Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
First Person Shooters (Games)

Video Games Found To Enhance Visual Attention 79

Posted by Soulskill from the told-you-mom dept.
donniebaseball23 writes "Reporting on new research from WIREs Cognitive Science, IndustryGamers writes: 'Action games like Call of Duty and Halo can enhance visual attention, the ability that helps us focus on relevant visual information. The mental mechanism allows people to select pertinent visual information and ignore irrelevant information. It suggests that action titles can be used to augment military training, educational tools, and correct visual deficits.' Shawn Green, co-author of the study, commented, 'At the core of these action video game-induced improvements appears to be a remarkable enhancement in the ability to flexibly and precisely control attention, a finding that could have a variety of real-world applications. For example, those in professions that demand "super-normal" visual attention, such as fighter pilots, would benefit enormously from enhanced visual attention, as their performance and lives depend on their ability to react quickly and accurately to primarily visual information."
Medicine

Miniature Human Livers Grown In Lab 154

Posted by Soulskill from the less-filling-tastes-great dept.
Zothecula writes "In the quest to grow replacement human organs in the lab, livers are no doubt at the top of many a barfly's wish list. With its wide range of functions that support almost every organ in the body and no way to compensate for the absence of liver function, the ability to grow a replacement is also the focus of many research efforts. Now, for the first time, researchers have been able to successfully engineer miniature livers in the lab using human liver cells."
Cellphones

'Cellphone Effect' Could Skew Polling Predictions 836

Posted by Soulskill from the go-vote dept.
Ponca City writes "A good deal of polling data suggest that Republicans may win the House of Representatives in today's mid-term elections. However, Nate Silver writes in the NY Times that there are several factors that could skew the election, allowing Democrats to outperform their polls and beat consensus expectations. Most prominent is the 'cellphone effect.' In 2003, just 3.2% of households were cell-only, while in the 2010 election one-quarter of American adults have ditched their landlines and rely exclusively on their mobile phones, and a lot of pollsters don't call mobile phones. Cellphone-only voters tend to be younger, more urban, and less white — all Democratic demographics — and a study by Pew Research suggests that the failure to include them might bias the polls by about 4 points against Democrats, even after demographic weighting is applied. Another factor that could skew results is the Robopoll effect, where there are significant differences between the results shown by automated surveys and those which use live human interviewers — the 'robopolls' being 3 or 4 points more favorable to Republicans over all. It may be that only adults who are extremely engaged by politics (who are more likely to be Republican, especially this year) bother to respond to robocalls. Still, when all is said and done, 'more likely than not, Republicans will indeed win the House, and will do so by a significant margin,' writes Silver. 'But just as Republicans could beat the consensus, Democrats could too, and nobody should be particularly shocked if they do.'"
Google

Google Bans Sale of Android Spying App 415

Posted by samzenpus from the what-are-you-writing-there dept.
dbune writes "Google is not letting a handset application that spies on someone's text messages be sold at its Android App Store. The Secret SMS Replicator developed by DLP Mobile to help lovers find out if their partners are cheating on them violates company policy, according to Google. The app works by secretly duplicating incoming text messages and forwarding these to another mobile phone number."
Transportation

Car Produced With a 3D Printer 257

Posted by samzenpus from the printing-some-wheels dept.
Lanxon writes "A prototype for an electric vehicle — code named Urbee — is the first to have its entire body built with a 3D printer, reports Wired. Stratasys and Winnipeg engineering group Kor Ecologic have partnered to create the electric/liquid fuel hybrid, which can deliver more than 200 miles per gallon on the motorway and 100 miles per gallon in the city."
Medicine

Breakthrough Portends Cure For the Common Cold 180

Posted by Soulskill from the also-portends-breathless-headlines dept.
breadboy21 writes with this excerpt from the Independent: "Scientists have been able to show for the first time that the body's immune defenses can destroy the common cold virus after it has actually invaded the inner sanctum of a human cell, a feat that was believed until now to be impossible. The discovery opens the door to the development of a new class of antiviral drugs that work by enhancing this natural virus-killing machinery of the cell. Scientists believe the first clinical trials of new drugs based on the findings could begin within two to five years."
Wireless Networking

M2Z's Free, Wireless Broadband Killed In Advance 113

Posted by timothy from the sorry-wrong-bribe-please-try-again dept.
mspohr writes with a sad excerpt from Fast Company: "Despite a seemingly stout business plan, and all the financial, social, and educational benefits it would bring, the FCC's just turned down M2Z's application for a coast-to-coast free wireless broadband system. ... The FCC is known to have heard complaints about M2Z's plan from existing wireless carriers. Though M2Z's network would've operated at under 1 Mbps peak speeds — meaning it was very slow by today's standards, and probably snail-like by tomorrow's — its free pricing may well have tempted many folks away from spending cash with an established ISP. Those carriers are now reported to be pleased with the FCC's decision, though they argue it's in line with the greater National Broadband Plan. Whenever that actually gets off the ground."
Bug

