Radiological Society of North America - Violent video games alter brain function in young men

30-Nov-2011
Radiological Society of North America

CHICAGO – A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis of long-term effects of violent video game play on the brain has found changes in brain regions associated with cognitive function and emotional control in young adult men after one week of game play. The results of the study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

The controversy over whether or not violent video games are potentially harmful to users has raged for many years, making it as far as the Supreme Court in 2010. But there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative neurological effect.

"For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home," said Yang Wang, M.D., assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. "These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior."

For the study, 22 healthy adult males, age 18 to 29, with low past exposure to violent video games were randomly assigned to two groups of 11. Members of the first group were instructed to play a shooting video game for 10 hours at home for one week and refrain from playing the following week. The second group did not play a violent video game at all during the two-week period.

Each of the 22 men underwent fMRI at the beginning of the study, with follow-up exams at one and two weeks. During fMRI, the participants completed an emotional interference task, pressing buttons according to the color of visually presented words. Words indicating violent actions were interspersed among nonviolent action words. In addition, the participants completed a cognitive inhibition counting task.

The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting task, compared to their baseline results and the results of the control group after one week. After the second week without game play, the changes to the executive regions of the brain were diminished.

"These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning," Dr. Wang said.

Amnesty International - United States Must Halt Life Without Parole Sentences for Children, says Amnesty International

Human Rights Organization Details Stories of Three Young Offenders From Louisiana, Illinois and North Carolina, in New Juvenile Justice Report

Louisiana Case to be Featured in Amnesty International’s Global Write-a-Thon

WASHINGTON - November 30 - Authorities in the United States must ban the imposition of life without parole sentences against children and review the cases of more than 2,500 prisoners currently serving such sentences to bring the sentences into line with international law, Amnesty International said today in a new report.

"In the United States, people under 18 cannot vote, buy alcohol or lottery tickets or consent to most forms of medical treatment, but they can be sentenced to die in prison for their actions. This needs to change,” said Natacha Mension, U. S. campaigner at Amnesty International (AI).

Children as young as 11 at the time of the crime have faced life imprisonment without parole in the United States – the only country in the world to impose this sentence on children.

Amnesty International’s 34-page report 'This is where I’m going to be when I die': Children facing life imprisonment without the possibility of release in the United States,illustrates the issue through the stories of Christi Cheramie, Jacqueline Montanez and David Young.

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Rania Khalek - The Shocking Ways the Corporate Prison Industry Games the System

By Rania Khalek, AlterNet

Posted on November 29, 2011, Printed on November 30, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153212/the_shocking_ways_the_corporate_prison_industry_games_the_system

The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners, and for the last 30 years America’s business entrepreneurs have found a lucrative way to cash in on the incarceration surplus: private for-profit prisons.

While the implications of an industry that locks human beings in cages for profit is an old story, there is an important part of the history of private prisons that often goes untold.   

Just a decade ago, private prisons were a dying industry awash in corruption and mired in lawsuits, particularly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest private prison operator.  Today, these companies are booming once again, yet the lawsuits and scandals continue to pile up.  Meanwhile, more and more evidence shows that compared to publicly run prisons, private jails are filthier, more violent, less accountable, and contrary to what privatization advocates peddle as truth, do not save money.  In fact, more recent findings suggest that private prisons could be more costly. 

So why are they still in business?

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Danny Schechter - WILL SHOPPING SAVE US?

By Danny Schechter 

Today’s the day. It’s “Black Friday” (“black” as in the day our business supposedly go into the black.) This may not have been such a wise use of language since the Wall Street crash of l929, ushering in the Great Depression, started on a “Black Thursday.” 

Throughout America, an advertising-dominated media is plugging all the “bargains” while shoppers, hungry to save a few bucks, in a country where more than half of our families are barely making it, are off to the malls in an annual ritual that each year barely saves the retail outlets but adds costly bills to already squeezed and debt dependent consumers. 

