Exposure therapy is not pleasant, but it does tend to work. I don't know much about PTSD, but for anxiety disorders and phobias exposure is quite effective and virtual reality techniques have been becoming more and more popular for this. For treating someone with public speaking anxiety it's easier to get a virtual audience than to arrange for a bunch of people in a room...
Re:Sithu Thein's comment is the most interesting
on
Girls in the Gaming World
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, men tend to perform better than women on tests of visuospatial ability. For example, they are better at mental rotation (Delgado & Prieto, 1996) and various other tests of visualspatial function (Collaer & Nelson, 2002). Men actually show different brain activations during a navigation task, something speficially relevant to these types of games (Wunderlisch, Spitzer, Tomczak, and Riepe, 2000). I'm not saying that there should be separate competitions, but I also would not assume the playing field is equal simply because muscles are not invovled.
Collaer, M. L., & Nelson, J. D. (2002). Large visuospatial sex difference in line judgment: Possible role of attentional factors. Brain and Cognition, 49, 1-12.
Delgado, A.R., & Prieto, G. (1996). Sex differences in visuospatial ability: do performance factors play such an important role? Memory & Cognition, 24: 504 - 510.
Wunderlich, Spitzer, Tomczak, & Reipe (2000). Brain activation during human naviagtion: gender-different neural networks as a function of performance. Nat Neurosci. 2000 Apr;3(4):404-8.
She found that Internet users on average were more likely to have sociological and psychological problems than the regular community. However, for each of the psychological items, she also asked when the Internet users first experienced their symptoms and found that onset of psychological symptoms "clearly preceded Internet use," at a range of five to 22 years.
This is interesting, I guess, but really doesn't say anything about the effects of internet usage. We don't know how psychological functioning changed as a result of internet use. All we know is that these people were experiencing problems before they used the internet - according to their memory, at least, which is not the most reliable form of evidence.
You don't resize the dock by dragging the mouse on its border. You have to command-click the line-seperator and drag... (a combination you wouldn't be using otherwise when at the dock and so it makes the chance of accidentally re-sizing the dock almost impossible.
Just to be picky, a regular click and drag on the line-seperator is enough to resize the dock. At least that's the way it works for me...
This is getting off topic, but I feel compelled to respond to this anyway. I agree that we need to keep an open mind these things, but the problem with homeopathy is that is based on a shaky premise and employs flawed epistemological techniques. The basic idea behind homepathy is that "like cures like": homeo (same) + pathy (disease). For cases like vaccines that use small amounts of a virus to stimulate immune response, this makes sense, but in most other contexts it does not. For example, the The National Center for Homeopathy recommends treating children who accidentally ingest poison with ipecac, which is basically poisonous itself and is used to induce vomiting. A classic homeopathic remedy. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends against using ipecac for poison treatment. Apparently it doesn't often get rid of all the poison and may cause the child to vomit up antidotes that actually do work, making treatment more difficult.
I'm sure there are many folk remedies that do work, but homeopathy as a principle seems kind of silly.
Well, apparently in the future, all of our houses will look like the inside of a nightclub with purplish bluish hues.
I agree with you -- they clearly were more interested in making it look cool than having a functional lighting system. I would have a hard time reading in there. Is this a matter of intent or technological limitations? I mean is it possible to get a room nice and bright and white using only LED lighting?
It seems like that is exactly what they are doing. From the article:
The company's software uses advanced encryption and mathematical models to avoid charging a seller a fee each time an item is sold. Instead, the system statistically selects a representative sample of the transactions for billing.
For example, the software might randomly select one sale of a $1 song from among 20. It multiplies this one sale by 20 to represent the other 19 sales, and passes along $20 to the seller. But by lumping the sales together, only one transaction fee, not 20, is charged.
"Would you prefer to be paid $1 minus a 25 cent transaction fee each time you make a sale," Dr. Micali asked, "or zero dollars 19 times and $20 minus a 25-cent transaction fee once?"
I think this was one of the few things minority report got right. This kind of gesture-based control is potentially extremely powerful. Human capacity for sequencing and generation of action sequences is extremely advanced, and may be the evolutionary precursor to vocal language. I bet a gesture-based computer-human interface will ultimately be the way we deal with these things rather than the star-trek vocal control way.
