields. What I'm curious about is how their process will differ from what the government already does in terms of funding such projects. Will google be equally rigorous in validating the work that comes out of this, or are they just looking for the next gadget to earn them millions?
It seems interesting, so I'll just have to wait and see how it pans out.
Agreed - If this is just another grant awarding body it's rather dull, and 10 million dollars won't go very far at all. Although most grant awards these days tend to go to short term projects with very definable and measurable outcomes, which is understandable for the sake of accountability, so maybe Google are going for some more blue-skies thinking and they won't care too much if they see anything come of each award or not.
So should we abandon thought, and leave all our decisions to instict? I cannot accept this model. We can make decisions based on evidence and long-term objectives, and resist the 'animal' (for want of a better word) imitation behaviour if we choose. We can admit we were wrong, and we can change our minds. We can deliberately simulate the minds of others, and act to some extent like the idealised rational machines we think we are.
The adult human brain is more than capable of adapting to new peripherals. The idea that children are better at learning than adults is no longer supported by science. Children just happen to be bombarded by new ideas at all times.
I don't think that's right. A child can sustain pretty massive brain damage, like removing a hemisphere for example, and make a pretty good recovery, recruiting other brain areas to compensate for the lost parts. An adult can't do that. It is true that adults can learn and adapt their brains throughout life, but children up to the age of about 10 are infinitely better at it.
For "silent" communication I can see morse being communicated that way, but reading words from the brain ? Maybe one can train people to concentrate and clearly form a few specific patterns which can then be recognized afterward and translated to words, but i doubt you could learn and differentiate so many patterns as to have a wordly communication. Furthermore in the midst of fire exchange, I doubt this would be easier to use than a radio.
I don't think adults can easily learn to use their brains in an entirely new way like this. Maybe if you gave a really young child one of these with some kind of visual feedback for them they could develop a more sophisticated way of communicating with it.
Or better yet, maybe deaf kids could use this to talk amongst themselves. It would have to be started very young though, so the brain could develop and strengthen the areas needed. Actually this is now sounding a bit like the plot from The Midwitch Cuckoos.
DAMNIT why did I just lurk for so long? I could had 5 digits, easy.
My heart bleeds. I was reading in 2000. Don't know what they were up to then. Then when I did get round to making an account I was listening to prog rock so I ended up with this stupid username.
Doesn't it bother anyone else that there are these huge stores of information about them sitting out there, churning away, doing their best to find a way to make a profit from what they know?
Not really. In fact, not at all. My disclaimer is that as an epidemiologist it's my job to search through huge stores of information trying to get medical knowledge out. I can't see any reason at all for people to protect data if it's anonymised, (apart from I suppose the very rare cases when specific combinations of things would be enough to publicly identify you.)
Although I appreciate that other people knowing your stock portfolio isn't really going to help mankind in any way, I can't see how it can possibly harm you (particularly if you don't use your real name), and it could bring you a lot of benefits (ie being able to use the online tools of your choice).
They're not claiming to recreate the web or anything like that. Rather, Berners-Lee has expressed concern about some of the trends in the way the WWW is working, and is now doing something about it. One example cited in the media today is the difficulty in distinguishing between rumours and content from reputable sources, since there is no robust mechanism for indicating the authenticity or credibility of a web site. This has led to fears of the LHC sucking the world into a black hole or, more seriously, to parents being misinformed about the dangers of MMR vaccine and making health decisions that are not in their child's best interests because of the bad information.
I agree this is a nice idea, but somehow making it a part of the infrastructure of the web is a bit alarming, and seems almost impossible, especially without creating an ultimate authority as you put it with the ability to hand out endorsements.
Right because being burned by incompetence doesn't happen in any other field right?
Actually it does happen in other fields, the whole premise of this article is wrong. I'm a statistician/epidemiologist and every post I've ever applied for has had some kind of techincal test. Some have been more formal than others. Anyway if I was applying for a post that needed a high level of technical knowledge I would expect to be tested on it.
I was on a trolley bus in Schaffhausen in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago. In Switzerland trolley busses and trams are everywhere. I was thinking more along the lines of a battery powered bus. It must be getting close to being feasible.
How would you stop your idea being stolen as soon as it was published though? If a good developer would take a week it would only take a week for your competitor to come on the market.
Unless you get a software patent of course. In fact searching through patent databases might be a better way of finding out whether anybody has has this idea before.
I was on a brand new (still smelled like new) bus on my way to the airport a couple of weeks ago and it struck me that they've had 80 years of development of the bus and the thing still vibrates annoyingly. If there was a way to combine the cheap infrastructure of buses with the smooth ride of trams it would be an instant success in most cities worldwide.
Any kind of electric bus would probably fulfill those criteria.
Google Scholar is also date-searchable for obvious reasons. It wouldn't be too hard to implement this for regular Google going forwards, since it would only have to remember when it indexed everything. I vaguely remember when every web page had a 'last-updated' line at the bottom. You don't see that much anymore, maybe because it made people look bad.
