OK, I just read the paper (subscription may be required), and I largely agree. The study used three tasks. The first one you described, and the second was an N-Back task. I don't think either of these are multi-tasking tasks, rather they are single-tasking in the presence of distractions. Single-tasking requires excluding irrelevant information, whereas multi-tasking requires awareness of more broad information, so is this any surprise? The traits that made heavy multi-taskers bad at these tests might actually be making them good at multi-tasking.
However, the third test was task switching:
"participants were presented a number and a letter, and
performed either a letter (vowel or consonant) or a number
(even or odd) classification task depending on a cue presented
before the stimulus. Switch cost was calculated as the difference
in mean response time between trials preceded by a trial of the
other type (switch trials) vs. trials preceded by a trial of the same
type (nonswitch trials). HMMs' [heavy media multitaskers] switch cost was 167 ms greater than that of LMMs [light media multitaskers], t (28)=-2.62, P less than 0.01
This, to me, is more convincing and harder to dismiss. Still, media multitasking doesn't require task switching. Why didn't they just test media multitasking directly, by having people monitor 6 video screens at a time and giving them a test on what they saw? Or maybe that kind of multi-tasking requires different skills than trying to watch TV and do homework at the same time? If so, "multi-tasking" needs to be subdivided into separate cognitive tasks to make any meaningful measurements.
I think he was making the point that marketing doesn't get the blame even when deserve it since they do the assessments, making it a privileged position. (Whether he is actually in marketing, or an engineer resentful of marketing, I wouldn't care to guess.)
I don't think ethical objections to the binary driver is the reason ID won't be supporting linux. It's money. If they thought the linux version would pay off, they would develop it.
Well, half the voters don't even believe in public health. If the carriers of an epidemic are deemed unworthy of health care, the free market solution is to wait until everybody gets it, then treat those with money. Ultimately that costs vastly more than stamping it out in the first place, but at least nobody gets healthcare they didn't deserve, and isn't that the most important thing?
Quibbling about 2% is pretty silly anyways compared to something that spoils the fun for the other 98%. Fun is why people play, after all (well, 98% of them). Who's going to play a sport where the losing team can just whip out their checkbook and buy points? (Think about it, Yankees fans).
It would be ridiculous to see this research as an indictment of fire codes as the summary (and GP) imply. OK, by tuning the exhaust manifold you can decrease backpressure a bit. That's nice. Maybe even counterintuitive. But it's not what fire codes about, which is stopping people from piling junk in front of emergency exits that blocks people exiting, which is far more significant than this.
Physics is never perfect because measurement is imperfect, and we're never sure the analogy between the math and reality is quite correct. But math itself is different. I don't think any facts widely accepted as "proven" in math have ever been overturned.
I have never understood the "rubber sheet" model of gravity either, for that reason - it seems like circular reasoning. If somebody could explain that, I will have learned something today.
I too can take the distribution of age at death, cut it in half and argue that the lower part's age expectancy is dramatically lower than the upper half.
No, you are missing the point, which is that the gulf is getting wider: "There was a steady increase in mortality inequality across the US counties between 1983 and 1999, resulting from stagnation or increase in mortality among the worst-off segment of the population."
People doing these studies are quite often bozos which start from the answer (we need socialism and redistribution) and work backward.
Which facts argue in favor of capitalist health care? You haven't cited any. Costs are lower and life expectancy is higher in countries with socialist health care. Can you dispute that, or do you simply feel the ideological considerations are more important?
No "health care system" is going to be able to overcome the human propensity to make unhealthy lifestyle choices unless it forces people to bear the costs of those choices themselves.
Really, it is hard for me to imagine that we won't eventually have direct neural interfaces. Why limit ourselves to the sensors and actuators evolution gave us?
If you read "The Road Ahead" from Bill Gates in 1995, that's what he thinks too - except he understated the importance of telephony, and the fact that they'd be referred to and often though of primarily as telephones. Which I guess proves that infrastructure is everything.
