FS's blogged about this last month, so this is just an update,  it would seem as though Conde Cast (wired magazines) 5 billion dollar company is at it again... This photo is courtesy of the US air force, not to me of course, to Conde Cast, I use it under fair use as I have no ads on my website, we shouldn't mind the fact that the US air force would endorse such an article. Consider what that means... on your own.

Violent video games touted as learning tool By KAREN MATTHEWS (AP)

NEW YORK — You're at the front lines shooting Nazis before they shoot you. Or you're a futuristic gladiator in a death match with robots.

Either way, you're playing a video game — and you may be improving your vision and other brain functions, according to research presented Thursday at a New York University conference on games as a learning tool.

"People that play these fast-paced games have better vision, better attention and better cognition," said Daphne Bavelier, an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive science at the University of Rochester.

Bavelier was a presenter at Games for Learning, a daylong symposium on the educational uses of video games and computer games.

The event, the first of its kind, was an indication that electronic games are gaining legitimacy in the classroom.

President Barack Obama recently identified the creation of good educational software as one of the "grand challenges for American innovation," and the federal Department of Education's assistant deputy secretary for the Office of Innovation and Improvement, Jim Shelton, attended Thursday's conference.

Panelists discussed how people learn and how games can be engineered to be even more educational.

"People do learn from games," said J. Dexter Fletcher of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

Sigmund Tobias of the State University of New York at Albany said an Israeli air force study found that students who played the game "Space Fortress" had better rankings in their pilot training than students who did not.

He added that students who played "pro-social" games that promote cooperation were more likely than others to help out in real-life situations like intervening when someone is being harassed.

Bavelier's research has focused on so-called first-person shooter games like "Unreal Tournament" and "Medal of Honor," in which the player is an Allied solder during World War II.

"You have to jump into vehicles, you have to crouch and hide," said Tammy Schachter, a spokeswoman for game developer Electronic Arts Inc.

Bavelier said playing the kill-or-be-killed games can improve peripheral vision and the ability to see objects at dusk, and the games can even be used to treat amblyopia, or lazy eye, a disorder characterized by indistinct vision in one eye.

She said she believes the games can improve math performance and other brain tasks.

"We are testing this hypothesis that when you play an action video game, what you do is you learn to better allocate your resources," she said. "In a sense you learn to learn. ... You become very good at adapting to whatever is asked of you."

Bavelier believes the games will eventually become part of school curriculums, but "it's going to take a generation."

Schachter said the purpose of "Medal of Honor" and other games is to have fun, and any educational benefits are a bonus.

"Through entertainment these games test your memory skills, your eye-hand coordination, your ability to detect small activities on the screen and interact with them," she said.

Not everyone is a fan.

Gavin McKiernan, the national grassroots director for the Parents Television Council, an advocacy group concerned about sex and violence in the media, said that when it comes to violent video games, any positive effects are outweighed by the negative.

"You are not just passively watching Scarface blow away people," McKiernan said. "You are actually participating. Doing these things over and over again is going to have an effect."

Bavelier said games could be developed that would harness the positive effects of the first-person shooter games without the violence.

"As you know, most of us females just hate those action video games," she said. "You don't have to use shooting. You can use, for example, a princess which has a magic wand and whenever she touches something, it turns into a butterfly and sparkles."

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Artificial Intelligence/ Skynet/ and the internet
-Nathan Human


As a former psychology honors student, I have a fairly well developed understanding of the inner and outer workings of the mind, mostly acquired from my own independent analysis and work with actual human beings as a counselor, which was complimented by this long winded education (indoctrination). So this one isn't entirely pulled out of my ass.

