"Just picking 100 as a sample number" shows you don't really know much about statistics (no offense intended). As your evidence you cite a paper some guy did presumably as a class assignment for his M.S. in Scientific & Technical Communication? That's it? I think you'd be better informed if you read Science (I think everybody is acquainted with the prestige of this peer-review journal), Volume 295, Issue 5564, pages 2377-2379, that's March 29, 2002. The article is by Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman. You can find the article cached on Google, but allow me to quote the opening 2 paragraphs: "Concerns about the negative effects of prolonged exposure to violent television programming emerged shortly after broadcasting began in 1946. By 1972 sufficient empirical evidence had accumulated for the U.S. Surgeon General to comment that "...televised violence, indeed, does have an adverse effect on certain members of our society". Other scientific bodies have come to similar conclusions. Six major professional societies in the United States--the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Psychiatric Association--recently concluded that "the data point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children" (2). In a report on page 2468 of this issue, Johnson and colleagues (3) present important evidence showing that extensive TV viewing among adolescents and young adults is associated with subsequent aggressive acts.
Despite the consensus among experts, lay people do not seem to be getting the message from the popular press that media violence contributes to a more violent society. We recently demonstrated that even as the scientific evidence linking media violence to aggression has accumulated, news reports about the effects of media violence have shifted to weaker statements, implying that there is little evidence for such effects (4). This inaccurate reporting in the popular press may account for continuing controversy long after the debate should have been over, much as the cigarette smoking/cancer controversy persisted long after the scientific community knew that smoking causes cancer." That's just one such article. Again, do the scholar.google.com searches for yourself.
Could you cite any of these studies that have been done before and found ZERO, NADA, NO increase in violent tendencies? Could you explain the significance of the number 100 in your thinking? The power of a statistical test relies on 3 things: sample size (which I think is what you're trying to get at), the significance criterion that you set for the test, and the effect size that you're looking for. As far as I know, there is nothing special about 2 groups of 50 people. I'll admit that I don't know the videogame literature as well, but I do know literally hundreds of studies that clearly show a link between exposing children to televised and live violence and a number negative outcomes. There are correlational studies, lab experiments (one of my favorites is a study that showed violent and nonviolent films to youth offenders incarcerated for either violent or non-violent offenses living in separate dorms), and naturalistic observations (some great studies from the 60s in Canada where obervers literally have the opportunity to look at children before and after television is available to rural communities). Negative outcomes include violent behavior in general (hitting/kicking), desensitization to violence ("Watch these kids playing and call me when you think their play is becoming too rough" - kids who are previously exposed to violence wait longer for the violence they are watching to escalate before calling the experimenter to intervene), belief in a violent world (e.g., I believe that arguments frequently end in physical violence), and copycat acts of violent behavior (e.g., I saw them put ground glass in the stew on TV, I thought I might try it at home to see if it works). If you have trouble believing any of this, just read the literature for yourself. Try a scholar.google.com search of the keywords "video game violence children" or check out "television violence children."
It isn't confusing if you know the history behind it, but I would hardly call Apple history "common knowledge." Jobs tried to hire Sculley away from Pepsi to come work for Apple. The story goes that he swayed Sculley by saying something to the effect of, "Do you just want to sell sugar-water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come to Apple and change the world?" With hindsight, it's clear that Jobs was right. Sculley just knew how to sell sugar water. He ran Apple right into the ground presumably because he didn't know anything about technology. Of course that raises the question, "Then why did Jobs want to hire him in the first place?" It's also helpful to know that Sculley probably played an important role in getting Jobs thrown out of Apple. In the end not only did Jobs get Apple back, he also got them to buy his company (NeXT) in the process. This definitely puts Jobs in the category of "Smarter than your average bear" IMHO.
Am I the only cynical bastard who thinks the labels aren't fishing for any $.09 rise? I am thinking more along the lines of raising "selected" song prices to $5.00. Sure, you can still have the filler tracks for.99, but the "hits" would probably go up big time.
