SoylentNews

hubie writes:

Innovative research from Japan challenges negative perceptions, revealing the psychological benefits of video gaming:

A pioneering study titled "Causal effect of video gaming on mental well-being in Japan 2020-2022," published in Nature Human Behaviour, has conducted the most comprehensive investigation to date on the causal relationship between video gaming and mental well-being. This research, the first to demonstrate this relationship using real-life data, challenges commonly held views about the effects of gaming.

The study found substantial improvements in mental well-being: owning a Nintendo Switch improved mental health by 0.60 standard deviations, while owning a PlayStation 5 improved it by 0.12 standard deviations. Additionally, PlayStation 5 ownership increased life satisfaction by 0.23 standard deviations.

"Our findings challenge common stereotypes about gaming being harmful or merely providing temporary euphoria," said lead author Hiroyuki Egami, PhD., Assistant Professor at Nihon University. "We've shown that gaming can improve mental health and life satisfaction across a broad spectrum of individuals."

Egami further explained, "Many earlier studies drew conclusions from correlational analysis with observational data, which can't distinguish between cause and effect. Our natural experimental design allows us to confidently say that gaming actually leads to improved well-being, rather than just being associated with it."

[...] Notably, the study found that while the PlayStation 5 offered relatively smaller psychological benefits for children, the Nintendo Switch provided larger psychological benefits. These findings question the stereotype that games are universally harmful to children and emphasize the importance of considering the multifaceted nature of gaming, including platforms, genres, and playing styles, in research and policymaking.

Journal Reference: Egami, H., Rahman, M.S., Yamamoto, T. et al. Causal effect of video gaming on mental well-being in Japan 2020–2022. Nat Hum Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01948-y

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/rust-in-linux-lead-retires-rather-than-deal-with-more-nontechnical-nonsense/

The Linux kernel is not a place to work if you're not ready for some, shall we say, spirited argument. Still, one key developer in the project to expand Rust's place inside the largely C-based kernel feels the "nontechnical nonsense" is too much, so he's retiring.

Wedson Almeida Filho, a leader in the Rust for Linux project, wrote to the Linux kernel mailing list last week to remove himself as the project's maintainer. "After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them," Filho wrote.
[...]
Filho also left a "sample for context," a link to a moment during a Linux conference talk in which an off-camera voice, identified by Filho in a Register interview as kernel maintainer Ted Ts'o, emphatically interjects: "Here's the thing: you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust." In the context of Filho's request that Linux's file system implement Rust bindings, Ts'o says that while he knows he must fix all the C code for any change he makes, he cannot or will not fix the Rust bindings that may be affected.
[...]
Drew DeVault, founder of SourceHut, blogged for a second time about Rust's attempts to find a place inside the Kernel. In theory the kernel should welcome enthusiastic input from motivated newcomers. "In practice, the Linux community is the wild wild west, and sweeping changes are infamously difficult to achieve consensus on, and this is by far the broadest sweeping change ever proposed for the project," DeVault writes.
[...]
Rather than test their patience with the kernel's politics, DeVault suggests Rust developers build a Linux-compatible kernel from scratch. "Freeing yourselves of the [Linux Kernel Mailing List] political battles would probably be a big win for the ambitions of bringing Rust into kernel space," DeVault writes.
[...]
Linus Torvalds [...] took a "wait and see" approach in 2021, hoping Rust would first make itself known in relatively isolated device drivers. At an appearance late last month, Torvalds... essentially agreed with the Rust-minded developer complaints, albeit from a much greater remove.

"I was expecting [Rust] updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust," Torvalds said. "They're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some pushback on Rust." Torvalds added, however, that "another reason has been the Rust infrastructure itself has not been super stable."

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91174361/kim-dotcom-loses-12-year-battle-halt-deportation-u-s

Kim Dotcom, founder of the once wildly popular file-sharing website Megaupload, lost a 12-year fight this week to halt his deportation from New Zealand to the U.S. on charges of copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering.

According to New Zealand's Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, the date for the extradition was not set, and Goldsmith said Dotcom would be allowed "a short period of time to consider and take advice" on the decision. "Don't worry I have a plan," Dotcom posted on X this week.

The saga stretches to the 2012 arrest of Dotcom in a dramatic raid on his Auckland mansion, along with other company officers. Prosecutors said Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies — before the FBI shut it down earlier that year.

