There's been quite a bit of previous research done on Tetris, which has found that just about the only thing playing tetris improves is your ability to play tetris. The spatial expertise acquired while playing tetris is highly domain specific (eg. see VK Sims, RE Mayer (2002) ). In fact Tetris has so few measurable changes on behavior that it's often used as the control game for action video game research (eg. Green CS, Bavelier D. (2003)).
Playing lots of FPS or "action video games" do have significant, measurable effects on cognition including speeding reaction time, decreasing attentional blink, improving multi-element tracking, improving spatial resolution for both vision and attention, etc etc.. A lot of interesting research on the subject is being done at the Bavelier Lab . Review papers can be found here and here [PDF warning].
But why are many of the people protesting against government run health insurance on Medicare, and express a high level of satisfaction with it? Same with Medicaid. Same with the US Postal Service (Obama's ignorant quip not withstanding), which I've certainly found easier to deal with than Fedex? Not to even delve into how we (in general) trust the government for security, domestic and abroad, collecting taxes without paying the head of the IRS one out of every ~$700 tax dollars every year (actual number for the CEO of United health care of US health care expenditure)?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a national situation where there's a private company providing a better service than a public equivalent (and this is ignoring the contract asymmetry where Enron is allowed to criminally game the market and the state can't abrogate the contracts, yet the private firm can just say "oops, but our owners have limited liability" and declare bankruptcy.. which abrogates their current contracts). I have a feeling this was different in the 70's and 80s, that government was really a lot less efficient than it is now, or else I doubt Reagan would have had such pull. But I was born just around when Reagen was first elected, and in my adult life the vast majority of the arbitrary, caustic and inefficient bureaucracy that I've encountered has been in the private sector.
While the surest means of preventing excess is a lot of people paying attention to politics, and being vocal... the idea that the current proposals are generating so much vitriol while Bush's Medicare 'reform' that prohibits negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies sure has the appearance of an irrational double standard.
The real issue is why we continue to ban 'criminals' when forensics are both available for testimony but often not for further examination because of deliberate overuse. We've now been shown data that even DNA evidence can be manufatured, if it's not first tested for methyl levels. And that is totally independent of physical specification. Which bring back the essential question that we've not had updated since 2000: What are we willing to expend energy for?
or, where the fuck are my lawyers? or to put into relevance for the rich dipshit that most likely first gets away first..are mine methylated or not? given the issue that the same line of DNA research is really promising (see fakery) there will be a window to turn this into law enforcement's best approach, and then it will fail like all the others.. when are we going to remember rational policy?
Indeed, I am guilty of pursuing a sports theory of science.. where while I am always willing to laud or congratulate the previous advance.
While I've tried to step back and appreciate our achievements ("Failure is not an Option" is my favorite documentary)... I won't stand in awe if there is room for tangible improvement of our general situation.
I care quite a bit, since I study vision... and understanding the differences between a newly seeing adult and a seeing adult really help us understand a lot about brain development and theories of vision. Things like this, and Project Prakash which I've noted above have also shown that 'critical periods' in neural development, while they exist, are a lot less important in humans than say, cats (or barn owls), where most of the classic studies of critical period have been done. This leaves me optimistic that both genetic/stem cell approaches and neural prosthesis in general have a lot more promise than was thought several years ago.
The point of my comment though, was that the summary implied that she had gained essentially normal visual function, which I doubt is the case... and that while this is an amazing treatment that can probably help quite a few people, we still have a lot of work we can do to improve it -- especially on the low-tech side such as better visual displays and therapy regimens that improve final post-operative function.
This is very cool stuff. But in terms of adapting 'remarkably quickly' to visual stimuli after congenital blindness, I'm slightly dubious. There's been quite a bit of recent research done on this recently through Project Prakash (which is also a very cool humanitarian mission at the same time), which finds that adults who regain vision see things very differently than we do... For example that have major problems with depth, object segmentation (think two overlapping squares -- normal observers will typically say there are two squares, overlapping, while newly seeing adults will report 1 square, where the overlap occurs), full field motion etc.
