Pigeons have been trained to discriminate all kinds of things, such as cats and cars.
Interesting how it is somehow much more interesting when a mammal like a dog can do it even though their brains are much more human-like? Animal cognition research is full of examples where you can train a pigeon to do something, it goes unnoticed, but if you train a dog or a chimp to do it, it's published in Science and all over the New York Times and BBC webpages.
It's a race to the bottom between iTunes and Firefox, for which piece of software can aggravate its users by constantly auto-updating.
At least Firefox doesn't make you accept the license agreement every time a patch is installed...
In the words of Inigno Montoya, "I do not think it means what you think it means."
(Yes, I know I'm going to hell for correcting the grammar of a person who's been rendered homeless by a natural disaster.)
Hey, isn't that a picture of the Geek Squad dude with Paulie Walnuts in that second link? That's just about the last guy I'd want to get caught stealing pron from...
"Passing the coin to an unwitting contractor, particularly in strife-torn countries, could mark the person for kidnapping or assassination"
But that doesn't seem practical in this case.
Sure it does! Ever try getting rid of Canadian money outside Canada? Impossible, nobody wants it. Especially coins - I more than once have had a Canadian penny - yes penny - handed back to me as "not real money" when paying at the till in the US.
Yeah, funny how the results of this study has gotten recycled several times over the last five years. In the end, the fact that they studied taxi drivers in London sells a lot better than some of the excellent hard science this group's been doing more recently. But I guess you gotta pay the bills...
Note that they were not talking about an fMRI study.This was an anatomical MRI study. The idea is they looked at patients who have difficulty matching words to the objects they represent and correlated their deficit with what regions of the brain appear to be degenerating in the patients.
Your point is very well taken about fMRI - it is more likely to tell you where something is happening than to tell you why.
Sony needs to learn from its mistakes. Closed standards kill platforms. They have gone to major pains to keep users from doing things like loading in their own movies or games via disc or memory stick. I wager they would do much better in sales if they went with an open framework that makes it easier to DIY video content, maybe even downloadable games that appeal to a more casual game crowd (a la Pop Cap games). Mind you this was all done in the interest of profit, since it keeps away the "pirates".
I seem to recall a Supreme Court decision that overturned a similar bill that tried to force public libraries to install porn filters on computers. The court declared it the same brand of censorship as forbidding libraries from lending out certain types of books.
Of course, I also seem recall my last visit to the LA Public Library, where a guy was grinning ear to ear as he surfed porn right there on a public terminal. The Library's solution was to install polarizing filters on the displays so that you couldn't accidentally see someone surfing porn (unless you were doing what I did, which was craning my neck to see what the guy was grinning about...)
*Sigh*... Democracy at its finest.
I guess it's one of those things where you're supposed to know who they are and if you don't, well, maybe you shouldn't be reading the list...
Of course it doesn't help that they misspelled Aaron Hillegass' name. Who, by the way, very much deserves to be on that list given his major role in educating people on how to develop apps in Coocoa.
One thing this will address is the kinds of input kids get, since we're interested in what kids have to learn from exposure vs. what they get for free from their genes (so to speak). Currently our guesses at this are based on brief recordings taken weeks apart, usually in a structured setting (see the CHILDES project at CMU for more info). A lot has been made of productions that children allegedly make without having been exposed to a model in parental speech, but we don't always know if it's true. The recordings could have missed it, given the very sparse sampling that's done. Projects like these could give us a more realistic view of what kinds of things parents say to/around kids, giving us a better idea of what they are using to learn language.
Do you think Canada will ever be in the same situation as the US where even young children can become CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) victims? - we asked him in the Q&A below.
OK, I can name at least one thing wrong with that statement. (Hint: there's no Canadian association of anything American).
Clever tactic: create a product for the sole purpose of showing that not everything you do/produce is antisocial (or construed as such). Wal-Mart does the same thing with its charities - "sure we pay minimum wage and no benefits, but we gave a couple of high school kids $500 scholarships too!"
Is there an English word for such a product? Cause there should be.
At $15 a month to play online, it's anything but 'free'! It's never been clear to me why they don't give away every copy in the first place.
"Busted", or just "old and tired"?
on
Videogame Mythbusting
·
· Score: 3, Informative
2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression.
Claims like this are based on the work of researchers who represent one relatively narrow school of research, "media effects."