I just started playing "Vampire: The Masquerade" a couple of nights ago. It's truly an amazing product. Dramatic flexibility in creating very different characters with very different capabilities and playstyles is clearly a strong point. I was hunting a ghost (a quest early in the game) at 1 am (real time) and I was literally getting shivers up and down my spine. It's been a long time since I've found a game this engaging, exciting, and fun to play. I personally find that it creates a much spookier atmosphere than Doom 3.
Exactly why this new service sounds like a waste of money to me. Regardless of what sort of shipping speed I select, it has always been my experience that Amazon ships when they're ready, and their projected dates often have no relationship to reality. I have even received items in the mail on the same day that I got an email from Amazon apologizing that they wouldn't be able to ship the item for some time. Whoever sends the emails that project shipping dates needs to communicate with the folks who are actually shipping stuff out the door.
Let me guess, you're under 30? Not that it changes anything you said, just don't be surprised if you gain a different perspective on things as you age.
That's a good point, but couldn't you also suggest that the metaphor was a belief in a "greater" or "common" good rather than a higher power? "Belief in the users" could be a vehicle for reminding us that technology should serve us, rather than allowing ourselves to be enslaved by our technology (or enslaved by the corporations/governments who yield such technologies). But then again, I don't own a cell phone, so I could be way off base here.
"Read the Bible for yourself, study it, and really look at what it says." - Better than reading the book, study who put it together, what they decided to put in, and what they kept out. Why did they write what they wrote. Since God didn't hand it to you personally, better figure out your sources.
"It says that Bush got more votes than expected, and that the counties where he got larger-than-expected numbers of votes are the same counties that used electronic voting, to a statistically significant level."
The only troubling thing I see in the study is the fact that the dependent variable is "the change in percent voting for Bush by county from 2000 to 2004." At first this makes sense. You're looking for places where Bush got more of the vote than you would have expected. But a potential problem is that the dependent variable here is relying on the belief that the recorded 2000 vote was accurate. We already have a reason to believe that those numbers were screwed up. For example, people were recorded as voting Buchanan when they meant to vote Gore. The findings suggest that electronic voting is the culprit, when a competing hypothesis might be that the counties who "screwed up" in 2000 (with "hanging chads," etc.) were more likely to implement electronic voting as a solution to their woes, and it's their screwed up 2000 numbers that are responsible for the difference found between the 2000 & 2004 results. We also need to consider that according to numbers found on Wikipedia and CNN, about 1.5 million more people voted in 2004 (7.5 million) than 2000 (just under 6 million). That's an increase of 25%. That's a pretty big deal.
Less biased? How so? They publish the source of all of their numbers. They are sources that are readily available to anyone with a web browser and a library card. If you think they cheated, go check the numbers. They publish the raw data on the site and tell you the tests they used. If you think they're cheating, do the calculations yourself. As far as the "large gap for a statistical study," again, how so? According to CNN there were 7,507,727 votes cast in FL. The difference between 130,000 and 260,000 gives us a gap of 130,000. Relative to the data set that we have here, that would be a gap of less than 2% (1.73 to be more precise) of the numbers we're talking about. In what sense is that a "large gap for a statistical study?" If you've got a specific criticism - great! let's hear it.
Creative offers some of the buggiest software I have ever come across. I had a Nomad II years ago, and the software was all but unuseable. Very slow. Lots of crashes. I can't say I've had a lot of success with the software for their soundcards in recent years either, but the older stuff used to be rock solid. iTunes has always been bulletproof for me, even sharing a 12K song library on a college campus.
As a faculty member at a small college, I cannot believe how many prospective and first year students approach me and tell me they are interested in forensic psychology, criminal profiling, etc.. How many of these jobs are actually out there? Aren't there only a few criminal profilers in the entire FBI? Is there any reason to expect that the number of job opportunities in this area are going to increase in the coming years? Fortunately college-level chemistry courses have a way of weeding out students quite quickly... If I had a penny for every poor pre-med student who took organic chemistry and then showed up in my office to ask me about psychology as a possible major... Heck, the only reason I went into Psychlogy was because of the old Bob Newhart show. I thought it would be great to be married to Suzanne Pleshette and live in downtown Chicago...