Guy/girl does something goofy in 70s as a teenager.
Gets covered by local news (at that time).
I've seen that already. I looked up an executive, and Google returned a hit from a student newspaper from the 1960s that they'd digitized from microfilm. The story mentioned the guy being
a member of the Socialist Workers Alliance.
Oh no! Exec dabbled with left wing ideology in youth! By the way I was a member of the Socialist Worker Student Society when I was a student because I was trying to impress a girl. Why would anybody care?
The people that freak me out are Young Conservatives. Those guys are creepy.
The Chinese are getting old too. And because of some stupid social engineering experiment they don't have a younger generation coming through. In a few years they are going to be in more trouble than anyone because of this.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is, does gaming improve mental agility and make you a safer driver.
That's the wrong question. A more correct question would be "Is there a correlation between gaming and driving ability?"
It could very well be the there is no causal relationship between the two, but rather they share a common cause. Perhaps those without sufficient mental acuity/coordination to drive also lack the "mad skillz" needed for gaming, and thus they don't find games to be enjoyable and therefore don't play.
It may be the wrong question, but it's probably the one they're basing their ideas on. Or this is a games-company sponsored stunt to try to reinforce the popular but scientifically groundless notion that playing games in old age is somehow good for you.
I suppose though there could be a hundred other confounding factors like playing games being a marker of biological age, being around younger family, being the kind of person that is generall aware of the world around them, etc.
Presumably nobody uses LaTeX for making charts or for performing calculations (the latter of which is really what's being addressed here).
The PSTricks package can make some really beautiful charts in LaTeX documents.
There's a book called Tex Unbound that gives lots of other ways to make charts in TeX/LaTeX that are way better than Excel output (or most other graphing packages IMO).
One of the reasons stories about how the banana is going extinct come up every few years is because the "modern" banana that most people in the over developed world can buy, are all clones! One disease can attack all the plants in the same manner.
I wondered how long it would be before someone dragged out a banana analogy.
Anyone doing this should get put in jail for a long, long time. It may not be fraud in the sense that they're publishing fraudulent results, but by not publishing results they're creating fraudulent overall data, with possibly deadly results. This needs to stop.
That's a bit simplistic - often nobody is directly responsible for not publishing results, it comes about because major medical journals are not interested in pubishing negative findings. There are of course exceptions, when the negative findings come as a big surprise or there is a lot of anticipation about them, like the reports of the Alzheimer's disease vaccination not working earlier this year.
The medical journals themselves know this is a problem, but they aren't sure what to do about it. One suggestion has been the journals should make a 'commitment to publish' for a trial based on its design and importance, and then publish the findings whatever they are, but that would of course mean they'd be publishing a lot less interesting stuff.
Also scientists can't be bothered to write up negative findings, because there are proportionally so many more of them than positive ones.
There is a problem of pharma companies suppressing bad findings or writing misleading journal articles, but that's a wholly independant issue and should be dealt with by the schemes in develpment for enforcing results to be left in public databases after the trials are finishsed. The problem with that is that not many GPs will be searching through these databases
The real solution is probably for doctors not to rely on scientific journals for information (which they often don't really understand), but to wait for advice from bodies like the National Institute for Clinical Excellence or the Cochrane Collaboration who do very thorough searches and synthesis.
Some projects require resources no matter how you look at it: e.g. labs, connections with other intelligent people, test subjects, etc. Unless you are rich or have a project that requires minimal resources, you may have a hard time doing all of the research and commercializing all of the work on your own. Now if you can do such a thing, kudos to you; but, these grants (and that is what they are) are probably meant for grand projects that bring together specialists across many different fields. What I'm curious about is how their process will differ from what the government already does in terms of funding such projects. Will google be equally rigorous in validating the work that comes out of this, or are they just looking for the next gadget to earn them millions? It seems interesting, so I'll just have to wait and see how it pans out.
Agreed - If this is just another grant awarding body it's rather dull, and 10 million dollars won't go very far at all. Although most grant awards these days tend to go to short term projects with very definable and measurable outcomes, which is understandable for the sake of accountability, so maybe Google are going for some more blue-skies thinking and they won't care too much if they see anything come of each award or not.
So should we abandon thought, and leave all our decisions to instict? I cannot accept this model. We can make decisions based on evidence and long-term objectives, and resist the 'animal' (for want of a better word) imitation behaviour if we choose. We can admit we were wrong, and we can change our minds. We can deliberately simulate the minds of others, and act to some extent like the idealised rational machines we think we are.
I wasn't one of those people until I read your comment but I am now. Thanks.
Still, everyone is more interested in laser weapons, Microsoft tents, and Comcast than the socialization of banks in the US.
That's because it's far more interesting. One group of grey suits looks much like another IMO.
The adult human brain is more than capable of adapting to new peripherals. The idea that children are better at learning than adults is no longer supported by science. Children just happen to be bombarded by new ideas at all times.
