Cool School – Where Peace Rules Human Development Scientists And Computer Game Developers Design Video Game That Teaches Conflict Resolution To Kids

March 27, 2010 Leave a comment

December 1, 2008 — Human development scientists and computer game developers designed a video game that teaches kids how to resolve conflicts peacefully amongst themselves. Inanimate objects, such as pencils and erasers, come to life to lead players through a series of common scenarios in which arguments are about to occur. The player is prompted for the non-violent solution and is rewarded for choosing correctly.

Amid growing concern surrounding the effects violent video games have on children, a new computer game could be the alternative parents have been waiting for.

Kids who play together also argue together. Fights over games, toys and friendships are common, but when arguments heat up, it’s time to solve them before things get out of hand. A new computer game teaches kids how to solve playground and classroom quarrels that kids face every day in a positive way — without fists and fights.

“It helps them resolve conflicts by giving them a chance to think about what happens in the course of an actual conflict episode,” said Melanie Killen, Ph.D., a human development expert at the University of Maryland in College Park, Md.

The game, called “Cool School: Where Peace Rules” — designed by a team of human development scientists, teachers, government mediators, computer game developers and animators — helps kids solve school violence and bullying while still having fun.

“You’re learning things, but at the same time it’s having fun with it,” said student Ellen Yaffe.

Animated objects come to life and depict common conflicts. Kids experiment on how to settle each argument. Players have the option of threatening the peer, telling the teacher, forgetting about it or talking things through.

Players are rewarded for choosing positive solutions to resolve conflicts with letters they collect to win.

“What this game is doing is it’s empowering children to make choices and decisions and to see what unfolds based on their own decisions,” Dr. Killen said.

Parents and teachers praise the new game, and kids love it for their own reasons.

“I think they make it very realistic with like the names and how the school looks,” student Jacob Tycko told Ivanhoe.

The best part is the game is totally free. You can download it online by visiting http://www.curriki.com and searching for “cool school.”

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–>ABOUT THE GAME: “Cool School: Where Peace Rules” came about when the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service asked a Human Development professor to help them design a videogame to help five to seven year old children deal with conflicts in a peaceful manner. The project relied on animators to create the visual environments, and for the professor to create scenarios that will help kids learn to resolve problems without resorting to violence. The game uses a wide variety of charactersýfrom erasers to desks to books and basketballsýto lead players through 52 different scenarios.To learn more about the game or to play it go to (http://www.rtassoc.com/gm_coolschool.html).

TIPS ON STOPPING BULLIES: This list is adapted from material on the website of the United States Health Resources and Services Administration. http://stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/

DO:

  • Tell an adult
  • Join clubs and groups where you will meet other kids
  • Support someone else who is being bullied

DO NOT:

  • Think it’s your fault.
  • Fight back or bully a person back.
  • Reply to online bullying

The American Sociological Association contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

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Study Examines Video Game Play Among Adolescents

March 27, 2010 Leave a comment

ScienceDaily (July 4, 2007) — On school days, teen boys who play video games appear to spend less time reading and teen girls who play video games appear to spend less time doing homework than those who do not play video games, according to a report in the July issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Overall, video game players did not spend less time than non-video game players interacting with parents and friends.

“The rapid growth of video game popularity has generated concern among practitioners, parents, scholars and politicians,” according to background information in the article. “Particularly during adolescence, when social interactions and academic success lay the groundwork for health in adulthood, there is concern that video games will interfere with the development of skills needed to make a successful transition to adulthood.”

Hope M. Cummings, M.A., of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Elizabeth A. Vandewater, Ph.D., of the University of Texas at Austin collected survey data from a nationally representative sample of 1,491 10- to 19-year olds during the 2002 to 2003 school year. Twenty-four-hour time use diaries were collected from the participants on one randomly chosen weekday and one randomly chosen weekend day. The teens recorded their time spent playing video games, with parents and friends, reading and doing homework and in sports and active leisure.

