Comment: Re:WHY CAN'T THE SUBJECT BE AN ELLIPSIS? (Score 1) 103
Well, for one thing, they'll charge you $285 for the privilege.
Why Creators Should Never Read Their Forums 221
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the lalala-i-can't-hear-you dept.
from the lalala-i-can't-hear-you dept.
spidweb writes "One full-time Indie developer writes about why he never goes to online forums discussing his work and why he advises other creators to do the same. It's possible to learn valuable things, but the time and the stress just don't justify the effort. From the article, 'Forums contain a cacophony of people telling you to do diametrically opposite things, very loudly, often for bad reasons. There will be plenty of good ideas, but picking them out from the bad ones is unreliable and a lot of work. If you try to make too many people happy at once, you will drive yourself mad. You have to be very, very careful who you let into your head.'"
Comment: Re:Not necessarily without deception. (Score 4, Informative) 430
Addtional: The researchers themselves note something along the lines of what I'm talking about:
The placebo response in this trial (59% on IBS-AR) was substantially higher than typical reported placebo responses of 30–40% in double-blind IBS pharmaceutical studies. [15] This finding seems counterintuitive. We speculate that it is an indication of the credibility of our open-label rationale. Patients in our study accepted that they were receiving an active treatment, albeit not a pharmacological one, whereas patients in double-blind trials understand that they have only a 50% chance of receiving active treatment. It may be that one hundred percent certainty that one is receiving the “treatment of interest” (in this case open-label placebo) is more placebogenic than a fifty percent probability of receiving an inactive control.
Comment: Re:Not necessarily without deception. (Score 1) 430
Perhaps "implicitly deceptive" is too strong a phrase. My argument is that the phrasing promoted the measurably effective placebo effect, rather than the inert nature of the pills themselves. I'd be interested to see some sort of companion study where the patients were told "These are completely inert sugar pills, they will have no physiological effect on you."
Incidentally, my objection may be beside the point. I read some time ago someone (possibly Ben Goldacre) arguing that one could potentially use placebos ethically in general practice, provided they were delivered with sufficiently careful phrasing. This study seems to be a verification of that idea.
Comment: Not necessarily without deception. (Score 4, Informative) 430
From the actual study, the wording used to present the placebos to the patients seems to have been very carefully chosen to be utterly truthful, yet implicitly deceptive:
...open-label placebo pills presented as “placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes”
Comment: Headline clarification (Score 2, Insightful) 187
Note that this is "may" in the sense of "is permitted to," rather than "might."
Comment: Re:How to Vote in South Australia (Score 1) 158
Okay, you can ignore my previous comment - he's fixed it now.
(Guess which feature was added just before he went to bed?)
Comment: Re:How to Vote in South Australia (Score 1) 158
That edit link is broken - I think it may be a problem with the site. Does it work for you?
I've already emailed the site's creator to alert him to the potential problem.
Comment: Re:I only speak 2 languages.... (Score 2, Informative) 674
No, it's spelt "Strine".
(Further info).
Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.
from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.
An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting:
"iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."