Really? I didn't know there were arcade emulators for the 386. Myself, I used to play the original Tetris in the campus game room.

One of these days, the deep pockets that fund this type of research will wise up, and start a tit-for-tat scheme... The Dairy Council will fund a $500,000 project that shows playing video games makes you a genius, and Nintendo will fund a $500,000 study that finds milk makes you superhuman.

Grants.gov.

Usually a PHS 398 Research Plan. Careful, it can't be more than 25 pages for Items 2-5.

Since the differences have been documented well before the advent of video games, they're definitely not causative.

However, there is a theory that the differences are NOT innate, but rather, a result of socialization that begins as soon as gender is known. We speak to boys and girls differently, even if they're newborns. We talk about them differently, play with them differently, and even perceive them differently. Now that most children's genders are known months before they are born, that gender socialization can begin in utero (and several experiments have documented that fetuses learn from repeated experiences before they're born, such as being read the same book or hearing the same piece of music).

It's a difficult theory to test. While there are children who are born with the wrong external genitalia, who don't learn their chromosomal gender until secondary sex characteristics begin developing at puberty, they're hardly a "normal" sample to test on (usually, they were exposed to high levels of androgens or estrogens in utero, causing the development of the "wrong" genitalia), nor are they a statistically significant sample. It's impossible to hide a baby's gender from EVERYONE; even if you could, you wouldn't get human subjects clearance on raising a cohort of girls as boys or boys as girls. But the fact that we can't test it doesn't mean we can *ignore* it, either, and there may still be ways to test... such as:

* Testing for differences in toddlers whose gender was known at the 20-week anatomy scan vs. those whose gender was unknown until birth
* Evaluating parents' attitudes toward gender based on self-reports and observational studies, and then evaluating their children's "gender-based" skills

These methods might detect a difference, in which case, it's more likely that the difference is primarily socialization... or they might not, in which case, you know practically nothing, because it may be that the slight delay in gender socialization or the attitudes of parents vs. the rest of society isn't enough to outweigh the onslaught of gender socialization children go through from day one. But it might be fun to see.

No, but it improves your skill at following a pair of Bavarian twins through the woods...

Related? Well, probably so. *Causatively* related? Probably not.

As society has developed, improvements in technology (which have made video games possible) have increased the standard of living while at the same time requiring greater specialization and division of labor. The levels of education and... well, *concentration* necessary to invent and effectively use such technologies can only occur in an environment where people feel reasonably safe. If any trip down the highway runs the risk of being attacked by brigands, everyone needs to keep that primal brain right at the forefront, ready to fight for your life. That interferes with the ability to accomplish more complex tasks on a regular basis. (Sociology 134: Culture of Personality lecture, UCLA, 1994.)

So, decreasing violence is necessary to increasing technological advancement. But the technology doesn't actually cause the decrease in violence; rather, the decrease in violence is a prerequisite to the tech. There is a feedback loop when those improvements (especially in communications) are employed in the mitigation and prevention of violence, but the causative relationship you seem to be drawing is unlikely at best.

I love it! We'll drop a bunch of Halo-playing /. nerds in Somalia, and bring a bunch of Somalian pirates to random universities across the US, and see what happens to their rates of violence and death!

Insanity defense only works if you're insane enough that you cannot tell right from wrong. If you can tell right from wrong, but you don't have the impulse control to avoid doing something just because you know it's wrong, you still go to prison.

Or, if your misdeeds were not directly motivated by your insanity at all... say, your psychiatric condition was adequately controlled by medication, but you got drunk and ran a red light and killed someone (voluntary manslaughter). Or maybe your condition was not identified/diagnosed until *after* you were arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated. You may even be under treatment for conditions related to incarceration, such as PTSD or clinical depression.

Yeah, it's not right. IMO, committing a crime is, in most cases, almost proof that you're not in your right mind. But I don't make the rules.

You'd like to include an option to forgo medical care completely?

Because, see, here's the problem: you might choose not to pay for any sort of insurance. But, when you're dying, you'll probably still go to the hospital. You may rack up more medical bills than your house is worth. You may or may not be employed at the time, or have assets sufficient to cover what you owe. Guess who pays, then?

It's like car insurance. If there was some way to prove that you had the means to cover up to, say, $1 million in expenses, then it'd make sense to let people completely forgo coverage. But very few people fall into that category, and most of *them* will have private insurance anyway. So, we require people to be insured to drive. You can choose not to drive, and you can choose not to go to the hospital when you're bleeding to death or can't breathe or whatever. But if you're going to go to the hospital, then yeah, I think it's fair to insist you have coverage.

