Now I'm not saying that vaccinations should be stopped. I give them to my own kids. But I do believe that people are really seeing things happen, and just because those people are mostly soccer moms, they don't always get taken seriously.
Except that they were taken seriously. Mercury is a known toxin, and while the levels or very low, and autism doesn't really much resemble mercury poisoning (of which there have been many authentic examples over the years), it is conceivable that some people might be extraordinarily sensitive and be affected in an idiosyncratic way. Which is why thimerosol was taken out of vaccines (even though it makes them more expensive and vulnerable to contamination) and why there have been numerous careful studies of the relationship between thimerosol and autism. The reason they are no longer being taken seriously is that the studies failed to substantiate a connection between thimerosol and autism, and removing thimerosol from the vaccines had zero effect on autism incidence, as shown by careful studies in multiple countries.
The issue is that some people couldn't bear to let go of a pet hypothesis. It was very satisfying; it provided an explanation, somebody to blame, and even a therapeutic approach--chelation therapy, which has turned out to be very lucrative for unethical therapists despite its lack of efficacy and its very dangerous side effects, in some cases including death.
While it may very well claim 1999, that was when it ceased being PRODUCED. They still used the old stock and THAT wasn't cleared until at least 2001. Also the flu shot contains mercury, and is administered to pregnant women now.
But not every pregnant woman receives flu vaccine, so surely there would be some decrease in the rates due to removal of mercury from other vaccines, shouldn't there? And if there is some delay due to old stocks, one would by now have expected the rates to have dropped in other countries that removed thimerosol even earlier. Yet they haven't.
Autism symptoms don't develop at 2 months, the time when the first vaccine is mandated.
Or, heck, even at birth, now that Hep-B shots before leaving the hospital are all the rage.
And you are presenting this in favor of the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism? Seriously?
With "factual analysis" by morons like you backing them up, it's little wonder crap statistical analyses like "this doesn't cause Autism" is the major focus, when spending the money on finding out what *does* cause it would be real science, but that ain't happenin'.
And who told you this? The guys selling "vaccines cause autism" books and quack chelation therapy? I was at the Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last year, and I saw row on row of posters describing work on the causes of autism. Try this: go to PubMed and type "autism" into the search box. There have been some important recent breakthroughs indicating a genetic basis for autism. Identifying the genes is an important step toward figuring out what goes wrong and developing a therapy. What doesn't contribute is investing yet more time and money pursuing the long-rejected notion that mercury or vaccines causes autism.
If you had half a brain cell to rub together, you might also be interested in this article, which has not been refuted by anyone.
Oh wow, an article in the respected scientific journal Rolling Stone. And it has not been refuted by anyone? Not even here? Or here? Or here? Or here?
After all, other countries have eliminated or dramatically reduced mercury in vaccines with zero effect on autism rates, and the mercury fanatics never batted an eye. Nor are they troubled by the fact that the neurological effects of actual mercury poisoning don't resemble autism.
It's a bit like homeopathy in reverse. Many of these guys have a superstitious fear of "toxins," and no matter how low the level might be, they will be convinced that it is poisoning their kids.
Of course, the real problem is that the age at which autism symptoms develop is about the same as the age when kids normally get their shots. A reasoned explanation of the difference between correlation and causality is often beyond the grasp of parents who are desperate for an explanation, or better yet, somebody to blame.
in other words you don't actually believe in god or gods, but for some social reasons you feel better not actually saying that, or take some sort of pride in not saying that so as to appear tolerant or just like to play some kind of word game?
Not really. It is more accurate to say that it is a possibility that has little personal relevance to me, and one where I see no real basis for investigation, so I neither believe nor disbelieve.
Seems like a queer belief for a scientist. It almost sounds like you have no preference between knowledge and ignorance.
When you say you don't care what the final answers are, does that extend to your experiments, if you perform experiments? And do you mean that you don't care whether your hypotheses turn out to be true or false? You don't care if you never learn anything in the rest of your career as a scientist, except that every experiment failed, because you're totally happy with mystery?
One thing that you have to accept when doing science is that there are no final answers. The only facts are your data. All interpretation and generalization is provisional--"just" theory. We expect, based on experience, that most of our theories will turn out to be wrong--in detail, if not in overall outline. The value of a hypothesis is not in whether it is true or false, but where it leads--how well as it works as a tool for discovery. We are constantly learning more, but we have no certainty that any answer is the final answer, and no way of recognizing a final answer if we succeed in discovering it.
