Belarusian uses a Latin-style "i" in place of the typical Cyrillic short i... So you can still phish admirably with "paypaI" and never leave Cyrillic. e, x, c, y, i, o, p, a: how many words can you make?
Scala lacks the webby web-web street cred that this list is laden with. Haskell is mentioned briefly in the article, but not considered worthy of Knowing. Meanwhile, Erlang is popular in certain buzzword compliance requirements considered key to trends in web development as of a year or two ago.
There's this story about an off-duty bridge officer aboard a large US military ship who, groggy after having to get up rather early, called the bridge and requested that the vehicle, some quarter of a million tons of steel, personnel and equipment, be rotated 15 degrees, all so he didn't have to move an inch to get the sun out of his eyes while he drank his coffee.
Maybe whoever wrote that list merely wants to read the Linux Journal forums. Surely we're not pretending as if SELinux doesn't exist and that the NSA hasn't historically contributed to Linux. That would be a foolish thing to do. Of foolishness.
Figure skating just hasn't developed far enough yet—throw in a few mocap suits and compare the recorded data to an ideal performance. Root mean standard deviation == your score. Simple!
It's more brilliant than you think—now the Microsoft employees who came up with this idea can get MacBooks without getting their boss's signature! In theory, anyway.
Hey, definitely. I'm all for this sort of interest piece; I've done some truly worthless statistical analyses purely for the geek value. But it shouldn't be mislabeled, much less sitting on Arxiv. I guess maybe this happened because the lead author is a physicist? Assume a spherical cow, etc.
Exactly. The results of this study could not be more bullshit. It's the kind of "why would you even bother doing that" study that should make people double over laughing.
Alas, they also noted differences in brain activation when the subjects were shorn pornographic imagery, so that joke doesn't quite work, unless they were secretly controlling their muscles for the elbow and wrist in the MRI tube. But we can pretend it does!
That's unfortunately quite a tall order for the Slashdot community. Now, if you'd wish they'd ramble tiresomely about tiny mosquito-decapitating robot overlords running out of control, you might not go home quite so disappointed.
Just for your convenience, then, here are all the statistics from the paper:
Research in the United States has shown that 66% of men and 41% of women consume pornography on a monthly basis.3 An estimated 50% of all Internet traffic is related to sex.4
Sixty-four healthy male participants (mean [SD] age, 28.9 [6.62] years, range 21-45 years) were recruited.
Because the distribution of the reported PHs [hours of pornography use per week] was skewed and not normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Z=1.54; P<.05), we transformed the variable by means of square root (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Z=0.77; P=.59).
The overall Internet Sex Screening Test score was positively correlated with the reported PHs (r64=0.389, P<.01). On the Sexual Addiction Screening Test, participants scored 1.35 on average (SD, 2.03). A positive correlation was observed between PHs and Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score (r64=0.250, P<.05) and Beck Depression Inventory score (r64=0.295, P<.05).
And just because it's so important to the science, the rest of the results:
When correlating PHs (square root) with GM segmentations, we found a significant negative association in the right striatum, namely caudate nucleus (based on the automated anatomical labeling atlas34; peak voxel: x=11, y=5, z=3; P<.001; corrected for multiple comparisons) (Figure 1A). When we used a lower threshold of P<.005, an additional cluster in the left caudate reached significance (x=6, y=0, z=6), showing that the effect is not clearly lateralized. We refer to the cluster as the striatum; however, for the subsequent discussion, it is noteworthy that the cluster overlaps with a reward processing literature-based probabilistic region of interest of the ventral striatum, created by means of in-house software35 (predominantly monetary-incentive delay task, see eAppendix in Supplement for details).
As for alternative hypotheses, the only one they present is "Individuals with lower striatum volume may need more external stimulation to experience pleasure and might therefore experience pornography consumption as more rewarding, which may in turn lead to higher PHs."
That may call into question cause, but not consequence; if pursuing a drug addiction causes behavioural changes (which alcoholism certainly does, even when sober) then it is not unreasonable to assume some alteration in activity or structure of the striatum comes as a result of this. The paper cites previous work on the topic, saying that alcoholism (and drug addiction in general) is indeed correlated with changes in the striatum, so I wouldn't really question that part of it too vigorously. My complaint is basically that they seem to be violating a triangle inequality: the brain change is tightly correlated with two addictive behaviours in the sample, but they're only weakly correlated with each other. It sounds to me like porn is correlated with novel changes in the same region.
