is that with games you are honing your center vision, able to track more objects in a limited field of view. however, this would mean you have lower peripheral vision capabilities.
This was actually the exact opposite of what they found in the study. You should read the article itself if you want to see how exactly they tested this (article linked here). But basically they tested the recognition of a shape with a distracting shape next to it, both video game players and non-video game players reaction times were slower when the distractor shape was different from the target shape. However, gamers were ALSO affected when the distractor shape was on the opposite side of the screen, in their periphery, while non-gamers did not even process the image (yes, you can determine this based on reaction times...read the article to find out more, I'm just summarizing).
The way to test this, of course, is to test the groups' visual abilities first at the onset of the experiment, then have them play the games extensively for a lengthy period of time (several weeks, months, or years depending on how long such neurological structures take to emerge), then test those abilities again.
They did do this, if you go read the full text of the article (linked off their lab webpage here) you can see exactly what the experiments were and what their claims are.
For those of you who don't want to read a scientific journal article, basically what they did was to have non-gamers play MOHAA for 10 days straight, an hour a day, and they then re-tested the non-gamers using the same tests and they did remarkably better.
"They just did better because they had already done it" you say? Another control group of non-gamers played tetris (not very demanding) for the same period, one hour a day, and they got NO better when they performed the experiments again.
I don't fault you for not knowing this because there was no way to read the full text article unless you paid Nature, or live with the experimenter and have access to the paper and know where the PDF resides. (It helps that the main researcher is my roomate and i was a subject in the study)
side note: the experimenters did not claim that this leads to better driving, they claim that it shows that people who play FPPOV games can better focus on multiple objects in their field of view, especially items in your periphery...and yes, this SHOULD then logically mean they are better able to process quickly moving and changing objects in their field of view, objects that are very common while driving a car.
My roomate did this study and I was going to wait to post it on/. until today when they were allowed by Nature to post the full-text of the article, but here it is, as a measly reply:
As a side note:
The guy who did the study is a 22-year old fellow gamer who wondered why his performance in visual attention tasks was so much higher than the average, and decided to start this as his senior research, which ended up taking 2.5 years to complete.
I went to a very good, $32,000/yr school because I had scholarships, grants, assloads of loans, and 2 sets of parents helping to pay...I graduated last May and make less than I paid in tuition each year...How on earth that does the fact that Jesse goes to an expensive school mean he should be paying this money any more than you or I?
How about modding parent "-1: Jealous" or "-1: Mad At the World"
This is exactly what I thought when I heard these students had settled. I told my girlfriend (no, don't mod me +1 funny for saying 'my girlfriend') that (IMHO of course) it is our "duty" as fellow music downloaders/swappers to help this kid out. He is paying $12,000 because millions of students, including many on/., download illegal music.
I understand that the overall "cause" is better helped by donating to the EFF...but I'd rather support this kid out who could just as well have been me.
For those of us without a dedicated DVD player, this is pretty good news. Now I can watch all those movies my friend burns me from Blockbuster (note to MPAA: I'm only kidding.) on my PS2...
On a more serious note, will the support for DVD-RW discs make it easier to play burned games? I haven't had any experience with that since the PSX.
You make a good point. Articulate, intelligent, well thought out, and clearly communicated. I especially like your use of the word "bitch" to emphasize your point and let everybody know that you're nobody to be messed with, bravo.
Maybe you just don't know what funny is. Here is a list of 5 things that are always, without a shadow of a doubt, funny:
Silly hats
A man in a chicken suit
over-sized phones
Any joke told with a british accent
Seeing somebody getting hit in the groin with any ball-shaped object
If this is supposed to be a joke, I think he forgot to add the humor. If it is supposed to be for-real, why not throw in some more devices that really have nothing to do with each other... say a pacemaker, a microwave oven, or, like, the wheel?
Or why not compare subtle (subtle, if you are 6 or Phineas Gage) satire and the people who don't get it?
It's an amazing thing having a wireless network in my apartment. We have taken such a liking to email/IM/web browsing (no pr0n, that's just kinda weird) while dropping the Cosby kids off at the pool, that we decided to coin it the "Wump", or "Wireless-Dump".
Crashes my mozilla too when I try to go to the 2nd page...then again, a LOT of sites crash mozilla, especially with the java plugin installed (geotrust.com for one).
Anybody mind posting the list here? Get free good karma by helping a pasty brotha' out.
I can say that I would have put Lisa the Vegetarian in my top 5, but what do I know, Im' not a nationally syndicated craphole....er, magazine.
That's how most of my CS professors decided the curve for a class, and it seems like a pretty good way to do things. You pick the average grade (mean? median? im no mathemagician) and make that the cutoff for a B-/C+ and make the grade scale based on that number. Often in the upper level classes you could get a 65 and have anywhere from a B to an A. This way the students are not punished for a test that was poorly written, or just plain too hard. In the ideal world no test is too hard, but tell that to any college student and watch them laugh at you (humanities majors don't count, i was one for a year...).