I think the article misses the purpose of Wikipedia. What's wrong with having a single source that you can rely on for a lot of your general knowledge needs? If I need a exhaustive data on Alexander Hamilton, wouldn't I check multiple sources? If I have no idea who Alexander Hamilton was, and Wikipedia gives me a general idea of some of his accomplishments, isn't that "mission accomplished?" I suppose that the "absolute" year of his birth might be important to some, but I doubt that those people are using Wikipedia for that purpose. If anything, isn't it a good idea to be teaching people to check multiple sources, and not rely exclusively on any single source?
"Instead of living in an apartment, which in the same area will cost less than renting an entire house, and saving up this family is now crammed in a motel room!"
You're blaming the guy because he chose to rent? Contrary to what many people seem to believe, buying a house is not always a smart financial move. First, I'm glad that you can rent "an entire house" cheaper than you can rent an apartment in your area, but I think you'll find that in many parts of the U.S. that isn't the case. Second, if you're not going to be able to stay in a house for a period of several years before you try to sell it, you can wind up losing quite a bit of money. You have to pay a real estate agent, loan fees, taxes, insurance, maintenance, utilities that might be included in rent (e.g. water and garbage), etc. If the selling price of your house hasn't gone up considerably since you bought it, it can be cheaper to rent. Any financial planner can tell you that. If your employment future in the area is murky, you might be better off renting.
There also seems to be a misunderstanding about the support of open source software. We're in the middle of my college's re-accreditation process. We're being visited by administrators from other schools who are checking up on us. In a meeting with some of these "watchers" I suggested that we might move from WebCT, a commercial product, to Moodle, an open source product and save quite a bit of money. The suit literally leaned back in his chair, smirked, and waved his hand dismissively. "But who will fix it when it goes wrong," he asked? I almost bit my tongue off, but I did not think it would be a good idea to try to clear some of his misperceptions in that setting.
The games went on for hundreds of years and were constantly changing. For a period of time women did compete in the games in honor of the Amazons. They ran a race in short tunics with their right breasts exposed.
Also, Sparta had nude women's wrestling. Apparently, to non-Spartans it had about the same effect as women's professional wrestling is meant to have today. Lots of horny guys would travel to Sparta to enjoy the show.
"learning how to trounce the US 'Dream Team,'" Not exactly hi-tech, that. My 7th grade basketball coach taught us about the zone defense way back in 1976. Man was that guy ahead of his time. Snicker. Here's another sure-fire strategy that will work against current American NBA stars: force them to shoot free-throws. And the networks wonder why NBA television ratings are sagging...
Yeah $4000 for the Mac II sure seemed like a lot of money, but Apples became even less affordable in the years to come. I caught Jurassic Park as I was flipping through the channels the other night, and I was struck by the sight of the Quadras and the huge SuperMac monitors that were used in that movie. I remember seeing it in the theatre and thinking those were machines I could only dream of. The Quadra 900 was introduced in 1991 for $7200!!! Quadra 800s came out in 1993 and were a comparative steal at $4700!!! My first computer was an Apple IIc $1000, amber monitor $99, and analog joystick $35.
Mod parent up. Scientists also like cry to Congress about shortages so they can get increased funding for training grants. More training grants means more money for grad students/post-doctoral fellows. Grad students and post-docs make great slaves for the people who already have secure jobs.
"...you can always get a job as a Professor at a university." Ya. Those are real easy jobs to get. Ask one of your U. Mich. Profs. how many applications they get when they advertise a tenure track position. Ask them what percentage of their new hires actually receive tenure. Try reading some more articles in the Chronicle. There's a huge glut of PhDs. Just do the math. Each faculty member at a university has a number of graduate students. Sure, some of them don't get PhDs, but a lot of them do. So figure every 2 or 3 years that faculty member graduates another PhD. The faculty member retains his/her job for 20-30 years, so where are all these new PhDs supposed to go? Private industry? It's kind of like music/entertainment. Sure, there are a lot of big names out there, but for each one there are a lot more people tending bar, waitressing, etc.