I don't think that's right. A child can sustain pretty massive brain damage, like removing a hemisphere for example, and make a pretty good recovery, recruiting other brain areas to compensate for the lost parts. An adult can't do that. It is true that adults can learn and adapt their brains throughout life, but children up to the age of about 10 are infinitely better at it.
For "silent" communication I can see morse being communicated that way, but reading words from the brain ? Maybe one can train people to concentrate and clearly form a few specific patterns which can then be recognized afterward and translated to words, but i doubt you could learn and differentiate so many patterns as to have a wordly communication. Furthermore in the midst of fire exchange, I doubt this would be easier to use than a radio.
I don't think adults can easily learn to use their brains in an entirely new way like this. Maybe if you gave a really young child one of these with some kind of visual feedback for them they could develop a more sophisticated way of communicating with it.
Or better yet, maybe deaf kids could use this to talk amongst themselves. It would have to be started very young though, so the brain could develop and strengthen the areas needed. Actually this is now sounding a bit like the plot from The Midwitch Cuckoos.
DAMNIT why did I just lurk for so long? I could had 5 digits, easy.
My heart bleeds. I was reading in 2000. Don't know what they were up to then. Then when I did get round to making an account I was listening to prog rock so I ended up with this stupid username.
Doesn't it bother anyone else that there are these huge stores of information about them sitting out there, churning away, doing their best to find a way to make a profit from what they know?
Not really. In fact, not at all. My disclaimer is that as an epidemiologist it's my job to search through huge stores of information trying to get medical knowledge out. I can't see any reason at all for people to protect data if it's anonymised, (apart from I suppose the very rare cases when specific combinations of things would be enough to publicly identify you.)
Although I appreciate that other people knowing your stock portfolio isn't really going to help mankind in any way, I can't see how it can possibly harm you (particularly if you don't use your real name), and it could bring you a lot of benefits (ie being able to use the online tools of your choice).
They're not claiming to recreate the web or anything like that. Rather, Berners-Lee has expressed concern about some of the trends in the way the WWW is working, and is now doing something about it. One example cited in the media today is the difficulty in distinguishing between rumours and content from reputable sources, since there is no robust mechanism for indicating the authenticity or credibility of a web site. This has led to fears of the LHC sucking the world into a black hole or, more seriously, to parents being misinformed about the dangers of MMR vaccine and making health decisions that are not in their child's best interests because of the bad information.
I agree this is a nice idea, but somehow making it a part of the infrastructure of the web is a bit alarming, and seems almost impossible, especially without creating an ultimate authority as you put it with the ability to hand out endorsements.
Right because being burned by incompetence doesn't happen in any other field right?
Actually it does happen in other fields, the whole premise of this article is wrong. I'm a statistician/epidemiologist and every post I've ever applied for has had some kind of techincal test. Some have been more formal than others. Anyway if I was applying for a post that needed a high level of technical knowledge I would expect to be tested on it.
I only assumed he did want to keep it because the article seemed so protective. Otherwise I agree entirely.
I was on a trolley bus in Schaffhausen in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago. In Switzerland trolley busses and trams are everywhere. I was thinking more along the lines of a battery powered bus. It must be getting close to being feasible.
How would you stop your idea being stolen as soon as it was published though? If a good developer would take a week it would only take a week for your competitor to come on the market.
Unless you get a software patent of course. In fact searching through patent databases might be a better way of finding out whether anybody has has this idea before.
Thanks - mapmyrun looks really cool although it doesn't have any runs in my area, I'll have to add mine.
Its funny because its true. They have re-invented the tram.
I was on a brand new (still smelled like new) bus on my way to the airport a couple of weeks ago and it struck me that they've had 80 years of development of the bus and the thing still vibrates annoyingly. If there was a way to combine the cheap infrastructure of buses with the smooth ride of trams it would be an instant success in most cities worldwide.
Any kind of electric bus would probably fulfill those criteria.
The 19th century called....they want their trams back.
Google Scholar is also date-searchable for obvious reasons. It wouldn't be too hard to implement this for regular Google going forwards, since it would only have to remember when it indexed everything. I vaguely remember when every web page had a 'last-updated' line at the bottom. You don't see that much anymore, maybe because it made people look bad.
Guy/girl does something goofy in 70s as a teenager. Gets covered by local news (at that time).
I've seen that already. I looked up an executive, and Google returned a hit from a student newspaper from the 1960s that they'd digitized from microfilm. The story mentioned the guy being a member of the Socialist Workers Alliance.
Oh no! Exec dabbled with left wing ideology in youth! By the way I was a member of the Socialist Worker Student Society when I was a student because I was trying to impress a girl. Why would anybody care?
The people that freak me out are Young Conservatives. Those guys are creepy.
You're a moron.
I think you misspelled 'genius'.
Thanks anyway.
The Chinese are getting old too. And because of some stupid social engineering experiment they don't have a younger generation coming through. In a few years they are going to be in more trouble than anyone because of this.