Dotcom has fought the order for years — lambasting the investigation and arrests — but in 2021 New Zealand's Supreme Court ruled that Dotcom and two other men could be extradited. It remained up to the country's Justice Minister to decide if the extradition should proceed.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Study finds people are consistently and confidently wrong about those with opposing views:

Despite being highly confident that they can understand the minds of people with opposing viewpoints, the assumptions humans make about others are often wrong, according to new research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, in partnership with the University of Oxford.

"Poorer representation of minds underpins less accurate mental state inference for out-groups" was published in Scientific Reports. The research explores the psychology behind why people come to the wrong conclusions about others, and suggests how society could start to change that.

In all, 256 participants were recruited from the U.S. and split evenly between those with left- and right-leaning political views. They were presented with various political statements (e.g. Immigrants are beneficial to society) and asked to rate on a 5-point scale how much they agreed with it (i.e. strongly agree to strongly disagree).

For each statement, the participant would then be presented with someone else's response to the same statement. If the two shared a similar opinion, they were deemed "in-group" to one another. If the two held different opinions, they were deemed "out-group" to each other.

The participant was then asked to predict the other person's response on a second statement (e.g. all women should have access to legal abortion), and to state their confidence in their answer, from "Not at all' to "Extremely."

Participants could then choose to receive up to five more of the other person's responses to different statements to help the participant build up a better idea—or "representation"—of the other person's mind. After receiving any further information, participants could update their initial prediction and reclarify their confidence on their final answer.

Analysis of the data found that, even though participants were prepared to seek out as much—and often more—information about someone they disagreed with, their predictions were consistently incorrect, even after receiving further information about them.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

CrowdStrike's major meltdown a month ago doesn't look like affecting the cyber security vendor's market dominance anytime soon, based on its earnings reported Wednesday.

CrowdStrike's faulty Falcon sensor update in July bricked 8.5 million Windows machines, grounding thousands of flights worldwide, delaying medical services and downing some US states' 911 emergency services. Nonetheless, it reported better-than-expected revenue for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025.

[...] Moving forward, these new customers signing CrowdStrike contracts will be key to watch – and a good indicator if the July 19 fiasco will have any lasting impact on the security vendor, said IDC Group VP of security and trust Frank Dickson.

"When you look at the impact, the only think you're really going to be able to impact is new consideration, new customers evaluating security vendors," Dickson told The Register. "Net-new companies may look at this and say 'I don't know.' But that isn't going to start showing its head in the earnings for another quarter or two."

Existing customers – especially those who have gone all in with CrowdStrike's security products – aren't likely to go anywhere, despite any lingering frustrations about the flawed update.

CrowdStrike, along with some of its competitors, calls its separate products "modules," and all 28 of CrowdStrike's modules connect to its central Falcon platform.

[...] This is where CrowdStrike finds the bulk of its business. "If you only have one service from CrowdStrike, it's a lot easier to cancel," Dickson explained. "If you are a company with four, five, and six modules, it's going to be a lot harder to change. If you were so angry at CrowdStrike that you wanted to rip and replace everything, that's a herculean effort."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Imagine receiving a traffic ticket in the mail because you were speeding down a Russian road in Kursk with a Ukrainian attack drone on your tail. That's the reality facing some Russians living near the front lines after Ukraine's surprise seizure of Russian territory in Kursk Oblast. And they're complaining about it on Telegram.

Rob Lee, a well-known analyst of the Ukraine/Russia war, comments on X that "traffic cameras are still operating in Kursk, and people are receiving speeding fines when trying to outrun FPVs [first-person-view attack drones]. Some have resorted to covering their license plates but the traffic police force them to remove them."

Volunteers and military volunteers who arrived in the Kursk region are asking the traffic police not to fine them for speeding when they are escaping from the drones of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Several people who are near the combat zone told Mash about this. Cameras are still recording violations in the border area, and when people try to escape from the drones, they receive letters of happiness [tickets]. One of the well-known military activists was charged 9k [rubles, apparently—about US$100] in just one day. He accelerated on a highway that is attacked almost every hour by enemy FPV drones. Some cover their license plates, but the traffic police stop them and demand that they remove the stickers.

Mash claims that the traffic police are sympathetic and that given the drone situation, "speeding can be considered as committed in a state of extreme necessity." But those who receive a speeding ticket will have to challenge it in court on these grounds.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://kevinboone.me/headphonejack.html

"It it ain't broke, replace it with something that is."

