Group items tagged

U.S. computer and video game software sales generated $10.5 billion in 2009.

Sixty-seven percent of American households play computer or video games. 

The average game player is 34 years old and has been playing games for 12 years.

The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old.

Forty percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (20 percent).

In 2010, 26 percent of Americans over the age of 50 play video games, an increase from nine percent in 1999.

Forty-two percent of heads of households play games on a wireless device, such as a cell phone or PDA, up from 20 percent in 2002.

Eighty-two percent of all games sold in 2009 were rated "E" for Everyone, "T" for Teen, or "E10+" for Everyone 10+.

Parents who have children under 18 with a gaming console in the home are present when games are purchased or rented 93 percent of the time.

Sixty-four percent of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives.

If you feel this way, you’re not alone, but it might surprise you to know that although there are more than 350 distinct species of sharks, only a few even bother with humans. The giant Whale Shark doesn’t even have teeth.

As of late 2009, the world’s population of sharks had already diminished by 50 to 75%.

A North Atlantic population survey reports as much as an 89% decrease.

show that for the 181 species of sharks for which they have adequate data, over 64% of those populations are noted as “threatened” or “vulnerable”. Of those, over 21% are categorized as “endangered” or worse. At least one species is already listed as “extinct in the wild.”

Sharks are pulled onto fishing boats where their fins are cut off and their bodies are thrown back into the ocean as waste. A large percentage of these animals are still alive and suffocate. Even though less than 5% of the shark is fin, the rest is usually thrown away because of the economics of it. Shark meat must be properly refrigerated and takes up a lot of space on a boat. Fins, however, can be cut off, bundled, and hung to dry in large nets. It is the fin that produces the largest profit by far and can be sold for hundreds of dollars per pound.

Consequences of Underage Drinking Youth who drink alcohol1, 3, 8 are more likely to experience School problems, such as higher absence and poor or failing grades. Social problems, such as fighting and lack of participation in youth activities. Legal problems, such as arrest for driving or physically hurting someone while drunk. Physical problems, such as hangovers or illnesses. Unwanted, unplanned, and unprotected sexual activity. Disruption of normal growth and sexual development. Physical and sexual assault. Higher risk for suicide and homicide. Alcohol-related car crashes and other unintentional injuries, such as burns, falls, and drowning. Memory problems. Abuse of other drugs. Changes in brain development that may have life-long effects. Death from alcohol poisoning. In general, the risk of youth experiencing these problems is greater for those who binge drink than for those who do not binge drink.8 Youth who start drinking before age 15 years are five times more likely to develop alcohol dependence or abuse later in life than those who begin drinking at or after age 21 years.9, 10

Prevention of Underage Drinking Reducing underage drinking will require community-based efforts to monitor the activities of youth and decrease youth access to alcohol.

reducing youth exposure to alcohol advertising, and development of comprehensive community-based programs. These efforts will require continued research and evaluation to determine their success and to improve their effectiveness.

wants to maintain a strong commitment to overseas assistance and global health.

budget request includes strategic

structural shifts to reach those goals, including aligning foreign assistance more closely with foreign policy objectives, demanding greater accountability from recipient governments, and delivering more "bang for the buck" by increasing cross-agency cooperation, streamlining delivery of goods and services, and reducing U.S. government redundancies.

Researchers suggest advertising media may adversely impact women's body image,

ads made women fear being unattractive

he average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day

and by the time she is 17 years old, she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media.

Only 9% of commercials have a direct statement about beauty,

but many more implicitly emphasize the importance of beauty--particularly those that target women and girls.

This constant exposure to female-oriented advertisements may influence girls to become self-conscious about their bodies and to obsess over their physical appearance as a measure of their worth

ty, and the bodies idealized in the media are frequently atypical of normal, healthy women. In fact,

Advertisements emphasize thinness as a standard for female beau

today's fashion models weigh 23% less than the average female

Women frequently compare their bodies to those they see around them, and researchers have found that exposure to idealized body images lowers women's satisfaction with their own attractiveness.

girls reported in a

Body Image Survey that "very thin" models made them

feel insecure about themselves.

