You know the “is good for you/is bad for you” thing where every other week a new study comes out to tell you why doing such & such a thing is essential/horrible for your health. Well now someone came up with a study that says drinkers earn more money.
The study finds that men who drink earn 10 percent more than abstainers and women drinkers earn 14 percent more than nondrinkers. However, unlike men, who get an additional income boost from drinking in bars, women who frequent bars at least once per month do not show higher earnings than women who do not visit bars.
Read: Reason Foundation - Report: Drinkers Earn More Money Than Non-Drinkers (via son of parnas)
One of my buddies is fond of pointing out that Google has no business model beyond being the search king, but it seems to me that Google is in the business of getting eyeballs - they’ve got eyeballs on this site & that has nothing to do with being a search engine.
With this acquisition, Google shows that they’re willing to go to unconventional locations to get the eyeballs, including video games. While I know everyone thinks of Google as “context sensitive text ads” I’m pretty sure they’ll bring the right kinds of innovation to in-game advertising as well.
One of the problems I see facing in-game ads is that there’s zero chance that they used a Coke just because that’s what happened to be lying around the studio, which is what someone may think about a TV show or Movie - someone had to sit there & program in that soda can - it’s deliberate, not casual. Dialogue, however, may still be up fo grabs. And why couldn’t the fast food places in Grand Theft Auto have been real fast food places?
“There is a whole world of difference between the form of advertising done by Google and Madison Avenue,” one source familiar with the in-game ad business said, comparing Google’s familiar text-based ads to the rich media used in videogames. “While everyone appreciates the dollars Google can throw around, when it comes to [in-game ad] experience they just don’t have it.”
At the end of the day, what Google brings is a history of innovation & the ability to test ideas before solidifying them - a level of flexibility that just isn’t known in modern gaming.
Read: Google Agrees to Buy Adscape
I’ve posted quite a few Orisinal games on my old (A Complete Waste of Time) page. Continuing in that tradition, here’s High Delivery.
Play: Orisinal.com - High Delivery (via Joystiq)
If you look hard enough, you can find correlations all over the place that don’t actually mean anything. For most people this isn’t a big deal, but for scientists spurious correlations can be the difference between a major breakthrough and, well, bad science.
For readers of this blog, it means, unless you can decipher the statistics (if they’re given) in any given study, you may want to take it with a grain of salt.
Read: Testing multiple statistical hypotheses resulted in spurious associations: a study of astrological signs and health. (via Crazy On Tap)
Also see: Bad Science
People are capable of making rational decisions, but the moment you introduce stress, that ability goes out the window. It’s already been demonstrated that being around friends can impair your memory, and now research shows that people lose the ability to perform calculations in stressful situations.
“People tend to have a hard time evaluating numbers, even when the numbers are clear and right in front of them,” Arvai said. “In contrast, the emotional responses that are conjured up by problems like terrorism and crime are so strong that most people don’t factor in the empirical evidence when making decisions.”
So we can’t remember things when we’re with people, and we can’t think clearly under stress. What chance do we have to make good decisions? Pretty good, actually. Gary Klein in his book Sources of Power studied people who made decisions in high-stress situations - fire chiefs, nurses, etc. What he found was that when placed in a high-stress situation (and any deadline situation is a high stress situation, even if that deadline is 6 months away), rather than listing alternatives and weighing possibilities, we came up with a scenario, ran through it looking for flaws, and then acted on it. The best way to train for these situations is to live through them, or to listen to the stories of people who have. This allows us to build a mental model of how things should go & identify, however subconsciously, when it’s going wrong.
Read: Decision making isn’t always as rational as you think (or hope) (via Crazy on Tap)
This is a fascinating article that demonstrates how 15 minutes of positive affirmations can help under-achieving minority groups get better grades in school for the rest of the year.
Read: A fifteen-minute exercise may help overcome a lifetime of racial stereotyping (via Mind Hacks)
I’m in the middle of reading Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman’s (former president of the American Psychological Association) book on Positive Psychology. Seligman stumbled on the idea of learned helplessness as a grad student - when dogs who were trained to associate a buzzer with an electrical shock didn’t try to escape, from the shock even when they could, he explained it by saying that they’d simply given up trying. This was contrary to the behaviorists at the time, who believed that animals could only do what they’d been taught to do through conditioning - this kind of abstraction (inescapable pain in one situation to pain in all situations), they believed, required human level thinking.
Seligman persisted, however, and further research bore him out - people can be trained to give up. The theory of learned helplessness eventually became attatched to an area of cognitive psychology known as “attributional style” in which people explain good or bad events as in terms of three dimensions - permenance, universality, and control. That is, will this bad event have a lasting effect (permenance) that affects multiple areas of your life (universality) and do you have the ability to change it (control). Your measure in these three dimensions predicts (according to Seligman’s book) how quickly you’ll recover from setbacks.
I’m not yet up to the part where tells us how to train ourselves to be optimistic, but I’ll keep you up to date. In the mean time, here’s a roundup of my links on happiness & positive psychology.
Read: Are We Happy Yet? (Survey on happiness in America & how it correlates to things like income, age and political affiliation)
Read: So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Read: The recipe for success: get happy and get ahead in life
Read: The Sweet Smell of … Happiness?
Read: Secret to a long life - get even more often (leave it to the Germans to figure out that surliness will help you live longer)
Read: Just the expectation of a mirthful laughter experience boosts endorphins 27 percent, HGH 87 percent
Read: The Beguiling Truth About Beauty (You’re hotter than you think)
Read: The Hidden Side of Happiness Pleasure only gets you so far. A rich, rewarding life often requires a messy battle with adversity.
Read: The New Science of Happiness What makes the human heart sing? Researchers are taking a close look. What they’ve found may surprise you
Read: So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Read: Smile for Success: New research shows happiness leads to success, not the other way around
Read: The Science of Happiness - Harvard Magazine (January-February 2007) (via MindHacks)
Read: Happiness 101 (via MindHacks)
Americans just don’t know how to do risque.
NSFW
watch: Obey The Suit (this one is an all time fave of mine)
watch: NEED DIRECTIONS?
I first learned of the mental health benefits of fish oil from the Durham Trial, which has shown remarkable results by giving children fish oil (just check the links for the information). I’ve been taking it fairly regularly ever since I read those reports. Fish oil has also been shown to help with depression. (Sorry, no specific cite for that one.)
Now, a study shows that Children of mothers who had eaten lots of fish during pregnancy had better communication and social skills at seven years old. Yes, eating more fish will help your unborn baby become more social.
A tip for anyone who, like me, doesn’t like the taste of fish and takes it in capsule form - put it in the refridgerator, or even the freezer. It helps prevent those burning fishy burps.
Read: Fish in pregnancy ‘benefits baby’
Brains don’t really regenerate. After sustaining brain damage, such as a stroke, the brain can compensate & work around the damaged areas building new pathways the way water blocked water will find alternate paths. There have been a few recent studies that show that under a few conditions, brains can generate new nerve cells, and it seems this is one of them.
The researchers said the addition of new nerve cells in the olfactory bulb in humans helped the system respond to different stimuli throughout a person’s life.
By utilizing these existing stem cells, scientists hope to be able to regrow brain tissue & help those with severe brain damage. This is almost as useful as using fat stem cells to augment breasts.
read: Brain creates ‘new’ nerve cells
read: New Cells from Old Brains