A diversion that everyone behind you is forced to watch as well, which can be utterly infuriating. People checking up on news, entertainement or playing games during class are projecting a wide cone of distraction behind them. It is also impossible for others to ignore it due to how the human brain reacts to peripheral movement and bright light sources.
Some science has already been done on this subject, and it suggests red light cameras actually increase the rate of accidents. If i remember correctly it was even covered previously on slashdot.
Guess the person(s) / corporation who sold this idea to the decisionmakers were not so keen at looking at what had already been established. Also, I posted the full link as I don't know how to "linkify" a word, and could not find a guide anywhere. I'm a med student and not a programmer. Please, have mercy.
You're leaving out a very important factor, the energy required for the manufacturing and transport process. There was an article on slashdot a while ago about a study that showed that 70% of the power consumed by an average laptop (over its average life span), is spent during the manufacturing process. This means that you have to keep your new device for a hell of a long time before the "saved" amount of power is larger then the power spent on getting the device.
"Also, we find jokes funny for lots of different reasons. They sometimes make us feel superior to others,[...] The hunter joke contained all three elements" (The superiority element was the first of three mentioned elements).
Here the article clearly states that the researchers viewed this joke as being within a category of what you define as jokes that "make fun of a group".
Ladies and gentlemen please look to the to the AC above. Observe the unrelated statements, the illogical statements, and the excessive long list of names being laid out for no particular reason, in a very non-slashdotesque manner.
Gentlemen, and ladies, we have ourselves an employee of the misinformation industry.
How did you get into these shenanigans? How did you realise that this was something that you could actually do, and how did you go from there to make it into a reality?
This seems like the most obvious and interesting question to me.
Yes, because "taking care of our customers" is completely motivated by religious dogma. And of course, religiously motivated organisations like say for example.. the church, have never been murderous, crooked and manipulative! Oh where have those good ol' times gone, those sweet days with wholesome and honest witchburning, crusadin', peasant extortions and altar boy rape.
*facepalm*
People never have and never will be primarily motivated to be nice and honest due to the fear of eventual retribution of some man in the sky. The main motivator will always be the fact that if you aren't it's likely to come back and bite you in the ass in the world you're living in now. This is a lesson that is learned over and over again by people and organisations that start to act out of line, and that underpins some of the basal aspects of human emotionality. It looks to me like BoA might be a bit on the receiving end of this lesson right now, as a matter of fact.
If my cultural insight is of any value (I'm from norway) the travelling is usually done after high school, most people go to work fresh after finishing their college education.
Furthermore, there are student loans here in Norway as well, but it is looked at as more of an enabler of freedom than something that enslaves you. Remember that if the money doesn't come from a loan, it has to come from somewhere, be it you parents, yourself, or another family member. Money always enslaves someone, but it enslaves you less if you have the option to pay it back when you have a good job. Then again, I'm a little biased as I come from Norway, where college education is free (for all intents and purposes), the student loans are generous, with up to 50% being converted to a stipend if you pass your exams. Luckily for my generation previous ones didn't buy into any of that "the market will sort it out" capitalistic bullshit, and kept our most important infrastructure controlled by the state (with a few notable exceptions).
Your description of his description is way off. He didn't say Siri was just voice commands. Even my ancient Nokia 3xxx had voice commands. Pay closer attention, because you're just mouthing off now about your strange Apple obsession. There are already two products with practically the same level of sophistication as Siri, namely the mentioned Iris Alpha and the subject of this article.
Some people are so excited about Apple products that they can't even read a comment right or provide any tangible counterarguments other than "you're wrong because Apple is awesome". It's like a mental illness.
Because if this is done in the germ line, it will end in a social catastrophy. What will happen when a group of people can say with reason that they are better humans then the rest of us? Today, it is possible to climb the social ladder because if you raise your kid right, he might not be so different from the kid of a millionaire, but when the millionaire kids are more intelligent and healthy by default, how is anyone ever going to go up in society? Imagine the riots that will happen once 90% of the population has no chance at getting a good job or ever having a family member get a good job, not because they do not work hard, but because they are "lesser" humans than the 10% on top.