How long exactly did it take from the time the first complaints hit your mailserver for you to realise hotticker was responsible, call and ask them for evidence about their mailing list, wait for their response, deem their response nowhere near good enough and then pull the plug? If it was less than 24 hours then I might agree that having your/24 listed is perhaps a tad harsh. But I suspect it was in fact much longer than that, perhaps as much as a week or more.
They were called the day complaints came in and terminated at the end of the next day. Our entire class C was simply seen as part of their growing network.
I notice on your SPEWS record [spews.org] that your/24 has been downgraded to level 2. Your three webhosting machines (io, colossus and jupiter) are still at level 1, but any mail they want to send can be smarthosted through your level-2'd mailserver.
Unless the main mail server for clients is one of the 3 level 1 servers (which it is).
Having your servers on as level 1 for months and your class C as a level 2 for 6 months is absolutely absurd for ONE case of ONE mailing of spam. Yes we should have looked into their history, and we now do with new clients.
The issue comes down to more than "Is SPEWS bad?". It is a matter of legitimate emails being blocked by uninformed sysadmins who don't realize they are NOT solving their spam problem, they are reducing their spam problem and causing another problem with rejected mail that should be getting through. How is it fair for the users of their networks, often entire universities (my alma mater uses spews and I could not send email to any addresses within that domain for a month...), to block legitimate mail, and to _not tell_ the users of their network that they are not receiving mail because the Univeristy/Organization/Company wants to help rid the world of spam?
Once we can tell you're not providing any more services to $SPAMMER - which may take a little time - we'll downgrade you to level 2
How about: their web site is inactive, all emails to the domain bounce? And regardless, too many organizations just take SPEWS list, regardless of level, and block those servers.
You would be hard pressed to find a more ethical ISP than mine, and one who believes as firmly in the "ethics of the internet (and business in general)". Mistakes are made, you learn from them, and SPEWS is there to rape you in the ass and allow other admins to punish their users for the mistakes of another ISP.
Sysadmins need to educate themselves about SPEWS before hastily hopping on board the "I'm preventing spam!" bandwagon. SPEWS doesnt prevent spam, it prevents spam AND legitimate emails.
Often it boils down to "The All ighty ollar". An irresponsible ISP is willing to let a spammer continue to pay for their outrageous use of bandwidth as long as they can. SPEWS does nothing more than allow the spammer to spread the wealth to other ISPs once their current one is blacklisted. And yes, this ISP should be punished, its sysadmins and CEO should be dragged out into the street and beaten. However, until SPEWS starts carrying out vigilante justice, SPEWS is doing more harm than it does good, and is not a viable spam solution.
Police Chief: My Mayor, as you asked we have devised a scheme to catch every criminal in the city before they can comitt a crime.
Mayor: That's amazing! Let's get started
Police Chief: There is a catch. It only catches criminals registered in our "Ex-Con Database" and 10% of the people imprisoned will be random towns-people who have done no wrong.
Mayor: But, it catches criminals right?
Police Chief: Well, yes, but...
Mayor: Then let's do it!
Welcome to Spewsville...Where the world is a better place..for some people.
They block IPs based soley on the fact your upstream provider hosts or has hosted in the past, someone the SPEWS "admins" (and I use that term losely) believe to be spammers.
As a sysadmin for an ISP I can assure you that this is absolutely the case. There is no human contact at Spews, the entire system is automated. Which means that when their system is alerted to a "spammer" within a particular class C, that entire class C is quickly blocked by thousands of misinformed SAs who don't understand that they are in the process going to block legitimate emails that the people within their network have every right to receive.
Blocking large blocks of class Cs, just because someone happens to share IP space with an alleged spammer is the WRONG way to filter spam.
A hosting provider should be responsible for the domains they host. But there is rarely anything a provider can do to pre-emptively stop a spammer. Just recently, my company signed up a new company for Co-Location. Within a week, this company sent out a huge spam mailing. The moment we saw spam complaints come in we called the company and demanded proof that their mailing list consisted solely of opt-in addresses. They had no proof and their contract was immediately terminated for violating our Acceptable Use Policy. However, at this point our entire class C (housing our main mail server for hundreds of websites and ten times that many individual email clients) was listed in SPEWS database. Apparently this company had, in the past, under a different name, been blacklisted as a spammer. We were now added to the list of their hosting providers and could not, despite our best effort, contact a single human at SPEWS to explain our situation. As a result, for over 3 weeks, thousands of mail servers were rejecting our clients' mail as coming from a spam-server.
I ask you, how does that make the internet a better place?
