We ♥ Katamari OST
Houston
87
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain
Tunes of CWL
Super Mario 64
Wing Cap
MGS4/ Einstein/ Old snake, Super Tyson Bro, Dr. S/Charles, Hawking in cerebro
Neil DeGrasse Tyson wearing the mario gloves riding one of the Super Mario Stars across space.
I can imagine the amount of people who fall for the geek/nerd male thinking they couldn’t possibly be as bad as the macho dudebros that still conjure up ‘make me a sandwich’ jokes or think they have a say in a woman’s or anyone’s business and or freedom of expression. And how wrong they are in thinking misogynists are constrained to one culture. That shit spans across the whole damn spectrum. This culture needs to fucking die, we need something new, all inclusive, respectful, and understanding. Is this really such a hard feat to achieve for a species who’s had many generations of trial and errors? I really do hope it all goes to shit and people get so fed up that we destroy that culture to create something new, something unlike everything else we’ve experienced so that we may never have to psychologically or physically maim others another group deems different. For that to ever be realized we’d obviously have to start boycotting things like tv, hollywood, music, comics, video games and all giant media powerhouses currently feeding our youth and adults all this crap. If we’re so determined to be consumers then at least let us be smart consumers that have a say with their own money, what we think is right and wrong. And who knows, maybe eventually we’ll come around to realizing we never needed the money in the first place to get these things done.
Tunes of CWL
Yasunori Mitsuda / Chrono Trigger OST
Corridors of Time (Zeal Palace Theme)
One of my favourite cosplayer !!!
Jenni Källberg @ pixelninja.se
As Samus Aran / Zero Suit Samus
Video Game With Biofeedback Teaches Children to Curb Anger
Side Note: I find the application of these studies very important especially when it comes to early education. I feel like the future to how we control and use our emotions to benefit rather than be our dismay lies in studies like these that aim to train our brains to regulate and control emotions like any system would monitor itself for peak efficiency. If we can use the applicability and entertainment in video games to make children who have severe anger problems a thing of the past we could be tackling a major problem within early childhood, education and or both. A child with controlled emotions is more likely to focus naturally on the tasks at hand without the need of drugs that may or may not just worsen his or her situation and put them early on into drug reliance.
Children with serious anger problems can be helped by a video game that helps them learn how to regulate their emotions, according to a new study.
Image: Young Spock inside a Vulcan virtual reality educational system Credit: Star Trek (2009)
Noticing that children with anger control problems are often uninterested in psychotherapy, but eager to play video games, Jason Kahn, Ph.D., and Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, M.D., at Boston Children’s Hospital developed “RAGE Control,” a video game with a biofeedback component that helps children practice emotional control skills.
The game involves shooting at enemy spaceships while avoiding shooting at friendly ones. As children play, a monitor on one finger tracks their heart rate and displays it on the computer screen. When the heart rate goes above a certain level, players lose their ability to shoot at the enemy spaceships. To improve their game, they must learn to keep calm, the researchers explain.
“The connections between the brain’s executive control centers and emotional centers are weak in people with severe anger problems,” said Gonzalez-Heydrich, chief of Psychopharmacology at Boston Children’s and senior investigator on the study. “However, to succeed at RAGE Control, players have to learn to use these centers at the same time to score points.”
The study, led by first author Peter Ducharme, M.S.W., a clinical social worker at Boston Children’s, compared two groups of 9- to 17-year-old children admitted to the hospital’s Psychiatry Inpatient Service who had high levels of anger. To qualify for the study, the children had to have a normal IQ and not need a medication change during the five-day study period.
One group, with 19 children, received standard treatments for anger, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, presentation of relaxation techniques and social skills training for five consecutive business days. The second group, with 18 children, got these same treatments, but spent the last 15 minutes of their psychotherapy session playing RAGE Control.
After five sessions, the gamers were significantly better at keeping their heart rate down, the researchers report. They also showed clinically significant decreases in anger scores on the State Trait Anger Expression Inventory-Child and Adolescent (STAXI-CA). Specific decreases were seen in the intensity of anger at a particular time, the frequency of angry feelings over time, and the expression of anger towards others or objects. The gamers also had a decrease in suppressed, internalized anger, according to the researchers.
Tunes of CWL
Yasunori Mitsuda
Secret of the Forest
Pac-Man Nebula Chomps Through Deep Space in Photo
A massive cloud of dust and gas create the likeness of the pixelated protagonist of 1980s video game fame, Pac-Man.
Astrophotographers Bob and Janice Fera took this photo of the nebula, also known as NGC 281, on Sept. 8-11, 2012 from Eagle Ridge Observatory in Foresthill, Calif. The Feras used an Officina Stellare RC-360AST 14” f/8 Ritchey Chretien Cassegrain telescope with two-element field flattener to observe the nebula. An Apogee Alta U16M CCD camera with Astrodon filters was used to capture the photo.
Located about 9,200 light-years away, the Pac-Man nebula earned its moniker because the star-forming cloud appears to be chomping space in visible-light images. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). The official name of the nebula is NGC 281 in the constellation Cassiopeia near the edge of our Milky Way.
Played By Humans, Scored By Nature
Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should.
The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past.
“We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.”
“This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.”
And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against.
So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising!