The only way this technology can ever be used for enhancement without creating a dystopia is if the state intervenes to raise the bottom along with the top, but that is also difficult due to the costs, and the fact the rich will be the only ones who can keep up with the newer and newer "models" of DNA enhacement.
Note that this research was funded by the content providers (like skype) ISPs were asking to pay extra for the bandwidth their services use. I'm not pointing any fingers, but it's something to think about.
You're still missing the point. Your second analogy actually describes the foldit situation perfectly, just that its the other way around. It would be more fitting to describe the foldit gamers as the astrophysicists who analyses data and makes a discovery. To go through the analogy step by step, the magnitude measurements would in this case be the foldit program itself and the data about the protein in question that was known in beforehand. The gamers use of a program is not analogous to them using a measuring tool to gather data, as the data they produced was completely new and originated only from their own minds. They did not just plug something into an equation and noted down the results, they had a set of data and measurements, looked long and hard at them, and then came up with a completely new equation to describe the relationship between the ones they already had.
I'm not saying they deserve a noble prize, personally I wouldn't say that their discovery is significant enough in it's own right to go that far, but they do deserve the recognition of their work as more than just an application of principles that were known in beforehand, as the inclusion of their names in the publicised scientific paper suggests.
By the way, just to be sure, you do know that the "foldit gamers" are not the same people driving the folding@home distributed computing project right? You do know what the foldit game is and what you do in it? It would be unfortunate if we would continue this discussion just to find out that we're talking about two different topics entirely.
The Foldit gamers weren't "merely" donors. They made an actual discovery. They looked at the shape of a protein, thought, discussed and experimented in how they could fold it properly, and in the end they found a novel solution to a problem that hadn't been solved before. That is not "donation", that is a scientific discovery.
It's almost suspiciously stupid. I wonder if the tea party or any other critical mass of stupid has some indian employees typing out that guff on sites like that.
You don't need entrepeneurs to get this kind of thing to happen, here in Norway we've had that for around 3 years around the sentrum of the city, stretching out quite far from it at the most. It's actually the universities that made this happen, and thus by extension the state (students don't pay the university money to go there, pretty much everything comes from the state). Also, in the hungarian town Pécs where I'm currently living, there's free wifi internet in the whole town, and according to speedtest.net it clocks in at 0.2mb/s. That probably the speed its going to end with in london as well.
Jesus christ guys, RTFA. The summary is a biased piece of crap. All that the researchers did was to show that very few of the people who supported the brief that denied that violent video games was a risk factor for agression had done any research on the topic, and that the little research that had been done by the people on that side was not good enough to be published in any major scientific journal. If you wanted to distinguish between two large groups of "experts", and wanted to asess what side actually knew what they were talking about, how would you have done it differently?
There has been alot of research on the effects of media violence before video games were as big as they are today, and the general conclusion was that media violence was in fact a risk factor for increased agression. The reason you don't hear that much about it is because that debate is pretty much settled, but you can find plenty of the studies you are looking for by simply typing in "media violence" on google scholar.
You seem to not have read TFA. The main point in the article, is how almost none of the few published papers by the people signing to "video games don't cause violence" brief were published in respectable psychological journals. So unless you can do proper science that disproves that video games are a risk factor for agression, which incidentally is very hard to find (why is that I wonder), your solution won't get you anywhere.
I'm a first year student studying psychology, and I happened to write a paper on the subject of the effect of violent video games, and I have some opinions on this subject. First of all, I'd like to say RTFA. The summary above is one of the worst summaries I have seen, presenting the matter in an extremely biased fashion. First of all, what the researchers in question (Bushman, Anderson, Sacks) did is not so outrageous as the article suggests. To rephrase it in a less biased way, they looked at the people who signed both the pro and con amicus briefs, and looked at how many had actually published something within the topics of the effects of video game violence or media violence. They then looked at how many of these published studies were published in respectable journals ("respectability" was calculated using a method called "impact factor", which measures the relative amount of references to articles in a certain journal). Here they found that the signers of the brief supporting the link between violent video games and violent behaviour, had 48 times more studies published in respectable journals then the opposing side, fourty eight TIMES more studies. They did this to asess the credentials and credibility of the people signing each brief, not to somehow directly prove that violent violent games cause agression, such as the OP suggests, and I would say their assesement is legitimate. What they did here was to show that almost none of the people (17%) calling themselves "experts" who signed to the fact that violent video games did not cause agressive behaviour had published a single study on the subject area, and that the studies that they had published were only accepted by obscure journals with very little credibility to them (ie. they are of very low quality). They did not prove that violent video games cause agression, but they did prove that almost all the people who said that it didn't had almost no credentials whatsoever, and that the opposing side had plenty. Make of that what you will.
