The team found that it is not just hardcore “shooter” games that get pirated on BitTorrent. They also recorded piracy of games across the board, from children’s and family games all the way to the major commercial titles. Furthermore, their results indicate that the actual number of illicit digital copies of computer games accessed on BitTorrent is not as high as those mentioned in reports from industry trade organizations, for instance.

During the period of monitoring BitTorrent, the research team found that about 12.6 million unique peers from over 250 countries/areas were sharing illicit copies of games, which included Fallout: New Vegas, Darksiders, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, NBA 2k11, TRON Evolution, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Starcraft 2, Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2, Two Worlds II, The Sims 3: Late Night. This represents a wide range of games vendors and games types encompassing simulations, sports and strategy as well as action games. They report that of the 173 digital games in the sample, the ten most popular games titles during the period analyzed drove more than 4 out of every 10 unique peers on BitTorrent and a mere 20 of the countries monitored were contributing to more than three-quarters of the total file-sharing activity.

For the most popular games, they add, there was an average of 536,727 unique peers sharing via Bit Torrent, and the geographical distribution of the unique peers paint a very diverse picture of where people who access illegally copied games on BitTorrent are positioned. For example, a number of countries stand out as having very large numbers of unique peers represented in the dataset, including Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, Greece, Poland, Italy, Armenia and Serbia. Portugal, Israel and Qatar also have more than 1% peers per Internet user. The results also point out that games receiving high critical acclaim tend to have higher numbers of unique peers than those which receive negative critique in media reviews.

While the games investigated covered all major hardware platforms, console games are much tougher to pirate than desktop computer games for the simple reason that one needs to modify the hardware of the console to use them. In contrast, to use an illicit copy of a PC game, one must commonly only modify the computer code itself. A recent turn towards cloud-based gaming could reduce the chances of games being copied illicitly still further but adoption relies on access to reliable broadband internet for gamers. Of course, better broadband also potentially means more efficient sharing of illegal copies of digital games.

Abstract of the research:

The distribution of illegal copies of computer games via digital networks forms the centre in one of the most heated debates in the international games environment, but there is minimal objective information available. Here the results of a large-scale, open-method analysis of the distribution of computer games via BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol is presented. 173 games were included, tracked over a period of three months from 2010 to 2011. A total of 12.6 million unique peers were identified across over 200 countries. Analysis indicates that the distribution of illegal copies of games follows distinct pattern, e.g., that a few game titles drive the traffic – the 10 most accessed games encompassed 42.7% of the number of peers tracked. The traffic is geographically localised – 20 countries encompassed 76.7% of the total. Geographic patterns in the distribution of BitTorrent peers are presented, as well as time-frequency distributions of torrents, and additional results.

Let’s examine this quote in a this interview with the Huftington Post:

“I can fix the examination system in one sentence. You should be allowed to bring in an iPad,” he said.

“People are adamant learning is not just looking at a Google page. But it is. Learningis looking at Google pages. What is wrong with that?”

“Teachers say to me, the internet is full of rubbish, wrong answers. But you would be surprised how just long it takes to find wrong information on Google, and where it’s not obvious that it’s wrong.”

A few words for the professor:

• Don Hirsch has a great piece on the idea that you can always just look stuff up.
  
• Ever heard about the filter bubble?
• Ever thought of bringing in some nuances about your projects in broad public that are  present in the scientific discussion?
• Maybe it’s a good, or even better a great idea, to examine what Daniel Willingham wrote already in 2009 on what we know from cognitive science about the flawed assumptions of the 21st century skills movement.

And no, please don’t answer this post by saying that I’m against the good work you do in India, I’m much in favor, but I do like to have some important nuances to the story.

Also I’m much in favor of using technology in education, but I do think we won’t help the implementation this way.