The author is quick to dismiss what turns out to be a large body of well-designed, peer-reviewed studies. For instance, he suggests studies are flawed because they are either correlation-based (looking at whether two behaviours co-occur, not whether one causes the other), because they happen in a laboratory, or because the subjects aren't always "real" video game players.
As a counterpoint, allow me to point out an article that came out in the November issue of Psychological Science (a highly regarded journal in Psychology) by Carnagey & Anderson at Iowa State University. They had college age adults play 3 versions of a violent driving game (Carmageddon 2) where they were either a) rewarded for violent behaviour; b) punished for it; or c) played a nonviolent version where killing pedestrian & other players wasn't possible. Afterwards they received a set of objective measures of physiological and psychological aggression, they found that subjects who played the version that rewarded violent behaviours (running over pedestrians) showed increased hostility and aggression.
Note that since subjects were randomly assigned to conditions one can safely assume a causal model in which playing a game that rewards violent behaviour does lead to hostile/aggressive behaviour.
Now, I am not saying that this means kids who play GTA will go out and kill pedestrians. But I also think it's ignorant to set aside scientific evidence that violence in media has no effect on people's behaviour. It does, both in kids and adults, and both in males and females. If gamers are going to defend themselves against overly zealous politicians, it makes sense to educate oneself about the science. By flippantly setting it all aside, this article does nothing to address it.
This is the same reason that digital cameras go up in quality (megapixels) every year. We want to see things that look better and better.
Yes, true. However, it's amazing how many people have a 4+ megapixel camera that they never use at full resolution since it fills up their memory card and they don't actually care about the difference (or worse, they don't know how to change the resolution, which is usually preset to something less than the maximum.
My point (and I do have one) is that we get a lot of stuff foisted on us that is bigger, faster, more megapixels, lemon scented whatever, but is not actually better in a way that regular folks will appreciate. As much as nice graphics helps make a good game great, it doesn't do jack if the game is lousy. In that case I really would rather play a great game at 640x480. The sad truth is that a lot of what is supposedly making the XBox 360 'better' is hyped up graphics stuff, when the thing that will matter in the long run is whether the games are going to be good. If they don't, it's $400 of badly spent money.
Sry, MMORPG is flawed because people cheat, people will look to cheat, and people enjoy cheating. MMORPG includes people. QED.
Yeah, I guess it's like in real life: there two kinds of people who cheat: (A) folks who are jerks who think they can get away with it; and (B) folks who think that everyone else is cheating and they need to 'even the odds'. As a college professor I have first hand experience with both mindsets. The minority are in category "a", but they wreck it for the rest of us because they cause reasonably honest people to decide to join catgory "b".
If you want cheating not to happen, you make it hard for people in category A to do their thing. It does involve balancing rights of privacy, meaning that people are going to have to make the decision to either play the game and get spied on, or not play. If anything, Blizzard's sin in this case is they weren't sufficiently informative with their users about the extent of the spying they were doing (before you shell out the $50 for the game etc.) But ultimately anti-cheating measures, like police officers, are a necessary evil.
Yeah. It was fun, but it took longer to download than to play through. I think Valve is giving this one away as a freebie but with the intention of selling other "levels" like this in the future (see yesterday's discussion of the XBox 360 microeconomics). But I'm not sure I'd have payed more than $2-3 for it. Just not enough "playability".
Unlike mice that have obvious buttons and scroll wheels, this one looks the same no matter how its configured, so you can't know if right-clicking is enabled (or disabled) without sitting down and becoming frustrated with it.
I'm sorry, how is this different from someone on a PC who has remapped the various buttons to do specific things? Or a Mac user who has remapped their Dashboard key to CMD-F12? Remapping button and keyboard behaviour has been around forever, and has always been seen as a feature, not a bug.
The problem with this theory is that the pattern of folds (known as gyri and sulci) is very similar across individuals. For instance, barring people with serious neural defects, everyone has a superior temporal gyrus and sulcus. What differs is the amount of gray matter that actually makes up these patterns.
So, while the existence and size of folds differs across species, and can possibly explain differences in the reasoning and intelligence abilities of species, within a species the brain volume and gray matter volume seems to be the more critical issue.
However, when a paper is presented which says that jews and palestinians are genetically the same, that's a bad thing.
Don't write off science so easily. The article on Jews vs. Palestinians wasn't pulled because it reported an unpopular result. From the article:
In common with earlier studies, the team found no data to support the idea that Jewish people were genetically distinct from other people in the region.