About five years ago I was suddenly, unexpectedly taken ill. Not just 'that's a bit nasty' ill, but 'prepare for the worst' ill. One thing that kept my spirits up in hospital, in the long watches of the night, was listening to comedy shows and audiobooks. I used my smartphone for this, since I had it with me, and a pair of old, wired headphones that I just had time to grab on my way to the ambulance.

I survived, of course, as evidenced by my continued ramblings on this site. But it was an unpleasant experience, made just a little better by a simple piece of technology: the 3.5mm headphone jack.

Now, of course, I do own wireless headphones and earbuds – I think almost everybody does. I also own several of those irritating USB dongles, that provide a 3.5mm port for devices that don't have one. But here's the problem: I can't use my Bluetooth earbuds while they're charging. And I can't easily charge my phone whilst it's connected to the USB dongle. In a critical-care facility, it's hard enough to find one free mains socket to connect a charger to, let alone two./blockquote.

[...] What makes the loss of the headphone jack so hard to bear is that it wasn't done for the consumer's benefit. To be sure, manufacturers made certain claims about the alleged benefits of losing the jack, but few of them stand up to much logical scrutiny.

[...] No. All of these weak excuses are simply distractions from the real reason Apple, Samsung, and Google dropped the headphone jack: they all have a substantial investment in the manufacture of wireless headphones.

Original Submission

Boeing's Starliner is Making Mysterious 'Sonar' Noises and No One Can Explain It - Plagued Spacecraf

upstart writes:

Boeing's Starliner Is Making Mysterious 'Sonar' Noises and No One Can Explain It - Plagued Spacecraft Is Scheduled To Return to Earth in a Week Without Its Crew:

The saga of the misadventures of Boeing's Starliner in space is far from over, even as the spacecraft is scheduled to return soon to Earth without its crew.

This time, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some 'strange noises' coming from a speaker inside it.

Ars Technica reported:

"'I've got a question about Starliner', Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. 'There's a strange noise coming through the speaker ... I don't know what's making it'."

Butch was not sure whether there was some problem in the connection between the station and the spacecraft that was causing the noise.

He asked Houston to listen to the audio inside the spacecraft.

"Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. 'Alright Butch, that one came through', Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. 'It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping'.

'I'll do it one more time, and I'll let y'all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what's going on', Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. 'Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out'."

The sonar-like noises most likely have a benign cause, and Butch did not seem worried.

hubie writes:

New research reveals that rudeness in the workplace is far more than just unpleasant — it can be downright dangerous:

Teams from the University of Florida, Indiana University, and other universities across the U.S. and Israel recently conducted five eye-opening studies about rudeness, uncovering that even mild instances of this behavior can significantly impair employees' performance. This could have potentially life-threatening consequences in critical fields like health care.

"Many workplaces treat rudeness as a minor interpersonal issue," said Amir Erez, Ph.D., W.A. McGriff, III Professor at the University of Florida Warrington College of Business. "Our research shows that it's a major threat to productivity and even safety. Organizations should treat it as such."

Erez and his fellow researchers, who published their findings in the Journal of Applied Psychology, evaluated teams in various settings (including a medical simulation) and found that exposure to rude behavior dramatically reduced team functioning. Surprisingly, the impact of rudeness was disproportionate to its intensity. In one study, relatively mild rude comments from an external source accounted for 44% of the variance in medical teams' performance quality.

The studies also discovered that rudeness functions as a social threat, triggering defensive responses in team members. This causes individuals to become less prosocial and more selfish, hindering the cooperation and coordination essential for effective teamwork. Specifically, teams exposed to rudeness showed reduced information sharing and workload sharing, which are two critical components of team performance. In medical settings, this translated to poorer execution of lifesaving procedures.

[...] With this in mind, the researchers recommend that organizations seek to implement solutions that help teams prepare for dealing with perceived threatening situations like rudeness. Training aimed at building team member resilience and mindfulness, for example, may better prepare employees for dealing with these situations.

"As our understanding of workplace dynamics evolves, our research underscores a critical point: in the quest for high-performing teams, sometimes the smallest courtesies can make the biggest difference," Erez said.

Journal Reference: Gale, J., Erez, A., Bamberger, P., Foulk, T., Cooper, B., Riskin, A., Schilpzand, P., & Vashdi, D. (2024). Rudeness and team performance: Adverse effects via member social value orientation and coordinative team processes. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001213

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/transatlantic-flight-speed-of-sound-record-blackbird-sr-71

On 1 September 1974 two men made the fastest ever journey between New York and London. The astonishing trip – at three times the speed of sound – took less than two hours and set a record that still stands 50 years later.