This assesement paints a picture of the situation that is pretty much in agreement to what I discovered when I wrote a paper on the subject: that there are only three (Ferguson, Kilburn, Freedman) serious researchers who deny the link between violent video games and agression, and that the rest are industry funded dickheads whose only purpose is to confuse the public into thinking that there is a real debate on the topic. All of the most recent experimental, cross-sectional and longitudal studies with a decent number of citations and credibility all supported the fact that violent video games are a risk factor for increased agression (by agression I mean agressive behaviour, cognition and affect). The largest and most credible meta-study I could find (done by Anderson et al in 2010), showed without any doubt that almost all psychological research done on the subject points to the fact that this risk factor is real. Denying the link between exposure to video game violence and increased risk of agressive behaviour, cognition and affect goes against all relevant psychological theory, former research on media violence, and even current research on the topic. The research that the OP dismisses clearly show that the people that are still denying it are the same industry funded idiots who have always denied any proper science being done on the subject of media violence, people who have no real scientific credibility. Note that we are talking about a risk factor here, not a causal link. The research doesn't show that all kids who play violent video games become violent individuals; it does however show that in combination with other factors it can play a role in making them so.
I think you misunderstand what 500 clicks a minute means. Sure, there is a a major physical aspect to it, in how fast it is actually possible for you to precisely perform actions within the game (mouse precision is more important than how fast you can click, as a click in the wrong place is at the least wasted, at the most catastrophical), but being able to click really fast really precisely, does not give you the ability to perform a corresponding number of actions within the game. To translate your mechanical speed into actions within the game, to translate those 300 clicks and button mashes into 300 actions per minute (APM), you need to have a robust mental checklist with clearly defined priorities and reactions.
To give an example, lets say that I am playing Starcraft, and is in the middle of a battle. There are many decisions to be made within the battle itself (Should I retreat? Focus a particular unit? Avoid any particular unit? Assume a particular formation of units? Use any particular abilities?), and all these actions require some degree of attention and mechanical work to perform, but meanwhile I also have to produce attacking units, make workers, make supply depots, and construct buildings according to what overall strategy I have decided to adopt. What mainly decides how fast I play in this situation, is not how fast I click, but how fast I go from performing one task to the next, how fast I know what to do. Micromanaging units for example, is not just clicking units and sending them in random directions, its having an idea of what units needs to go where and do what, and going through with that idea as fast as you can. The speed at which you macro, or manage you economy, is also to some degree decided alot by how fast you go make strategical decisions, and how much of your attention you are willing to take away from your army. The quickness and precision of your actions is only the cap of the speed of your play as long as you have a crystal clear mental checklist that tells you exactly what to do next.
What I am saying here is that while peforming 500 clicks per minute is a purely physical thing, performing 500 actions per minute is as much cerebral as it is physical (somewhat of an unrealistic number by the way, with the way APM is measured in Sc2 the best reach around 350 in especially intense moments), somewhat negating your point. Furthermore, this discussion does not even begin to adress the quality of your actions, of wether the priorities in that checklist are good or not (in other words, wether or wether not you make overall good strategical decisions, as well as devoting the right amount of attention to the right things at the right time), or the additional skills that are required beyond the ones mentioned here (having good eye movement, general awareness of everything going on on-screen, being able to count large clusters of units with some degree of accuracy in half a second and so on), to become a good Starcraft (1 or 2) progamer. There are staggering physical and mental requirements that I think very few people are aware of, and which is why I also think so many have a difficulty in accepting it as a sport.
Slashdot Mirror
A diversion that everyone behind you is forced to watch as well, which can be utterly infuriating.
People checking up on news, entertainement or playing games during class are projecting a wide cone of distraction behind them. It is also impossible for others to ignore it due to how the human brain reacts to peripheral movement and bright light sources.