You don't care if you never learn anything in the rest of your career as a scientist, except that every experiment failed, because you're totally happy with mystery?
A successful experiment is one in which I learn something, even if what I learn is simply that my hypothesis is wrong.
Conversely, if you say that you do desire answers and that you appreciate learning, but just don't happen to care whether it's final or not, does that not imply that you prefer answers to mysteries?
I prefer finding answers to having them given to me. And to find an answer, you must first have a mystery.
However, Einstein did speak of God, although it is clear that he did not believe in a personal God who answers prayer:
About God, I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church. As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indocrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.
every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe -- spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive. (1936)
Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion and science? Can religion be superseded by science? The answers to these questions have, for centuries, given rise to considerable dispute and, indeed, bitter fighting. Yet, in my own mind there can be no doubt that in both cases a dispassionate consideration can only lead to a negative answer. What complicates the solution, however, is the fact that while most people readily agree on what is meant by "science," they are likely to differ on the meaning of "religion."...As regards religion, on the other hand, one is generally agreed that it deals with goals andevaluations and, in general, with the emotional foundation of human thinking and acting, as far as these are not predetermined by the inalterable hereditary disposition of the human species. Religion is concerned with man's attitude toward nature at large, with the establishing of ideals for the individual and communal life, and with mutual human relationship. (1948)
Why do I have to believe or disbelieve in God? Some religious views I find repugnant, in the sense that I would not consider such a God as deserving of worship, but that is not disbelief. I don't have any personal emotional need for "meaning," nor do I have any emotional need for everything in the universe to be explained to me right now. I am comfortable with mystery, and am more interested in the process of discovery and puzzling out the answers than in what the final answers might be. If everything were explained to me tomorrow, it would spoil all the fun, like somebody telling me the end of a movie when I walk in the door. What would be left for me do?
God as a general concept is just not interesting. It is too vague too be testable, so it falls into the category of ideas like solipsism or the notion that the entire universe and all of our memories were created 10 seconds ago. It certainly could be right, but so what? It is an intellectual blind alley that does not lead anywhere interesting. It is boring. You take it as far as it goes (not very far) and then you look for something more interesting to think about.
If somebody wants to propose a testable God hypothesis, fine. I'll give it the thought that it merits. God created all of the species at one time a few thousand years ago? OK, that one's been tested and it's wrong. Next?
Einstien did not believe in god, despite using the word as a surrogate for "nature".
Then why would he need a surrogate? If he meant "nature," why not say "nature?" It seems more likely that Einstein did not think of God in the same way as you do, and did not see a meaningful distinction between "God" and "nature." Who is to say that this is not a form religious belief, even if it is not the kind of personal God that many people visualize?
I'm pretty tolerant against people with any kind of religion, mostly because it is the only way to get along. But trying to reconcile science and religion? They are both trying to describe how the world works, from two opposite sides.
Not necessarily. People turn to religion for many reasons, and explanation of how the world works is only one of them, and usually not the most important. Many scientists are religious, but they look to religion for meaning, not for descriptions of how the world works. The book expresses this quite clearly:
Science can neither prove nor disprove religion. Scientific advances have called some religious beliefs into question, such as the ideas that the Earth was created very recently, that the Sun goes around the Earth, and that mental illness is due to possession by spirits or demons. But many religious beliefs involve entities or ideas that currently are not within the domain of science. Thus, it would be false to assume that all religious beliefs can be challenged by scientific findings
Video games are far from the most important issue being debated by the candidates, and the likelihood that a Presidential candidate's views on videogames will impact actual laws is small. Hillary Clinton has come out in support of draconian legal penalties for stores that slip up and sell games to underage players, but such laws have not fared well in the courts. I'd be surprised if Clinton's enthusiasm for this approach extends to trying to pack the judiciary with supporters of videogame censorship.
Nevertheless, this is an issue for me. The fact that Clinton would support such harsh federal intervention in a matter that is properly the concern of parents, and is in any event more a local matter than a federal one concerns me. And the fact that she ignores the actual evidence--the fact that violent crime has dropped as videogames have become more popular, and dropped most dramatically in the very age group that most plays videogames, demonstrating that any pro-violence effect of videogames is insignificant compared to other social and demographic factors--is reminiscent of the way the Bush administration ignored the evidence that Iraq did not have WMD. I cannot help but see this as an indicator of the same kind of poor judgement that led many members of Congress, including Clinton, to support intervention in Iraq. This is the primary reason why I will not be donating to Hillary Clinton's campaign or voting for her at the primary level (although I would certainly support her over all of the Republican candidates).
