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Aneesh Mysore

Grand Theft Auto: Do Video Games Cause Behavior Problems? - 0 views

www.suite101.com/...grand-theft-auto-a22850

grand theft auto

shared by Aneesh Mysore on 11 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • “You play as a thug with problems you must steal and shoot your way out of, but the problems this time are disconcertingly more realistic.
  • (ie: of the level that shoots and steals his way out of problems?? Wouldn’t this indicate some psychopathic tendencies? Do parents actually buy this game for kids?)
  • The killing and stealing bothers this writer not at all, just the curse words. And, there is this comment, barely literate and disturbing: “dis game is tight the graphocs rock one thing i enjoy is that you get to kill people and take peoples nice cars and in one mission u can buy a big plane like ones at the airports”.
Dillon Patel

Solar Cycles Cause Global Warming & Cooling, not Humans - 0 views

www.lunarplanner.com/SolarCycles-climate.html

humans are not cause of global warming

shared by Dillon Patel on 14 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Planetary warming has also been observed on Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and on Neptune's largest moon Triton during the decades following the peak of the "Solar Grand Maximum" - wonder why - there are no humans there!
  • And Pluto is moving further from the sun in its orbit,
  • it should be cooling, but instead it is warming.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • due to solar changes rather than mere human antics.
  • t Earth's oceans are now beginning to cool.
  • The Earth heats up after a Solar Grand Maximum, lagging a bit after the peak. With a Solar Grand Minimum now on its way, a "global cooling" is on the horizon--a natural oscillation occurring in much longer solar cycles.
  • continue to ignore all of this, perpetuating fear and advocating spending billions of dollars on non-solutions.
  • humans contribute to greenhouse gases,
  • the overall effect is a tiny fraction compared to natural causes.
  • Dillon Patel on 14 Nov 10
     
    Humans ARE NOT the cause of Global Warming. Against my argument.
Yasmin Tandon

Foreign Aid for Development Assistance - Global Issues - 0 views

www.globalissues.org/...ign-aid-development-assistance

Foreign Aid America economy

shared by Yasmin Tandon on 11 Nov 10 - Cached
  • both the quantity and quality of aid have been poor and donor nations have not been held to account.
  • 1970,
  • world’s rich countries agreed to give 0.7% of their gross national income as official international development aid, annually
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Furthermore, aid has often come with a price of its own for the developing nations:Aid is often wasted on conditions that the recipient must use overpriced goods and services from donor countriesMost aid does not actually go to the poorest who would need it the mostAid amounts are dwarfed by rich country protectionism that denies market access for poor country products, while rich nations use aid as a lever to open poor country markets to their productsLarge projects or massive grand strategies often fail to help the vulnerable; money can often be embezzled away.
  • This web page has the following sub-sections:
  • “Trade, not aid”
  • excuse for rich countries to cut back aid that has been agreed and promised at the United Nations.
  • This target was codified in a United Nations General Assembly Resolution, and a key paragraph says:
  • The donor governments promised to spend 0.7% of GNP on ODA (Official Development Assistance) at the UN General Assembly in 1970—some 40 years ago
  • developed countries will rapidly and progressively take what measures they can … to reduce the extent of tying of assistance and to mitigate any harmful effects
  • make loans tied
  • Developed countries will provide, to the greatest extent possible, an increased flow of aid on a long-term and continuing basis.
  • almost all rich nations have constantly failed to reach their agreed obligations of the 0.7% target. Instead of 0.7%, the amount of aid has been around 0.2 to 0.4%, some $100 billion short.
  • the quality of the aid has been poor.
  • USA’s aid, in terms of percentage of their GNP has almost always been lower than any other industrialized nation in the world, though paradoxically since 2000, their dollar amount has been the highest.Between 1992 and 2000, Japan had been the largest donor of aid, in terms of raw dollars. From 2001 the United States claimed that position, a year that also saw Japan’s amount of aid drop by nearly 4 billion dollars.
  • Aid beginning to increase but still way below obligations
  • In 2009, the OCED and many others feared official aid would decline due to the global financial crisis. They urged donor nations to make aid “countercyclical”; not to reduce it when it is needed most, but those who didn’t cause the crisis.
  • And indeed, for 2009, aid did increase as official stats from the OECD shows. It rose 0.7% from just under $123 bn in 2008 to just over $123 bn in 2009 (at constant 2008 prices).
Aneesh Mysore

Video game controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Video_game_controversy

video game controversy

shared by Aneesh Mysore on 15 Nov 10 - Cached
  • There are three types of aggression, measured along a mild-to-violent severity continuum: physical, verbal, and relational. Violence refers to physical aggression of which the victim is likely to suffer serious physical injury.
  • One study did find an increase in reports of bullying, noting, "Our research found that certain patterns of video game play were much more likely to be associated with these types of behavioral problems than with major violent crime such as school shooting
  • On April 20, 1999, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher in the Columbine High School massacre. The two were allegedly obsessed with the video game Doom.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • a 19-year-old Thai teenager, stabbed a Bangkok taxi driver to death during an attempt to steal the driver's cab in order to obtain money to buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV.
Ben Walters

Were video games to blame for massacre? - Technology & science - Games - msnbc.com - 0 views

www.msnbc.msn.com/18220228

Entertainment Brain Games Society Psychology Violence Aggression Jack Thompson

shared by Ben Walters on 14 Nov 10 - Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • 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,
    • Ben Walters
      Ben Walters on 14 Nov 10
       
      'common sense tells me'
  • 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. 
  • Microsoft did not create "Counter Strike" but did publish a version of it for the Xbox.
  • 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."
    • Ben Walters
      Ben Walters on 14 Nov 10
       
      See how bad his research is, the only possibility of him ever playing a game was on his computer, yet he blames Microsoft, who created a game for the Xbox (which would be incompatible for a PC) for directly and massively influencing these events.
    • Ben Walters
      Ben Walters on 14 Nov 10
       
      Counter Strike, the game he blamed for these killings, has two objectives. Protect an objective from a bomb that the team of terrorists are going to try to plant, or to plant this bomb. Neither of these objectives have to include murder, or solo missions.
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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."
  • "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."
  • 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."
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