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Games

Video Games Lead To Quick Thinking Skills 174

Posted by CmdrTaco from the and-no-add-whatsoev dept.
shmG writes "Parents who dismiss video games as mindless entertainment with no intrinsic value for their children may not have a leg to stand on anymore thanks to science. Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester have proven action based video games train people to make quick, accurate decisions. These skills acquired from video games, which help players develop a heightened sensitivity to their surroundings, can be used in real world applications. This includes multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town."

Comment Re:How about (Score 1) 520

by elBart0 (#33368204) Attached to: Look-Alike Tubes Lead To Hospital Deaths

What about validation?

The whole product development life cycles, as well as the IQ/OQ/PQ portion of validation with the required submissions to the FDA for new devices can not be compressed down to two weeks. Two months is a possibility, but you're also failing to account for the fact that cross company/ industry wide standards would have to be developed and approved prior to the creation of the new kits. That's a process that takes years in most industries.
Politics

Submission + - UK to switch off £235m child database (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by wdef
wdef writes: The UK's controversial ContactPoint database is actually being switched off! It's rare that we hear anything this sensible from government about an expensive, privacy-destroying, 'think of the children' solution: (quote)The government argued the system was disproportionate to the problem, so is looking at developing other solutions.(unquote). Perhaps the UK coalition government really is winding back Big Brother, as they had promised to do? Does seem unlikely.
Medicine

Submission + - Medical Papers by Ghostwriters Pushed Therapy

Submitted by krou
krou writes: The New York Times reports on newly released court documents that show how pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid a medical communications firm to use ghost writers in drafting and publishing 26 papers between 1998 and 2005 backing the usage of hormone replacement therapy in women. The articles appeared in 18 journals, such as The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology. The papers "emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia", and the apparent "medical consensus benefited Wyeth ... as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001." The apparent consensus crumbled after a federal study in 2002 "found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke." The documents showed how Wyeth used the communications company "to outline articles, draft them and then solicit top physicians to sign their names, even though many of the doctors contributed little or no writing". This particular case appears to only scratch the surface, however, as the documents also suggest that other pharmaceutical companies are involved in the practice, covering a number of other drugs.
Science

Super-Sensors To Sense Big Bang Output 50

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the really-just-building-a-time-machine-with-a-camcorder dept.
New super-sensitive microwave detectors from the National Institute of Standards and Technology may soon tackle the question of what happened immediately following the big bang. "The new experiment will begin approximately a year from now on the Chilean desert and will consist of placing a large array of powerful NIST sensors on a telescope mounted in a converted shipping container. The detectors will look for subtle fingerprints in the CMB [cosmic microwave background] from primordial gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time from the violent birth of the universe more than 13 billion years ago. Such waves are believed to have left a faint but unique imprint on the direction of the CMB's electric field, called the 'B-mode polarization.' These waves — never before confirmed through measurements — are potentially detectable today, if sensitive enough equipment is used."

IBM Doubles Rewards For Ditching Sun 207

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the go-for-the-jugular dept.
Taking advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Oracle's acquisition of Sun, IBM has doubled the monetary incentives they are offering to ditch Sun gear. Offering $8,000 in software or services for every Sun Sparc processor ditched for an IBM Power server, the program seems to be paying off. IBM has helped 1,640 customers migrate from other manufacturers' hardware over the last year. "The program applies to Sparc-based Sun hardware, such as the Sparc, UltraSparc, and Sparc 64 servers, and also to Fujitsu systems that run on Sparc chips. A customer that moves off a Sparc-powered system running, say, eight processors would be eligible for up to $64,000 worth of rewards."
Communications

Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters 504

Posted by Soulskill from the how-many-characters-do-you-really-need dept.
The LA Times has a story about Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the communications researchers behind efforts to standardize various cell phone technologies. In particular, he worked out the 160 character limit for text messages. "Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand's magic number ... Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks. This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. ... Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Comment Re:Why open Source not open Standard? (Score 3, Informative) 170

by elBart0 (#27706381) Attached to: Senate Bill Calls For Open Source Electronic Health Records

The standards for the data already exist. HITSP However adoption of the standard is optional, and healthcare IT is very very slow to update technologies. Most system to system healthcare messaging is currently done in HL7 V2.x which is a pipe-delimited text format and while new XML based standards exist, adoption of them has been slow and spotty, at best.
Movies

Watchmen 50 Days On, Was It Worth the Gamble? 448

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-i-enjoyed-it dept.
brumgrunt writes "Friday marks the 50th day on general release for what was the long-awaited Watchmen movie. But how much money has it made, and how has it measured up to Warner Bros' expectations? Has it, bluntly, been worth the gamble, expense and hassle? "
Power

Submission + - Solar power headed for 45% annual growth (usatoday.com) 1

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "USA Today is running a pretty good article on solar power that gives an overview of the current state of the industry. Highlight include production costs of $1.19/Watt for First Solar, 40% annual cost reductions over the last five years, revenues expected to triple in three years, and it predicts 2014 as the year when solar photovoltaic power plants become cheaper than other forms of generation."

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