The easy availability of credit has created what Robert Manning calls our Credit Card Nation, where we are encouraged to shop until we drop. In the aftermath of the terror attacks of September l1, 2001, recall that President Bush made that point shamelessly when he told the American people that the best way to help in that traumatic period was to go shopping again. 

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Eric Boehlert - 7 Things Fox Viewers Are Wildly Misinformed About

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America

Posted on November 25, 2011, Printed on November 26, 2011
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201111220020?frontpage 

The release this week of yet another survey indicating the more you watch Fox News the less they know, has once again shone a spotlight on one of the unique features that defines Rupert Murdoch's cable news outlet - it is very, very good at misinforming people. And it's very bad at reporting the news. In other words: Propaganda? Yes. News? Not so much.

It's true that the most recent survey, conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University, only polled adults in New Jersey and doesn't represent national indictment against Fox. Nonetheless, the findings created amedia stir because they reinforce what pollsters and academics previously discovered; that one of the country's all-news channels consistently leaves viewers less informed. 

What's stunning is how many different areas of the news and public policy Fox viewers are misinformed about. For instance, the Fairleigh Dickinson survey asked viewers about recent grassroots uprisings in Arab nations [emphasis added]: 

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Bruce Weber - Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73

November 24, 2011

By BRUCE WEBER

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

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Robert Scheer - Thanks for What?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thanks_for_what_20111124/

Posted on Nov 24, 2011

By Robert Scheer

I love Thanksgiving for its illusion of abundance. It brings back early childhood memories of the one day each year during the Depression when the food on my family’s table was not the leftover produce that my Uncle Leon could no longer sell at his stall, or the nearly spoiled organ meats that our local butcher offered at a steep discount. 

But Thanksgiving day was quite the opposite, and while I obviously can’t recall what was served in 1936, the year I was born, the holiday was soon seared into my childhood memory as the day when the good times looked upon us in the form of charity gift baskets from philanthropists of various religious and political orders, much like the needy will be served today in volunteer kitchens across America and just as soon will be forgotten.

It did not take long before I was old enough to realize that the largesse of Thanksgiving was the rare exception, and that “just getting by,” as my mother’s brave optimism would have it, was the norm. Getting by, thanks to Mom’s piecework in the downtown sweatshops and my mechanic father’s signing on to one of the New Deal’s public jobs programs.

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Los Alamos National Laboratory - Is sustainability science really a science?

Los Alamos National Laboratory, 

http://www.lanl.gov/news/releases/is_sustainability_science_really_a_science.html

Los Alamos and Indiana University researchers say yes

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, November 22, 2011—The idea that one can create a field of science out of thin air, just because of societal and policy need, is a bold concept.  But for the emerging field of sustainability science, sorting among theoretical and applied scientific disciplines, making sense of potentially divergent theory, practice and policy, the gamble has paid off.

In the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Santa Fe Institute, and Indiana University analyzed the field’s temporal evolution, geographic distribution, disciplinary composition, and collaboration structure.

"We don’t know if sustainability science will solve the essential problems it seeks to address, but there is a legitimate scientific practice in place now," said Luís Bettencourt of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Santa Fe Institute, first author on the paper, "Evolution and structure of sustainability science.

The team’s work shows that although sustainability science has been growing explosively since the late 1980s, only in the last decade has the field matured into a cohesive area of science. Thanks to the emergence of a giant component of scientific collaboration spanning the globe and an array of diverse traditional disciplines, there is now an integrated scientific field of sustainability science as an unusual, inclusive, and ubiquitous scientific practice.

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David Holthouse - How White Supremacists Are Trying to Make an American Town a Model for Right-Wing Extremism

By David Holthouse, Media Matters for America

Posted on November 22, 2011, Printed on November 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153162/how_white_supremacists_are_trying_to_make_an_american_town_a_model_for_right-wing_extremism

At first glance the Pioneer Little Europe website seems like it could be the work of the Montana Office of Tourism. Photographs depict the rugged beauty of the Flathead Valley region near Glacier National Park in northwest Montana.

