“Exposure To Fast Food Influences Our Everyday Psychology And Behavior (Medical News Today)” plus 2 more |
- Exposure To Fast Food Influences Our Everyday Psychology And Behavior (Medical News Today)
- In the Neighborhood: The psychology of deciphering comments (Greeley Tribune)
- Innovation: Gaze trackers eye computer gamers (New Scientist)
| Exposure To Fast Food Influences Our Everyday Psychology And Behavior (Medical News Today) Posted: 26 Mar 2010 08:10 AM PDT [fivefilters.org: unable to retrieve full-text content] Fast food is not only bad for your body, but may also harm your bank account. Eating habits have shifted dramatically over the last few decades - fast food has become a multibillion dollar industry that has widespread influence on what and how we eat. The original idea behind fast food is to increase efficiency, allowing people to quickly finish a meal so they can move on to other matters... |
| In the Neighborhood: The psychology of deciphering comments (Greeley Tribune) Posted: 26 Mar 2010 12:08 AM PDT
The Internet gives us the ability to receive instant gratification by expressing our feelings on an endless variety of subjects. It is so easy that most media sources with Web access have a following of regular "commenters." Some commenters follow protocol and merely express their view in a polite manner. Others take the opportunity to self-promote their self-founded "truths" and personal beliefs on everything. After reading comments for some time, I wonder how close their screen name and comments are to the reality of the person. The phenomenon is not isolated to The Tribune. We have all read comments from those who take every opportunity to be critical of Greeley, District 6, local law enforcement, etc. However, 9News and every other easy access media have a similar following of "commenters." One does not need to read regularly to see that 9News hosts an "Aurora hater" and another who begrudges residents of Highlands Ranch. All of these "easy access media sources" allow us to blatantly express and promote our political views. Some extend this opportunity of expression by forwarding an unlimited amount of spam promoting their ideology to all acquaintances. The freedom of the Internet allows this. As I read some comments, I wonder who these people are and what makes them "tick." Could a psychologist render a description of the person from their comments? Some commenters seem to associate religion or politics with all subjects. Then some offer blessings regularly while others decry the stupidity of others. There are those who serve as "red pencil grammar specialists" to correct the efforts of others. Do these "commenters" represent a true cross-section of society or is the group weighted with retired or unemployed people with spare time? Are these individuals equally expressive in their day-to-day lives? As I write, there is probably someone using grant funding to study this subject. After all, such a societal study could be defended for use by media, terrorist control and political campaigns. Perhaps someone is already studying the words of "Army-man," "Scholar," "Dirt-girl," "No-bama," "Border-BanMan" and many thousands of others. I would be interested in reading the final report. Please comment. Helen La Bounty of Greeley is a retired health care finance professional. She has a master's degree in accounting and is a licensed substitute teacher. She is interested in geology, rockhounding, senior savings and advocacy, activities, travel and grandparenting.
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| Innovation: Gaze trackers eye computer gamers (New Scientist) Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:24 AM PDT Innovation is our regular column that highlights emerging technological ideas and where they may lead Gamers in search of a more thrilling experience look set to get it thanks to interfaces that let them use what are probably the body's fastest and most fatigue-resistant muscles: the ones that move our eyes. Gaze-tracking technology has been honed over the years for psychology experiments Eye spyThe trackers uses a small camera to track the movement of the pupil of one eye. Typically the user first calibrates the system by focussing on a series of onscreen targets, after which they can use a glance to control cursor movement. The potential speed gains over having to find a target and then move a mouse to it are obvious. "With eye tracking, once you've discovered the target you are already aiming at it," says John Paulin Hansen at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He recently vindicated this bit of common sense by giving a number of people either a mouse, a touchscreen, a joystick or a gaze interface to use and then racing them against each other to find and select a small target. Those using a gaze tracker simply had to frown to select the target once they were looking at it, thanks to a headband that monitored muscle activity. Target selection time using gaze took, on average, 350 milliseconds – over 50 milliseconds faster than the nearest competitor, the mouse. Other systems have used blinking to trigger a click, something that can be detected by the eye-tracking camera without the user having to don special headgear. Blink to shootPerhaps ideally, gaze would augment existing interfaces. But games can also be controlled by eye alone. Howell Istance at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, and colleagues are trialling a gaze-controlled version This week the team reported that trials with 12 experienced WoW players showed that experienced gamers can quickly adapt to an eyes-only control scheme. Hidden in plain sightPast research has shown that an eye tracker can also allow games to respond to a player more intelligently, or even deviously. A shoot-'em-up game developed at the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, changes the places where enemies appear in response to where a player is looking: players have an easy time when new enemies pop up near their focus of attention, but struggle when they are spawned far from where they are looking. Given the evidence of eye-controlled gaming's potential, it's not surprising that the gaze-tracking systems company Tobii, based in Stockholm, Sweden, would like to develop its technology into a new, gamer-centric direction. "We do a lot of research and development projects, and gaming is an obvious field to explore," says a Tobii spokesperson. The technology is still relatively expensive, though, so the company would need a partner from the games industry to bring the idea to market, she says. "The most likely first step would be some eye controller in arcade games rather than home computers." Journal references: PsychNology Journal, vol 7, p 213; ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, vol 4, issue 3; the DeMontford team reported their WoW trials at the Eye Tracking Research and Applications conference in Austin, Texas, this week Read previous Innovation columns: Market research wants to open your skull If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
and to help disabled people. Now it' s proving capable of providing faster interaction than conventional games controllers, touchscreens or mice – and can lead to trickier gaming challenges to boot. At least one leading manufacturer of eye-tracking systems says it's likely that the technology will be a part of the computer gaming future.| You are subscribed to email updates from Yahoo! News Search Results for Psychology To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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