Instead the editor yanked it because it was written in an unobjective and politically charged style:
In doing so, the team's research challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people and that Judaism can only be inherited.
So, the issue in that case wasn't whether the article's results were PC. People have reported such results in the past and it was published. The issue was that the authors were using the result to grind their own political - rather than scientific - axes.
Slashdot Mirror
Pigeons have been trained to discriminate all kinds of things, such as cats and cars. Interesting how it is somehow much more interesting when a mammal like a dog can do it even though their brains are much more human-like? Animal cognition research is full of examples where you can train a pigeon to do something, it goes unnoticed, but if you train a dog or a chimp to do it, it's published in Science and all over the New York Times and BBC webpages.
It's a race to the bottom between iTunes and Firefox, for which piece of software can aggravate its users by constantly auto-updating. At least Firefox doesn't make you accept the license agreement every time a patch is installed...
This isn't a terribly new idea. Just a lot of hype. Boy, I wish my Ph.D. dissertation work got Slashdotted!
Hey, isn't that a picture of the Geek Squad dude with Paulie Walnuts in that second link? That's just about the last guy I'd want to get caught stealing pron from...
Yeah, funny how the results of this study has gotten recycled several times over the last five years. In the end, the fact that they studied taxi drivers in London sells a lot better than some of the excellent hard science this group's been doing more recently. But I guess you gotta pay the bills...
Note that they were not talking about an fMRI study.This was an anatomical MRI study. The idea is they looked at patients who have difficulty matching words to the objects they represent and correlated their deficit with what regions of the brain appear to be degenerating in the patients. Your point is very well taken about fMRI - it is more likely to tell you where something is happening than to tell you why.
Sony needs to learn from its mistakes. Closed standards kill platforms. They have gone to major pains to keep users from doing things like loading in their own movies or games via disc or memory stick. I wager they would do much better in sales if they went with an open framework that makes it easier to DIY video content, maybe even downloadable games that appeal to a more casual game crowd (a la Pop Cap games). Mind you this was all done in the interest of profit, since it keeps away the "pirates".
I seem to recall a Supreme Court decision that overturned a similar bill that tried to force public libraries to install porn filters on computers. The court declared it the same brand of censorship as forbidding libraries from lending out certain types of books. Of course, I also seem recall my last visit to the LA Public Library, where a guy was grinning ear to ear as he surfed porn right there on a public terminal. The Library's solution was to install polarizing filters on the displays so that you couldn't accidentally see someone surfing porn (unless you were doing what I did, which was craning my neck to see what the guy was grinning about...) *Sigh*... Democracy at its finest.
I guess it's one of those things where you're supposed to know who they are and if you don't, well, maybe you shouldn't be reading the list... Of course it doesn't help that they misspelled Aaron Hillegass' name. Who, by the way, very much deserves to be on that list given his major role in educating people on how to develop apps in Coocoa.
One thing this will address is the kinds of input kids get, since we're interested in what kids have to learn from exposure vs. what they get for free from their genes (so to speak). Currently our guesses at this are based on brief recordings taken weeks apart, usually in a structured setting (see the CHILDES project at CMU for more info). A lot has been made of productions that children allegedly make without having been exposed to a model in parental speech, but we don't always know if it's true. The recordings could have missed it, given the very sparse sampling that's done. Projects like these could give us a more realistic view of what kinds of things parents say to/around kids, giving us a better idea of what they are using to learn language.
OK, I can name at least one thing wrong with that statement. (Hint: there's no Canadian association of anything American).
Clever tactic: create a product for the sole purpose of showing that not everything you do/produce is antisocial (or construed as such). Wal-Mart does the same thing with its charities - "sure we pay minimum wage and no benefits, but we gave a couple of high school kids $500 scholarships too!" Is there an English word for such a product? Cause there should be.
At $15 a month to play online, it's anything but 'free'! It's never been clear to me why they don't give away every copy in the first place.
