The shooting on the Virginia Tech campus was only hours old, police hadn't even identified the gunman, and yet already the perpetrator had been fingered and was in the midst of being skewered in the media.
Were video games to blame for massacre? - Technology & science - Games - msnbc.com - 0 views
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Video games. They were to blame for the dozens dead and wounded. They were behind the bloodiest massacre in U.S. history. Or so Jack Thompson told Fox News and, in the days that followed, would continue to tell anyone who'd listen.
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But whether Seung-Hui Cho, the student who opened fire Monday, was an avid player of video games and whether he was a fan of "Counter-Strike" in particular remains, even now, uncertain at best.
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Is physician-assisted suicide legal? - 1 views
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Physician-assisted suicide is illegal in every state except Oregon.
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the Court reaffirmed that Americans do have the right to refuse or end life-sustaining treatment, such as ventilators and feeding tubes.
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Is physician-assisted suicide legal
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JIHAD - Hasan al-Banna - 0 views
Is Poverty Linked to Terrorism? | Global Envision - 0 views
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starting with the fact that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by middle-to-upper-class men. (A 2003 paper suggests that terrorist groups may recruit well-educated, well-off members because they can blend into their Western targets.)
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Poverty can surely lead to a sense of societal alienation, which could make people more likely to join a terrorist group
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A prime example is American Greg Mortenson's efforts to build dozens of schools in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are documented in the book Three Cups of Tea. According to Mortenson, "Education in general is a powerful tool to provide alternatives to the illiterate, impoverished areas that are the recruiting grounds for terror."
The gaming-violence connection: why society finds it comforting - 0 views
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the attempts to legislate restrictions on violent video games and the ambiguous science that supports those efforts.
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why these legislative efforts gain so much traction despite their lack of a solid scientific foundation.
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in the journal Contexts, USC sociology lecturer Karen Sternheimer analyzes these efforts in terms of ongoing societal fears regarding the influence of media on children.
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Part 2 - How video games are good for the brain - The Boston Globe - 0 views
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A type of scan that illuminates brain activity showed that at the end of the three months, the girls’ brains were working less hard to complete the game’s challenges. What’s more, parts of the cortex, the outer layer of their brains responsible for high-level functions, actually got thicker. Several of these regions are associated with visual spatial abilities, planning, and integration of sensory data.
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Other researchers are hoping to use video games to encourage prosocial behaviors - actions designed to help others.
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Generalizability to non-game situations is the big question surrounding other emerging games, particularly software that is being marketed explicitly as a way to keep neurons spry as we age. The jury is still out on whether practicing with these games helps people outside of the context of the game. In one promising 2008 study, however, senior citizens who started playing Rise of Nations, a strategic video game devoted to acquiring territory and nation building, improved on a wide range of cognitive abilities, performing better on subsequent tests of memory, reasoning, and multitasking. The tests were administered after eight weeks of training on the game. No follow-up testing was done to assess whether the gains would last.
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Bunnies Don't Wear Lipstick: Death by Mascara: Why We Torture, I Mean, Test On, Bunnies... - 0 views
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Mrs. Brown was to be honored by her local PTA that very evening. At the beauty parlor hours before the big event, she decided to go ahead and try a cosmetic change -- to permanently darken her brows and eyelashes. Her hairdresser had a new coal tar-based dye called "Lash Lure." Riding home, Mrs. Brown’s eyes started burning. According to Teresa Riordan, author of Inventing Beauty, Mrs. Brown made matters probably worse when she got home by applying various treatments herself, one boric acid, another a topical made by her pharmacist, and then “yellow oxide of mercury.’ At the PTA banquet that evening, Mrs. Brown was so uncomfortable she left early. In the ensuing days, the skin around Mrs. Brown’s eyes ulcered and blistered. Nothing really helped. Of the aftermath, The New Republic would write: “Her eyes are gone and the flesh around them is a mass of tortured scars.”1
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