I think most people in the neuroscience community are aware of the limits of current fMRI approaches. The general linear model, which is used to compute blood flow, is rightly under considerable attack from a number of directions (it assumes, among other things, that all measured hemodynamic response is the result of changes in underlying neural activity, and there is now quite a bit of evidence that this is not the case). And the basic paradigm for most fMRI experiments, especially ones examining 'higher cognition' and emotion is the deeply limited subtractive inference (which was once described to me as "You show somebody a picture of their ass, and you show them a picture of a hole in the ground, subtract the two responses, and claim you've figured out the area responsible for discerning your asshole from a hole in the ground). The 'double dipping' described in the article is actually quite a minor concern compared with the above, although certainly a real one.
But the real value of fMRI, regardless of the deeply flawed current methodologies, is that it does give us a very good idea what areas of the brain we should be looking at with other experimental techniques, such as various types of electrophysiology, anatomical tracing, inactivation etc... And the good news is that there are fMRI methods being developed which are much more robust and will be able to tell us a great deal more about what's going on in the entire brain over various tasks, such as multispectral MRI and attempts to use stronger magnets to directly measure currents, rather than blood flow. So while I certainly agree that there is an 'Oooh! Shiny!' element to a lot of current fMRI research on higher cognition, and one should be deeply skeptical about many of the assertions made on the basis of such data, that doesn't mean fMRI is not an incredibly useful research method, and is likely to become even more so.
I should have made clear, I'm talking about the subject of the article, which is not video games made today, but possible incredibly vivid, detailed and immersive games of the future.
And while I agree that there are many other things, some of which you mentioned, which are more desensitizing, corrosive and dangerous today -- that doesn't mean that we can write off the potential for future games to lead communal harm.
The main reason for this is because our brains behave very differently when passively observing, than when we are interacting directly with our environment. You put people in an environment that requires little willing suspension of disbelief for long enough, and have them act within that environment, massive psychological changes can occur rapidly. I think video games are far away from this threshold at present, but I'm fairly sure that they'll eventually get there.
And in terms of consequences deterrence, there's a reason that I qualified the possible problems to upset/emotionally charged situations, which is that people don't evaluate consequences in emotional situations rationally.
(As a personal aside, I'm not anti-video game in general at all. Not only do I play them quite a bit, but I'm also a neuroscientist who in part models the effects of gaming on vision / motor control. Action video games have considerable positive effects if you're a regular player.. they increase visual acuity, dramatically improve visual attention, increase spatial awareness, shorten reaction times (video games are better than actually playing sports for this), and may mitigate several types of reading disability.. )
You seriously underestimate how easy it is to psychologically indoctrinate a 'normal' person to do all sorts of horrific things. The reason ex-combat soldiers rarely go on killing sprees is the indoctrination is surrounded by discipline... which while it allows them to stop killing when they get home apparently, as we are finding out, has a major psychological cost.
And even if you doubt the psychological evidence, such as from Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment, do you really think everybody actively involved in the Holocaust, Siberian prison camps, Cultural revolution, Rwandan genocides, Darfur,Bosnia/Serbia, Armenian and Kurdish genocides, My lai, the Killing fields, etc, etc etc were all psychopaths?
Or just maybe, it's not that hard to desensitize a person towards killing. And if it's done in a non-disciplined setting, especially something like a video game where you get some type of reward for instigating indiscriminate murder, the line will get blurry for quite a few people if they get upset, or are in an emotionally charged situation.
I think that glibly writing off any possible consequences to 'well, they were psychopaths anyway' ignores both what we know of psychology and history.
Congrats.. you are my first foe, because to are a blathering idiot.. This whole situation has nothing to do with non-Iranian politics.. it is a 3 way fight between the conservative clerics (Khamenei), the conservative seculars (Ahmadinejad), and the young secular movement who wants actual democracy and who views Mousavi as the figurehead to that end. Nobody has a clue how it's going to turn out or who has the stronger stomach, but this is an extremely serious situation... and neither the US nor Europe has any sway at the moment
I'd say that tying allowance to grades is counter productive in that it makes school 'work.' School is already tedious enough as it is without making scholastic performance a job. What my parents did (which I think worked pretty well) was essentially paid me to do chores by the chore (eg. 50 cents for setting the table, a dollar for clearing it, etc etc). That made the money worth something, while allowing academic achievement to be it's own reward (it helped that my parents were extremely proactive in finding subject related challenges, or encouraged me to study what I was interested in when the school curriculum was going too slowly). That way intellectual achievement is reinforced as not really being work, which I think is a good result.