Dissatisfaction with their bodies causes many women and girls to strive for the thin ideal. The number one wish for girls ages 11 to 17 is to be thinner

Eighty percent (80%) of 10-year-old girls have dieted,

One study found that 47% of the girls were influenced by magazine pictures to want to lose weight, but only 29% were actually overweight

Research has also found that stringent dieting to achieve an ideal figure can play a key role in triggering eating disorders.

Girls who were already dissatisfied with their bodies showed more dieting, anxiety, and bulimic symptoms after prolonged exposure to fashion and advertising images

in a teen girl magazine.

So how do we talk about time? We talk about it metaphorically, and for the most part and this not just in English, but across the world in many different languages.

So the metaphors we have like time being a landscape that we are moving across; so we talk about "coming up to Thanksgiving," as though Thanksgiving is a location that we are moving towards, but we also sometimes talk about time as something that's moving while we are static.

Kuuk Thaayorre, the language of Pormpuraaw, is that time moves for them from east to west, so they don't talk about it as moving from east to west, but in terms of nonlinguistic cognition—we've tested this in various ways—they seem to depict it as moving from east to west

Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde supersonic transport (SST)

commercial servic

cruise speed of mach 2.04 and a cruise altitude of 60,000 feet

In the late 1950s the

British, Fr

ench, American

Soviets

developing a supersonic transport

ere lar

espective governments as a way of gaining some foothold in the aircraft market that was

designs called the Type 233 and Super-Caravelle

dominated by the United States.

prototype construction in the early 1960s, but the cost was so great that the companies (and governments) decided to join forces

egotiated as an international treaty between Britain and France

draft treaty was signed on November 28, 1962.

both companies had been merged into new ones and the Concorde project was thus a part of the British Aircraft Corporation and Aerospatiale.

Only 20 Concordes were built, six for development and 14 for commercial service. These were: two prototypes two pre-production aircraft 16 production aircraft

Critically, many of the victims of the 9/11 attacks were business executives based within the World Trade Center buildings who were either regular Concorde customers themselves, or authorised others to travel on the aircraft.

despite the proliferation of violent, first-person shooters in the wake of Doom, juvenile homicide rates have fallen in the decade since its release. Random school shootings remain incredibly rare; for all forms of homicide, students face a seven in 10 million chance of being a victim.

Random school shootings remain so rare, in fact, that Sternheimer reports that the FBI found it impossible to generate a profile of a "typical" shooter.

society doesn't really understand its youth. As a result, adults fear their loss of control over the factors that influence childhood development in an increasingly connected world.

Far from being a new danger, the Sternheimer report suggests that gaming is simply the latest in a long series of media influences to take the blame. "Over the past century, politicians have complained that cars, radio, movies, rock music, and even comic books caused youth immorality and crime, calling for control and sometimes censorship." She terms the targets of such efforts "folk devils," items branded dangerous and immoral that serve to focus blame and fear.

These folk devils can be used for political advancement or financial gain via lawsuits such as those that have targeted game makers. But, based on Sternheimer's description, their primary function appears to be to distract people from identifying the real causes underlying our discomfort with youth culture. It also may distract people from getting to know their kids.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the school shootings and the finger-pointing that followed, game players and industry advocates say they're outraged that the brutal acts of a deeply disturbed and depressed loner with a history of mental illness would be blamed so quickly on video and computer games. They say this is perhaps the most flagrant case of anti-game crusaders using a tragedy to promote their own personal causes.

"It's so sad. These massacre chasers — they're worse than ambulance chasers — they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox," said Jason Della Rocca,

When Jack Thompson gets worked up, he refers to gamers as "knuckleheads." He calls video games "mental masturbation." When he's talking about himself and his crusade against violent games, he calls himself an "educator." He likes to use the word "pioneer."

On those rare occasions when a student opens fire on a school campus, Thompson is frequently the first and the loudest to declare games responsible. In recent years he's blamed games such as "Counter-Strike," "Doom" and "Grand Theft Auto III" for school shootings in Littleton, Colo., Red Lake, Minn. and Paducah, Ky.

