This question is very similar to the earlier "Cheating Your System" question which outlines the fraud problem. As mentioned there, we have systems which look at all aspects of the transaction to gauge its likeliness to be fraudulent. Our strongest long-term weapon is the ability to ban participants from the marketplace, a tactic which is much more effective in the C2C world where a scammer cannot just move on to the next gold selling B2C website. Since gamers on Sparter tend to under price the B2Cs by 30-40%, getting banned for bad behavior is stealing from your own pocket.
Oh I see! I now fully trust that they are on top of the fraud issue. We can rest easy, they have systems that look at all aspects of the transaction!
is what happens when you think something that you don't want to actually carry out? I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has random thoughts that enter their mind and then you dismiss and don't actually do anything with. How can you tell between idle thoughts and thoughts that are supposed to bring about actions?
It's an interesting point, because the brain does use much the same circuitry for imagining action as it does for executing actions. For example, premotor cortex and supplementary motor areas are typically activated by imagining an action you don't perform, and some subregions can even be activated by seeing someone else perform an action. However, there are differences, obviously, which is why you don't perform every action you imagine (although there are a few cases of brain damage in the literature where this happens!). Primary motor cortex, which has most of the neurons that send signals downstream to the spinal cord is generally not activated by imagination.
Short answer is that a sufficiently sophisticated device could tell the difference.
I would think that monitoring blood flow would be a bit slow. IANANeurologist, but doesn't the brain rely on electrical impulses for the high-speed stuff, with the chemical processes helping set the stage?
It seems to me that if we're trying to develop a mind-control mouse interface (or whatever), it would have significantly less lag if it could read electrical signals (like an EEG).
Essentially you are correct. The blood flow changes in the brain are secondary to the electrical activity and occur at a delay. The hemodynamic response peaks about 6 seconds or so after the onset of the electrical activity. That poses challenges for real-time applications of brain imaging based on blood flow (like optical imaging or fMRI). Its like having a temporal blur on the signal.
EEG is better for temporal resolution, however much poorer in spatial resolution. The ideal is to have an implanted electrode in the brain. It's a million times easier to achieve control over an external device when you have the temporal and spatial precision of an implanted electrode, although obviously it's a little too invasive to be currently practical.
Being angry will never make you better at any game for the same reason that being angry will never make you better at martial arts.
Ideally, yes. And well designed games are certainly an effective tool for practicing this desirable skill. But all games are not created equal and
it seems to me that many of them may be exercising things we don't necessarily want exercised. Anger was just a potential example. Part of the martial
art mindset involves knowing what thoughts to encourage in yourself and what thoughts to discourage. You going to let game designers determine that?
And you are right, for a very large portion of the brain, there is no difference between fantasy and reality. That is why you must TRAIN your kids to recognize the difference between fantasy and reality, which is exactly what I have been saying.
But cognitively recognizing that you are in a fantasy does not remove the learning that is being done. To stick with the example of anger: just because
you recognize it is a fantasy does not change the fact that now your limbic system is primed and ready for anger. I think you are saying that since its not real, we get to choose which aspects of it we learn from and which we don't. I don't think learning works that way.
Just like a boxer cannot train without being punched, a kid cannot learn without being shown.
Agreed. It's just a question of what is being learned. It doesn't make sense to me to think that all games ever created only teach kids
things that are worth learning. If they are such a good learning tool, then why aren't they equally effective at teaching things we don't want our kids
to learn?
If by mindset you mean getting "in the zone" and being able to play the game better, then yes I 100% agree with you.
Among other things, yes. You don't really get to pick and choose which aspects of the mindset stay with you. For example, being angry might be part of the game.
Get them while they are young, teach and show them properly, and they will always be able to distinguish the difference between fantasy and reality
Part of my point is that this is a false distinction. We use the same mechanisms to imagine anger, violence, etc. that we do to enact them. For much of the brain, there is no difference between fantasy and reality. If being angry makes you better at the game, you are exercising your anger.
Well, that is interesting, but being "desensitized" is not really what I was getting at.
It is true, one principle of learning is habituation. When you are repeatedly exposed to a stimulus your reaction
to it may decrease over time. But there is another thing that happens when you generate a thought or behavior repeatedly,
which is that it becomes more likely to be invoked in the future. That's how habits form. Habits of behavior and habits
of thought affect us all. The more often you invoke a certain mindset, the easier and more likely it becomes that you will invoke in the future.
The difference is, when you hear about someone getting brutally murdered on the news, a person actually died.
Another difference is when you play the game, you are doing the killing. I'm not for banning video games, but let's not dismiss entirely the consequences of such a simulation. Simulating the performance of violent acts does have some overlap with actually committing them. Imagining action and watching actions all recruit the brain's circuitry for action planning and performance (see mirror neurons), and these systems are connected with the emotional and motivational networks that feed them.
I'm not suggesting that people who play a game like this will become killers, but I also don't think it's particularly healthy to adopt the mindset of a brutal killer and to be rewarded for invoking the thoughts and actions of a murderer. Obviously "games" have become much more than they were in the past, but originally, games and simulations were nature's way of skilling us up -- preparing us for what we were one day going to do. We do learn from games.