If a person expatriates from the US, they may have to pay taxes for up to 10 years after renouncing their citizenship if they continue to have many types business dealings / or visit the US for too long a time. I see no reason why each job that's outsourced by a corporation shouldn't be taxed similarly.
And how is the parent supposed to do this, when these companies can add for charge services to your contract without prior notification, where there is no clear and concise explanation of where you may incur expenses, etc? There is such a strong movement to blame the parent/mortgage recipient/other borrower and insist they they live up to their end of contracts, while allowing various banks and corporations abrogate their contracts again and again (but heaven forbid the government should be able to do so)-- simply because they they had the legal and lobbying expertise to get this behavior legalized. Perhaps you know only responsible, technically literate parents who have countless hours to devote not only to their children but also to closely analyze everything they have to sign in a given day, but I certainly haven't.
And you are ignoring the fact that when there is shortfall of aggregate demand, as is the current case, having the government borrow money to break windows actually does help. It narrows the demand shortfall. Of course, it's better to spend the money projects more useful than breaking windows, but any spending that helps close the demand shortfall is useful.
(Keynes version of breaking windows was the government digging pit, placing boxes of cash at the bottom, then filling it in -- which he advocated over inaction.)
In an academic setting plagiarism is generally more broadly defined as copying material without proper attribution. It doesn't matter whether the existing material was created by you, or somebody else. Failing to cite or acknowledge the original work is considered dishonest because non-attributed material is expected to be novel.
In practice, the level attribution you need give for recycling material you have created is low, so long as some attribution is there. In the grandparent's situation, informally communicating to the professor that parts of a new paper are adapted from a previous one is sufficient in most situations.
Since that was 2006, I decided to see what they decided.. The Utah Supreme Court decision (pdf warning) wasn't nearly as imbecilic as the prosecutor, trial judge or appeals court.
I think the main reason that it's not obvious is that the structure of the retina is quite a bit more complex than you make it out to be. First of all, there is essentially an exponential fall-off of receptor density as we move away from the fovea. Secondly, there are several horizontal channels in the lamina of the retina that aggregate receptor inputs in an center-surround manner (eg. on-center, off surround, off center, on surround)- and these horizontal channels are of differing lengths.
So it's not such an easy question of which, if any, are the privileged pieces of the circuit, or which, if spatial areas of the retina are privileged, since there are multiple spatial scales in the former, and spatial frequency gradients in the latter.
There are also some complications about time averaging. The retina has both on and off channels - on channels have fast temporal response to increased light, then their activity decays back to 'base', while off channels have the opposite transient response. So you have asymmetric temporal responses between the channels (which is one of the reasons you have center-surround processing). You also have the detail that most neurons in the retina don't spike, they communicate using membrane potentials rather than action potentials (spikes) - and the temporal resolution of many of these channels is still not fully understood.
I think the reason that your insight isn't obvious, is because it's very difficult to translate that insight into a form that's understood by those expert in the anatomy and physiology so they can tell you whether your assumptions are consistent with the data.
not the original poster but I got curious.. apparently the US accounts for about 47% of worldwide military spending and accounts for about 85% of the total military market. If those facts are correct, the arms industry represents about 63% of US industry (12.99% of GDP for arms industry, 20.6% of GDP total). I don't know how or if these numbers account for Iraq/Afghanistan expenditure.
But I'll take the computing power of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bohr, Segre, Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Compton, Bethe, Tolman, von Karman, Ulam, Feynman, etc etc over any supercomputer every day of the week;)
Slashdot Mirror
There's been quite a bit of previous research done on Tetris, which has found that just about the only thing playing tetris improves is your ability to play tetris. The spatial expertise acquired while playing tetris is highly domain specific (eg. see VK Sims, RE Mayer (2002) ). In fact Tetris has so few measurable changes on behavior that it's often used as the control game for action video game research (eg. Green CS, Bavelier D. (2003)).
