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The New York Times is trying to shut down a popular Connections puzzle creator - The Verge
In the letter, which Salazar shared with The Verge, the NYT’s counsel alleges that the website “unlawfully copies and reproduces” Connections, which constitutes “trademark and copyright infringement in violation of The Times’s intellectual property rights.” The letter also says that the NYT has three trademark applications pending in connection with Connections.
A local tip helps reveal an ancient ‘arcade’ in Kenya’s highlands | YaleNews
“Modern people in the region tend to play games like Mancala when they are out herding,” she said. “That’s probably what they were doing here. People tend to look at early life as brutish, nasty, and short. But perhaps life was not all about survival.”
Baby and adult brains 'sync up' during play: It's not your imagination -- you and your baby really are on the same wavelength -- ScienceDaily
When they looked at the data, the researchers found that during the face-to-face sessions, the babies' brains were synchronized with the adult's brain in several areas known to be involved in high-level understanding of the world -- perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or analyze the motives of the adult reading to them.
When the adult and infant were turned away from each other and engaging with other people, the coupling between them disappeared.
That fit with researchers' expectations, but the data also had surprises in store. For example, the strongest coupling occurred in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in learning, planning and executive functioning and was previously thought to be quite underdeveloped during infancy.
"We were also surprised to find that the infant brain was often 'leading' the adult brain by a few seconds, suggesting that babies do not just passively receive input but may guide adults toward the next thing they're going to focus on: which toy to pick up, which words to say," said Lew-Williams, who is a co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab.
Why Are Rich People So Mean? | WIRED
tweak a game of Monopoly. The psychologists rigged the game so that one player had huge advantages over the other from the start. They ran the study with over a hundred pairs of subjects, all of whom were brought into the lab where a coin was flipped to determine who’d be “rich” and “poor” in the game. The randomly chosen “rich” player started out with twice as much money, collected twice as much every time they went around the board, and got to roll two dice instead of one. None of these advantages was hidden from the players. Both were well aware of how unfair the situation was. But still, the “winning” players showed the tell-tale symptoms of Rich Asshole Syndrome. They were far more likely to display dominant behaviors like smacking the board with their piece, loudly celebrating their superior skill, even eating more pretzels from a bowl positioned nearby.
Digital games may beat mindfulness apps at relieving stress, new study shows -- ScienceDaily
Participants who played the shape-fitting game ("Block! Hexa Puzzle") reported feeling more energised and less tired afterwards, while those in the mindfulness and fidget-spinner groups reported the opposite: their level of "energetic arousal" appeared to decline.
In a second part of the study, participants who played a shape-fitting game after arriving home from work for five days reported feeling more relaxed by the end of the week than those who were asked to use a mindfulness app.
Rigged card game 'Swap' sheds light on perceptions of inequality - ScienceBlog.com
Regardless of how many cards were exchanged and which version they played, winners were twice as likely as losers to describe the game as fair. When cards were exchanged to favor the winner, however, winners found the game less fair – an effect that became more pronounced when two cards per round were traded.
In fact, the winners’ perceptions of the game’s fairness declined more sharply than losers’ as their advantage increased – “indicating that winners’ perceptions are more sensitive than losers’ to a system that is rigged in their favor,” according to the paper.
Researchers termed this the “Warren Buffett effect,” because Buffett and some other billionaires advocate to pay higher taxes. “A possible reading of our results is that winners want the playing field to be tilted enough to guarantee the outcome but not so much that the game appears hopelessly rigged in their favor,” Macy said.