The average viewer of prerecorded disks does not know or care about DRM. They buy or rent the disk, and don't bother trying to get the movie off of it. But the problem for content providers is that this is a pretty minor quality upgrade for everybody except the guys with really huge sets. The visible quality bump is much less than 480i to 480p. So most people will upgrade, but they are willing to pay only a slight premium over standard DVD players and disks, and they have no patience with a content war.
It does look like Blu-Ray will win, due primarily to support from Blockbuster and the Sony PS3, but the prize is going to turn out to be hardly worth fighting for as far as content and hardware producers are concerned.
Well, they should have done that as soon as they saw the first atoms forming, or at least when the stars started. The quantization is very much needed to give us something resembling what we have. Classical mechanics simply didn't cut it.
That does not mean that there is no non-quantal way of getting stable atoms or stars. I doubt if anybody has tried very hard to develop such theories, considering that so much other evidence points in the direction of quantum mechanics.
There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new or profound in the paper. None of the "tests" suggest any practical experiments, so it seems to me little more than amusing speculation.
However, along those lines:
The notion that the apparent quantized nature of physics could be an approximation--a way for a simulation to limit memory requirements--occurred to me some years ago. It has some potentially disturbing implications (at least if you take it seriously).
This idea is meaningful only if the simulation is embedded in a universe is not itself quantized. Of course, our universe could be an accurate simulation of a quantized universe, but then our universe's quantal nature is not any kind of evidence for our universe being a VR.
This leads to some concerns about the motivations of the creators of the simulation. Generally, one constructs a simulation to answer questions about one's own world, so we may speculate that the developers of the simulation presumed that quantizing reality at such a tiny scale would not be a major source of error.
Yet here we are, developing technologies that work only because of the quantal nature of physics, happily exploiting what are really "bugs" in the simulation. If the developers happen to notice what we are doing, they might not be too happy about this--potentially, the use of quantum technology to any major extent would undermine the validity of their simulation in terms of making predictions regarding their (presumably non-quantum) universe. What if they notice, realize that their simulation is faulty and decide to turn us off?
No, this is not a knee-jerk reaction to the silliness of the war on drugs. This is asking "Why the hell are people reducing the effect of all cocaine derived **//medicines//**???" These pain relievers are an important part of many people's lives to mitigate and control pain.
Not true. There are no important cocaine-derived pain relievers.
Is it really so selective that it prevents getting a high from cocaine, yet does not diminish the anesthetic effects of lidocaine, xylocaine, articane, prilocaine, etc.?
This is one case in which similarity of name is misleading. cocaine does not really look all that much like procaine or other local anesthetics. Not surprising, since cocaine does something other local anesthetics don't do--it blocks the dopamine transporter. So it shouldn't be that hard to avoid local anesthetic cross reactivity. Pretty much the same thing goes for dopamine and other natural catecholamines, and these are obvious things to check.
Cocaine is actually one of the safer stimulants out there (compared to its main rivals, crack and meth, which emerged due to cocaine's astronomical price thanks to prohibition).
You are quite a ways behind the times. The notion that cocaine is a relatively safe stimulant fell by the wayside when people in their 20's started dropping dead from cocaine cardiotoxicity. Crack is just another name for cocaine (in the free-based form in which it is now most commonly sold--once in the bloodstream, it is the same drug). Meth may indeed be worse than cocaine but that is more an indictment of meth than a testimonial for cocaine.
The orgasm releases neurotransmitters that are similar to cocaine. Perhaps those vaccinated against cocaine would never have orgasms, or reduced orgasms. In fact, dopamine is critical for a lot of enjoyment. Maybe this will spawn a 'deadheading' procedure. Piss off the wrong person or government and you will never enjoy anything ever again. You wouldn't even want revenge, there would be no joy in it.
If the antibodies got into the brain and cross reacted with dopamine, I'd be more worried about Parkinsonian symptoms than blocking orgasm. But even though cocaine blocks the dopamine transporter, it is chemically pretty difficult from dopamine, so it should be possible come up with an antigen that only elicited antibodies against cocaine, and not against dopamine or other related natural neurotransmitters and hormones. These are such an obvious concern that the vaccine would never have gone forward if there were any evidence of this.