Some science has already been done on this subject, and it suggests red light cameras actually increase the rate of accidents. If i remember correctly it was even covered previously on slashdot.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080311151159.htm
Guess the person(s) / corporation who sold this idea to the decisionmakers were not so keen at looking at what had already been established.
Also, I posted the full link as I don't know how to "linkify" a word, and could not find a guide anywhere. I'm a med student and not a programmer. Please, have mercy.
You're leaving out a very important factor, the energy required for the manufacturing and transport process.
There was an article on slashdot a while ago about a study that showed that 70% of the power consumed by an average laptop (over its average life span), is spent during the manufacturing process. This means that you have to keep your new device for a hell of a long time before the "saved" amount of power is larger then the power spent on getting the device.
They're already one letter away from being killbots. Mark my words, soon they will travel around in packs and vibrate people to death.
RTFA
"Also, we find jokes funny for lots of different reasons. They sometimes make us feel superior to others,[...] The hunter joke contained all three elements" (The superiority element was the first of three mentioned elements).
Here the article clearly states that the researchers viewed this joke as being within a category of what you define as jokes that "make fun of a group".
Ladies and gentlemen please look to the to the AC above. Observe the unrelated statements, the illogical statements, and the excessive long list of names being laid out for no particular reason, in a very non-slashdotesque manner.
Gentlemen, and ladies, we have ourselves an employee of the misinformation industry.
especially in this country where the US government can search your computing devices at airports and so on.
Fixed that for you.
Wrong. The gasses sterilize the bags AND allow cells to adhere to the sides of the bag.
She most likely contains blood plasma...or when I think about it, maybe she doesnt.
How did you get into these shenanigans? How did you realise that this was something that you could actually do, and how did you go from there to make it into a reality?
This seems like the most obvious and interesting question to me.
Yes, because "taking care of our customers" is completely motivated by religious dogma.
And of course, religiously motivated organisations like say for example.. the church, have never been murderous, crooked and manipulative! Oh where have those good ol' times gone, those sweet days with wholesome and honest witchburning, crusadin', peasant extortions and altar boy rape.
*facepalm*
People never have and never will be primarily motivated to be nice and honest due to the fear of eventual retribution of some man in the sky. The main motivator will always be the fact that if you aren't it's likely to come back and bite you in the ass in the world you're living in now. This is a lesson that is learned over and over again by people and organisations that start to act out of line, and that underpins some of the basal aspects of human emotionality. It looks to me like BoA might be a bit on the receiving end of this lesson right now, as a matter of fact.
If my cultural insight is of any value (I'm from norway) the travelling is usually done after high school, most people go to work fresh after finishing their college education.
Furthermore, there are student loans here in Norway as well, but it is looked at as more of an enabler of freedom than something that enslaves you. Remember that if the money doesn't come from a loan, it has to come from somewhere, be it you parents, yourself, or another family member. Money always enslaves someone, but it enslaves you less if you have the option to pay it back when you have a good job.
Then again, I'm a little biased as I come from Norway, where college education is free (for all intents and purposes), the student loans are generous, with up to 50% being converted to a stipend if you pass your exams. Luckily for my generation previous ones didn't buy into any of that "the market will sort it out" capitalistic bullshit, and kept our most important infrastructure controlled by the state (with a few notable exceptions).
Silly.
Your description of his description is way off. He didn't say Siri was just voice commands. Even my ancient Nokia 3xxx had voice commands. Pay closer attention, because you're just mouthing off now about your strange Apple obsession. There are already two products with practically the same level of sophistication as Siri, namely the mentioned Iris Alpha and the subject of this article.
Some people are so excited about Apple products that they can't even read a comment right or provide any tangible counterarguments other than "you're wrong because Apple is awesome". It's like a mental illness.
Because if this is done in the germ line, it will end in a social catastrophy.
What will happen when a group of people can say with reason that they are better humans then the rest of us? Today, it is possible to climb the social ladder because if you raise your kid right, he might not be so different from the kid of a millionaire, but when the millionaire kids are more intelligent and healthy by default, how is anyone ever going to go up in society?
Imagine the riots that will happen once 90% of the population has no chance at getting a good job or ever having a family member get a good job, not because they do not work hard, but because they are "lesser" humans than the 10% on top.
