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A pair of Harvard researchers are saying what everybody who’s grown up with a controller in their hand already knows, violent video games don’t turn children into killers. According to a newly published book, ‘Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do’, psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson dispel common myths about violent games. In their two-year study, they found that there was no data to support any causation between games and real-life violence.

Kutner and Olson studied 1200 middle-school children in a $1.5 million federally funded study. Instead of studying the children in the laboratory, like other studies, the pair actually sat down and talked to kids after long bouts of game playing – sometimes in excess of 15 hours a week. The lucky kids played a variety of games from the very non-violent The Sims to grandma shooting, pedestrian bashing Grand Theft Auto.

They discovered that children who played violent video games – those rated Mature or above – were just relieving stress. Some children did exhibit some playful fighting after playing games, but this was similar to what children have always done after watching action or Karate-type movies.

51% of male children who played 15 hours or more of violent games per week were involved in fights in the past year compared to 28% who played regular video games. For girls, 40% of the violent game players were in fights compared to 14% of the non-violent players. Despite the figures, Kutner and Olson say this is just a correlation and that the fighting was probably due to an underlying psychological problem that children had before playing the video game.

Perhaps the most startling finding (at least for people the likes of Jack Thompson) is that boys that don’t play any video games at all are now considered to be socially inept. A danger sign for boys is “not playing video games at all, because it looks like for this generation, video games are a measure of social competence,” says Kutner and Olsen.

I wonder if Kutner and Olsen will now do a follow-up study to find out if the children who play GTA4 will have increased carjacking skills?

You can get the book online from Amazon for about $16.

Worldometers is managed by an international team of developers, researchers, and volunteers with the goal of making world statistics available in a thought-provoking and time relevant format to a wide audience around the world.

It’s pretty interesting to see information on the number of books sold, cars sold, computers sold, water used versus people without viable drinking water, etc.Here’s a screenshot of a small portion of the stats they show (note that when you view it on the website below the statistics are being update in real-time.:

http://www.worldometers.info/

he European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) is working on a new super fast Internet infrastructure called Grid. CERN, the particle physics center based in Geneva that created the web, has built “the grid,” a replacement for the Internet is expected to be 10,000 times faster than the regular broadband speed.

The UK’s Times Online has published a story on how a new “grid” computing project, designed to capture data from CERN’s (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) new Large Hadron Collider or LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator due to be switched on in the European summer – or in other words, soon. The Times Online article quotes David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a ‘leading figure in the grid project’, as saying that the grid technology being used to capture data from the LHC project “could revolutionise society”, saying specifically that: “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine”.

It took almost 15 years and $8 billion to construct for CERN. The LHC is located in a 27-km circular tunnel 100 meters below ground level outside Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border. It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria by analyzing 140m compounds, an undertaking that would have taken 420 years on a standard internet-linked PC.

Given the fact that most countries are still struggling with ADSL2+, fibre rollouts, WiMAX networks and 3.5G HSPA upgrades to existing 2G and 3G networks, CERN’s superfast broadband grid project is certainly making plenty of waves on the international technology news circuit.

But the reality is that consumers will have to likely wait years before the technology is sufficiently advanced – and affordable enough – to be made available for consumers. Still… the prospect sounds cool, and more speed is always better!

People have been trying to link video games to violence for years.It was Doom that made those crazy kids at Columbine do it. It was CounterStrike that made the wackjob at Virginia Tech go nuts. Bullshit. Unstable people are unstable people. Stephen King says it very well in an Entertainment Weekly article:

What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture — not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter — as a whipping boy. It’s easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud. Also, it allows legislators to ignore the elephants in the living room. Elephant One is the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in this country, a situation guys like Fiddy and Snoop have been indirectly rapping about for years. Elephant Two is America’s almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. Cho used it in a rampage that resulted in the murder of 32 people. If he’d been stuck with nothing but a plastic videogame gun, he wouldn’t even have been able to kill himself.

Case closed

Anywho… here’s a chart showing violent crimes rates along with release dates for major “violent” video games.

The chart is intended to refute that video games do NOT equal violence. Not that video games are what’s removing violence.

The steady stream of good news about green tea is getting so hard to ignore that even java junkies are beginning to sip mugs of the deceptively delicate brew. You’d think the daily dose of disease-fighting, inflammation-squelching antioxidants–long linked with heart protection–would be enough incentive, but wait, there’s more! Lots more.

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