Spam is a waste of bandwidth, of time, and it's insanely annoying, as a sysadmin I realize that as much as anybody (except maybe Alan Ralsky). But SPEWS is a horrible "solution" to the problem. Too many misinformed sysadmins use SPEWS at the expense of those who use their network.
Another great place for downloading legal music is the Etree Internet Archive. You can download live sets from a good number of bands who allow taping and trading of their shows...(see list here)
And yeah, the concerts are huge, but since they are in.shn format, it is lossless compression (unlike mp3s, which are a lossy compression) and can only get a.wav file down to about 60% of its original size, but the quality is worth it.
As far as the concerts not being as good as many live CDs...you would be surprised. The majority of taper-friendly concerts are recorded by people with well over $2,000-$3,000 worth of equipment who tape 50+ concerts a year and are often, in my opinion, better than a lot of the shit put out by the labels.
-------
Build a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a day. Light a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Slashdot Mirror
This was actually the exact opposite of what they found in the study. You should read the article itself if you want to see how exactly they tested this (article linked here). But basically they tested the recognition of a shape with a distracting shape next to it, both video game players and non-video game players reaction times were slower when the distractor shape was different from the target shape. However, gamers were ALSO affected when the distractor shape was on the opposite side of the screen, in their periphery, while non-gamers did not even process the image (yes, you can determine this based on reaction times...read the article to find out more, I'm just summarizing).
They did do this, if you go read the full text of the article (linked off their lab webpage here) you can see exactly what the experiments were and what their claims are.
For those of you who don't want to read a scientific journal article, basically what they did was to have non-gamers play MOHAA for 10 days straight, an hour a day, and they then re-tested the non-gamers using the same tests and they did remarkably better.
"They just did better because they had already done it" you say? Another control group of non-gamers played tetris (not very demanding) for the same period, one hour a day, and they got NO better when they performed the experiments again.
I don't fault you for not knowing this because there was no way to read the full text article unless you paid Nature, or live with the experimenter and have access to the paper and know where the PDF resides. (It helps that the main researcher is my roomate and i was a subject in the study)
side note: the experimenters did not claim that this leads to better driving, they claim that it shows that people who play FPPOV games can better focus on multiple objects in their field of view, especially items in your periphery...and yes, this SHOULD then logically mean they are better able to process quickly moving and changing objects in their field of view, objects that are very common while driving a car.
My roomate did this study and I was going to wait to post it on /. until today when they were allowed by Nature to post the full-text of the article, but here it is, as a measly reply:
The effect of video games on visual attention
As a side note:
The guy who did the study is a 22-year old fellow gamer who wondered why his performance in visual attention tasks was so much higher than the average, and decided to start this as his senior research, which ended up taking 2.5 years to complete.
How the fuck is this "+5: Insightful"??
I went to a very good, $32,000/yr school because I had scholarships, grants, assloads of loans, and 2 sets of parents helping to pay...I graduated last May and make less than I paid in tuition each year...How on earth that does the fact that Jesse goes to an expensive school mean he should be paying this money any more than you or I?
How about modding parent "-1: Jealous" or "-1: Mad At the World"
This is exactly what I thought when I heard these students had settled. I told my girlfriend (no, don't mod me +1 funny for saying 'my girlfriend') that (IMHO of course) it is our "duty" as fellow music downloaders/swappers to help this kid out. He is paying $12,000 because millions of students, including many on /., download illegal music.
I understand that the overall "cause" is better helped by donating to the EFF...but I'd rather support this kid out who could just as well have been me.
For those of us without a dedicated DVD player, this is pretty good news. Now I can watch all those movies my friend burns me from Blockbuster (note to MPAA: I'm only kidding.) on my PS2...
On a more serious note, will the support for DVD-RW discs make it easier to play burned games? I haven't had any experience with that since the PSX.
You forgot monkeys!
Monkeys are indeed always funny, and their humor value is tripled when they are dancing or wearing a funny hat or bellhop suit.
Maybe you just don't know what funny is. Here is a list of 5 things that are always, without a shadow of a doubt, funny:
I realize its early Monday morning, but I could have sworn that the headline read:
"Triple E Enlargement Lends Hope to Quantum Computer"
Needless to say I was both baffled and erotically curious.
Maybe I should clear somthing up....I shit *into* the toilet, not *onto* my hands. I'm not French
It's an amazing thing having a wireless network in my apartment. We have taken such a liking to email/IM/web browsing (no pr0n, that's just kinda weird) while dropping the Cosby kids off at the pool, that we decided to coin it the "Wump", or "Wireless-Dump".
taking a shit + wireless broadband = heaven
Trust me, it is the life of kings.
What's next on slashdot?
As a side note, how long will it be before Slashdot posts are flamed for not being XHTML compliant?