The DAILY (Daily Automated Intensive Log for Youth) Trial: A Wireless, Portable System to Improve Adherence and Glycemic Control in Youth with Diabetes | Request PDF
Blood glucose (BG) monitoring (BGM) is an important component of diabetes management. New wireless technologies may facilitate BGM and help to optimize glycemic control. We evaluated an integrated wireless approach with and without a motivational game in youth with diabetes. Forty youth, 8-18 years old, each received a handheld device fitted with a wireless modem and diabetes data management software, plus a wireless-enabled BG monitor. Half were randomized to receive the new technologies along with an integrated motivational game in which the participants would guess a BG level following collection of three earlier readings (Game Group). BG data, insulin doses, and carbohydrate intake were displayed graphically prior to the glucose estimation. The other group received the new technologies alone (Control Group). Both groups were instructed to perform BGM four times daily and transmit their data to a central server via the wireless modem. Feasibility of implementation and outcomes were ascertained after 4 weeks. Ninety-three percent of participants successfully transmitted their data wirelessly to the server. The Game Group transmitted significantly more glucose values than the Control Group (P < 0.001). The Game Group also had significantly less hyperglycemia (glucose >/=13.9 mmol/L or >/=250 mg/dL) than the Control Group (P < 0.001). Youth in the Game Group displayed a significant increase in diabetes knowledge over the 4-week trial (P < 0.005). Finally, there was a trend for more youth in the Game Group to maintain hemoglobin A1C values </=8% (P = 0.06). Thus a pediatric population with diabetes can successfully implement new technologies to facilitate BGM. Use of a motivational game appears to increase the frequency of monitoring, reduce the frequency of hyperglycemia, and improve diabetes knowledge, and may help to optimize glycemic control.
Collaborative video games could increase office productivity: Team video gaming increased effectiveness of newly-formed teams by 20 percent -- ScienceDaily
A new study by four BYU information systems professors found newly-formed work teams experienced a 20 percent increase in productivity on subsequent tasks after playing video games together for just 45 minutes. The study, published in AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, adds to a growing body of literature finding positive outcomes of team video gaming.
"To see that big of a jump -- especially for the amount of time they played -- was a little shocking," said co-author and BYU associate professor Greg Anderson. "Companies are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on team-building activities, and I'm thinking, go buy an Xbox."
Quantum science turns social -- ScienceDaily
Why could players without any formal training in experimental physics manage to find surprisingly good solutions? One hint came from an interview with a top-player, a retired Italian microwave systems engineer. He said, that for him participating in the Alice Challenge reminded him a lot of his previous job as an engineer. He never attained a detailed understanding of microwave systems but instead spent years developing an intuition of how to optimize the performance of his "black-box."
"We humans may develop general optimization skills in our everyday work life that we can efficiently transfer to new settings. If this is true, any research challenge can in fact be turned into a citizen science game," said Jacob Sherson, head of the ScienceAtHome project at Aarhus University.
It still seems incredible that untrained amateurs using an unintuitive game interface outcompete expert experimentalists. One answer may lie in an old Herbert Simon quote: "Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent."
New study shows certain video games can improve health in children with obesity -- ScienceDaily
wenty-two of the 23 families in the gaming group finished the six-month program. Children and parents in the gaming group completed 94 percent of the gaming sessions and attended 93 percent of the video-chat sessions. "When you don't intervene with kids who are overweight, often their health risk factors and health behaviors worsen over time," said Dr. Staiano. "So, unfortunately, we weren't surprised to see that kids in the control group increased blood pressure and cholesterol and decreased physical activity over the six-month period."
Children in the gaming group:
Reduced their body mass index by about 3 percent while the control group increased their BMI by 1 percent.
Reduced their cholesterol by 7 percentiles while the control group increased cholesterol by 7 percentiles. In other words, the kids in the gaming group remained in the healthy range. The increase in the control group's cholesterol levels pushed them into the borderline category for high cholesterol.
Ready Patient One: Video Games as Therapy
"Basically, what we're saying is, 'Wouldn't it be therapeutic if you could be a character in a Pixar movie," he explained. "We want people to exist in a space that takes them away from an awareness of their disability and allows them to explore movement in a childlike way. Otherwise, they might not try because it's yoked to what they think is plausible in the joint space of a regular limb.