The only way this technology can ever be used for enhancement without creating a dystopia is if the state intervenes to raise the bottom along with the top, but that is also difficult due to the costs, and the fact the rich will be the only ones who can keep up with the newer and newer "models" of DNA enhacement.
I was convinced that I was about to read about Devilles career as a pornstar when I clicked on that last link.
Note that this research was funded by the content providers (like skype) ISPs were asking to pay extra for the bandwidth their services use. I'm not pointing any fingers, but it's something to think about.
You're still missing the point.
Your second analogy actually describes the foldit situation perfectly, just that its the other way around. It would be more fitting to describe the foldit gamers as the astrophysicists who analyses data and makes a discovery. To go through the analogy step by step, the magnitude measurements would in this case be the foldit program itself and the data about the protein in question that was known in beforehand. The gamers use of a program is not analogous to them using a measuring tool to gather data, as the data they produced was completely new and originated only from their own minds. They did not just plug something into an equation and noted down the results, they had a set of data and measurements, looked long and hard at them, and then came up with a completely new equation to describe the relationship between the ones they already had.
I'm not saying they deserve a noble prize, personally I wouldn't say that their discovery is significant enough in it's own right to go that far, but they do deserve the recognition of their work as more than just an application of principles that were known in beforehand, as the inclusion of their names in the publicised scientific paper suggests.
By the way, just to be sure, you do know that the "foldit gamers" are not the same people driving the folding@home distributed computing project right? You do know what the foldit game is and what you do in it? It would be unfortunate if we would continue this discussion just to find out that we're talking about two different topics entirely.
The Foldit gamers weren't "merely" donors. They made an actual discovery.
They looked at the shape of a protein, thought, discussed and experimented in how they could fold it properly, and in the end they found a novel solution to a problem that hadn't been solved before.
That is not "donation", that is a scientific discovery.
It's almost suspiciously stupid. I wonder if the tea party or any other critical mass of stupid has some indian employees typing out that guff on sites like that.
You don't need entrepeneurs to get this kind of thing to happen, here in Norway we've had that for around 3 years around the sentrum of the city, stretching out quite far from it at the most. It's actually the universities that made this happen, and thus by extension the state (students don't pay the university money to go there, pretty much everything comes from the state).
Also, in the hungarian town Pécs where I'm currently living, there's free wifi internet in the whole town, and according to speedtest.net it clocks in at 0.2mb/s. That probably the speed its going to end with in london as well.
Jesus christ guys, RTFA. The summary is a biased piece of crap.
All that the researchers did was to show that very few of the people who supported the brief that denied that violent video games was a risk factor for agression had done any research on the topic, and that the little research that had been done by the people on that side was not good enough to be published in any major scientific journal. If you wanted to distinguish between two large groups of "experts", and wanted to asess what side actually knew what they were talking about, how would you have done it differently?
There has been alot of research on the effects of media violence before video games were as big as they are today, and the general conclusion was that media violence was in fact a risk factor for increased agression. The reason you don't hear that much about it is because that debate is pretty much settled, but you can find plenty of the studies you are looking for by simply typing in "media violence" on google scholar.
You seem to not have read TFA.
The main point in the article, is how almost none of the few published papers by the people signing to "video games don't cause violence" brief were published in respectable psychological journals. So unless you can do proper science that disproves that video games are a risk factor for agression, which incidentally is very hard to find (why is that I wonder), your solution won't get you anywhere.
I'm a first year student studying psychology, and I happened to write a paper on the subject of the effect of violent video games, and I have some opinions on this subject.