Facebook Glitch Let Spammer Post To Walls 63

Posted by samzenpus from the bigger-longer-lasting-status-updates dept.
angry tapir writes "A clever spammer found a glitch in Facebook's photo upload system and used it to post thousands of unwanted Wall messages last week. Facebook confirmed the bug Friday, after notifying affected users of the issue. Most of the messages promised 'Free iPhones,' a common spam message on Facebook these days. Facebook says that the spammer hit thousands of profiles before the company removed the spammy photos and notified affected users. No accounts were compromised as a result of the bug."
Japan

The State of Household Robots 102

Posted by samzenpus from the series-12-nannybot dept.
paulelaguna writes "The dream of owning a household robot is starting to become reality, particularly for people in Japan. There are robots to help you do the dishes, move furniture, and even robotic wheelchairs to help you get around. Really, the only question that remains for us is when do we move?"
Displays

The New Difficulties In Making a 3D Game 190

Posted by samzenpus from the reach-out-and-shoot-someone dept.
eldavojohn writes "MSNBC spoke with the senior producer of a new stereoscopic 3D game called Killzone 3 and highlighted problems they are trying to solve with being one of the first FPS 3D games for the PS3. The team ran into serious design problems, like where to put the crosshairs for the players (do they constantly hover in front of your vision?) and what to do with any of the heads-up display components. Aside from the obvious marketing thrown in at the end of the article (in a very familiar way), there is an interesting point raised concerning normalized conventions in all video games and how one ports that to the new stereoscopic 3D model — the same way directors continue to grapple with getting 3D right. Will 3D games be just as gimmicky as most 3D movies? If they are, at least Guerrilla Games is making it possible for the player to easily and quickly switch in and out of stereoscopic 3D while playing."
Cellphones

Submission + - New phone allows bosses to snoop on staff

Submitted by tad001
tad001 writes: The Japanese phone giant KDDI has developed a way to track users movements in fine detail. It works by analysing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets. Activities such as walking, climbing stairs or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say. The company plans to sell the service to clients such as managers, foremen and employment agencies.

"Technically, I think this is an incredibly important innovation," says Philip Sugai, director of the mobile consumer lab at the International University of Japan. "For example, when applied to the issue of telemedicine, or other situations in which remotely monitoring or accessing an individual's personal movements is vital to that service. But there will surely be negative consequences when applied to employee tracking or salesforce optimisation."

The full article is available on the BBC news site.

Is it just me or does this strike anyone as being overtly Orwellian?
Power

Submission + - The Future of Wind Power May be Underground 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available, but utilities need consistent always-on power from large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid. Now Alexis Madrigal reports in Wired that operators are looking at Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) using abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest to store compressed-air that converts the intermittent motions of the air into the kind of steady power that could displace coal by taking power from a renewable energy and using it to run air compressors to pump air into an underground cave where it’s stored under pressure. When the air is released, it powers a turbine, creating electricity. “This is the first nonhydro renewables technology that can replace coal in the dispatch order,” says David Marcus, co-founder of General Compression, a new company that has received $16 million in funding from investors to build a full-scale prototype of their energy storage system which would be deployed with arrays of wind turbines. The first CAES plant in the United States actually went online in McIntosh, Alabama in 1991 where engineers created a geological pocket 900 feet long and up to 238 feet wide in a dome by pumping water into it to dissolve the rock salt. When the (briny) water was pumped back out, the salt resealed itself and they had an air-tight container. ‘We expect the CAES plant technology pioneered in Alabama to lead to widespread application in this country,” says Robert Schainker, the manager of the Electric Power Research Institute’s Energy Storage Program. ‘Three fourths of the United States has geology suitable for underground air storage. At present, more than a dozen utilities are evaluating sites for CAES application.”"
Linux

Submission + - "Mythical Man-Month" supposedly busted by MIT firm (ksplice.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth of the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done in a month and quadrupling its productivity. This picture shows the interns jammed in like sardines to a tiny room. We've written about them previously, but is this really who you want working on your kernel?
Security

Submission + - OpenSSH 5.4 released (undeadly.org)

Submitted by HipToday
HipToday writes: As posted on the OpenBSD Journal, OpenSSH 5.4 has been released: "Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new 'netcat mode', many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com."

Slashdot Top Deals

A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing. -- Alan Perlis

Close