Poker Has a ‘Tell’ About Strategic Thinkers - Neuroscience News
The game offers many mechanisms by which players can strategically misinform each other about the value of their cards. Players with strong hands may signal weak hands with small bets to keep the pot growing, and players with weak hands may signal strong hands with large bets to intimidate their opponents into folding before “showdown,” when all players remaining in the game must reveal their hands. Often there is one player left who collects the pot of money.
The online version of the game eliminates in-person knowledge of other players, including cues such as eye contact and body language, which could be a disadvantage. However, most online experts take advantage of software and other resources, making up for lack of in-person knowledge by building behavioral dossiers on their opponents and even collecting or buying records of other players’ “hand histories,” Frey said.
Students learn Italian playing Assassin's Creed video game -- ScienceDaily
In a class called Intensive Italian for Gamers, all students made progress equal to two semesters of Italian over the course of a single fall semester. By the final, students were 3 to 5 points ahead of students in a traditional Italian course.
How To Become A Centaur
But won’t AI eventually get better at the dimensions of intelligence we excel at? Maybe. However, consider the “No Free Lunch” theorem, which comes from the field of machine learning itself.4 The theorem states that no problem-solving algorithm (or “intelligence”) can out-do random chance on all possible problems: instead, an intelligence has to specialize. A squirrel intelligence specializes in being a squirrel. A human intelligence specializes in being a human. And if you’ve ever had the displeasure of trying to figure out how to keep squirrels out of your bird feeders, you know that even squirrels can outsmart humans on some dimensions of intelligence. This may be a hopeful sign: even humans will continue to outsmart computers on some dimensions.
How To Become A Centaur
Not surprisingly, a Human+AI Centaur beats the solo human. But — amazingly — a Human+AI Centaur also beats the solo computer.
Some video games are good for older adults' brains -- ScienceDaily
"3-D video games engage the hippocampus into creating a cognitive map, or a mental representation, of the virtual environment that the brain is exploring.," said West. "Several studies suggest stimulation of the hippocampus increases both functional activity and gray matter within this region."
Conversely, when the brain is not learning new things, gray matter atrophies as people age. "The good news is that we can reverse those effects and increase volume by learning something new, and games like Super Mario 64, which activate the hippocampus, seem to hold some potential in that respect," said West. Added Belleville: "These findings can also be used to drive future research on Alzheimer's, since there is a link between the volume of the hippocampus and the risk of developing the disease."
Virtual reality reduces phantom pain in paraplegics -- ScienceDaily
"We tapped the back of the subject near the shoulders and the subject experienced the illusion that the tapping originated from the paralyzed legs," explains Polona Pozeg, co-author of the study and now neuroscientist at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV). "This is because the subject also received visual stimuli of dummy legs being tapped, viewed through the virtual reality headset, so the subject saw them immersively as his or her own legs."
Science: Your new fitness tracker will not work miracles
People who are motivated to use today’s trackers can be reassured that “they really do a pretty effective job of letting people quantify their lifestyle habits,” says Cedric Bryant, chief science officer of the American Council on Exercise. “But there appears to be a gap between monitoring your habits and actually changing them.”
Google's Improbable Deal to Recreate the Real World in VR | WIRED
Improbable offers a new way of building virtual worlds, including not just immersive games à la Second Life or World of Warcraft, but also vast digital simulations of real cities, economies, and biological systems. The idea is that these virtual worlds can run in a holistic way across a practically infinite network of computers, so that they can expand to unprecedented sizes and reach new levels of complexity.
Gaming your brain to treat depression: Participants using a game-based app show improvement -- ScienceDaily
Project: EVO runs on phones and tablets and is designed to improve focus and attention at a basic neurological level. The results, published Jan. 3 in the journal Depression and Anxiety, showed that the group using Project: EVO demonstrated specific cognitive benefits (such as attention) compared to the behavioral therapy, and saw similar improvements in mood and self-reported function. Joaquin A. Anguera, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), researcher in neurology and psychiatry, is the lead author, and Areán is the senior author. The researchers have no commercial interests in the intervention manufactured by Akili Interactive Labs in Boston.