Even the mighty Concorde, which set the record for the fastest commercial transatlantic flight in 1996, straggled in almost an hour behind.

The US air force Lockheed Blackbird SR-71 jet had a crew of two – pilot James Sullivan and reconnaissance systems operator Noel Widdifield – who completed the journey between the two cities in one hour, 54 minutes and 56 seconds before triumphantly landing to a fanfare welcome at the Farnborough air show in Hampshire.

[...] The aircraft had to take on fuel twice: when it took off, linking with a refuelling plane above California to fill it to capacity, and partway during the journey near to Greenland.

There was also an incident which would have looked terrifying from the outside but which the crew took in their stride. The Blackbird began to suddenly "yaw" – moving swiftly from side to side – after losing thrust.

The Blackbird took in air from the front to give thrust to the engines, and it was common for a device in the inlet to become displaced, causing one engine to lose much of its power momentarily.

All in a day's work... for some!

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A new study has shown the roleplaying game boosts people's confidence and enables them to feel more comfortable with social interactions:

Dungeons and Dragons is a hugely popular roleplaying game enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, both in person and online, every day.

However, new research has found it could be particularly beneficial for people with autism, giving them a safe space to engage in social interactions away from some of the challenges they face in their daily lives.

The study, published in the journal Autism, was led by researchers from the University of Plymouth's School of Psychology along with colleagues at Edge Hill University and Dalarna University in Sweden.

It saw researchers working with a group of autistic adults and aimed to explore whether finding a social situation where people felt comfortable could help them to excel.

After some initial familiarisation with Dungeons and Dragons, the participants – under the guidance of a games master – played out scenarios within small groups over the space of six weeks.

They were then interviewed individually by the researchers about the ways they felt their autism might have interacted with their experiences and, in turn, whether taking part in the game impacted their lives.

In those interviews, the participants spoke at length about their social desires and motivations, but how this came with challenges such as a lack of confidence in their communication with others, and insecurities about how other people would perceive them. This, they said, often resulted in them masking, or hiding, autistic traits.

Playing Dungeons and Dragons, they said, provided them with a friendly environment in which they very quickly felt a sense of innate kinship with others taking part.

Understanding common issues linked to activities inside and outside of the game allowed them to relax without feeling pressure to act in a certain way, and as a result they felt included in – and able to better contribute to – the group's interactions.

The participants also felt able to take some of the traits from their new character outside of the game, where it enabled them to feel differently about themselves.

[...] Another recently published study showed that those with autism enjoy board games because they took the pressure off the uncertainty around meeting and interacting with people, removing the need for small talk.

Journal Reference: Atherton et al.: A critical hit: Dungeons and Dragons as a buff for autistic people – is published in Autism, DOI: 10.1177/13623613241275260

Original Submission

upstart writes:

At least 24 EU countries struggle with teacher shortages:

Most EU member states see a large proportion of their teaching vacancies unfilled at the start of each school year, often thanks to low wages, high workload, and an ageing teacher population.

Sweden has been reported as one of the worst affected, with 153,000 qualified teachers needed by 2035.

Only Croatia and Cyprus did not report a lack of education staff, according to the European Commission's Education and Training Monitor 2023 report, while Greece's existing public data does not allow it to assess whether all needs are covered or if specific subjects might suffer shortages.

Most countries face teacher shortages specifically in STEM subjects and qualified personnel in early childhood education and care.

Germany's Education and Science Workers' Union, GEW, has warned "against lowering the standards for pedagogical qualifications to compensate for the shortage of staff."

[...] However, an EU-level solution might be difficult to implement.

"One of the reasons why it is difficult to come up with a European comparable cross-country indicator on teacher shortage is because countries have different educational institutional rules," wrote education economist Giorgio Di Pietro in a technical report for the EU's Joint Research Centre.

"For instance, formal teaching qualifications can be obtained in different ways in different countries. In some countries, one automatically becomes a teacher when they complete the teacher preparation programme, while in others there are additional steps to complete."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Darwin's fear was unjustified: Study suggests fossil record gaps not a major issue:

Fossils are used to reconstruct evolutionary history, but not all animals and plants become fossils and many fossils are destroyed before we can find them (e.g., the rocks that contain the fossils are destroyed by erosion). As a result, the fossil record has gaps and is incomplete, and we're missing data that we need to reconstruct evolutionary history.