Since cocaine works by blocking the dopamine transporter, the obvious worries are dopamine and other natural catecholamines epinephrine and norepinephrine. But these are very obvious--any vaccine that elicited antibodies against natural catecholamines would wash out very early in development.
None of those things need to be in the paper; the presumption in scientific papers is that the authors are familiar with the basic tools and methods of their research area. Unless you have a specific cause to doubt that, you have no justification for questioning their results because they did not include those details.
Frankly, no matter how much detail they included, I'd be skeptical. It's not entirely impossible in principle that RF could affect neurotransmission; I could imagine a situation where a very low amplitude signal modulates near-threshold synaptic responses--but it sounds pretty unlikely and would require a great deal of positive feedback. Moreover, the effect size is small relative to the standard deviation. This means that there is a lot of potential for errors and artifacts. Was the blinding perfect? Were any outliers excluded after the code was broken? Were the experimental and placebo really indistinguishable to both subjects and experimenters?
Hmmm.... most other people would be breaking open champagne and kissing a loved one at midnight on New Years Eve. But iPhone users are staring into their phones... I guess that says it all.
Actually, in the minutes before New Years Eve, most people are looking at their watch, waiting for the precise moment to crack open the champagne.
Like many iPhone owners, I no longer bother to carry a watch.
Right, but the newer realistic games might be undoing the good previous generations of games have done, and if that reversal keeps true, then it will escalate.
Except that there is no evidence of any reversal, even though the kids who played Grand Theft Auto in their teens are now into their 20's, the prime age range for crime and violence. At most, the decline looks like it might be leveling out--which it pretty much has to do at some point, whatever the cause. After all, the murder rate can only drop so far, unless criminals start resurrecting people.
Or in Jacko's terms... the more realistic the murder simulator, the more damaging to society.
More accurately, rates of crime and violence have dropped steadily as videogames have become more realistically violent, and dropped most dramatically in the very demographic group--young males--that are the most avid consumers of videogames. Violent crime rates are the lowest since statistics began to be collected in 1973, well before the availability of realistic videogames. Therefore, any hypothetical pro-violence or pro-crime effect of videogames, whether 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit, is so small as to be completely swamped by other social and demographic factors influencing crime rates.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that they were taken seriously. Mercury is a known toxin, and while the levels or very low, and autism doesn't really much resemble mercury poisoning (of which there have been many authentic examples over the years), it is conceivable that some people might be extraordinarily sensitive and be affected in an idiosyncratic way. Which is why thimerosol was taken out of vaccines (even though it makes them more expensive and vulnerable to contamination) and why there have been numerous careful studies of the relationship between thimerosol and autism. The reason they are no longer being taken seriously is that the studies failed to substantiate a connection between thimerosol and autism, and removing thimerosol from the vaccines had zero effect on autism incidence, as shown by careful studies in multiple countries.
The issue is that some people couldn't bear to let go of a pet hypothesis. It was very satisfying; it provided an explanation, somebody to blame, and even a therapeutic approach--chelation therapy, which has turned out to be very lucrative for unethical therapists despite its lack of efficacy and its very dangerous side effects, in some cases including death.
But not every pregnant woman receives flu vaccine, so surely there would be some decrease in the rates due to removal of mercury from other vaccines, shouldn't there? And if there is some delay due to old stocks, one would by now have expected the rates to have dropped in other countries that removed thimerosol even earlier. Yet they haven't.
And you are presenting this in favor of the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism? Seriously?
And who told you this? The guys selling "vaccines cause autism" books and quack chelation therapy? I was at the Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last year, and I saw row on row of posters describing work on the causes of autism. Try this: go to PubMed and type "autism" into the search box. There have been some important recent breakthroughs indicating a genetic basis for autism. Identifying the genes is an important step toward figuring out what goes wrong and developing a therapy. What doesn't contribute is investing yet more time and money pursuing the long-rejected notion that mercury or vaccines causes autism.
Oh wow, an article in the respected scientific journal Rolling Stone. And it has not been refuted by anyone? Not even here? Or here? Or here? Or here?
After all, other countries have eliminated or dramatically reduced mercury in vaccines with zero effect on autism rates, and the mercury fanatics never batted an eye. Nor are they troubled by the fact that the neurological effects of actual mercury poisoning don't resemble autism.