Playing lots of FPS or "action video games" do have significant, measurable effects on cognition including speeding reaction time, decreasing attentional blink, improving multi-element tracking, improving spatial resolution for both vision and attention, etc etc.. A lot of interesting research on the subject is being done at the Bavelier Lab . Review papers can be found here and here [PDF warning].
But why are many of the people protesting against government run health insurance on Medicare, and express a high level of satisfaction with it? Same with Medicaid. Same with the US Postal Service (Obama's ignorant quip not withstanding), which I've certainly found easier to deal with than Fedex? Not to even delve into how we (in general) trust the government for security, domestic and abroad, collecting taxes without paying the head of the IRS one out of every ~$700 tax dollars every year (actual number for the CEO of United health care of US health care expenditure)?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a national situation where there's a private company providing a better service than a public equivalent (and this is ignoring the contract asymmetry where Enron is allowed to criminally game the market and the state can't abrogate the contracts, yet the private firm can just say "oops, but our owners have limited liability" and declare bankruptcy.. which abrogates their current contracts). I have a feeling this was different in the 70's and 80s, that government was really a lot less efficient than it is now, or else I doubt Reagan would have had such pull. But I was born just around when Reagen was first elected, and in my adult life the vast majority of the arbitrary, caustic and inefficient bureaucracy that I've encountered has been in the private sector.
While the surest means of preventing excess is a lot of people paying attention to politics, and being vocal... the idea that the current proposals are generating so much vitriol while Bush's Medicare 'reform' that prohibits negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies sure has the appearance of an irrational double standard.
The real issue is why we continue to ban 'criminals' when forensics are both available for testimony but often not for further examination because of deliberate overuse. We've now been shown data that even DNA evidence can be manufatured, if it's not first tested for methyl levels. And that is totally independent of physical specification. Which bring back the essential question that we've not had updated since 2000: What are we willing to expend energy for?
This is why us big ten folk are rarely the problem, and rareley become it.. OSU sucks, but that's there problem
or, where the fuck are my lawyers? or to put into relevance for the rich dipshit that most likely first gets away first..are mine methylated or not? given the issue that the same line of DNA research is really promising (see fakery) there will be a window to turn this into law enforcement's best approach, and then it will fail like all the others.. when are we going to remember rational policy?
Indeed, I am guilty of pursuing a sports theory of science.. where while I am always willing to laud or congratulate the previous advance.
While I've tried to step back and appreciate our achievements ("Failure is not an Option" is my favorite documentary)... I won't stand in awe if there is room for tangible improvement of our general situation.
I care quite a bit, since I study vision... and understanding the differences between a newly seeing adult and a seeing adult really help us understand a lot about brain development and theories of vision. Things like this, and Project Prakash which I've noted above have also shown that 'critical periods' in neural development, while they exist, are a lot less important in humans than say, cats (or barn owls), where most of the classic studies of critical period have been done. This leaves me optimistic that both genetic/stem cell approaches and neural prosthesis in general have a lot more promise than was thought several years ago.
The point of my comment though, was that the summary implied that she had gained essentially normal visual function, which I doubt is the case... and that while this is an amazing treatment that can probably help quite a few people, we still have a lot of work we can do to improve it -- especially on the low-tech side such as better visual displays and therapy regimens that improve final post-operative function.
This is very cool stuff. But in terms of adapting 'remarkably quickly' to visual stimuli after congenital blindness, I'm slightly dubious. There's been quite a bit of recent research done on this recently through Project Prakash (which is also a very cool humanitarian mission at the same time), which finds that adults who regain vision see things very differently than we do... For example that have major problems with depth, object segmentation (think two overlapping squares -- normal observers will typically say there are two squares, overlapping, while newly seeing adults will report 1 square, where the overlap occurs), full field motion etc.