2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression. Claims like this are based on the work of researchers who represent one relatively narrow school of research, "media effects." The author is quick to dismiss what turns out to be a large body of well-designed, peer-reviewed studies. For instance, he suggests studies are flawed because they are either correlation-based (looking at whether two behaviours co-occur, not whether one causes the other), because they happen in a laboratory, or because the subjects aren't always "real" video game players. As a counterpoint, allow me to point out an article that came out in the November issue of Psychological Science (a highly regarded journal in Psychology) by Carnagey & Anderson at Iowa State University. They had college age adults play 3 versions of a violent driving game (Carmageddon 2) where they were either a) rewarded for violent behaviour; b) punished for it; or c) played a nonviolent version where killing pedestrian & other players wasn't possible. Afterwards they received a set of objective measures of physiological and psychological aggression, they found that subjects who played the version that rewarded violent behaviours (running over pedestrians) showed increased hostility and aggression. Note that since subjects were randomly assigned to conditions one can safely assume a causal model in which playing a game that rewards violent behaviour does lead to hostile/aggressive behaviour. Now, I am not saying that this means kids who play GTA will go out and kill pedestrians. But I also think it's ignorant to set aside scientific evidence that violence in media has no effect on people's behaviour. It does, both in kids and adults, and both in males and females. If gamers are going to defend themselves against overly zealous politicians, it makes sense to educate oneself about the science. By flippantly setting it all aside, this article does nothing to address it.
This is the same reason that digital cameras go up in quality (megapixels) every year. We want to see things that look better and better. Yes, true. However, it's amazing how many people have a 4+ megapixel camera that they never use at full resolution since it fills up their memory card and they don't actually care about the difference (or worse, they don't know how to change the resolution, which is usually preset to something less than the maximum. My point (and I do have one) is that we get a lot of stuff foisted on us that is bigger, faster, more megapixels, lemon scented whatever, but is not actually better in a way that regular folks will appreciate. As much as nice graphics helps make a good game great, it doesn't do jack if the game is lousy. In that case I really would rather play a great game at 640x480. The sad truth is that a lot of what is supposedly making the XBox 360 'better' is hyped up graphics stuff, when the thing that will matter in the long run is whether the games are going to be good. If they don't, it's $400 of badly spent money.
Sry, MMORPG is flawed because people cheat, people will look to cheat, and people enjoy cheating. MMORPG includes people. QED. Yeah, I guess it's like in real life: there two kinds of people who cheat: (A) folks who are jerks who think they can get away with it; and (B) folks who think that everyone else is cheating and they need to 'even the odds'. As a college professor I have first hand experience with both mindsets. The minority are in category "a", but they wreck it for the rest of us because they cause reasonably honest people to decide to join catgory "b". If you want cheating not to happen, you make it hard for people in category A to do their thing. It does involve balancing rights of privacy, meaning that people are going to have to make the decision to either play the game and get spied on, or not play. If anything, Blizzard's sin in this case is they weren't sufficiently informative with their users about the extent of the spying they were doing (before you shell out the $50 for the game etc.) But ultimately anti-cheating measures, like police officers, are a necessary evil.
Yeah. It was fun, but it took longer to download than to play through. I think Valve is giving this one away as a freebie but with the intention of selling other "levels" like this in the future (see yesterday's discussion of the XBox 360 microeconomics). But I'm not sure I'd have payed more than $2-3 for it. Just not enough "playability".
Organized crime. *drool*
I'm sorry, how is this different from someone on a PC who has remapped the various buttons to do specific things? Or a Mac user who has remapped their Dashboard key to CMD-F12? Remapping button and keyboard behaviour has been around forever, and has always been seen as a feature, not a bug.
It could have been much worse... it could have been posted on Fark instead.
The problem with this theory is that the pattern of folds (known as gyri and sulci) is very similar across individuals. For instance, barring people with serious neural defects, everyone has a superior temporal gyrus and sulcus. What differs is the amount of gray matter that actually makes up these patterns. So, while the existence and size of folds differs across species, and can possibly explain differences in the reasoning and intelligence abilities of species, within a species the brain volume and gray matter volume seems to be the more critical issue.
Don't write off science so easily. The article on Jews vs. Palestinians wasn't pulled because it reported an unpopular result. From the article:
In common with earlier studies, the team found no data to support the idea that Jewish people were genetically distinct from other people in the region.
Instead the editor yanked it because it was written in an unobjective and politically charged style:
In doing so, the team's research challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people and that Judaism can only be inherited.
So, the issue in that case wasn't whether the article's results were PC. People have reported such results in the past and it was published. The issue was that the authors were using the result to grind their own political - rather than scientific - axes.
Yes, and last time I flew them the wifi "was broken". So much for the famous German efficiency. I'm sure US airlines will do better though.