It's hard to believe this guy is really a mathematician. I read this with interest as I teach college classes and have to give tests. However, there's not much content in the article.
His point about only counting the correct answers is rather silly. In a test where each question is either right or wrong, counting the wrong answers into the score does not add any information (you can tell how many are wrong if you know how many are right). The only thing it does is change the scaling of the resulting scores. This only makes a difference if you have an issue interpreting the scores. He seems to want the scores to proportional to the amount of knowledge someone has, so that if I have twice as much knowledge as you my score is twice as high. But in the example case of a professional qualifying examination, all that matters is whether or not you achieve some minimum. Whether that is represented as % correct or % correct - %incorrect/2 really makes no difference.
Designing better tests generally involves moving beyond multiple choice, not manipulating the scoring process.
You can't prevent this sort of thing. It really is impossible.
Perhaps you can't stop all incidents like this from ever happening, but you may be able to stop some of of them,
which would certainly be worthwhile. We should do what we can, right?
For example, the article points out that he was supposed to be denied a gun due to his psychiatric diagnosis but the info was never forwarded from Virginia to the federal database. Yeah, who knows, he may have gotten one some other way if he was truly determined, but who knows? It's worth making sure the system works properly if it could have helped.
There's a more interesting issue going on right now with live coverage of the World Series of Poker. Harrah's made an exclusive
deal with Pokernews.com to cover the event and provide live chip counts, etc. Cardplayer.com has been updating their site with chip counts taken from pokernews. Tony G, the owner of Pokernews.com is angry and threatening a lawsuit:
We put the chip counts up on PokerNews, and one minute later they are up on Cardplayer.com. Cardplayer has no one counting chips at the WSOP, and they know that counting chips is against the rules for them since we beat them to the rights for coverage this year. But they have the counts up on their site, stolen straight from the counts we are doing live in the room at the Rio. We have paid a lot of money for these rights and a lot of money to the 40 people we have hired to cover the series.
Do they have the exclusive rights to this kind of factual information once it is posted on the internet?
But a more optimistic thought is that Microsoft may be afraid to list these supposed violations because it knows the patents can be worked around by the open source community, leaving Microsoft high and dry without any leverage at all."
so if i accuse you of murder and youre wrongfully imprisoned it will be perfectly ok as long as i'm getting the murderers the other 99% of the time?
It's not OK, but it is a necessary consequence of any detection system. We do in fact wrongfully imprison people all the time in our quest for justice, because no system can perfectly distinguish between a murderer and a nonmurderer. The mistakes are mistakes, and they need to be rectified, for sure, but the point is there are going to be mistakes. Given that fact, you have to make a choice as to which kind of mistake you would rather have, false positives or misses. That is my point.
You can argue which is of greater consequence, a miss or a false alarm. But you can't ignore that there is such a tradeoff.
When you tune your bias towards having fewer false positives you almost necessarily have more misses.
With drugs I agree that false positives may be more harmful than misses. However in the case of anti-terrorism it is desirable to have false positives at the expense of having fewer misses, because a miss is fatal.
This has got to be one of the most insidious catch phrases of the last 20 years.
If the players were not happy with the game, they would work to change it. The players are
responsible for the game they play. What do you think would happen if Verizon and friends
started putting their muscle behind patent reform?
I think the existence of this game is disturbing, and frankly it should not be encouraged by a link on slashdot. Gold farming is a serious issue that undermines the integrity of the games we invest our time and money in to play. This game is a slap in the face of the hard working people trying to combat gold farming. Making a hero out of the gold farmer is purely offensive.
The FSF has also explicitly asked the community whether the new patent provisions should apply retroactively to the Microsoft-Novell deal
Is that really an option? Wouldn't that be changing the terms of the license (v2) after it was distributed and agreed to?
I don't understand how they can affect the Novell deal without going through the trouble of upgrading Linux to GPLv3-- and even then
Novell should be able to use old Linux released under GPLv2, no?
Well it should be noted that the experimental technique used in this article cannot be done with a standard televison, since it requires input to each eye to be controlled separately. They used continuous flash suppression, where an image presented to one eye is suppressed by flashing another image in the other eye.
Well I just read the article and it appears that the main point of this paper is that attention affects the processing of unconscious, invisible visual stimuli.
What they did was to have a task in central vision that was either easy (not requiring much attention) or hard (requiring lots of attention). At the same time, invisible pictures were flashed in the periphery (made invisible by masking). Looking at the voxels in visual cortex which correspond to the locations of the invisible, peripheral stimuli, they found greater activity in easy mode than in hard mode. In other words, when the central visual task required lots of attention, the invisible stimuli in the periphery activated visual cortex more weakly.
To quote the article "The present findings are the first to show that neural processes involved in the retinotopic registration of stimulus presence in V1 depend on availability of attentional capacity, even when they do not invoke any conscious experience. These findings challenge previous suggestions that attention and awareness are one and the same."