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"Just picking 100 as a sample number" shows you don't really know much about statistics (no offense intended). As your evidence you cite a paper some guy did presumably as a class assignment for his M.S. in Scientific & Technical Communication? That's it? I think you'd be better informed if you read Science (I think everybody is acquainted with the prestige of this peer-review journal), Volume 295, Issue 5564, pages 2377-2379, that's March 29, 2002. The article is by Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman. You can find the article cached on Google, but allow me to quote the opening 2 paragraphs: "Concerns about the negative effects of prolonged exposure to violent television programming emerged shortly after broadcasting began in 1946. By 1972 sufficient empirical evidence had accumulated for the U.S. Surgeon General to comment that "...televised violence, indeed, does have an adverse effect on certain members of our society". Other scientific bodies have come to similar conclusions. Six major professional societies in the United States--the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Psychiatric Association--recently concluded that "the data point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children" (2). In a report on page 2468 of this issue, Johnson and colleagues (3) present important evidence showing that extensive TV viewing among adolescents and young adults is associated with subsequent aggressive acts. Despite the consensus among experts, lay people do not seem to be getting the message from the popular press that media violence contributes to a more violent society. We recently demonstrated that even as the scientific evidence linking media violence to aggression has accumulated, news reports about the effects of media violence have shifted to weaker statements, implying that there is little evidence for such effects (4). This inaccurate reporting in the popular press may account for continuing controversy long after the debate should have been over, much as the cigarette smoking/cancer controversy persisted long after the scientific community knew that smoking causes cancer." That's just one such article. Again, do the scholar.google.com searches for yourself.
Could you cite any of these studies that have been done before and found ZERO, NADA, NO increase in violent tendencies? Could you explain the significance of the number 100 in your thinking? The power of a statistical test relies on 3 things: sample size (which I think is what you're trying to get at), the significance criterion that you set for the test, and the effect size that you're looking for. As far as I know, there is nothing special about 2 groups of 50 people. I'll admit that I don't know the videogame literature as well, but I do know literally hundreds of studies that clearly show a link between exposing children to televised and live violence and a number negative outcomes. There are correlational studies, lab experiments (one of my favorites is a study that showed violent and nonviolent films to youth offenders incarcerated for either violent or non-violent offenses living in separate dorms), and naturalistic observations (some great studies from the 60s in Canada where obervers literally have the opportunity to look at children before and after television is available to rural communities). Negative outcomes include violent behavior in general (hitting/kicking), desensitization to violence ("Watch these kids playing and call me when you think their play is becoming too rough" - kids who are previously exposed to violence wait longer for the violence they are watching to escalate before calling the experimenter to intervene), belief in a violent world (e.g., I believe that arguments frequently end in physical violence), and copycat acts of violent behavior (e.g., I saw them put ground glass in the stew on TV, I thought I might try it at home to see if it works). If you have trouble believing any of this, just read the literature for yourself. Try a scholar.google.com search of the keywords "video game violence children" or check out "television violence children."
It isn't confusing if you know the history behind it, but I would hardly call Apple history "common knowledge." Jobs tried to hire Sculley away from Pepsi to come work for Apple. The story goes that he swayed Sculley by saying something to the effect of, "Do you just want to sell sugar-water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come to Apple and change the world?" With hindsight, it's clear that Jobs was right. Sculley just knew how to sell sugar water. He ran Apple right into the ground presumably because he didn't know anything about technology. Of course that raises the question, "Then why did Jobs want to hire him in the first place?" It's also helpful to know that Sculley probably played an important role in getting Jobs thrown out of Apple. In the end not only did Jobs get Apple back, he also got them to buy his company (NeXT) in the process. This definitely puts Jobs in the category of "Smarter than your average bear" IMHO.
Am I the only cynical bastard who thinks the labels aren't fishing for any $.09 rise? I am thinking more along the lines of raising "selected" song prices to $5.00. Sure, you can still have the filler tracks for .99, but the "hits" would probably go up big time.
I just started playing "Vampire: The Masquerade" a couple of nights ago. It's truly an amazing product. Dramatic flexibility in creating very different characters with very different capabilities and playstyles is clearly a strong point. I was hunting a ghost (a quest early in the game) at 1 am (real time) and I was literally getting shivers up and down my spine. It's been a long time since I've found a game this engaging, exciting, and fun to play. I personally find that it creates a much spookier atmosphere than Doom 3.