"While EVO was not directly designed to treat depressive symptoms; we hypothesized that there may indeed be beneficial effects on these symptoms by improving cognitive issues with targeted treatment, and so far, the results are promising," said Anguera.
People with late-life depression (60+) are known to have trouble focusing their attention on personal goals and report trouble concentrating because they are so distracted by their worries. Akili's technology was designed to help people better focus their attention and to prevent people from being easily distracted.
Ingress Has the World as Its Game Board
This blend of real-world, multiplayer interaction and complex digital strategy sets Ingress apart from other mobile games. Nodding to childhood pastimes like Capture the Flag as well as to vast online simulations like World of Warcraft, Ingress is one of the first popular games built using augmented reality, a technology that overlays virtual objects onto the real world.
Developed by Google geolocation engineers and released to the public in December 2013, Ingress has more than one million active players in 4,000 communities worldwide, including heavy concentrations in the United States, Japan and Europe. Last year, Google spun out the development team into a separate company called Niantic.
Video games and depression
Results indicate that there was a 57% average decrease in depression symptoms among participants in the experimental group and this was statistically significant when compared to the control group. Table 1 presents clinical results for PHQ-9 pre- and post-study for both the video game and control groups.
The video game group saw significant reductions in depression across the board, with all seven subjects previously classified as suffering from moderate to severe depression moving to the minor or minimal depression categories. At the same time, the number of subjects classified as having minor depression dropped from nine to four.
Four types of poker players
1. Tight-aggressive: You bet only when you have a good hand, but when you do, you don’t back down.
2. Loose-aggressive: You bet often, but you don’t let people push you into folding.
3. Tight-passive: You rarely bet, and when the action gets hot, you’re content to fold away.
4. Loose-passive: You call all bets without dictating the game.
Poker shaped American markets
Poker is an American game (invented on the frontier in the early 1800s) with American sensibilities (the decidedly anti-monarchical bent that ranks the ace above the king). But what made it truly special was its use of chips—a novel idea at the time. These markers freely flowed between individuals, creating upstart economies complete with risk, debt, and credit, all in a time and place where actual currency was sparse and stagnant.
It makes sense, Brown asserts, that the first futures markets sprouted up in poker-crazy parts of the country, some two decades after the game first became popular. “Futures exchanges are populated by tough, brawling innovators who often make fortunes or lose fortunes,” Brown tells the class. Poker games are named after places that were populated by these types of people—Texas, Omaha, Chicago, etc. That’s why, he argues, “there is no poker game named after any place except places where, if you lose all your money in a game … you float down to New Orleans.”
Brain scans show compulsive gamers have hyperconnected neural networks
“Hyperconnectivity between these brain networks could lead to a more robust ability to direct attention toward targets, and to recognize novel information in the environment,” says Anderson. “The changes could essentially help someone to think more efficiently.” One of the next steps will be to directly determine whether the boys with these brain differences do better on performance tests.
More troublesome is an increased coordination between two brain regions, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction, a change also seen in patients with neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, Down’s syndrome, and autism. Hyperconnectivity between the two regions is also observed in people with poor impulse control.
Odds are good that risky gambling choices are influenced by a single brain connection -- ScienceDaily
Using that technique, called diffusion-weighted MRI, Knutson and graduate student Josiah Leong found a tract that directly connects the anterior insula and nucleus accumbens -- something that had been seen before in animals but never in humans.
What's more, they found that the thicker the sheath of fatty tissue insulating the bundle -- an indicator of the strength of the connection -- the more cautious the study participants' decisions were in a gambling test. The neuronal connection appears to be a conduit for the more cautious brain region to dampen activity in the more enthusiastic region.
"Most people love the small chance of a huge win," Knutson said. "But people vary. Some people really, really like it. But people who have a stronger connection don't like it as much."