I realize I'm a professor and very well educated, but so are you guys (after all, anyone using Linux is probably in the top 3 percentile for raw intelligence). That being said, I DON'T WATCH TV.
Hey, I am a research scientist too and I actually enjoy watching tv sometimes, especially when the programming contains useful information, whether it be about modern social relationships (E!), Hitler (THC), or coporate control of mass media (CNN).
Just because we are smart does not mean we are immune to entertainment. In fact, I have a hard time reading many scientific journals because I feel that they explicitly disregard the nature of my attentional system. The reason going to a lecture is so much better than reading is that it is a more natural and rich form of communication. The potential that film and video have for learning should not be ignored.
You know, this reminds me last year I saw Dennis Tito give a talk about his experience as a space tourist. What a boring guy. He made it seem like a slide show of his trip to the beach or something. Almost all of the wonder and amazement seemed to be lost on him. He just seemed proud to have been able to afford it. At least that was my impression.
Made me think that traveling into space is a kind of privelige that we should bestow upon those worthy of it...
It's just that the term "warflying" seems to have significance nowadays that "wardialing" would not...I don't know if it's really a good idea to say you are warflying over los angeles.
... and student arithmetical skills have never recovered.
Yes, but they needn't recover. They are obsolete. The whole reason we invented calculators is so that we don't have to waste our time and mental attention doing arithmetic anymore. We now focus on higher-level tasks. We have freed our children of this menial task - they no longer really need it, just like most kids don't really need to know how to start a fire anymore.
Granted, there may be some generalizable skill gained from learning arithmetic, and I'm sure students still learn how to do it the old-fashioned way, but the point is that it simply isn't very important in today's world. Computers are ubiquitous in the world today; not to involve them in education would be absurd.
Probably the meaning is determined by the pitch contour, as is the case in many tonal languages, which use pitch contour to convey grammatical information. It sounds like this is the case, listening to the example. The idea is that the meaning comes from how the tone changes from the beginning of the word to the end. You don't need perfect pitch for this, although native speakers are probably more skilled at it - having had all that pitch discrimination experience as a child.
The fact that you and I can refer to goatse and people know what we're talking about means that it's an important part of our shared culture. I think that anything that archives the good and bad of a culture is worth keeping around.
I have to disagree. An object which produces such trauma should not be preserved simply because the traumatic experience is shared. I think I have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder lingering from the day I saw the goatse thing - complete with horrifying flashbacks. That thing needs to go.
Why should any aspect of "culture" be preserved simpy because it constitutes "culture"? If we preserve everything that we have in common, we will be compulsive hoarders and the people of the earth will soon be living under a heap of obsolete car tires, betamax tapes and floppy disks. When we are done with something, we should let it go.
Yeah, it's funny that when the human wins it is seen a victory for humanity. It could just as easily be seen as a loss for humanity, since the humans weren't able to build a computer that could beat a person at chess!
Why add another store which will have the same set of songs?
Worse, why add another store which will have a subset of the songs? The article states that Walmart is discussion with the 5 major record labels... Apple has contracted with many independent labels, and I don't really see these indies striking up a deal with Walmart.
Also, Apple has admitted they don't make much off the store and really use it to sell iPods - what exactly is Walmart's plan here?
I remember learning on a tour of Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory that in the UK, one cannot advertise anything that cannot be _PROVEN_.
Does that mean you also can't advertise that Ben & Jerry's "tastes great!" or that it is "delicious"? Being restricted to that which can be "proven" seems a little too conservative. I mean you don't want to mislead the consumers, but what's wrong with little bragging about your own product?
I totally agree that this is more of a gimmick than a useful tool. It sounds a lot like Apple's "Speakable Items" that has been built in to Mac OS for a long time...no training required and you can launch an applescript that does almost anything by speaking its name. I don't know anyone who actually uses this feature. Its fun to play with the first time you see it, but that's about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Exposure therapy is not pleasant, but it does tend to work. I don't know much about PTSD, but for anxiety disorders and phobias exposure is quite effective and virtual reality techniques have been becoming more and more popular for this. For treating someone with public speaking anxiety it's easier to get a virtual audience than to arrange for a bunch of people in a room...