Now you've got me curious. What were you having for lunch?
Exactly why this new service sounds like a waste of money to me. Regardless of what sort of shipping speed I select, it has always been my experience that Amazon ships when they're ready, and their projected dates often have no relationship to reality. I have even received items in the mail on the same day that I got an email from Amazon apologizing that they wouldn't be able to ship the item for some time. Whoever sends the emails that project shipping dates needs to communicate with the folks who are actually shipping stuff out the door.
Let me guess, you're under 30? Not that it changes anything you said, just don't be surprised if you gain a different perspective on things as you age.
That's a good point, but couldn't you also suggest that the metaphor was a belief in a "greater" or "common" good rather than a higher power? "Belief in the users" could be a vehicle for reminding us that technology should serve us, rather than allowing ourselves to be enslaved by our technology (or enslaved by the corporations/governments who yield such technologies). But then again, I don't own a cell phone, so I could be way off base here.
"Read the Bible for yourself, study it, and really look at what it says." - Better than reading the book, study who put it together, what they decided to put in, and what they kept out. Why did they write what they wrote. Since God didn't hand it to you personally, better figure out your sources.
"It says that Bush got more votes than expected, and that the counties where he got larger-than-expected numbers of votes are the same counties that used electronic voting, to a statistically significant level."
The only troubling thing I see in the study is the fact that the dependent variable is "the change in percent voting for Bush by county from 2000 to 2004." At first this makes sense. You're looking for places where Bush got more of the vote than you would have expected. But a potential problem is that the dependent variable here is relying on the belief that the recorded 2000 vote was accurate. We already have a reason to believe that those numbers were screwed up. For example, people were recorded as voting Buchanan when they meant to vote Gore. The findings suggest that electronic voting is the culprit, when a competing hypothesis might be that the counties who "screwed up" in 2000 (with "hanging chads," etc.) were more likely to implement electronic voting as a solution to their woes, and it's their screwed up 2000 numbers that are responsible for the difference found between the 2000 & 2004 results. We also need to consider that according to numbers found on Wikipedia and CNN, about 1.5 million more people voted in 2004 (7.5 million) than 2000 (just under 6 million). That's an increase of 25%. That's a pretty big deal.Actually, the article doesn't have anything to do with polls. They're analyzing recorded votes.
Less biased? How so? They publish the source of all of their numbers. They are sources that are readily available to anyone with a web browser and a library card. If you think they cheated, go check the numbers. They publish the raw data on the site and tell you the tests they used. If you think they're cheating, do the calculations yourself. As far as the "large gap for a statistical study," again, how so? According to CNN there were 7,507,727 votes cast in FL. The difference between 130,000 and 260,000 gives us a gap of 130,000. Relative to the data set that we have here, that would be a gap of less than 2% (1.73 to be more precise) of the numbers we're talking about. In what sense is that a "large gap for a statistical study?" If you've got a specific criticism - great! let's hear it.
Creative offers some of the buggiest software I have ever come across. I had a Nomad II years ago, and the software was all but unuseable. Very slow. Lots of crashes. I can't say I've had a lot of success with the software for their soundcards in recent years either, but the older stuff used to be rock solid. iTunes has always been bulletproof for me, even sharing a 12K song library on a college campus.
As a faculty member at a small college, I cannot believe how many prospective and first year students approach me and tell me they are interested in forensic psychology, criminal profiling, etc.. How many of these jobs are actually out there? Aren't there only a few criminal profilers in the entire FBI? Is there any reason to expect that the number of job opportunities in this area are going to increase in the coming years? Fortunately college-level chemistry courses have a way of weeding out students quite quickly... If I had a penny for every poor pre-med student who took organic chemistry and then showed up in my office to ask me about psychology as a possible major... Heck, the only reason I went into Psychlogy was because of the old Bob Newhart show. I thought it would be great to be married to Suzanne Pleshette and live in downtown Chicago...