It's a bit like homeopathy in reverse. Many of these guys have a superstitious fear of "toxins," and no matter how low the level might be, they will be convinced that it is poisoning their kids.
Of course, the real problem is that the age at which autism symptoms develop is about the same as the age when kids normally get their shots. A reasoned explanation of the difference between correlation and causality is often beyond the grasp of parents who are desperate for an explanation, or better yet, somebody to blame.
Not really. It is more accurate to say that it is a possibility that has little personal relevance to me, and one where I see no real basis for investigation, so I neither believe nor disbelieve.
One thing that you have to accept when doing science is that there are no final answers. The only facts are your data. All interpretation and generalization is provisional--"just" theory. We expect, based on experience, that most of our theories will turn out to be wrong--in detail, if not in overall outline. The value of a hypothesis is not in whether it is true or false, but where it leads--how well as it works as a tool for discovery. We are constantly learning more, but we have no certainty that any answer is the final answer, and no way of recognizing a final answer if we succeed in discovering it.
A successful experiment is one in which I learn something, even if what I learn is simply that my hypothesis is wrong.
I prefer finding answers to having them given to me. And to find an answer, you must first have a mystery.
Abundant in Einstein's writings
For example
Why do I have to believe or disbelieve in God? Some religious views I find repugnant, in the sense that I would not consider such a God as deserving of worship, but that is not disbelief. I don't have any personal emotional need for "meaning," nor do I have any emotional need for everything in the universe to be explained to me right now. I am comfortable with mystery, and am more interested in the process of discovery and puzzling out the answers than in what the final answers might be. If everything were explained to me tomorrow, it would spoil all the fun, like somebody telling me the end of a movie when I walk in the door. What would be left for me do?
God as a general concept is just not interesting. It is too vague too be testable, so it falls into the category of ideas like solipsism or the notion that the entire universe and all of our memories were created 10 seconds ago. It certainly could be right, but so what? It is an intellectual blind alley that does not lead anywhere interesting. It is boring. You take it as far as it goes (not very far) and then you look for something more interesting to think about.
If somebody wants to propose a testable God hypothesis, fine. I'll give it the thought that it merits. God created all of the species at one time a few thousand years ago? OK, that one's been tested and it's wrong. Next?
Then why would he need a surrogate? If he meant "nature," why not say "nature?" It seems more likely that Einstein did not think of God in the same way as you do, and did not see a meaningful distinction between "God" and "nature." Who is to say that this is not a form religious belief, even if it is not the kind of personal God that many people visualize?
Not necessarily. People turn to religion for many reasons, and explanation of how the world works is only one of them, and usually not the most important. Many scientists are religious, but they look to religion for meaning, not for descriptions of how the world works. The book expresses this quite clearly:
Video games are far from the most important issue being debated by the candidates, and the likelihood that a Presidential candidate's views on videogames will impact actual laws is small. Hillary Clinton has come out in support of draconian legal penalties for stores that slip up and sell games to underage players, but such laws have not fared well in the courts. I'd be surprised if Clinton's enthusiasm for this approach extends to trying to pack the judiciary with supporters of videogame censorship.
Nevertheless, this is an issue for me. The fact that Clinton would support such harsh federal intervention in a matter that is properly the concern of parents, and is in any event more a local matter than a federal one concerns me. And the fact that she ignores the actual evidence--the fact that violent crime has dropped as videogames have become more popular, and dropped most dramatically in the very age group that most plays videogames, demonstrating that any pro-violence effect of videogames is insignificant compared to other social and demographic factors--is reminiscent of the way the Bush administration ignored the evidence that Iraq did not have WMD. I cannot help but see this as an indicator of the same kind of poor judgement that led many members of Congress, including Clinton, to support intervention in Iraq. This is the primary reason why I will not be donating to Hillary Clinton's campaign or voting for her at the primary level (although I would certainly support her over all of the Republican candidates).
The average viewer of prerecorded disks does not know or care about DRM. They buy or rent the disk, and don't bother trying to get the movie off of it. But the problem for content providers is that this is a pretty minor quality upgrade for everybody except the guys with really huge sets. The visible quality bump is much less than 480i to 480p. So most people will upgrade, but they are willing to pay only a slight premium over standard DVD players and disks, and they have no patience with a content war.