I think most people in the neuroscience community are aware of the limits of current fMRI approaches. The general linear model, which is used to compute blood flow, is rightly under considerable attack from a number of directions (it assumes, among other things, that all measured hemodynamic response is the result of changes in underlying neural activity, and there is now quite a bit of evidence that this is not the case). And the basic paradigm for most fMRI experiments, especially ones examining 'higher cognition' and emotion is the deeply limited subtractive inference (which was once described to me as "You show somebody a picture of their ass, and you show them a picture of a hole in the ground, subtract the two responses, and claim you've figured out the area responsible for discerning your asshole from a hole in the ground). The 'double dipping' described in the article is actually quite a minor concern compared with the above, although certainly a real one.
But the real value of fMRI, regardless of the deeply flawed current methodologies, is that it does give us a very good idea what areas of the brain we should be looking at with other experimental techniques, such as various types of electrophysiology, anatomical tracing, inactivation etc... And the good news is that there are fMRI methods being developed which are much more robust and will be able to tell us a great deal more about what's going on in the entire brain over various tasks, such as multispectral MRI and attempts to use stronger magnets to directly measure currents, rather than blood flow. So while I certainly agree that there is an 'Oooh! Shiny!' element to a lot of current fMRI research on higher cognition, and one should be deeply skeptical about many of the assertions made on the basis of such data, that doesn't mean fMRI is not an incredibly useful research method, and is likely to become even more so.
I should have made clear, I'm talking about the subject of the article, which is not video games made today, but possible incredibly vivid, detailed and immersive games of the future.
And while I agree that there are many other things, some of which you mentioned, which are more desensitizing, corrosive and dangerous today -- that doesn't mean that we can write off the potential for future games to lead communal harm.
The main reason for this is because our brains behave very differently when passively observing, than when we are interacting directly with our environment. You put people in an environment that requires little willing suspension of disbelief for long enough, and have them act within that environment, massive psychological changes can occur rapidly. I think video games are far away from this threshold at present, but I'm fairly sure that they'll eventually get there.
And in terms of consequences deterrence, there's a reason that I qualified the possible problems to upset/emotionally charged situations, which is that people don't evaluate consequences in emotional situations rationally.
(As a personal aside, I'm not anti-video game in general at all. Not only do I play them quite a bit, but I'm also a neuroscientist who in part models the effects of gaming on vision / motor control. Action video games have considerable positive effects if you're a regular player.. they increase visual acuity, dramatically improve visual attention, increase spatial awareness, shorten reaction times (video games are better than actually playing sports for this), and may mitigate several types of reading disability.. )
You seriously underestimate how easy it is to psychologically indoctrinate a 'normal' person to do all sorts of horrific things. The reason ex-combat soldiers rarely go on killing sprees is the indoctrination is surrounded by discipline... which while it allows them to stop killing when they get home apparently, as we are finding out, has a major psychological cost.
And even if you doubt the psychological evidence, such as from Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment, do you really think everybody actively involved in the Holocaust, Siberian prison camps, Cultural revolution, Rwandan genocides, Darfur,Bosnia/Serbia, Armenian and Kurdish genocides, My lai, the Killing fields, etc, etc etc were all psychopaths?
Or just maybe, it's not that hard to desensitize a person towards killing. And if it's done in a non-disciplined setting, especially something like a video game where you get some type of reward for instigating indiscriminate murder, the line will get blurry for quite a few people if they get upset, or are in an emotionally charged situation.
I think that glibly writing off any possible consequences to 'well, they were psychopaths anyway' ignores both what we know of psychology and history.
Congrats.. you are my first foe, because to are a blathering idiot.. This whole situation has nothing to do with non-Iranian politics.. it is a 3 way fight between the conservative clerics (Khamenei), the conservative seculars (Ahmadinejad), and the young secular movement who wants actual democracy and who views Mousavi as the figurehead to that end. Nobody has a clue how it's going to turn out or who has the stronger stomach, but this is an extremely serious situation... and neither the US nor Europe has any sway at the moment
I'd say that tying allowance to grades is counter productive in that it makes school 'work.' School is already tedious enough as it is without making scholastic performance a job. What my parents did (which I think worked pretty well) was essentially paid me to do chores by the chore (eg. 50 cents for setting the table, a dollar for clearing it, etc etc). That made the money worth something, while allowing academic achievement to be it's own reward (it helped that my parents were extremely proactive in finding subject related challenges, or encouraged me to study what I was interested in when the school curriculum was going too slowly). That way intellectual achievement is reinforced as not really being work, which I think is a good result.