One image shows a young blond-haired girl playing in a meadow overlooking Kalispell, the largest town in the area, with a population around 20,000.

The site also features short news items about the Northwest Montana State Fair and a wildflower beautification program along with Kalispell job postings.

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Henry Giroux - Occupy Colleges Now -- Students as the New Public Intellectuals

Monday 21 November 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-colleges-now-students-new-public-intellectuals/1321891418

The police violence that has taken place at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis does more than border on pure thuggery; it also reveals a display of force that is as unnecessary as it is brutal, and it is impossible to justify. These young people are being beaten on their campuses for simply displaying the courage to protest a system that has robbed them of both a quality education and a viable future.

Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good.  

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Miller-McCune Media - Study: Ethical People More Satisfied With Life

University of Missouri economist Harvey James finds a relationship between life satisfaction and low tolerance for unethical conduct.

Miller-McCune Media, November 19, 2011

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/study-ethical-people-more-satisfied-with-life-36792/?utm_source=Newsletter188&utm_medium=email&utm_content=1122&utm_campaign=newsletters

“The just man is happy, and the unjust man is miserable,” Plato declares in The Republic. A noble thought, to be sure, but Socrates’ most famous student didn’t have data to back up his belief. Harvey James, on the other hand, does. The University of Missouri economist finds a relationship between life satisfaction and low tolerance for unethical conduct. He discussed his findings, first published in the journal Kyklos, with Miller-McCune staff writer Tom Jacobs.

The research
“I found a correlation between how people responded to ethics questions and their satisfaction with life. As part of the 2005-06 wave of the World Values Survey (which examines attitudes around the globe), respondents were asked in face-to-face interviews: On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? There were also four ethics questions that ask how acceptable or unacceptable they felt a particular practice is: claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled; avoiding paying your fare on public transportation; cheating on taxes; and accepting a bribe.

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Christine Dobby - Love your job? You might be Canadian

Christine Dobby, FINANCIAL POST Nov 17, 2011

http://business.financialpost.com/2011/11/17/love-your-job-you-might-be-canadian/

As with so many things, Canada comes in a rather unremarkable third place in a LinkedIn survey on global worker happiness.

But the fact that 69% of Canadians surveyed were either “happy” or “very happy” with their current job, is worth noting.

Only respondents from the Netherlands and Sweden are more content with their careers, with 80% and 71% of respondents from those countries, respectively, saying they were happy.

At the other end of the scale was Japan, where only 31% of those polled said they were content, well below the global average of 63%.

LinkedIn surveyed 12,548 professionals in 16 countries, including 797 workers in Canada, for its research on job happiness released Thursday.  (Not everyone polled responded to every question asked.)

Nicole Williams, connection director at the online professional network company, speculated that a tough economy might mean those with jobs appreciate them more than they would otherwise.

“Perhaps you didn’t get the raise you wanted this year, but you are appreciative of an amazing supportive manager who keeps an eye out for opportunities that will help you grow in your career,” she said.

Canadians were also fairly optimistic on the prospect of getting ahead in their career, with 53% of respondents saying they agree or strongly agree that there is a good chance of advancement “If I work hard and demonstrate results.”

This was above the global average of 52% who thought they would get ahead through hard work and good results.

But beyond getting promoted, Canadians’ professional aspirations seem a bit modest.

Out of options that included working abroad, starting a business and changing industries or careers, the top career ambitions for Canadian professionals were:

1. Get promoted
2. I’m happy where I am
3. Retire early

Frida Berrigan - Civil Disobedience, Do You Pay to Play or Do the Time?