Slashdot Mirror
Hitachi calls it optical topography, that's where the article gets it from.
. html
http://www.hitachi-medical.co.jp/info/opt-e/index
They are both valid terms, really.
Short answer is that a sufficiently sophisticated device could tell the difference.
EEG is better for temporal resolution, however much poorer in spatial resolution. The ideal is to have an implanted electrode in the brain. It's a million times easier to achieve control over an external device when you have the temporal and spatial precision of an implanted electrode, although obviously it's a little too invasive to be currently practical.
Part of my point is that this is a false distinction. We use the same mechanisms to imagine anger, violence, etc. that we do to enact them. For much of the brain, there is no difference between fantasy and reality. If being angry makes you better at the game, you are exercising your anger.
Well, that is interesting, but being "desensitized" is not really what I was getting at.
It is true, one principle of learning is habituation. When you are repeatedly exposed to a stimulus your reaction to it may decrease over time. But there is another thing that happens when you generate a thought or behavior repeatedly, which is that it becomes more likely to be invoked in the future. That's how habits form. Habits of behavior and habits of thought affect us all. The more often you invoke a certain mindset, the easier and more likely it becomes that you will invoke in the future.
I'm not suggesting that people who play a game like this will become killers, but I also don't think it's particularly healthy to adopt the mindset of a brutal killer and to be rewarded for invoking the thoughts and actions of a murderer. Obviously "games" have become much more than they were in the past, but originally, games and simulations were nature's way of skilling us up -- preparing us for what we were one day going to do. We do learn from games.
It's hard to believe this guy is really a mathematician. I read this with interest as I teach college classes and have to give tests. However, there's not much content in the article.
His point about only counting the correct answers is rather silly. In a test where each question is either right or wrong, counting the wrong answers into the score does not add any information (you can tell how many are wrong if you know how many are right). The only thing it does is change the scaling of the resulting scores. This only makes a difference if you have an issue interpreting the scores. He seems to want the scores to proportional to the amount of knowledge someone has, so that if I have twice as much knowledge as you my score is twice as high. But in the example case of a professional qualifying examination, all that matters is whether or not you achieve some minimum. Whether that is represented as % correct or % correct - %incorrect/2 really makes no difference.
Designing better tests generally involves moving beyond multiple choice, not manipulating the scoring process.
For example, the article points out that he was supposed to be denied a gun due to his psychiatric diagnosis but the info was never forwarded from Virginia to the federal database. Yeah, who knows, he may have gotten one some other way if he was truly determined, but who knows? It's worth making sure the system works properly if it could have helped.
Clearly the solution to this whole situation is to have Microsoft play tic-tac-toe over and over again....
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
-Inigo Montoya
Fixed.
You can argue which is of greater consequence, a miss or a false alarm. But you can't ignore that there is such a tradeoff.
Red Hat stock seems to be doing ok...
When you tune your bias towards having fewer false positives you almost necessarily have more misses.
With drugs I agree that false positives may be more harmful than misses. However in the case of anti-terrorism it is desirable to have false positives at the expense of having fewer misses, because a miss is fatal.
If the players were not happy with the game, they would work to change it. The players are responsible for the game they play. What do you think would happen if Verizon and friends started putting their muscle behind patent reform?
Obviously this is only fair if humans are also given Chimp Rights!
For example, the right to throw poo at our neighbors, the right of adults to wear diapers in public...
april fools ;-)
Interesting theory... apply to self?
I think the existence of this game is disturbing, and frankly it should not be encouraged by a link on slashdot. Gold farming is a serious issue that undermines the integrity of the games we invest our time and money in to play. This game is a slap in the face of the hard working people trying to combat gold farming. Making a hero out of the gold farmer is purely offensive.
The FSF has also explicitly asked the community whether the new patent provisions should apply retroactively to the Microsoft-Novell deal
Is that really an option? Wouldn't that be changing the terms of the license (v2) after it was distributed and agreed to? I don't understand how they can affect the Novell deal without going through the trouble of upgrading Linux to GPLv3-- and even then Novell should be able to use old Linux released under GPLv2, no?
Well it should be noted that the experimental technique used in this article cannot be done with a standard televison, since it requires input to each eye to be controlled separately. They used continuous flash suppression, where an image presented to one eye is suppressed by flashing another image in the other eye.
Well I just read the article and it appears that the main point of this paper is that attention affects the processing of unconscious, invisible visual stimuli.
What they did was to have a task in central vision that was either easy (not requiring much attention) or hard (requiring lots of attention). At the same time, invisible pictures were flashed in the periphery (made invisible by masking). Looking at the voxels in visual cortex which correspond to the locations of the invisible, peripheral stimuli, they found greater activity in easy mode than in hard mode. In other words, when the central visual task required lots of attention, the invisible stimuli in the periphery activated visual cortex more weakly.
To quote the article "The present findings are the first to show that neural processes involved in the retinotopic registration of stimulus presence in V1 depend on availability of attentional capacity, even when they do not invoke any conscious experience. These findings challenge previous suggestions that attention and awareness are one and the same."