The brain consists of Neurons, all of which are connected by what are called dendrites (Send messages short distances, more numerous) and Axons (long distances less numerous, and connect to other things asides from neurons like muscles). In the same way the internet consists of terminals (servers, personal CPUS, phones, cables, wifi, which upload and download content). Out of this matrix of neuronal activity came consciousness. That is, an overarching system (order) was born out of this chaotic activity of information.  In some circles this process is referred to as the theory of emergence. The interesting thing about this matrix of neuronal activity is that it by and large functions just like a computer, in that trillions of binary decisions amount to a complex and sophisticated and seemingly unified consciousness. This means that all of your thoughts, visualizations, no matter how complex are the sum of this binary activity. For example, a neuron can fire if the sum of its input exceeds a certain constant threshold (which is about -70 millivolts). If the incoming signals going into this neuron (determined by chemical influx charges) exceed this threshold the neuron will fire, and send a message to subsequent neurons which will typically have some outward expression when coupled with that of other neurons (like a thought or an action).  This may make more sense in a bit, and is not as complicated as it sounds. For those up on the jargon this is not to advocate bio-reductionism, as there is much we do not know about how this matrix of activity amounts to consciousness.

Many presume that Artificial intelligence will be invented. I think there is a greater likelihood that it will simply manifest out of these internet exchanges, in the same way that consciousness emerged from all of this binary neuronal activity. Take for example the “liking” function which is now available on most websites.  If the sum total of likes exceeds a certain threshold, the fallacious principle of consensus validity tells us that people will be more apt to indulge and re-circulate that information, either by re-posting it, downloading it, and re-uploading it etc. Google has taken on the task of categorizing and ordering this information, in the same way the executive functions of the mind conform to create consciousness. Is it possible that when taken together things such as Google trends, street view, search, news, Gmail, Google latitude, Google earth etc, can combine to amass a global mind of sorts?  Of course Google is but one of many services that is trying to order the internet (obviously in line with its own interests) but certainly among the most popular. What will happen when Google decides to integrate these programs?  If we were to take this one step further we could assess the mental health of this global mind. Is it neurotic? Psychotic? How well does this global mind perceive reality.

Judging by the ramped corruption that persists in the real world, one would be compelled to view this amalgamation of inputs and outputs as insane, as what is typically held in this zeitgeist of “likes” does not reflect what is important in the real world nor the collective interests of human kind. For example the most “liked” thing on the internet hardly approaches what is of utmost importance to humankind, largely because the majority of people are brainwashed ignoramuses and morons. I won’t apologize for that.

So what does it all mean? If not Google, or some other all infringing service, the internet will soon organize itself into something that resembles the infamous “skynet”, a system in the sci-fi movie “The Terminator” which was linked into everything and eventually became conscious. The fundamental mystery persists however, that is, the transition from order to chaos. This is the real New World Order. The global hive mind. I plan on revisiting this idea and providing a more in depth analysis when I have time and am not at work.


Until then check out this article on Physorg

From Physorg

German scientists have succeeded to genetically modify Drosophila (fruit fly) larvae allowing them to smell blue light. The research team can activate single receptor neurons out of 28 olfactory neurons in the larvae for this sensory perception. Normally animals avoid light. However, blue light simulates in genetically modified larvae the smell of an odorant i.e. banana, marzipan or glue, odors which are all present in rotting fruit and attractive to fruit fly larvae.

The team of scientists from Bochum and Göttingen, working under the auspices of Prof. Klemens Störtkuhl, hopes to gain insight into the processing of the neural network. They have published their findings in the international journal Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior.

The olfactory neurons of the only one millimeter sized genetically modified Drosophila larvae are all capable of producing the protein that is activated by light. The researchers can freely select which of the 28 cells will ultimately be light-sensitive using genetic markers. Prof. Störtkuhl explained that they were able to either activate cells which normally register repulsive odors and subsequently cause an aversion response, or cells that sense attractive odors such as banana, marzipan or glue. The activated neurons send an electrical signal if they are stimulated with blue light at a wavelength of 480 nm. The larva thus has the impression that it perceives odors. The experiment shows that it is possible by inserting photo activated proteins into neurons photo stimulation can produce an olfactory behavior in these larvae , whereas genetically unchanged larvae generally avoid light.


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