Given that the most-used features of cellphones are things other than talking on the phone (presumably included in the "Other 9%")
Even if this were serious, it only seems odd because we use the misnomer "cellphone" instead of something more accurate like, I dunno, personal digital assistant. Imagine if people insisted on thinking of PCs as typewriters (since word processing was an early killer app) and they were still called typewriters, and people started whinging that PCs shouldn't be able to run web browsers because "that's not typing," and "when will we all return to typewriters that just type!" It's nonsense.
it should be noted that nothing factual you stated conflicts with the summary or the story - you just don't think it's a bad thing. OK, fine. If it's true that life expectancy in the US is peaking, that is an interesting, objective observation. If you want to make the case that's a good thing because you think most people are inherently dumb and deserve to die, go ahead. But don't claim it's not newsworthy, or is nothing but politics.
It just depends on the application. Webmail is an obvious success; why have every company re-creating this capability when everybody needs and wants the same thing? There is the issue of trust, but then, we do put our money in banks, so that is solvable.
It seems to me like all their study found was that the average gamer is the average person in that place.
No, if they found a correlation between video gaming, weight, and depression in their subject population, what it means is that gamers are more overweight and depressed than non-gamers (not to imply causation) on average among the population they sampled. If the gamers and non-gamers in their sample were equally overweight, no matter how much overweight, then no correlation would have been found.
Now, I suppose it is theoretically possible they didn't actually find a correlation, but just took the average weight of everybody who reported gaming more than X hours per week, and found that average to be overweight - as so many here are assuming - but it's an extreme stretch of the imagination that they would be so foolish, and that the CDC would fund anybody to do that, and that nobody reviewing for the American Journal of Preventive Medicine knows what an observational correlation study is. No, I don't find that plausible at all.
Too bad nobody has posted a link to the paper though.
Do you have a link to the study? The first assertion would be crazy if they made it. You are mistaken on the second; if they found a correlation between gaming, weight and depression among respondents in that same geographical area, SAD would not explain it, since it affects gamers and non-gamers alike.
No, wrong. If levels of overweight and depression were no higher among gamers than non-gamers, there would be no correlation, regardless of the baseline.
The "N" in your study is somewhere between 3 and 15; the CDC's was 552. Also, the norms for fat and depression came from the same survey. In other words, you pick a bunch of people, ask them to describe their BMI, happiness, and gaming, then check for a correlation. Now, you could still argue this correlation will only hold in the Seattle-Tacoma area. But offhand I don't know why that would be.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the third test was task switching:
This, to me, is more convincing and harder to dismiss. Still, media multitasking doesn't require task switching. Why didn't they just test media multitasking directly, by having people monitor 6 video screens at a time and giving them a test on what they saw? Or maybe that kind of multi-tasking requires different skills than trying to watch TV and do homework at the same time? If so, "multi-tasking" needs to be subdivided into separate cognitive tasks to make any meaningful measurements.
I don't think ethical objections to the binary driver is the reason ID won't be supporting linux. It's money. If they thought the linux version would pay off, they would develop it.
Well, half the voters don't even believe in public health. If the carriers of an epidemic are deemed unworthy of health care, the free market solution is to wait until everybody gets it, then treat those with money. Ultimately that costs vastly more than stamping it out in the first place, but at least nobody gets healthcare they didn't deserve, and isn't that the most important thing?
Quibbling about 2% is pretty silly anyways compared to something that spoils the fun for the other 98%. Fun is why people play, after all (well, 98% of them). Who's going to play a sport where the losing team can just whip out their checkbook and buy points? (Think about it, Yankees fans).
It would be ridiculous to see this research as an indictment of fire codes as the summary (and GP) imply. OK, by tuning the exhaust manifold you can decrease backpressure a bit. That's nice. Maybe even counterintuitive. But it's not what fire codes about, which is stopping people from piling junk in front of emergency exits that blocks people exiting, which is far more significant than this.