What are the main findings:

• When selecting a target, most burglars said they considered the close proximity of other people — including traffic, people in the house or business, and police officers; the lack of escape routes; and signs of increased security — including alarm signs, alarms, dogs inside, and outdoor cameras or other surveillance equipment.
• Approximately 83 percent said they would try to determine if an alarm was present before attempting a burglary, and 60 percent said they would seek an alternative target if there was an alarm on-site. This was particularly true among the subset of burglars who were more likely to spend time deliberately and carefully planning a burglary.
  (Do read the end of this blogpost!)
• Among those who discovered the presence of an alarm while attempting a burglary, half reported they would discontinue the attempt, while another 31 percent said they would sometimes retreat. Only 13 percent said they would always continue with the burglary attempt. (again, do read the end of this blogpost!)
• Respondents indicated their top reasons for committing burglaries was related to the need to acquire drugs (51 percent) or money (37 percent), which was often used to support drug habits. Only one burglar indicated interest in stealing firearms, which is a common misperception.
• About half reported burglarizing homes primarily, while 31 percent typically committed commercial burglaries.
• Most burglars reported entering open windows or doors or forcing windows or doors open. About one in eight burglars reported picking locks or using a key that they had previously acquired to gain entry.
• About 12 percent indicated that they typically planned the burglary in advance, 41 percent suggested it was most often a “spur of the moment” event, and the other 37 percent reported that it varied.

One bit of fair warning: the research was funded by  the Alarm Industry Research and Educational Foundation (AIREF), under the auspices of the Electronic Security Association (ESA), the largest trade association for the electronic life safety and security industry. (source)

“Reich is not a technophobe. But he says he’s deeply concerned about how online learning will change society. He says the pay-for-play model that online learning represents could change the nature of American policy.

Public education exists in part to educate young citizens, he noted. Online learning “positions them as consumers, and hopes that market will efficiently distribute these resources,” Reich said.

He warns that this is a fundamental shift in education. Schools of almost every stripe have been places where students shared experiences, and developed and deviated from social norms. In such a system, he argues, children are involved in collaboratively authoring their learning experiences.”

We present evidence from an ongoing field experiment in college coaching/ mentoring. The experiment is designed to ask whether mentoring plus cash incentives provided to high school students late in their senior year have meaningful impacts on college going and persistence. For women, we find large impacts on the decision to enroll in college and to remain in college. Intention to treat estimates are an increase in 15 percentage points in the college going rate (against a base rate of 50 percent) while treatment on the treated estimates are 30 percentage points. Offering cash bonuses alone without mentoring has no effect. There are no effects for men in the sample. The absence of effects for men is not explained by an interaction of the program with academic ability, work habits, or family and guidance support for college applications. However, differential returns to college and/or occupational choice may explain some of the differences in treatment effects for men and women.

From the press release:

“Graphs with pictures may be more visually appealing and engaging to children than those without pictures. However, engagement in the task does not guarantee that children are focusing their attention on the information and procedures they need to learn. Instead, they may be focusing on superficial features,” said Jennifer Kaminski

The problem of distracting visuals is not just an academic issue. In the study, the authors cite real-life examples of colorful, engaging – and possibly confusing – bar graphs in educational materials aimed at children, as well as in the popular media.

And when the authors asked 16 kindergarten and elementary school teachers whether they would use the visually appealing graphs featured in this study, all of them said they would. Intuitively, most of these teachers felt that the graphs with the pictures would be more effective for instruction than the graphs without, according to the researchers.

The findings apply beyond learning graphs and mathematics, the authors said.

“When designing instructional material, we need to consider children’s developing ability to focus their attention and make sure that the material helps them focus on the right things,” Kaminski said.

“Any unnecessary visual information may distract children from the very procedures we want them to learn.”

The main study involved 122 students in kindergarten, first and second grade. All were tested individually.

The experiment began with a training phase where a researcher showed each child a graph on a computer screen and taught him or her how to read it. The children were then tested on three graphs to see if they could accurately interpret them.

The graphs in the training phase involved how many shoes were in a lost and found for each of five weeks. Half the students were presented with graphs in which the bars were a solid color. The other students were shown graphs in which the bars contained pictures of shoes. The number of shoes in the bars was equal to the corresponding y-value on the graph. In other words, if there were five shoes in the lost and found, there were five shoes pictured in the bar.

After the training phase, the children were tested on new graphs in which the bars were either solid-colored or contained pictures of objects such as flowers. However, the number of objects pictured did not equal the correct y-value for the bar. In other words, the bar value could equal 14 flowers, but only seven flowers were pictured.

