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Comment Re:Broken Link (Score 1) 124

by briglass (#44549319) Attached to: Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility
Heh -- well, it's probably been about a decade since I spent serious time on here. Kinda odd that while in the firehose the url changed 3 or 4 times, at least it ended up with this one, instead of the one instance where it was the url below concatenated 3 times in a row Again: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201308/can-video-games-make-you-smart-or-least-more-flexible
Games

Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility 124

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the tricked-into-learning dept.
First time accepted submitter briglass writes "Imagine being a total non-gamer and then suddenly playing an hour of StarCraft a day for almost two months. A new study of mine demonstrates that a group of female gaming novices (seriously novice, as in 0 to 1 hour of gaming per week novice) demonstrated increased cognitive flexibility after playing StarCraft, a sort of fast-paced chess on steroids. The control group played The Sims. It's been well known that video gaming can lead to psychological benefits, such as faster perceptual information processing after playing first-person shooter games. But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions. The StarCraft game was customized to be adaptive and remain challenging as the newly minted gamers honed their skills, and in-game behavior was recorded to determine what aspects of StarCraft leads to the boost in flexibility."

Submission + - Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility (psychologytoday.com)

Submitted by briglass
briglass writes: Imagine being a total non-gamer and then suddenly playing an hour of StarCraft a day for almost two months. A new study of mine demonstrates that a group of female gaming novices (seriously novice, as in 0 to 1 hour of gaming per week novice) demonstrated increased cognitive flexibility after playing StarCraft, a sort of fast-paced chess on steroids — the control group played The Sims. It's been well known that video gaming can lead to psychological benefits, such as faster perceptual information processing after playing first-person shooter games. But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions. The StarCraft game was customized to be adaptive and remain challenging as the newly minted gamers honed their skills, and in-game behavior was recorded to determine what aspects of StarCraft leads to the boost in flexibility.

Comment Circularity (Score 1) 1064

by briglass (#27037385) Attached to: Why Doctors Hate Science
If doctors are upset by this and believe that their medicine works better, then they ought to use the circularity of the concept of "empirically supported treatment" to their benefit. In other words, if it is in fact the case that some other system of treatment works better than the "empirically supported treatment", then it should be able to be shown-- empirically-- and thus BECOME the empirically supported treatment.
Handhelds

Google To Sell Truly Open Android Dev Phone 219

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-were-they-waiting-for dept.
binary.bang writes "Google has announced an unlocked version of T-Mobile's G1 for sale at the same unlocked price of $399. The Android Dev Phone 1 is the G1, except being truly open: no SIM-lock, no hardware lock. Feel free to flash your customized Android build — the bootloader won't be checking for signatures. Don't be misled by the word 'Dev,' looks like all you need to qualify is an Android Market account. This looks like the Open Handset Alliance delivering the promised Open Handset: yes root, yes flash-your-build, no contract, no strings attached. Anyone else relieved & thrilled?"
Earth

China to Use Silver Iodide & Dry Ice to Control the Weather 387

Posted by Zonk from the definitely-not-a-step-towards-a-weather-machine dept.
eldavojohn writes "While we made light of it before, the MIT Review is taking a serious look at China's plans to prevent rain over their open 91,000 seat arena for The Olympics. From the article: 'China's national weather-engineering program is also the world's largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers — mostly peasant farmers — who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.' They plan on demonstrating their ability to control the weather to the rest of the world, and expanding on their abilities in the future."
Google

Google Goes Green 374

Posted by kdawson from the all-that-and-carbon-neutral-too dept.
foobsr writes "Google today announced its RE<C project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal in the near future. The company, and its charitable arm google.org, plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the initiative. Larry Page stated: 'With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.'"
Power

Ubuntu's Power Consumption Tested 330

Posted by kdawson from the no-lyme-disease dept.
RedDragon writes "Ubuntu 7.10 is due out on Thursday, October 18, and in addition to desktop 3D effects, GNOME 2.20, and other features is the use of the Linux 2.6.22 kernel with the tick-less (CONFIG_NO_HZ) kernel feature. But does this mean enhanced power savings when compared to past Ubuntu releases? Phoronix tested Ubuntu power consumption looking back 2-1/2 years at the six Ubuntu releases from Ubuntu 5.04 to the yet-to-be-released Ubuntu 7.10. Testing was done when the system was idling and then under load, and when the Lenovo notebook was powered via the battery and then again with the AC adapter. The Pentium M CPU temperature was also monitored. While Ubuntu 7.10 does include the tick-less kernel feature, more daemons and processes running by default on these modern Ubuntu releases is actually causing an increase in power consumption."

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