Actually, men tend to perform better than women on tests of visuospatial ability. For example, they are better at mental rotation (Delgado & Prieto, 1996) and various other tests of visualspatial function (Collaer & Nelson, 2002). Men actually show different brain activations during a navigation task, something speficially relevant to these types of games (Wunderlisch, Spitzer, Tomczak, and Riepe, 2000). I'm not saying that there should be separate competitions, but I also would not assume the playing field is equal simply because muscles are not invovled.
Collaer, M. L., & Nelson, J. D. (2002). Large visuospatial sex difference in line judgment: Possible role of attentional factors. Brain and Cognition, 49, 1-12.
Delgado, A.R., & Prieto, G. (1996). Sex differences in visuospatial ability: do performance factors play such an important role? Memory & Cognition, 24: 504 - 510.
Wunderlich, Spitzer, Tomczak, & Reipe (2000). Brain activation during human naviagtion: gender-different neural networks as a function of performance. Nat Neurosci. 2000 Apr;3(4):404-8.
A great musician once said:
"Silence is also music."
Well, there's a virus I do have to deal with on my Mac. Recurring slashdot jokes.
She found that Internet users on average were more likely to have sociological and psychological problems than the regular community. However, for each of the psychological items, she also asked when the Internet users first experienced their symptoms and found that onset of psychological symptoms "clearly preceded Internet use," at a range of five to 22 years.
This is interesting, I guess, but really doesn't say anything about the effects of internet usage. We don't know how psychological functioning changed as a result of internet use. All we know is that these people were experiencing problems before they used the internet - according to their memory, at least, which is not the most reliable form of evidence.
You don't resize the dock by dragging the mouse on its border. You have to command-click the line-seperator and drag... (a combination you wouldn't be using otherwise when at the dock and so it makes the chance of accidentally re-sizing the dock almost impossible.
Just to be picky, a regular click and drag on the line-seperator is enough to resize the dock. At least that's the way it works for me...
This is getting off topic, but I feel compelled to respond to this anyway. I agree that we need to keep an open mind these things, but the problem with homeopathy is that is based on a shaky premise and employs flawed epistemological techniques. The basic idea behind homepathy is that "like cures like": homeo (same) + pathy (disease). For cases like vaccines that use small amounts of a virus to stimulate immune response, this makes sense, but in most other contexts it does not. For example, the The National Center for Homeopathy recommends treating children who accidentally ingest poison with ipecac, which is basically poisonous itself and is used to induce vomiting. A classic homeopathic remedy. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends against using ipecac for poison treatment. Apparently it doesn't often get rid of all the poison and may cause the child to vomit up antidotes that actually do work, making treatment more difficult.
I'm sure there are many folk remedies that do work, but homeopathy as a principle seems kind of silly.
Yeah, it's right between the stove and the ventilation hood. Looks like it would be nicely steamed LCD in no time.
Well, apparently in the future, all of our houses will look like the inside of a nightclub with purplish bluish hues.
I agree with you -- they clearly were more interested in making it look cool than having a functional lighting system. I would have a hard time reading in there. Is this a matter of intent or technological limitations? I mean is it possible to get a room nice and bright and white using only LED lighting?
It seems like that is exactly what they are doing. From the article:
The company's software uses advanced encryption and mathematical models to avoid charging a seller a fee each time an item is sold. Instead, the system statistically selects a representative sample of the transactions for billing.
For example, the software might randomly select one sale of a $1 song from among 20. It multiplies this one sale by 20 to represent the other 19 sales, and passes along $20 to the seller. But by lumping the sales together, only one transaction fee, not 20, is charged.
"Would you prefer to be paid $1 minus a 25 cent transaction fee each time you make a sale," Dr. Micali asked, "or zero dollars 19 times and $20 minus a 25-cent transaction fee once?"
I think this was one of the few things minority report got right. This kind of gesture-based control is potentially extremely powerful. Human capacity for sequencing and generation of action sequences is extremely advanced, and may be the evolutionary precursor to vocal language. I bet a gesture-based computer-human interface will ultimately be the way we deal with these things rather than the star-trek vocal control way.
But there are hidden costs. Horrific working conditions on assembly lines in China...
And what makes slashdot so cheap are those barrels of trained elephants that make the homepages....
I realize I'm a professor and very well educated, but so are you guys (after all, anyone using Linux is probably in the top 3 percentile for raw intelligence). That being said, I DON'T WATCH TV.