It does look like Blu-Ray will win, due primarily to support from Blockbuster and the Sony PS3, but the prize is going to turn out to be hardly worth fighting for as far as content and hardware producers are concerned.
That does not mean that there is no non-quantal way of getting stable atoms or stars. I doubt if anybody has tried very hard to develop such theories, considering that so much other evidence points in the direction of quantum mechanics.
There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new or profound in the paper. None of the "tests" suggest any practical experiments, so it seems to me little more than amusing speculation.
However, along those lines:
The notion that the apparent quantized nature of physics could be an approximation--a way for a simulation to limit memory requirements--occurred to me some years ago. It has some potentially disturbing implications (at least if you take it seriously).
This idea is meaningful only if the simulation is embedded in a universe is not itself quantized. Of course, our universe could be an accurate simulation of a quantized universe, but then our universe's quantal nature is not any kind of evidence for our universe being a VR.
This leads to some concerns about the motivations of the creators of the simulation. Generally, one constructs a simulation to answer questions about one's own world, so we may speculate that the developers of the simulation presumed that quantizing reality at such a tiny scale would not be a major source of error.
Yet here we are, developing technologies that work only because of the quantal nature of physics, happily exploiting what are really "bugs" in the simulation. If the developers happen to notice what we are doing, they might not be too happy about this--potentially, the use of quantum technology to any major extent would undermine the validity of their simulation in terms of making predictions regarding their (presumably non-quantum) universe. What if they notice, realize that their simulation is faulty and decide to turn us off?
Not true. There are no important cocaine-derived pain relievers.
This is one case in which similarity of name is misleading. cocaine does not really look all that much like procaine or other local anesthetics. Not surprising, since cocaine does something other local anesthetics don't do--it blocks the dopamine transporter. So it shouldn't be that hard to avoid local anesthetic cross reactivity. Pretty much the same thing goes for dopamine and other natural catecholamines, and these are obvious things to check.
You are quite a ways behind the times. The notion that cocaine is a relatively safe stimulant fell by the wayside when people in their 20's started dropping dead from cocaine cardiotoxicity. Crack is just another name for cocaine (in the free-based form in which it is now most commonly sold--once in the bloodstream, it is the same drug). Meth may indeed be worse than cocaine but that is more an indictment of meth than a testimonial for cocaine.
If the antibodies got into the brain and cross reacted with dopamine, I'd be more worried about Parkinsonian symptoms than blocking orgasm. But even though cocaine blocks the dopamine transporter, it is chemically pretty difficult from dopamine, so it should be possible come up with an antigen that only elicited antibodies against cocaine, and not against dopamine or other related natural neurotransmitters and hormones. These are such an obvious concern that the vaccine would never have gone forward if there were any evidence of this.
Since cocaine works by blocking the dopamine transporter, the obvious worries are dopamine and other natural catecholamines epinephrine and norepinephrine. But these are very obvious--any vaccine that elicited antibodies against natural catecholamines would wash out very early in development.
Frankly, no matter how much detail they included, I'd be skeptical. It's not entirely impossible in principle that RF could affect neurotransmission; I could imagine a situation where a very low amplitude signal modulates near-threshold synaptic responses--but it sounds pretty unlikely and would require a great deal of positive feedback. Moreover, the effect size is small relative to the standard deviation. This means that there is a lot of potential for errors and artifacts. Was the blinding perfect? Were any outliers excluded after the code was broken? Were the experimental and placebo really indistinguishable to both subjects and experimenters?
Actually, in the minutes before New Years Eve, most people are looking at their watch, waiting for the precise moment to crack open the champagne.
Like many iPhone owners, I no longer bother to carry a watch.
Switched from Dec 07 to Jan 08 exactly on time.
Except that there is no evidence of any reversal, even though the kids who played Grand Theft Auto in their teens are now into their 20's, the prime age range for crime and violence. At most, the decline looks like it might be leveling out--which it pretty much has to do at some point, whatever the cause. After all, the murder rate can only drop so far, unless criminals start resurrecting people.
More accurately, rates of crime and violence have dropped steadily as videogames have become more realistically violent, and dropped most dramatically in the very demographic group--young males--that are the most avid consumers of videogames. Violent crime rates are the lowest since statistics began to be collected in 1973, well before the availability of realistic videogames. Therefore, any hypothetical pro-violence or pro-crime effect of videogames, whether 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit, is so small as to be completely swamped by other social and demographic factors influencing crime rates.