“This allowed us to clearly identify which students learned the correct way to read a bar graph from those who simply counted the number of objects in each bar,” Sloutsky said.

Sure enough, children who trained with the pictures on the graph were more likely than others to get the answers wrong by simply counting the objects in each bar.

All of the first- and second-graders and 75 percent of the kindergarten children who learned on the solid-bar graphs appropriately read the new graphs.

However, those who learned with the more visually appealing shoe graphs did not do nearly as well. In this case, 90 percent of kindergarteners and 72 percent of first-graders responded by counting the number of flowers pictured. Second-graders did better, but still about 30 percent responded by counting.

All the children were then tested again with graphs that featured patterned bars, with either stripes or polka dots within each bar.

Again, those who learned from the more visually appealing graphs did worse at interpreting these patterned graphs.

“To our surprise, some children tried to count all the tiny polka dots or stripes in the bars. They clearly didn’t learn the correct way to read the graphs,” Kaminski said.

The researchers conducted several other related experiments to confirm the results and make sure there weren’t other explanations for the findings. In one experiment, some children were trained on graphs with pictures of objects. But in this case, the number of objects pictured was not even close to the correct value of the bar, so the students could not use counting as a strategy.

Still, these children did not do as well on subsequent tests as did those who learned on the graphs with single-colored bars.

“When teaching children new math concepts, keeping material simple is very important,” Sloutsky said.

“Any extraneous information we provide, even with the best of intentions, to make the lesson more interesting may actually hurt learning because it may be misinterpreted,” he said.

The researchers said these results don’t mean that textbook authors or others can never use interesting visuals or other techniques to capture the interest of students.

“But they need to study how such material will affect students’ attention. You can’t assume that it is beneficial just because it is colorful; in can affect learning by distracting attention from what is relevant,” Sloutsky said.

Abstract of the research:

Educational material often includes engaging perceptual information. However, this perceptual information is often extraneous and may compete with the deeper to-be-learned structure, consequently hindering either the learning of relevant structure or its transfer to new situations. This hypothesis was tested in 4 experiments in which 6- to 8-year-old children learned to read simple bar graphs. In some conditions, the bars were monochromatic (i.e., No Extraneous Information), whereas in other conditions, the bars consisted of columns of discrete countable objects (i.e., Extraneous Information). Results demonstrated that the presence of extraneous information substantially attenuated learning; participants tended to count the objects and failed to acquire the appropriate strategy. The interference effects decreased with age. These findings present evidence of how extraneous information affects learning of new mathematical knowledge. Broader implications of these findings for understanding the development of the ability to filter task-irrelevant information and for educational practice are also discussed.

Reblogged from GigaOM:

“Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is the fourth most common mental disorder. Such a high prevalence inherently means that several unsuspected individuals might be affected, plausibly including several scientists who might more or less unconsciously express obsessive-compulsory (OC) activities in their routine activity.”

But when they describe how OCD can be translated, in being a workaholic, than suddenly there is a big chance that it gets too close to home for some people:

“Basically, a workaholic is a person “who gradually becomes emotionally crippled and addicted to control and power in a compulsive drive to gain approval and success”, and work-addiction is a well-recognized and important cause of high rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, divorce and suicide in the medical profession,…”

But how do I recognize this kind of disorder:

“Most likely, there is not a direct association with age, since OCD can develop early in the scientific career, although it may expand incrementally later in life, evidenced by the gradual increase in accumulated pages of the curriculum vitae. Both genders may both be affected, although males might tend to be more evidently affected, particularly if they have less involvement in other daily routines, such as raising children or performing housework. The ideal candidate to this OC syndrome has probably published more than 100 papers in scientific journals over the last 2-year period (i.e., nearly one every week or so), does not remember the birthday of his/her relatives and children, but remembers perfectly the number of his/her papers on PubMed, and his/her overall H-index, which is constantly (almost daily) updated. This person does not remember the number of his/her mobile phone, but knows exactly the impact factor of more than 1000 scientific journals.”

Feeling relieved or is it time to look for help?

You can read the whole paper here.