Published on Sunday, November 20, 2011 by Waging Nonviolence

http://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/11/do-you-pay-to-play-or-do-the-time/

Reflections on Extending Direct Action by Not Paying Fines, Going to Court and Maybe Even to Jail

by Frida Berrigan

Standing in front of a judge is intimidating (to me anyway). It seems a whole lot easier to cross a line, refuse to move, or lie down in the middle of the street, than stand before a judge. I would rather be trussed up in handcuffs and crammed into a crowded police wagon than stand before a judge. They are often world-weary and judgmental (I guess it comes with the territory). I would rather stay in the grubby holding cell and drink the water that comes out of the little fountain on top of the stainless steel (seat-less) toilet than stand before a judge. They don’t really appear to be listening to what the people standing before them are saying. They often look out from heavy eye lids and one gets the sense that they think they have heard it all before. It is easier to hold a big sign or wear an orange jumpsuit or participate in street theater or leaflet the tourists or engage in conversation with an angry and alienated guy, than try and explain my motivations and thinking to a judge who I assume doesn’t have the time or interest to care.

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Elizabeth Whitman - U.S. Bottled Water Companies Target Minorities, But So Do Soda Firms

Elizabeth Whitman 

IPS New, November 19, 2011

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105903

NEW YORK, Nov 19 (IPS) - Water is the lifeblood of this planet, whose inhabitants are watching its accelerated spiral into crisis mode even as they struggle to address the issues and lifestyles that are stretching the earth's resources thin.

Outwardly, the global water crisis appears straightforward - people simply consume too much water. A key factor in this spiral is the fact that water has been morphing from a natural resource into a marketable - and costly - product, experts and reports have shown. 

Exploring different aspects of the global water crisis, from privatisation of water to corporations marketing to minorities, reveals that water - as a human right, as a product, as a natural resource - is firmly entangled with a host of issues in areas, including public health. 

By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in areas with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world's population - projected to reach eight billion by then - will be under stress conditions. Some 1.4 billion currently lack access to safe water. 

Humans consume water at a rate more than twice that of population growth, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In 60 percent of European cities with a population greater than 100,000, groundwater is used more quickly than it is replenished, said the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. 

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Henry Porter - Odd as it may seem, 2011 is proving to be a year of rebirth

Something deep and impressive is going on in the new generation who have an innate sense of justice and fairness

• 

  Henry Porter

  The Observer, Saturday 19 November 2011

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/20/henry-porter-optimistic-about-world

When New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sent stormtrooper cops – equipped with batons, pepper spray and ear-splitting pain compliance devices – to sweep the Occupy protesters from Wall Street, he was attacked by the American TV commentator Keith Olbermann as "a smaller, more embarrassing version of the tinpot tyrants who have fallen around the globe this year".

That will have pricked Bloomberg's technocratic vanity, yet there he is, three months away from his 70th birthday and worth approximately $19.5bn, ordering his police chief, Ray Kelly, who has already hit 70 but is still, incidentally, a familiar figure on the Manhattan party circuit, to unleash a shocking level of force against young people who were simply agitating for a better economic system, more equity and transparency.

It is not a good look in a country where, as Joseph Stiglitz revealed in Vanity Fair, 1% of the population now takes nearly 25% of the nation's income. Justly or not, Bloomberg will be lumped with that international class of rich, often kleptomaniac, elderly men who have been brought down or who are looking shaky as demands for reform circle the world in what I believe to be a surge of optimism and, crucially, reason.

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Kanya D’Almeida - The 'School to Prison Pipeline': Education Under Arrest

Published on Thursday, November 17, 2011 by Inter Press Service

by Kanya D'Almeida

WASHINGTON - Metal detectors. Teams of drug-sniffing dogs. Armed guards and riot police. Forbiddingly high walls topped with barbed wire.

Such descriptions befit a prison or perhaps a high-security checkpoint in a war zone. But in the U.S., these scenes of surveillance and control are most visible in public schools, where in some areas, education is becoming increasingly synonymous with incarceration.

The United Nations, along with various human rights bodies and international courts, have recognised that "free education is the cornerstone of success and social development for young people".

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ScienceDaily - Is a Stranger Trustworthy? You'll Know in 20 Seconds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111115103510.htm

ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2011) — There's definitely something to be said for first impressions. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests it can take just 20 seconds to detect whether a stranger is genetically inclined to being trustworthy, kind or compassionate.