He's blamed them for shootings beyond school grounds as well. In an attempt to hold game developers and publishers responsible for these spasms of violence, Thompson has launched several unsuccessful lawsuits.

"It disgusts me," said Isaiah Triforce Johnson, a longtime gamer and founder of a New York-based gaming advocacy group that, in response to the accusations, is now planning what is the first ever gamer-driven peace rally. 

authorities released a search warrant listing the items found in Cho's dorm room. Not a single video game, console or gaming gadget was on the list, though a computer was confiscated. And in an interview with Chris Matthews of "Hardball," Cho's university suite-mate said he had never seen Cho play video games.

"This is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer,"

And in a letter sent to Bill Gates Wednesday, he wrote: "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill."

Microsoft did not create "Counter Strike" but did publish a version of it for the Xbox.

Fed up with the scapegoating and lack of understanding, gamer groups have begun to get increasingly organized in their attempts to change public perception of their favorite hobby.

"You cannot tell me — common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that."

Dr. Karen Sternheimer, a sociologist at the University of Southern Calfornia and author of the book " Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today's Youth," disagrees. She believes that it didn't require much skill for Cho to shoot as many people as he did. After all, eye witness accounts indicate many of the victims were shot at point-blank range.

And for all of Thompson's claims that violent video games are the cause of school shootings, Sternheimer points out that before this week's Virginia Tech massacre, the most deadly school shooting in history took place at the University of Texas in Austin… in 1966. Not even "Pong" had been invented at that time.

Sternheimer says the rush to blame video games in these situations is disingenuous for yet another reason. Although it remains unclear whether Cho played games, it seems nobody will be surprised if it turns out he did. After all, what 23-year-old man living in America hasn't played video games?

"Especially if you're talking about young males, the odds are pretty good that any young male in any context will have played video games at some point,"

"I think in our search to find some kind of answer as to why this happened, the video game explanation seems easy," she says. "It seems like there's an easy answer to preventing this from happening again and that feels good on some level."

The blame game

Jason Della Rocca agrees. "Everyone wants a simple solution for a massively complex problem. We want to get on with our lives."

As the leader of an organization that represents video game creators from all over the world, Della Rocca knows the routine all too well.

Someone opens fire on a school campus. Someone blames video games. His phone starts ringing. People start asking him questions like, "So how bad are these games anyway?"

Of course, he also knows that this is far from the first time in history that a young form of pop culture has been blamed for any number of society's ills. Rock and roll was the bad guy in the 1950s. Jazz was the bad guy in the 1930s. Movies, paintings, comic books, works of literature…they've all been there.

Still, Della Rocca believes that people like Thompson are "essentially feeding off the fears of those who don't understand games."

For those who didn't grow up playing video games, the appeal of a game like "Counter-Strike" can be hard to comprehend. It can be difficult to understand that the game promotes communication and team work. It can be hard fathom how players who love to run around gunning down their virtual enemies do not have even the slightest desire to shoot a person in real life.

"It's the thing they don't understand," Della Rocca says. "It's a thing that's scary."

While Thompson concedes that there are many elements that must have driven Cho to commit such a brutal act, he insists that without video games Cho wouldn't have had the skills to do what he did. "He might have killed somebody but he wouldn't have killed 32 if he hadn't rehearsed it and trained himself like a warrior on virtual reality. It can't be done. It just doesn't happen."

the members of Empire Arcadia — a grassroots group dedicated to supporting the gaming community and culture — have been so incensed by the recent attempts to blame video games for the Virginia Tech shootings that they've begun planning a rally in New York City with the assistance of the ECA.

"There we will protest, mourn and show how real gamers play video games peacefully and responsibly," organizer Johnson wrote on the group's Web site. "This demonstration is to show that gamers will not take the blame of this tragic matter but we will do what we can to help put an end to terrible events like this." Johnson says that, ultimately, he hopes the rally — scheduled for May 5 — will help people better understand video game enthusiasts like him. "We are normal people," he says. "We just play games."