I think the article misses the purpose of Wikipedia. What's wrong with having a single source that you can rely on for a lot of your general knowledge needs? If I need a exhaustive data on Alexander Hamilton, wouldn't I check multiple sources? If I have no idea who Alexander Hamilton was, and Wikipedia gives me a general idea of some of his accomplishments, isn't that "mission accomplished?" I suppose that the "absolute" year of his birth might be important to some, but I doubt that those people are using Wikipedia for that purpose. If anything, isn't it a good idea to be teaching people to check multiple sources, and not rely exclusively on any single source?
"Instead of living in an apartment, which in the same area will cost less than renting an entire house, and saving up this family is now crammed in a motel room!"
You're blaming the guy because he chose to rent? Contrary to what many people seem to believe, buying a house is not always a smart financial move. First, I'm glad that you can rent "an entire house" cheaper than you can rent an apartment in your area, but I think you'll find that in many parts of the U.S. that isn't the case. Second, if you're not going to be able to stay in a house for a period of several years before you try to sell it, you can wind up losing quite a bit of money. You have to pay a real estate agent, loan fees, taxes, insurance, maintenance, utilities that might be included in rent (e.g. water and garbage), etc. If the selling price of your house hasn't gone up considerably since you bought it, it can be cheaper to rent. Any financial planner can tell you that. If your employment future in the area is murky, you might be better off renting.Yeah, but it's not as easy to get Chinese food...
There also seems to be a misunderstanding about the support of open source software. We're in the middle of my college's re-accreditation process. We're being visited by administrators from other schools who are checking up on us. In a meeting with some of these "watchers" I suggested that we might move from WebCT, a commercial product, to Moodle, an open source product and save quite a bit of money. The suit literally leaned back in his chair, smirked, and waved his hand dismissively. "But who will fix it when it goes wrong," he asked? I almost bit my tongue off, but I did not think it would be a good idea to try to clear some of his misperceptions in that setting.
The games went on for hundreds of years and were constantly changing. For a period of time women did compete in the games in honor of the Amazons. They ran a race in short tunics with their right breasts exposed. Also, Sparta had nude women's wrestling. Apparently, to non-Spartans it had about the same effect as women's professional wrestling is meant to have today. Lots of horny guys would travel to Sparta to enjoy the show.
"learning how to trounce the US 'Dream Team,'" Not exactly hi-tech, that. My 7th grade basketball coach taught us about the zone defense way back in 1976. Man was that guy ahead of his time. Snicker. Here's another sure-fire strategy that will work against current American NBA stars: force them to shoot free-throws. And the networks wonder why NBA television ratings are sagging...
I bought a new (faster) CPU for my mac here.
Yeah $4000 for the Mac II sure seemed like a lot of money, but Apples became even less affordable in the years to come. I caught Jurassic Park as I was flipping through the channels the other night, and I was struck by the sight of the Quadras and the huge SuperMac monitors that were used in that movie. I remember seeing it in the theatre and thinking those were machines I could only dream of. The Quadra 900 was introduced in 1991 for $7200!!! Quadra 800s came out in 1993 and were a comparative steal at $4700!!! My first computer was an Apple IIc $1000, amber monitor $99, and analog joystick $35.
Mod parent up. Scientists also like cry to Congress about shortages so they can get increased funding for training grants. More training grants means more money for grad students/post-doctoral fellows. Grad students and post-docs make great slaves for the people who already have secure jobs.
"...you can always get a job as a Professor at a university." Ya. Those are real easy jobs to get. Ask one of your U. Mich. Profs. how many applications they get when they advertise a tenure track position. Ask them what percentage of their new hires actually receive tenure. Try reading some more articles in the Chronicle. There's a huge glut of PhDs. Just do the math. Each faculty member at a university has a number of graduate students. Sure, some of them don't get PhDs, but a lot of them do. So figure every 2 or 3 years that faculty member graduates another PhD. The faculty member retains his/her job for 20-30 years, so where are all these new PhDs supposed to go? Private industry? It's kind of like music/entertainment. Sure, there are a lot of big names out there, but for each one there are a lot more people tending bar, waitressing, etc.