Haibane.info

Month: February 2012

  • @Warcraft improves cognitive ability in older adults

    There are plenty of brains in Warcraft
    via @tomshardware, playing MMO games like World of Warcraft can help improve cognitive ability among older adults, according to a study at North Carolina State University:

    Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that playing WoW actually boosted cognitive functioning for older adults – particularly those adults who had scored poorly on cognitive ability tests before playing the game.

    “We chose World of Warcraft because it has attributes we felt may produce benefits – it is a cognitively challenging game in a socially interactive environment that presents users with novel situations,” says Dr. Anne McLaughlin, an assistant professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the study. “We found there were improvements, but it depended on each participant’s baseline cognitive functioning level.”

    Researchers from NC State’s Gains Through Gaming laboratory first tested the cognitive functioning of study participants, aged 60 to 77, to set a baseline. The researchers looked at cognitive abilities including spatial ability, memory and how well participants could focus their attention.

    More information on the study here and here’s a link to the actual study at Science Direct.

    This is unsurprising, because WoW’s complexity really scales with the player. You can easily access the game as a total noob but if you’re a diehard theorycrafter you cam minmax your way into elitist heaven. And there’s an entire social layer on top of that – you can play the game solo if you prefer, but from guilds to PUGs to PVP there’s plenty of actual human interaction that forces teamwork, competition, etc. There’s even a free market economy and the occasional plague. I think that the cognitive benefits for people with higher baseline are going to be more subtle, but like the Nintendo Wii I think that there’s an argument to be made for WoW in particular to become part of the therapists’ arsenal.

  • Brave goes where every Disney film has gone before

    I’m an unabashed fan of mahou shojou as a genre in anime, but in American animation the trope of the oppressed girl who takes control of her own destiny has been done to death:

    Ariel: follows her heart for true love despite overbearing father (and saves the day)
    Belle: follows her heart for true love despite overbearing society (and lifts the curse)
    Jasmine: follows her heart for true love despite overbearing law (and kicks some ass)
    Pocahontas: follows her heart to save her people despite overbearing Clash of Civilizations (and gets the guy)
    Mulan: follows her heart to save China despite overbearing culture (and gets the guy)

    meanwhile, how do the Boys of Disney/Pixar fare?

    Aladdin: lies about who he is, chases the girl, marries into royalty
    Nemo: gets lost

    Monsters Inc. and the Toy Story franchises meanwhile aren’t about boys at all – every character is basically an adult. It’s like a fantasy analogue to The Office.

    The only two recent Disney stories with any real meaningful characters in them for boys are in Lion King and Brother Bear, and in both cases these are more about society and responsibility rather than any message about finding your own path. Cars doesn’t count, because it’s not about an ordinary “boy” it’s about Michael Freakin’ Jordan (note to storytellers: a superstar celebrity athlete has advantages that regular boys do not).

    Ok, Ratatouille was sort of about that, but since it revolved around RATS and FOOD the message was kind of lost, especially since the boy in question had a rat (literally) pulling his strings (literally). And the boy in The Incredibles did have to come to terms with being Super but he had like 5 minutes of screen time, half of which was the admittedly awesome running-on-water-chuckle-in-amazement bit. Pinocchio was about the last movie from Disney that I can think of that had any kind of self-reliance and follow-dreams message, but that was decades ago.

    And now we have Brave, Disney/Pixar’s latest:

    The funny thing is that there’s all this antipathy towards Disney’s treatment of girls as forcing them into some kind of unhealthy self-image. I don’t see it at all, and believe me as the father of two young girls I am hyper-sensitive to it.

    I’d just like to see a movie from Disney/Pixar for once where the main character is a young boy, who follows his heart and defies his own society and culture, and achieves something more than just mere personal happiness, but actually makes a difference.

  • Japanese nationalism and the Nanking massacre

    Japan and IslamRemember this old fracas a few years ago? In a nutshell, a Japanese muslim found my site Talk Islam and revealed a very ugly side of Japanese nationalism that I had never really known about before. He really got set off y a pretty reasonable comment by Steven, and eventually left promising never to return. Well, he returned, promising a more temperate mindset about the Chinese people. However, he has resumed denying the Nanking Massacre ever occurred, which frankly is new to me. I rank this up with Armenian and Holocaust genocide denial, but the depth to which he as a Japanese nationalist believes that his nation was incapable of such atrocities is astounding. He argues poorly but I’ve seen that same mindset before, in response to 9-11 of course being the main example.

    Anyway, just though I’d mention it here, despite it straying uncomfortably close to the political line I try to avoid at all costs.