A total of 534 teens (36 percent) played video games. Most of these (425 [80 percent]) were boys and 109 (20 percent) were girls. “Female gamers spent an average of 44 minutes playing on the weekdays and one hour and four minutes playing on the weekends,” the authors write. “Male gamers spent an average of 58 minutes playing on the weekdays and one hour and 37 minutes playing on the weekends.”

“For boys on the weekends and for girls on the weekdays, more time spent playing video games without parents was related to less time spent with parents doing other activities,” the authors write. The more time girls spent playing video games with their parents, the more time they spent in other activities with them as well. On weekends, the more time boys and girls spent playing video games without their friends, the less time they spent in other activities with them and the more time they spent playing video games with their friends, the more time they spent in other activities with them. Compared with non-video game–players, adolescents who played video games spent 30 percent less time reading and 34 percent less time doing homework.

“Although we focused on the relationship between time spent in video game play and other activities among adolescents, an important next step for future research will be to assess the ways in which video game play is related to academic and social outcomes among American youth,” they conclude. “… Our results indicate that game play has different social implications for girls and boys who play. Future studies aimed at understanding how and why girls vs. boys use game play to fulfill different social needs are warranted.”

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Game On? Video-Game Ownership May Interfere With Young Boys' Academic Functioning

March 27, 2010 Leave a comment

ScienceDaily (Mar. 11, 2010) — Parents of young boys may want to encourage moderation when it comes to their kids’ video game habits. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, owning a video-game system may hamper academic development in some children.

Psychological scientists Robert Weis and Brittany C. Cerankosky of Denison University conducted a study examining short-term effects of video-game ownership on academic development in young boys. Families with boys between the ages of 6 to 9 were recruited for this study. The families did not own video-game systems, but the parents had been considering buying one for their kids. The children completed intelligence tests as well as reading and writing assessments. In addition, the boys’ parents and teachers filled out questionnaires relating to their behavior at home and at school. Half of the families were selected to receive a video-game system (along with three, age-appropriate video games) immediately, while the remaining families were promised a video-game system four months later, at the end of the experiment. Over the course of the four months, the parents recorded their children’s activities from the end of the school day until bedtime. At the four-month time point, the children repeated the reading and writing assessments and parents and teachers again completed the behavioral questionnaires.

The results of this study showed that the boys who received the video-game system immediately spent more time playing video games and less time engaged in after-school academic activities than boys who received the video-game system at the end of the experiment. Furthermore, the boys who received the video-game system at the beginning of the study had significantly lower reading and writing scores four months later compared with the boys receiving the video-game system later on. Although there were no differences in parent-reported behavioral problems between the two groups of kids, the boys who received the video-game system immediately had greater teacher-reported learning problems.

Further analysis revealed that the time spent playing video games may link the relationship between owning a video-game system and reading and writing scores. These findings suggest that video games may be displacing after-school academic activities and may impede reading and writing development in young boys. The authors note that when children have problems with language at this young age, they tend to have a tougher time acquiring advanced reading and writing skills later on. They conclude, “Altogether, our findings suggest that video-game ownership may impair academic achievement for some boys in a manner that has real-world significance.”

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Neural Networks Help Unravel Complexity Of Self-Awareness

March 27, 2010 Leave a comment

ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2009) — Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing have applied modular neural networks to model cognitive functions associated with awareness and time-delay neural networks to temporally model self-awareness.

The doctoral research, conducted by Milton Martínez Luaces, was directed by the School of Computing’s professor Alfonso Rodríguez-Patón.

This research represents a dual advance in the modelling of awareness-associated cognitive functions. On the theoretical side, it applies the theory of informons and holons to awareness structures. An informon is an information entity. It can take the form of data, news or knowledge. The term holon refers to autonomous entities that act both as a part and as a whole.

On the practical side, awareness-associated processes were simulated and influenced the design and development of software models. To do this, modular neural networks were used to develop multi-entity simulators. The networks were used to simulate several scenarios of interaction between their own potential and that of the systems with which they interact.