Slashdot Mirror
in 2009, a group of Chinese scientists created a viral strain of flu virus
a viral strain of flu virus
Well, at least it wasn't a... eukaryotic strain of flu virus?
Belarusian uses a Latin-style "i" in place of the typical Cyrillic short i... So you can still phish admirably with "paypaI" and never leave Cyrillic. e, x, c, y, i, o, p, a: how many words can you make?
Scala lacks the webby web-web street cred that this list is laden with. Haskell is mentioned briefly in the article, but not considered worthy of Knowing. Meanwhile, Erlang is popular in certain buzzword compliance requirements considered key to trends in web development as of a year or two ago.
Nice catch, Captain Obvious. That was my point!
...is that really a property of Javascript, though, or just your computer? Do the ECMA standards prescribe memory or reference size limits?
...And somehow, HTML is both on the list and lower than Java. Anyone got any theories?
I believe you'll find it's spelled "navel vassal."
My mistake; the original text merely said "thousands." See ctheme's comment.
That's the one! I would've posted the source but I'd only seen it as an image and didn't remember what to search for. Thanks.
There's this story about an off-duty bridge officer aboard a large US military ship who, groggy after having to get up rather early, called the bridge and requested that the vehicle, some quarter of a million tons of steel, personnel and equipment, be rotated 15 degrees, all so he didn't have to move an inch to get the sun out of his eyes while he drank his coffee.
Maybe whoever wrote that list merely wants to read the Linux Journal forums. Surely we're not pretending as if SELinux doesn't exist and that the NSA hasn't historically contributed to Linux. That would be a foolish thing to do. Of foolishness.
Figure skating just hasn't developed far enough yet—throw in a few mocap suits and compare the recorded data to an ideal performance. Root mean standard deviation == your score. Simple!
Pfft! We can still be disappointed.
You and me both. Let's spread the tag !nuclearpulsepropulsion to show our dismay!
It's more brilliant than you think—now the Microsoft employees who came up with this idea can get MacBooks without getting their boss's signature! In theory, anyway.
Well... there's the beachfront property market.
See also: Slashdot and unicode support.
Hey, definitely. I'm all for this sort of interest piece; I've done some truly worthless statistical analyses purely for the geek value. But it shouldn't be mislabeled, much less sitting on Arxiv. I guess maybe this happened because the lead author is a physicist? Assume a spherical cow, etc.
Exactly. The results of this study could not be more bullshit. It's the kind of "why would you even bother doing that" study that should make people double over laughing.
We'd deal with them the same way we dealt with Denmark. Simple.
develop nuclear weapons.
As another commenter said already, Canada went through nuclear disarmament in 1984. (The US wasn't pleased.) "Develop" is definitely the wrong word.
Alas, they also noted differences in brain activation when the subjects were shorn pornographic imagery, so that joke doesn't quite work, unless they were secretly controlling their muscles for the elbow and wrist in the MRI tube. But we can pretend it does!
The study asserts that there is; alcoholism and other drug addictions are already associated with striatum differences.
That's unfortunately quite a tall order for the Slashdot community. Now, if you'd wish they'd ramble tiresomely about tiny mosquito-decapitating robot overlords running out of control, you might not go home quite so disappointed.
Just for your convenience, then, here are all the statistics from the paper:
And just because it's so important to the science, the rest of the results:
As for alternative hypotheses, the only one they present is "Individuals with lower striatum volume may need more external stimulation to experience pleasure and might therefore experience pornography consumption as more rewarding, which may in turn lead to higher PHs."
That may call into question cause, but not consequence; if pursuing a drug addiction causes behavioural changes (which alcoholism certainly does, even when sober) then it is not unreasonable to assume some alteration in activity or structure of the striatum comes as a result of this. The paper cites previous work on the topic, saying that alcoholism (and drug addiction in general) is indeed correlated with changes in the striatum, so I wouldn't really question that part of it too vigorously. My complaint is basically that they seem to be violating a triangle inequality: the brain change is tightly correlated with two addictive behaviours in the sample, but they're only weakly correlated with each other. It sounds to me like porn is correlated with novel changes in the same region.