Crashes my mozilla too when I try to go to the 2nd page...then again, a LOT of sites crash mozilla, especially with the java plugin installed (geotrust.com for one).
Anybody mind posting the list here? Get free good karma by helping a pasty brotha' out.
I can say that I would have put Lisa the Vegetarian in my top 5, but what do I know, Im' not a nationally syndicated craphole....er, magazine.
I meant B-/C+ not B+/C-, that would be quite different.
That's how most of my CS professors decided the curve for a class, and it seems like a pretty good way to do things. You pick the average grade (mean? median? im no mathemagician) and make that the cutoff for a B-/C+ and make the grade scale based on that number. Often in the upper level classes you could get a 65 and have anywhere from a B to an A. This way the students are not punished for a test that was poorly written, or just plain too hard. In the ideal world no test is too hard, but tell that to any college student and watch them laugh at you (humanities majors don't count, i was one for a year...).
They were called the day complaints came in and terminated at the end of the next day. Our entire class C was simply seen as part of their growing network.
I notice on your SPEWS record [spews.org] that your
Unless the main mail server for clients is one of the 3 level 1 servers (which it is).
Having your servers on as level 1 for months and your class C as a level 2 for 6 months is absolutely absurd for ONE case of ONE mailing of spam. Yes we should have looked into their history, and we now do with new clients.
The issue comes down to more than "Is SPEWS bad?". It is a matter of legitimate emails being blocked by uninformed sysadmins who don't realize they are NOT solving their spam problem, they are reducing their spam problem and causing another problem with rejected mail that should be getting through. How is it fair for the users of their networks, often entire universities (my alma mater uses spews and I could not send email to any addresses within that domain for a month...), to block legitimate mail, and to _not tell_ the users of their network that they are not receiving mail because the Univeristy/Organization/Company wants to help rid the world of spam?
How about: their web site is inactive, all emails to the domain bounce? And regardless, too many organizations just take SPEWS list, regardless of level, and block those servers.
You would be hard pressed to find a more ethical ISP than mine, and one who believes as firmly in the "ethics of the internet (and business in general)". Mistakes are made, you learn from them, and SPEWS is there to rape you in the ass and allow other admins to punish their users for the mistakes of another ISP.
Often it boils down to "The All ighty ollar". An irresponsible ISP is willing to let a spammer continue to pay for their outrageous use of bandwidth as long as they can. SPEWS does nothing more than allow the spammer to spread the wealth to other ISPs once their current one is blacklisted. And yes, this ISP should be punished, its sysadmins and CEO should be dragged out into the street and beaten. However, until SPEWS starts carrying out vigilante justice, SPEWS is doing more harm than it does good, and is not a viable spam solution.
Welcome to Spewsville...Where the world is a better place..for some people.
As a sysadmin for an ISP I can assure you that this is absolutely the case. There is no human contact at Spews, the entire system is automated. Which means that when their system is alerted to a "spammer" within a particular class C, that entire class C is quickly blocked by thousands of misinformed SAs who don't understand that they are in the process going to block legitimate emails that the people within their network have every right to receive.
A hosting provider should be responsible for the domains they host. But there is rarely anything a provider can do to pre-emptively stop a spammer. Just recently, my company signed up a new company for Co-Location. Within a week, this company sent out a huge spam mailing. The moment we saw spam complaints come in we called the company and demanded proof that their mailing list consisted solely of opt-in addresses. They had no proof and their contract was immediately terminated for violating our Acceptable Use Policy. However, at this point our entire class C (housing our main mail server for hundreds of websites and ten times that many individual email clients) was listed in SPEWS database. Apparently this company had, in the past, under a different name, been blacklisted as a spammer. We were now added to the list of their hosting providers and could not, despite our best effort, contact a single human at SPEWS to explain our situation. As a result, for over 3 weeks, thousands of mail servers were rejecting our clients' mail as coming from a spam-server.
I ask you, how does that make the internet a better place?
Spam is a waste of bandwidth, of time, and it's insanely annoying, as a sysadmin I realize that as much as anybody (except maybe Alan Ralsky). But SPEWS is a horrible "solution" to the problem. Too many misinformed sysadmins use SPEWS at the expense of those who use their network.
Another great place for downloading legal music is the Etree Internet Archive. You can download live sets from a good number of bands who allow taping and trading of their shows...(see list here)
.shn format, it is lossless compression (unlike mp3s, which are a lossy compression) and can only get a .wav file down to about 60% of its original size, but the quality is worth it.
And yeah, the concerts are huge, but since they are in
As far as the concerts not being as good as many live CDs...you would be surprised. The majority of taper-friendly concerts are recorded by people with well over $2,000-$3,000 worth of equipment who tape 50+ concerts a year and are often, in my opinion, better than a lot of the shit put out by the labels.
-------
Build a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a day. Light a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.