Self-awareness and the time dimension

In the case of human beings, self-awareness does not imply just an abstract image of what one is, but also an image of one’s trajectory throughout time. This research also modelled the time dimension of self-awareness using time-delay neural networks. These networks have shown, in different interaction scenarios, that the image that each entity has of its qualities in the past or its expectations for the future has an impact on how it interacts with other entities. For example, a figure reveals how interaction with other artificial entities, in this case in a competitive scenario, enables these entities to develop self-awareness.

In the same way as individuals tend to form groups with common interests and, as a result, develop a sense of belonging at more than one level, artificial entities may interact similarly to achieve a particular purpose.

Possible applications

The proposed models and their neural network implementations have basically two possible fields of application.

First they are useful for research into plausible models for explaining biological models. This approach tackles the problem of awareness through the formulation and computer simulation of artificial models.

Second these models could, from a practical viewpoint, also be applicable in the field of artificial intelligence. This would involve the prospective deployment of some of these features in multi-purpose artificial systems (robots, softbots, multiagent systems, etc.). In actual fact, several researchers are working on applying software models to robots in competitive or collaborative environments.

The models that have so far been implemented in artificial intelligence systems to approximate awareness are the result of huge simplifications because it is hard to model such complex reality.

No doubt this also applies to the models presented in this research. However, many of the concepts suggested by the proposed models and the high-level modelling principles match the results of animal experiments and observations and outcomes of non-invasive experiments conducted on human beings.

These early advances are not in themselves a solution to the complex open questions, the researchers note. Even so, many others are tackling the subject of awareness from different angles, configuring an attack on several fronts, such as cognitive psychology, neurobiology and artificial intelligence.

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Cognition

March 27, 2010 Leave a comment

The term cognition is used in several loosely related ways to refer to a faculty for the human-like processing of information, applying knowledge and changing preferences.

Cognition or cognitive processes can be natural and artificial, conscious and not conscious; therefore, they are analyzed from different perspectives and in different contexts, in anesthesia, neurology, psychology, philosophy, systemics and computer science.

The concept of cognition is closely related to such abstract concepts as mind, reasoning, perception, intelligence, learning, and many others that describe numerous capabilities of human mind and expected properties of artificial or synthetic intelligence.

Cognition is an abstract property of advanced living organisms; therefore, it is studied as a direct property of a brain or of an abstract mind on subsymbolic and symbolic levels. In psychology and in artificial intelligence, it is used to refer to the mental functions, mental processes and states of intelligent entities (humans, human organizations, highly autonomous robots), with a particular focus toward the study of such mental processes as comprehension, inferencing, decision-making, planning and learning (see also cognitive science and cognitivism).

Recently, advanced cognitive researchers have been especially focused on the capacities of abstraction, generalization, concretization/specialization and meta-reasoning which descriptions involve such concepts as beliefs, knowledge, desires, preferences and intentions of intelligent individuals/objects/agents/systems. The term “cognition” is also used in a wider sense to mean the act of knowing or knowledge, and may be interpreted in a social or cultural sense to describe the emergent development of knowledge and concepts within a group that culminate in both thought and action..

For more information about the topic Cognition, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

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Red In The Face? People Use The Color Of Your Skin To Judge How Healthy You Are

March 27, 2010 Leave a comment

ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2009) — People use the color of your skin to judge how healthy you are, according to researchers at the University of St Andrews.

Scientists in the School of Psychology have shown that there is truth to the received wisdom that a “rosy” complexion denotes healthiness, whilst a “green” or “pale” color indicates illness.

Lead researcher Ian Stephen worked with the University’s Perception Lab to determine how face color is associated with healthy looks.

Several monkey species use redness in their faces or sexual skin to advertise their health status and to attract mates. The team was keen to discover whether similar mechanisms were at work in humans.

Ian Stephen said, “Parents and doctors know that when you get ill, you can end up looking pale. Our research goes further and shows that even young, healthy university students can benefit from a complexion reflecting more blood and more oxygen in the skin.”

The team from the University of St Andrews first measured how skin color varies with the amount of blood and oxygen in the blood.

