Video Game Violence

How are you to objectively measure the effect of video games on level of violence?

Here are some articles about a study that tries to create an objective measure.

Techdirt: does-being-more-vocal-video-game-violence-debate-mean-you-have-better-argument.shtml
eurekalert: Press Release

So the way the "study" creates this objective measure is by weighing the number of publications produced by both sides of an argument. I wonder if they have ever heard of the field called publication bias.

Here is another study that finds a link between video games and mental health issues
Slashdot Article

Impact Factors for Bioinformatics

Publish or be damned, or in this case publish and be damned.

NAR 7.9
Bioinformatics 4.9
BMC Bioinformatics 3.4
PloS One 4.3
Briefings in Bioinformatics 7.3
BMC Genomics 3.8
Proteins, Structure Function and Bioinformatics 3.4

What are the chances?

Here are another pair of news stories from the 27th of February 2011. Both made the front page of the BBC website that day and both were about fatalities of people who had come from Tadcaster Yorkshire

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-12592527
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12591428

So coincidences happen ridiculously often, you always need to think about the data.

Getting the most out of Google - part 1

Basic Searching

1. Phrases in quotation marks.
2. Default Boolean is AND.
3. Use OR explicitly.
4. Negate using the minus sign (should not contain). Minus must not be separated by a space.
5. Use a + to make an explicit inclusion of a short word ignored by Google e.g. +the.
6. Also search with synonyms by using the ~ character.
7. Number ranges are separated by .. e.g. 5..10. If the second number is missing it will be a maximum or minimum.
8. There are no stemming wildcards - so * only is a wildcard for a complete word.

Special Syntax

These allow you to focus your search onto certain elements of the web.

1. intitle: limits the search to the titles of webpages.
2. inanchor: searches only in hyperlinks
3. intext: searches only in the page text - not anchors, URLs.
4. insite: restrict the search to a particular domain.
5. inurl: limits the search to a particular page.
6. link: searches for pages that link to that URL.
7. cache: searches the cache - this is useful if the page has moved/been deleted.
8. filetype: searches for suffixes of that filetype e.g. ppt.
9. related: finds related pages.
10. define: finds related definitions.

To find more detail, there is the O'Reilly book - Google Hacks The problem is parts of it are badly outdated so it is perhaps best from a library rather than to buy.

The Joy of Stats and the Visigasm

If you have never seen one of Hans Rosling's talks or videos then you need to. He is an example of how you can make the presentation of data both interesting and also clear and simple. Along with Edward Tufte he has made data visualisation an art form. The BBC have recently made a documentary about him and there is also a  Wired article about the Data Visgasm.

Peer Review Again: NASA arsenic based life and the bloggers

A critique of the Science paper by NASA investigators saying that they have discovered a new form of life that does not use phosphorous in the DNA nucleotides has been published on a Blog by a researcher in the field. The response from NASA is to put their fingers in their ears and to say they are not listening because it is not criticism from a peer reviewed journal. This is exactly the same as the authors of "The Spirit Level" who also refused to respond to criticism that was not in peer reviewed journals.

Here is a wired article discussing the NASA response and comparing it to the arguments made by the Church in pre-enlightenment times. I especially like the title - The Wrong Stuff.

The Guardian has an interesting story tracker following events

Conspiracy and Coincidence

How common is the surname Aylward?

It does not seem too common to me. I cannot remember meeting anyone who has the surname but that might reflect regional variations in surnames. My own surname is not very common outside of its ancestral home in Leicestershire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

So what are the chances of the surname being involved in two major news events on the same day?

Two BBC news headlines for the 25th of October involved Aylwards.

Violetta Aylward was a nurse who accidentally switched off the life support systems of a tetraplegic man in her care leaving him with brain damage.
Rebecca Aylward was found murdered in woodland after she had been attacked by two teenage boys.

What are the chances of that happening? It did happen and there is obviously no connection but chance patterns arise all around us, and it is difficult to escape trying to read too much into them.