Now, a team of sedimentologists and stratigraphers from the Netherlands and the UK have examined how this incompleteness influences the reconstruction of evolutionary history. To their surprise, they found that the incompleteness itself is actually not such a big issue.

"It's as if you are missing half of a movie. If you are missing the second half, you can't understand the story, but if you are missing every second frame, you can still follow the plot without problems.

"The regularity of the gaps, rather than the incompleteness itself, is what determines the reconstruction of evolutionary history," explains Niklas Hohmann of Utrecht University's Faculty of Geosciences, who led the study. "If a lot of data is missing, but the gaps are regular, we could still reconstruct evolutionary history without major problems, but if the gaps get too long and irregular, results are strongly biased."

The study is published in the journal BMC Ecology and Evolution.

Since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, the incompleteness of the fossil record has been considered problematic for reconstructing evolutionary history from fossils. Darwin feared that the gradual change that his theory predicted would not be recognizable in the fossil record due to all the gaps.

"Our results show that this fear is unjustified. We have a good understanding of where the gaps are, how long they are and what causes them. With this geological knowledge, we can reconstruct evolution hundreds of millions of years ago at an unprecedented temporal resolution," says Hohmann.

Journal Reference:
Hohmann, Niklas, Koelewijn, Joël R., Burgess, Peter, et al. Identification of the mode of evolution in incomplete carbonate successions [open], BMC Ecology and Evolution (DOI: 10.1186/s12862-024-02287-2)

Original Submission

Ok this was pretty cool.

https://kottke.org/24/08/secret-message-in-one-million-checkboxes

(Editor's note: we usually do not post videos, but it is integral to understanding the story it well worth watching. I encourage you to watch the whole video! --MartyB)

posted 2d ago by Jason Kottke

The Secret Message Contained in One Million Checkboxes

In my XOXO post on Monday, I said that Nolen Royalty, the creator of One Million Checkboxes (a game), had told "one of the wackiest internet nerd stories I've ever heard". Well, Royalty has now put that story online, both in the form of a blog post and a YouTube video: https://youtu.be/OI4DbECnp8A

I panicked. There were URLs in my database! There were URLs pointing to catgirls.win in my database!! Something was very very wrong.

I assumed I'd been hacked. I poured over my logs, looking for evidence of an intrusion. I read and re-read my code, searching for how somebody could be stuffing strings into a database that should have just contained 0s and 1s.

I couldn't find anything. My access logs looked fine. My (very simple) code was ok. My heart rate increased. My girlfriend patiently waited for me to join her for dinner. And then — wait.

Wait!

I saw it.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A rocket team reports the first successful detection of Earth's ambipolar electric field:

Using observations from a NASA suborbital rocket, an international team of scientists has, for the first time, successfully measured a planet-wide electric field thought to be as fundamental to Earth as its gravity and magnetic fields. Known as the ambipolar electric field, scientists first hypothesized over 60 years ago that it drove how our planet's atmosphere can escape above Earth's North and South Poles. Measurements from the rocket, NASA's Endurance mission, have confirmed the existence of the ambipolar field and quantified its strength, revealing its role in driving atmospheric escape and shaping our ionosphere — a layer of the upper atmosphere — more broadly.

[...] Since the late 1960s, spacecraft flying over Earth's poles have detected a stream of particles flowing from our atmosphere into space. Theorists predicted this outflow, which they dubbed the "polar wind," spurring research to understand its causes.

Some amount of outflow from our atmosphere was expected. Intense, unfiltered sunlight should cause some particles from our air to escape into space, like steam evaporating from a pot of water. But the observed polar wind was more mysterious. Many particles within it were cold, with no signs they had been heated — yet they were traveling at supersonic speeds.

[...] The hypothesized electric field, generated at the subatomic scale, was expected to be incredibly weak, with its effects felt only over hundreds of miles. For decades, detecting it was beyond the limits of existing technology. In 2016, Collinson and his team got to work inventing a new instrument they thought was up to the task of measuring Earth's ambipolar field.

[...] Endurance's discovery has opened many new paths for exploration. The ambipolar field, as a fundamental energy field of our planet alongside gravity and magnetism, may have continuously shaped the evolution of our atmosphere in ways we can now begin to explore. Because it's created by the internal dynamics of an atmosphere, similar electric fields are expected to exist on other planets, including Venus and Mars.

Journal Reference: Collinson, G.A., Glocer, A., Pfaff, R. et al. Earth's ambipolar electrostatic field and its role in ion escape to space. Nature 632, 1021–1025 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07480-3

Original Submission