If a person expatriates from the US, they may have to pay taxes for up to 10 years after renouncing their citizenship if they continue to have many types business dealings / or visit the US for too long a time. I see no reason why each job that's outsourced by a corporation shouldn't be taxed similarly.
And how is the parent supposed to do this, when these companies can add for charge services to your contract without prior notification, where there is no clear and concise explanation of where you may incur expenses, etc? There is such a strong movement to blame the parent/mortgage recipient/other borrower and insist they they live up to their end of contracts, while allowing various banks and corporations abrogate their contracts again and again (but heaven forbid the government should be able to do so)-- simply because they they had the legal and lobbying expertise to get this behavior legalized. Perhaps you know only responsible, technically literate parents who have countless hours to devote not only to their children but also to closely analyze everything they have to sign in a given day, but I certainly haven't.
Can be found here.
And you are ignoring the fact that when there is shortfall of aggregate demand, as is the current case, having the government borrow money to break windows actually does help. It narrows the demand shortfall. Of course, it's better to spend the money projects more useful than breaking windows, but any spending that helps close the demand shortfall is useful.
(Keynes version of breaking windows was the government digging pit, placing boxes of cash at the bottom, then filling it in -- which he advocated over inaction.)
In an academic setting plagiarism is generally more broadly defined as copying material without proper attribution. It doesn't matter whether the existing material was created by you, or somebody else. Failing to cite or acknowledge the original work is considered dishonest because non-attributed material is expected to be novel.
In practice, the level attribution you need give for recycling material you have created is low, so long as some attribution is there. In the grandparent's situation, informally communicating to the professor that parts of a new paper are adapted from a previous one is sufficient in most situations.
Since that was 2006, I decided to see what they decided.. The Utah Supreme Court decision (pdf warning) wasn't nearly as imbecilic as the prosecutor, trial judge or appeals court.
I think the main reason that it's not obvious is that the structure of the retina is quite a bit more complex than you make it out to be. First of all, there is essentially an exponential fall-off of receptor density as we move away from the fovea. Secondly, there are several horizontal channels in the lamina of the retina that aggregate receptor inputs in an center-surround manner (eg. on-center, off surround, off center, on surround)- and these horizontal channels are of differing lengths.
So it's not such an easy question of which, if any, are the privileged pieces of the circuit, or which, if spatial areas of the retina are privileged, since there are multiple spatial scales in the former, and spatial frequency gradients in the latter.
There are also some complications about time averaging. The retina has both on and off channels - on channels have fast temporal response to increased light, then their activity decays back to 'base', while off channels have the opposite transient response. So you have asymmetric temporal responses between the channels (which is one of the reasons you have center-surround processing). You also have the detail that most neurons in the retina don't spike, they communicate using membrane potentials rather than action potentials (spikes) - and the temporal resolution of many of these channels is still not fully understood.
I think the reason that your insight isn't obvious, is because it's very difficult to translate that insight into a form that's understood by those expert in the anatomy and physiology so they can tell you whether your assumptions are consistent with the data.
Michele Rucci's lab figured out a while back that microsaccades improve our perception of high spatial frequency stimuli.. here's the article.
not the original poster but I got curious.. apparently the US accounts for about 47% of worldwide military spending and accounts for about 85% of the total military market. If those facts are correct, the arms industry represents about 63% of US industry (12.99% of GDP for arms industry, 20.6% of GDP total). I don't know how or if these numbers account for Iraq/Afghanistan expenditure.
But I'll take the computing power of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bohr, Segre, Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Compton, Bethe, Tolman, von Karman, Ulam, Feynman, etc etc over any supercomputer every day of the week ;)
Robert Gates (Sec. of Defense) was deliberately absent from the ceremony to preserve the line of succession.