The findings reinforce that healthy humans are wired to recognize strangers who may help them out in a tough situation. They also pave the way for genetic therapies for people who are not innately sympathetic, researchers said.

"It's remarkable that complete strangers could pick up on who's trustworthy, kind or compassionate in 20 seconds when all they saw was a person sitting in a chair listening to someone talk," said Aleksandr Kogan, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral student at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Two dozen couples participated in the UC Berkeley study, and each provided DNA samples. Researchers then documented the couples as they talked about times when they had suffered. Video was recorded only of the partners as they took turns listening.

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Robert Parry - Big Media's Double Standards on Iran

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Big-Media-s-Double-Standar-by-Robert-Parry-111115-949.html

November 15, 2011 By Robert Parry The mainstream U.S. press corps is again pounding the propaganda war drums, this time over dubious accusations of Iran's secret work on a nuclear bomb. It is a pattern of bias that is the U.S. media's worst -- and most dangerous -- ethical violation. Arguably, the most serious ethical crisis in U.S. journalism is the deep-seated bias about the Middle East that is displayed by major American news outlets, particularly the Washington Post and the New York Times. When it comes to reporting on "designated enemies" in the Muslim world, the Post and the Times routinely jettison all sense of objectivity even when the stakes are as serious as war and peace, life and death. Propaganda wins out over balanced journalism. We have seen this pattern with Iraq and its non-existent stockpiles of WMD; with the rush to judgment about Syria's supposed guilt in the killing of Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri; with the false certainty about Libya's role in the Lockerbie bombing; and many other examples of what everyone just "knows to be true" but often turns out isn't. [For more on these cases, click here.]

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Times of India - Desk job can send you early to grave

Times of India| Nov 14, 2011

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health/Desk-job-can-send-you-early-to-grave/articleshow/10171967.cms

The study of more than 200,000 men and women in NSW has found that the longer people sit each day the greater their chances of going to an early grave.

Even when exercise was taken into account, it was often not enough to offset the effects of sitting for several hours.

Those who sat for more than 10 hours a day had a 48 per cent increased risk of death compared to more active people who sat for less than four hours a day.

Co-author of the study, Adrian Bauman, of the University of Sydney's school of public health, said people with physically active jobs such as gardeners, builders and childcare workers faced less of a problem than those chained to a desk.

"Your lowest risk of death is if you are physically active and don't sit," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Professor Bauman as saying.

"Your highest risk is if you don't do any physical activity and you sit a lot of the day.

"What's happening is when you sit, the meal you have just eaten is broken down into sugar and your blood sugar stays high.

"Sugar wants to be taken into muscles and the liver to be used but if you're sitting it's just circulating so your blood sugar stays high," Prof Bauman explained.

The findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the 45 and Up Study, the largest ongoing health research project in the southern hemisphere.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd - Why 'Liberal Hollywood' Is a Myth

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, AlterNet

Posted on November 10, 2011, Printed on November 13, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153041/why_%27liberal_hollywood%27_is_a_myth

This week the film director Brett Ratner, known for his high-speed movies and extravagant lifestyle, angered people all over the country with his unflappable mouth. First: during a screening of his latest film, Tower Heist, Ratner responded to the question, “How do you rehearse your actors?” with the answer that “rehearsals are for fags.” His use of the pejorative term was the spark of a week-long outrage, which eventually led him to make a public apology and resign as producer of this year’s Oscars. (Eddie Murphy, the star of Tower Heistwho agreed to host at Ratner’s prodding, also resigned.)

His exit from the awards show wasn’t solely about his gay slurs: this week, Ratner appeared on the Howard Stern show and spoke quite disgustingly about very specific parts of his sex life (and his sexual anatomy), making comments that “appalled” the president of the Academy. And if that wasn’t enough, he smeared his ex-girlfriend, actress Olivia Munn,telling “Attack of the Show” that “I banged her a few times, but I forgot her.” So, homophobia, misogyny and displays of alpha masculinity that are both cavemanish and juvenile? Check, check and check. Our creep radar is going bananas.

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