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Filed under: Games

Which came first, our love of video games -- or ADD?

Here's a meaty issue -- a meaty, contemporary issue. Go back fifty years, before video games, before ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) was 'discovered', and such a story couldn't even exist.

But here we are: modern day. Love it or hate it, we inhabit a world where vast and incredible leaps in the realms of technology and science occur on a daily basis. We're now, as a result, one very big international community full of gamers, where the person sitting next to you on the train is more likely to be a fellow gamer than not. And apparently -- and this might not be a shock to some of you -- according to a new report, we're picking up new and freshly-labeled psychoses from our rampant, reckless, just-one-more-hour gaming habits. Apparently.

CNET breaks down the conclusion of the report:
"A new study out of Iowa State University finds that people who play video games for 40-plus hours a week have a harder time focusing on certain tasks than those who play just a few hours a week."

You should probably read the findings of the study yourself and draw your own conclusions, but I do have one thing to add:
Considering the complexity and involvement of video games, maybe gamers just don't find real life quite as interesting by comparison?

If I could choose between going to the office and focusing on a word processor for 8 hours a day, or playing a 32-player video game that involves pixel-perfect hand-eye coordination and one-hundred percent, focused concentration all the time -- well, I think I'd choose the game. Is it any surprise that we gamers find our mind wandering when turned to the menial, humdrum tasks of the real world?

[via CNET]

Filed under: Business, News

BSA loves irony, disproves link between piracy and malware

I know, sometimes it's hard to believe that the "BS" in BSA stands for business software when they publish reports like the one Wired shared with us this week. Entitled Software Piracy on the Internet: A Threat to Your Security, the BSA's latest tour de force is fine example of propaganda gone wrong.

Wired highlights this quote from the report: "Globally, there is a significant evidence to link software piracy with the frequency of malware attacks. While this correlation has not been measured with precision, the evidence from industry sources suggests that markets with high software piracy rates also have a tendency to experience high rates of malware infection...."

Not measured with precision? Adam and Jamie would call this thing busted on that point alone.

What the hell, fellas. In addition to your own admission that you weren't particularly careful in how you calculated your figures you obviously didn't look too closely at your charts.

Read more →

Filed under: Social Software, Microblogging

Hate Twitter spam? Now you can report it with one click

The head honchos at Twitter have decided to take action against the site's growing problem with spam accounts by giving users some new options to file spam reports. You'll see a new "Report as spam" link on the sidebar of each user's Twitter page, and a "Report as spam" action available from your followers and following lists. Clicking on either of those links will give you a chance to decide if you're sure you want to report, and then block the user and flag them for review.

Previously, reporting spam meant following Twitter's @spam account, and sending it a direct message with the username you wanted to report. There's no official word from Twitter on how the spam reports work, yet, but I suspect it's something like the way blocking worked before: i.e., the more times an account is marked as spam, the more likely it will be to get deleted. This seems like a much more efficient way to handle the spam problem, and it'll be interesting to see if it results in fewer bot accounts on Twitter.

[Thanks, Damon!]

UPDATE: Twitter's official blog post on spam reporting is up now.

Filed under: Web services, Google

Google's sekrit plans revealed

GoogleGoogle Blogoscoped has published a summary of an apparently-leaked internal Google memo that outlines the Big G's secret plans to breed evil radioactive mutant rats, er, take over the world, er, make a ton of money this year. To summarize the summary, this year Google planned to:

  • Improve infrastructure and make engineers more productive with uber-search tools
  • Build 10MW of green power toward its goal of becoming carbon-neutral
  • Become the best in search (duh), which includes building the world's top AI lab, eliminating spam, and launching products with UIs that "that people love"
  • Sell lots of ads, with a goal of $1 billion in new business this year
  • Expand communities and content, in particular video
  • Push Google Pack deployment
  • "Increase the scale of innovation"
  • Test a "radically improved" Google News prototype in Q4

There's lots more in Google Blogscoped's report, so if you're a Googleholic like us I don't recommend missing it.

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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