I have no problem with it being catastrophic coverage, either. I haven't read the current proposals, so I don't know for sure that that's not an option. Care to apply a citation?

You are a privileged individual, then. I have had the following experiences with private insurers:

* Being billed YEARS later for fees that were mistakenly not charged at the point of service, each for a sum of less than $50, but adding up to a couple hundred. They hounded me for MONTHS, with no proof that I owed them the money other than they said so. I finally threatened to sue them for harassment and they gave it up.

* One day I went to fill a prescription. My health insurance policy (not provider) had changed, so I knew my prescription cost might change, but was I SHOCKED when they said I owed $558! Turned out that there was a miscommunication between my new employer and my insurer, so they dropped me by mistake. Fortunately, the pharmacy comped me a week's supply of my medication, and it was my employer's job to sort out the problem.

* Another company mistakenly had the service provider (an anesthesiologist who worked as part of a surgical team) bill me, and then reimbursed me for the fee. Not how it's supposed to be, but not *that* big a deal. Unfortunately, I accidentally destroyed the check (put it in my pocket then put it through the laundry). I called, all apologies, to ask for a replacement, and they said no problem... but then THAT time, they sent the check to the provider, who cashed it. They told me *I* would have to collect my money from the provider. Yeah, right. I didn't hire him (the hospital did), I had no business relationship with him, and he had been double-paid due to two insurer screwups and one (relatively minor) me screwup. It took me about six months to get them to cut me a new check.

* I received an invoice for services that didn't seem quite right (birth of my first son). I asked for an itemized bill. They sent it, and the line items DID NOT ADD UP to the total. It took me, again, months, to get a correct statement.

* My oldest son was born at the beginning of July. I had just finished classes for grad school, and had coverage through September, but my son needed to go on my husband's plan. He was automatically covered under my old insurance for a month (California law), but we had chosen a pediatrician that was in network for the new plan. I was also on the new plan already, but completed the birth on the old plan. But... the pediatrician we chose was from a different medical group from my doctor on the new plan, and was outside the network for my University coverage. We COULD NOT bill insurance for services in that 30 days under my son's name, only under mine. Therefore, we couldn't bill services for a provider outside the practice my PCP was in. We paid out-of-pocket for his 2-week checkup, because there was no way either insurer could pay THAT provider for it at THAT time, even though he was in-network for the new insurer. There was no resolution possible for that issue; we just gave up.

And I can't tell you how many times I've called my insurer to try to find out what my coverage is and they just plain don't know. Their response is "Submit a claim, and maybe we'll pay it." Gee, thanks. I'm one of those funny consumers that likes to know what my costs are likely to be BEFORE I incur them.

OTOH, I've had experiences in many other areas where public has been far more streamlined than private. For example, I can't *tell* you what a breath of fresh air it was going from Southern California Edison for power to LADWP. Signing up for service, I kid you not, took all of two minutes... and the last 30 seconds was me thanking the rep for a great experience with a great company. Oh, and we've had far fewer momentary power cuts since moving, too. Don't *even* get me started on the difference between USPS and UPS... sufficeth to say, the postman has never randomly left other people's packages addressed to other buildings on my doorstep because at some time in the last five years, someone with that name had something delivered to my address.

So I can't say as I agree with the notion that private is always going to be more efficient or provide better service than public. My private healthcare experience has been mediocre to godawful, and in other areas, public has been superior to private in efficiency and service. YMMV.

Not only that... the letter says "You've been diagnosed with X," whereas the letter from the private insurer says, "Your coverage has been terminated" without mention of the (erroneous) diagnosis.

Or a feature of military service that doesn't have to do with how you serve... like the vaccination schedule or elements of the training process. Or heck, the food. Maybe some chemical they use in the living quarters.

There's a lot of things that could explain such a difference. I agree we need more research to determine what they are.

We're still stuck using ICD9 coding. We were supposed to switch to ICD10 years ago, but it keeps getting delayed, mostly because of the arcane field of medical billing software. ICD9 is a half-assed system, based on decades-old knowledge of disease and injury, that you can't even be sure whether you'll find the disease you want under the part of the body it affects or its taxonomy.

So it doesn't surprise me at all that the ICD9 code for ALS is ambiguous for other neurological diseases.

So, the VA can't afford cleaning staff, IHS can't afford doctors, and Medicare can't afford accounts payable staff?

And somehow, this is going to be solved by spending LESS gov't money on healthcare?

And with Medicaid, he'd need to requalify every six months, so that's pretty generous.