Hey, I am a research scientist too and I actually enjoy watching tv sometimes, especially when the programming contains useful information, whether it be about modern social relationships (E!), Hitler (THC), or coporate control of mass media (CNN).
Just because we are smart does not mean we are immune to entertainment. In fact, I have a hard time reading many scientific journals because I feel that they explicitly disregard the nature of my attentional system. The reason going to a lecture is so much better than reading is that it is a more natural and rich form of communication. The potential that film and video have for learning should not be ignored.
You know, this reminds me last year I saw Dennis Tito give a talk about his experience as a space tourist. What a boring guy. He made it seem like a slide show of his trip to the beach or something. Almost all of the wonder and amazement seemed to be lost on him. He just seemed proud to have been able to afford it. At least that was my impression.
Made me think that traveling into space is a kind of privelige that we should bestow upon those worthy of it...
The White House says that enough stem cells from human embryos exist for research and that cloning an embryo for any reason is unethical.
Ah yes, I forgot that the Bush administration is a world reknowned authority on ethics.
Thanks for the explanation..
It's just that the term "warflying" seems to have significance nowadays that "wardialing" would not...I don't know if it's really a good idea to say you are warflying over los angeles.
Yeah, I can almost see my house!
Actually I feel a little strange about this... Can anyone just fly over the city like that? And why is it called "warflying"?
It's not clear from either of these stories 1) why the highway department wants them to have GPS, nor 2) why the contractors don't want to have it.
Are they planning some huge NORAD-like control room with huge screens and little dots for all the snowplows?
Are they having a problem with the drivers taking off time to make snow-angels? I don't get it.
... and student arithmetical skills have never recovered.
Yes, but they needn't recover. They are obsolete. The whole reason we invented calculators is so that we don't have to waste our time and mental attention doing arithmetic anymore. We now focus on higher-level tasks. We have freed our children of this menial task - they no longer really need it, just like most kids don't really need to know how to start a fire anymore.
Granted, there may be some generalizable skill gained from learning arithmetic, and I'm sure students still learn how to do it the old-fashioned way, but the point is that it simply isn't very important in today's world. Computers are ubiquitous in the world today; not to involve them in education would be absurd.
Probably the meaning is determined by the pitch contour, as is the case in many tonal languages, which use pitch contour to convey grammatical information. It sounds like this is the case, listening to the example. The idea is that the meaning comes from how the tone changes from the beginning of the word to the end. You don't need perfect pitch for this, although native speakers are probably more skilled at it - having had all that pitch discrimination experience as a child.
The fact that you and I can refer to goatse and people know what we're talking about means that it's an important part of our shared culture. I think that anything that archives the good and bad of a culture is worth keeping around.
I have to disagree. An object which produces such trauma should not be preserved simply because the traumatic experience is shared. I think I have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder lingering from the day I saw the goatse thing - complete with horrifying flashbacks. That thing needs to go.
Why should any aspect of "culture" be preserved simpy because it constitutes "culture"? If we preserve everything that we have in common, we will be compulsive hoarders and the people of the earth will soon be living under a heap of obsolete car tires, betamax tapes and floppy disks. When we are done with something, we should let it go.
Yeah, it's funny that when the human wins it is seen a victory for humanity. It could just as easily be seen as a loss for humanity, since the humans weren't able to build a computer that could beat a person at chess!
Why add another store which will have the same set of songs?
Worse, why add another store which will have a subset of the songs? The article states that Walmart is discussion with the 5 major record labels... Apple has contracted with many independent labels, and I don't really see these indies striking up a deal with Walmart.
Also, Apple has admitted they don't make much off the store and really use it to sell iPods - what exactly is Walmart's plan here?
I remember learning on a tour of Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory that in the UK, one cannot advertise anything that cannot be _PROVEN_.
Does that mean you also can't advertise that Ben & Jerry's "tastes great!" or that it is "delicious"? Being restricted to that which can be "proven" seems a little too conservative. I mean you don't want to mislead the consumers, but what's wrong with little bragging about your own product?
I totally agree that this is more of a gimmick than a useful tool. It sounds a lot like Apple's "Speakable Items" that has been built in to Mac OS for a long time...no training required and you can launch an applescript that does almost anything by speaking its name. I don't know anyone who actually uses this feature. Its fun to play with the first time you see it, but that's about it.