Physics is never perfect because measurement is imperfect, and we're never sure the analogy between the math and reality is quite correct. But math itself is different. I don't think any facts widely accepted as "proven" in math have ever been overturned.
I have never understood the "rubber sheet" model of gravity either, for that reason - it seems like circular reasoning. If somebody could explain that, I will have learned something today.
No, you are missing the point, which is that the gulf is getting wider: "There was a steady increase in mortality inequality across the US counties between 1983 and 1999, resulting from stagnation or increase in mortality among the worst-off segment of the population."
Which facts argue in favor of capitalist health care? You haven't cited any. Costs are lower and life expectancy is higher in countries with socialist health care. Can you dispute that, or do you simply feel the ideological considerations are more important?
What evidence, if any, are you basing this on?
Really, it is hard for me to imagine that we won't eventually have direct neural interfaces. Why limit ourselves to the sensors and actuators evolution gave us?
If you read "The Road Ahead" from Bill Gates in 1995, that's what he thinks too - except he understated the importance of telephony, and the fact that they'd be referred to and often though of primarily as telephones. Which I guess proves that infrastructure is everything.
Even if this were serious, it only seems odd because we use the misnomer "cellphone" instead of something more accurate like, I dunno, personal digital assistant. Imagine if people insisted on thinking of PCs as typewriters (since word processing was an early killer app) and they were still called typewriters, and people started whinging that PCs shouldn't be able to run web browsers because "that's not typing," and "when will we all return to typewriters that just type!" It's nonsense.
it should be noted that nothing factual you stated conflicts with the summary or the story - you just don't think it's a bad thing. OK, fine. If it's true that life expectancy in the US is peaking, that is an interesting, objective observation. If you want to make the case that's a good thing because you think most people are inherently dumb and deserve to die, go ahead. But don't claim it's not newsworthy, or is nothing but politics.
No, you're thinking of BSD (ducks)
It just depends on the application. Webmail is an obvious success; why have every company re-creating this capability when everybody needs and wants the same thing? There is the issue of trust, but then, we do put our money in banks, so that is solvable.
Plus people usually refer to latency in round-trip times (e.g. ping) so it would be 2.5s latency.
Sorry, slashdot took the pi symbol out of my link. Just search for "proof that pi is irrational" at wikipedia.
Yes
No, I think "parody" in this case would mean it was a commentary on the Time copyright image (which it isn't), rather than the President himself (which is what it actually is). A similar case would be the Obama red/blue "Hope" image - the guy who created it (or derived it, if you will) was sued by the AP which holds the copyright.
No, if they found a correlation between video gaming, weight, and depression in their subject population, what it means is that gamers are more overweight and depressed than non-gamers (not to imply causation) on average among the population they sampled. If the gamers and non-gamers in their sample were equally overweight, no matter how much overweight, then no correlation would have been found.
Now, I suppose it is theoretically possible they didn't actually find a correlation, but just took the average weight of everybody who reported gaming more than X hours per week, and found that average to be overweight - as so many here are assuming - but it's an extreme stretch of the imagination that they would be so foolish, and that the CDC would fund anybody to do that, and that nobody reviewing for the American Journal of Preventive Medicine knows what an observational correlation study is. No, I don't find that plausible at all.
Too bad nobody has posted a link to the paper though.
Do you have a link to the study? The first assertion would be crazy if they made it. You are mistaken on the second; if they found a correlation between gaming, weight and depression among respondents in that same geographical area, SAD would not explain it, since it affects gamers and non-gamers alike.
No, wrong. If levels of overweight and depression were no higher among gamers than non-gamers, there would be no correlation, regardless of the baseline.
Missing the point? If anything, studies like this reinforce the intuitive explanation you are advancing.
The "N" in your study is somewhere between 3 and 15; the CDC's was 552. Also, the norms for fat and depression came from the same survey. In other words, you pick a bunch of people, ask them to describe their BMI, happiness, and gaming, then check for a correlation. Now, you could still argue this correlation will only hold in the Seattle-Tacoma area. But offhand I don't know why that would be.