    Here’s a more representative picture of Japan’s muslims, by the way.

  • Facts about Foxconn – your move, Apple

    As a follow up to the ongoing and groundbreaking series at the New York Times about Apple’s dark side (labor exploitation of Chinese workers at Foxconn), Nightline just aired their own investigation, and courtesy of the Verge here’s the takeaway message in handy factoid form:

    Bloody Apple Valentine

    • It takes 141 steps to make an iPhone, and the devices are essentially all handmade
    • It takes five days and 325 hands to make a single iPad
    • Foxconn produces 300k iPad camera modules per day
    • Foxconn workers pay for their own food — about $.70 per meal, and work 12 hour shifts
    • Workers who live in the dorms sleep six to eight a room, and pay $17.50 a month to do so
    • Workers make $1.78 an hour
    • (Foxconn CEO) Louis Woo, when asked if he would accept Apple demanding double pay for employees replied “Why not?”

    your move, Apple, indeed. The question is, will consumers also be willing to pay $20 more for their iPads? (If not, will Apple be willing to eat that cost?)

  • Bizarro-Moore’s Law for SSDs?

    It looks like SSDs are going to get worse over time, unlike hard drives:

    SSDs are seemingly doomed. Why? Because as circuitry of NAND flash-based SSDs shrinks, densities increase. But that also means issues relating to read and write latency and data errors will increase as well.
    […]
    The group discovered that write speed for pages in a flash block suffered “dramatic and predictable variations” in latency. Even more, the tests showed that as the NAND flash wore out, error rates varied widely between devices. Single-level cell NAND produced the best test results whereas multi-level cell and triple-level cell NAND produced less than spectacular results.

    This suggests to me that SSDs are never going to break out of the boot-disk niche for hardware builds. I get equivalent read-speads on my striped hard drives as my boot SSD, for that matter.

  • I love @Target – here’s why

    The New York Timaes has a fascinating article on how Target does datamining on its customers:

    For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

    Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

    They are so good at this that they are able to predict due dates for pregnant women just based on buying patterns of lotions, vitamins, etc. and sends targeted coupons to those women. This sounds like a privacy nightmare, but it’s actually awesome. It would be great if Target sent me customized coupons for the products I buy regularly – or products that I want to buy, or am thinking about buying.

    I want to see more of this kind of targeted enticement, not less, from the retailers I patronize. For example, if I had a coupon for a discount on a Kindle (which for me is a want, not a need) I might take the plunge. And the coupons would save me money in the long run.

  • Amazon can out-Apple Apple with video

    I’ve written a guest post for Forbes magazine on Erik Kain’s blog, in which I speculate how Amazon could pull an Apple by focusing on video the way Apple did on music. Check it out!

  • is nothing sacred? scaremongering about Ramen noodles at TED

    This video is as misleading as it is disgusting:

    The basic premise is that they had someone swallow a small pill containing a tiny camera, and filmed the digestion process for instant ramen noodles, gatorade and gummy bears versus more “natural” versions of those foods. And shocker, the processed foods did not seem to digest as quickly as the non-processed versions. There’s also some chemical scaremongering about how the ingredients in Ramen are “related” to butane which is a component of gasoline.

    The whole thing is clumsy and ham-handed and (of course) gross; basically, the recipe for instant viral success. But just because the noodles retain their shape longer hardly means they are not being digested; if they were really immune to acid then they’d come out in the same shape as they went in (a rather obvious point ignored by the artists here, who have clevely titled their project M2A for “mouth 2 anus”)

    The top-rated comments on the video also are worth sharing as solid critiques:

    62+ packets assuming the maximum allowed amount of TBHQ (0.02% per product). I’d worry more about sodium intake before then (and ramen is full of sodium, natural or otherwise, no arguing there).

    Oh, then this gem– “survive Armageddon”– ramen has an official shelf life of about 6 months. It’s flash-fried and then quickly dried. This is the major preservative. TBHQ preserves the oils.
    But what do I know? I don’t have a fancy degree in media art production like Ms Bardin.

    This video is just misinformation and half-truths. “Artificial flavours are intellectual property”? True, but they are disclosed to the FDA (in the US). The FDA must approve all artificial colours and flavours. No ifs or buts.
    TBHQ is chemically related to butane, in so much that it contains a butyl moiety. So does butter. Butter and butane share a root word– butyrum. Butter is natural. Where’s that info in this video? Plus, you’d need 62+ packets @ 80g to get 1g of TBHQ, the “sick” amount.