EVE Online already has an elaborate player-driven economy, corporations, an elected council, and so on. Where's the value added in Empire & State?

How do they work?!?

I've collaborated on research using Twitter traffic as a predictor so I applaud their efforts, but a 79% correlation with telephone responses is not as high as it sounds. For example, the minimum acceptable correlation for interrater reliability is typically 80%.

Put simply, the Twitter data can only account for about two thirds of the variation in phone responses. That's useful but there's still a lot of unexplained variance -- we have a long way to go.

Although the Pygmalion effect is typically thought of in a positive light (i.e., expect good performance, get good performance) you're right. Telling a kid they are going to be a criminal doesn't seem like a good way to keep them from becoming one.

You are entirely correct. Social scientists don't need names or addresses (IP or physical). We can figure out who you are with a frighteningly small number of data points. Doubly so for individuals who have a public Facebook profile and therefore probably have public profiles elsewhere on the net. I suspect that this guy, despite his best intentions, did NOT anonymize the data well enough to hide at least 80% of the users.

... can't anyone resell the VDM content (which they have so generously compiled for you) at a slightly lower cost? It seems like their low margin business model relies on "owning" the very content they're repackaging. Oh the irony!

I agree that someone who breaks into your house and doesn't murder you should be punished less than the person who does, but that doesn't mean I'm cool with the former.

I sympathize with this guy in that they'll probably throw the book at him, but should burglary be allowed simply because locks are easy to pick?

If it's undetectable, doesn't that make it a $100 bill?

On top of this, it's much easier to say jobs should be designed to have clear, incremental goals than to actually implement them. It only works well in basic manufacturing jobs ("you get __ XP for making each widget!"), not complex, ambiguous knowledge work like most of us do. It really comes down to: how do you measure performance? The easier you can answer that question for a position, the easier it is to create a token reward system, whether the token is candy, XP, or cash.

Old farts perhaps (and some young clueless ones), but there is a rich history of collaboration between computer science and psychology. We're not all Luddites. As a grad student in psychology (not associated with this study) who does conduct research with adult video game players, I can certainly comment on basic methodology. I would need to see the actual journal article to make bold pronouncements regarding the specifics, but assuming they are not completely incompetent researchers ...

1) It doesn't matter that the study was "only" 4 months. Individually you're right, +/- 4 months on a developmental marker is not a big deal at all. But this was not a change occurring across one or two children, this was across the treatment group. A systematic societal delay, even if it's just 4 months, is worth talking about. Do we need further data? Of course, I'd love to see the follow-up at a time greater than 4 months to see if these kids remain behind the curve. But neither you nor I has collected that data, so the 4 mo data will have to do for now to generate hypotheses regarding longer term effects.

2) You make a valid point regarding a single video game, but I don't believe it is as applicable to a gaming system. As long as there continue to exist good titles that I have not played, my 360 use will not decline any huge amount. I get tired of individual games, not the system itself. I do agree that it would have been nice to compare these random control trials kids to long-term exposure kids, but any results would have had major sampling confounds so it makes sense the researchers did not include them (assuming they didn't -- who knows what was left out of the press article).

As you point out, it would be difficult if not impossible to compare kids with and kids without video games (in a study with random assignment) through high school. But we could look at kids like the ones in this group to see if the gap remains years in the future. In other words, do these kids recover when their peers start playing games, are they permanently behind 4 mos, and what can they do to compensate and/or catch up (i.e., parental monitoring?).

You mention goofing off as a confound. Again, these kids were randomly assigned to PS or no PS. If goofing off caused the decline in learning (and was solely to blame), it would have done so among the no PS kids and there would have been no effect for owning or not owning a PS. That wasn't the case, so the PS caused a decline in learning. Now, it is possible that other activities hurt learning even more (i.e., TV) but that would only mask the effect of owning a PS and make it look smaller than it is.

The biggest thing that worries me is an expectancy or pygmalion effect given that parents presumably knew (or at least guessed) the purpose of the study and teachers may have known about the study (they probably did, since teacher feedback was collected). Most importantly, did teachers know which kids were in each condition? Teacher-student pygmalion effects are fairly well documented. That could totally kill the results. We need the journal article to know whether the teachers were blind to the treatment.

You conclude that the results are invalid without having read the journal article, so having not read it either, I'll say it sounds reasonable to me. Earth-shattering news? Not so much. Important to actually empirically test it (not just another correlation survey study)? Definitely. For every common sense belief we confirm with decent science (so everyone can say "well duh, I knew that!") we disconfirm another.

If this content was already on the disc, didn't they fail at the new EA model? It should have been "DLC" that was free to owners of purchased versions of the game (via an unlock code) and $5 to owners of used copies of the game (via $5 unlock code). To charge everybody for something already on the disc is greedy and lazy. What's amusing is that people would apparently be less outraged if only greed were involved -- that is, if the content were withheld and you had to download it.

One possible explanation: If reporters consciously or subconsciously expect old drivers to be crappy drivers, they may be more likely to report the ages of older drivers.

What program are you in? My classmates in organizational behavior are passionate about the field and many have prior experience. Like anything else I'm sure it all depends.

Not anymore. On my newer Win 7 system (multicore, 8GB RAM) I can happily play Mass Effect 2 with uTorrent, Virtual PC, Outlook, and Firefox active in the background and Alt+Tab around when I feel like it. I could never pull something like that off before. I have no illusions that it's all thanks to Win 7 -- it's the shiny hardware letting me do this -- but Win 7 is in no way impeding.