First of all, I'd like to say RTFA. The summary above is one of the worst summaries I have seen, presenting the matter in an extremely biased fashion. First of all, what the researchers in question (Bushman, Anderson, Sacks) did is not so outrageous as the article suggests. To rephrase it in a less biased way, they looked at the people who signed both the pro and con amicus briefs, and looked at how many had actually published something within the topics of the effects of video game violence or media violence. They then looked at how many of these published studies were published in respectable journals ("respectability" was calculated using a method called "impact factor", which measures the relative amount of references to articles in a certain journal). Here they found that the signers of the brief supporting the link between violent video games and violent behaviour, had 48 times more studies published in respectable journals then the opposing side, fourty eight TIMES more studies. They did this to asess the credentials and credibility of the people signing each brief, not to somehow directly prove that violent violent games cause agression, such as the OP suggests, and I would say their assesement is legitimate. What they did here was to show that almost none of the people (17%) calling themselves "experts" who signed to the fact that violent video games did not cause agressive behaviour had published a single study on the subject area, and that the studies that they had published were only accepted by obscure journals with very little credibility to them (ie. they are of very low quality). They did not prove that violent video games cause agression, but they did prove that almost all the people who said that it didn't had almost no credentials whatsoever, and that the opposing side had plenty. Make of that what you will.
This assesement paints a picture of the situation that is pretty much in agreement to what I discovered when I wrote a paper on the subject: that there are only three (Ferguson, Kilburn, Freedman) serious researchers who deny the link between violent video games and agression, and that the rest are industry funded dickheads whose only purpose is to confuse the public into thinking that there is a real debate on the topic. All of the most recent experimental, cross-sectional and longitudal studies with a decent number of citations and credibility all supported the fact that violent video games are a risk factor for increased agression (by agression I mean agressive behaviour, cognition and affect). The largest and most credible meta-study I could find (done by Anderson et al in 2010), showed without any doubt that almost all psychological research done on the subject points to the fact that this risk factor is real.
Denying the link between exposure to video game violence and increased risk of agressive behaviour, cognition and affect goes against all relevant psychological theory, former research on media violence, and even current research on the topic. The research that the OP dismisses clearly show that the people that are still denying it are the same industry funded idiots who have always denied any proper science being done on the subject of media violence, people who have no real scientific credibility. Note that we are talking about a risk factor here, not a causal link. The research doesn't show that all kids who play violent video games become violent individuals; it does however show that in combination with other factors it can play a role in making them so.
I think you misunderstand what 500 clicks a minute means. Sure, there is a a major physical aspect to it, in how fast it is actually possible for you to precisely perform actions within the game (mouse precision is more important than how fast you can click, as a click in the wrong place is at the least wasted, at the most catastrophical), but being able to click really fast really precisely, does not give you the ability to perform a corresponding number of actions within the game. To translate your mechanical speed into actions within the game, to translate those 300 clicks and button mashes into 300 actions per minute (APM), you need to have a robust mental checklist with clearly defined priorities and reactions.
To give an example, lets say that I am playing Starcraft, and is in the middle of a battle. There are many decisions to be made within the battle itself (Should I retreat? Focus a particular unit? Avoid any particular unit? Assume a particular formation of units? Use any particular abilities?), and all these actions require some degree of attention and mechanical work to perform, but meanwhile I also have to produce attacking units, make workers, make supply depots, and construct buildings according to what overall strategy I have decided to adopt. What mainly decides how fast I play in this situation, is not how fast I click, but how fast I go from performing one task to the next, how fast I know what to do. Micromanaging units for example, is not just clicking units and sending them in random directions, its having an idea of what units needs to go where and do what, and going through with that idea as fast as you can. The speed at which you macro, or manage you economy, is also to some degree decided alot by how fast you go make strategical decisions, and how much of your attention you are willing to take away from your army. The quickness and precision of your actions is only the cap of the speed of your play as long as you have a crystal clear mental checklist that tells you exactly what to do next.
What I am saying here is that while peforming 500 clicks per minute is a purely physical thing, performing 500 actions per minute is as much cerebral as it is physical (somewhat of an unrealistic number by the way, with the way APM is measured in Sc2 the best reach around 350 in especially intense moments), somewhat negating your point. Furthermore, this discussion does not even begin to adress the quality of your actions, of wether the priorities in that checklist are good or not (in other words, wether or wether not you make overall good strategical decisions, as well as devoting the right amount of attention to the right things at the right time), or the additional skills that are required beyond the ones mentioned here (having good eye movement, general awareness of everything going on on-screen, being able to count large clusters of units with some degree of accuracy in half a second and so on), to become a good Starcraft (1 or 2) progamer. There are staggering physical and mental requirements that I think very few people are aware of, and which is why I also think so many have a difficulty in accepting it as a sport.