These measurements were used with computer graphics to allow research participants to change the color of the faces in the photographs to look as healthy as possible. The team found that, for all faces, participants added more oxygen rich blood color to improve the healthy appearance.

Stephen continued, “Our skin contains many tiny blood vessels that carry blood laden with oxygen to the skin cells, allowing them to “breathe”, and allowing us to lose heat during exercise. People who are physically fit or have higher levels of sex hormones have more of these blood vessels and flush easier than people who are unhealthy, unfit, elderly or smokers. Physically fit people also have more oxygen in their blood than people who are unfit or have heart or lung illnesses.”

Professor Dave Perrett, head of the Perception Lab commented, “Our evaluators all thought that bright red blood with lots of oxygen looked healthier than darker, slightly bluer blood with lower oxygen levels. It is remarkable is that people can see this subtle difference.”

“This may explain why some people with very red faces do not look so healthy; the color of their blood may be wrong. So it’s not just the amount of blood that’s important; it’s the type of blood that determines healthy looks”.

The research shows that people use the color of the blood in your skin to judge how healthy you are.

“Since your attractiveness relies upon how healthy you look, you might be able to make yourself more attractive by being kind to your heart and lungs in doing more exercise or quitting smoking,” concluded Ian Stephen.

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Journal Reference:

  1. Stephen et al. Skin Blood Perfusion and Oxygenation Colour Affect Perceived Human Health. PLoS ONE, 2009; 4 (4): e5083 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005083
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Scientists have shown that there is truth to the received wisdom that a “rosy” complexion denotes healthiness. (Credit: iStockphoto/Klaas Lingbeek-Van Kranen)

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Scientists Discover Important Beauty Secret For Balanced Skin Color And Tone

March 27, 2010 Leave a comment

ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2007) — In the timeless quest for healthier, younger looking skin, scientists from the University of Cincinnati and Tokyo Medical University have made an important discovery toward manipulating skin tone and color.

The implications of this research range from helping doctors develop more natural looking bioengineered skin grafts to helping cosmetics companies develop new products for achieving the “perfect” sunless tan. The research study, published in the September print issue of The FASEB Journal, shows for the first time how to manipulate skin color and tone using cells previously thought to play no significant role in this function.

“Most immediately, this study should lead to bioengineered skin grafts that more closely resemble the natural tone and color of recipients, which may help reduce the appearance of scarring,” said Gerald Weissmann, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. “Down the road, however, this study opens doors to new types of cosmetics based on our understanding of how and why ‘skin deep’ differences in appearance evolved over millions of years.”

In the article, researchers describe how cells responsible for pigmentation, called melanocytes, can be controlled by the most commonly occurring skin cells, called keratinocytes, which produce no pigment of their own. Working with bioengineered skin, which is used for some types of skin grafts, the researchers juggled various mixtures keratinocytes from people with different types of skin colors. In turn, the keratinocytes produced chemical signals to “tell” melanocytes to produce more or less pigment, called melanin, as well as how to distribute that pigment.

The researchers found that using keratinocytes from light-skinned individuals had a lightening effect on the bioengineered skin graft material, while keratinocytes from dark-skinned individuals had a darkening effect. This is a significant finding as it shows a conclusive link between keratinocytes and melanocytes and because keratinocytes are much easier to manipulate than melanocytes.

Medical conditions that sometimes require the use of bioengineered skin grafts include severe burns, scleroderma, epidermis bullosa, diabetes, and venous leg ulcers. In addition, the study’s senior researcher, Raymond Boissy, says this study also could “help the quality of life for people with pigment diseases such as vitiligo, melasma and age spotting by making their skin more healthy looking.”

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Skin Transplant Offers New Hope to Vitiligo Patients

March 27, 2010 Leave a comment


ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2010) — In the first study of its kind in the United States, Henry Ford Hospital showed that skin transplant surgery is safe and effective for treating vitiligo.

Henry Ford researchers followed 23 patients for up to six months after surgery and found that the treated area regained on average 52 percent of its natural skin color. In eight patients with a specific type of vitiligo, the treated area regained on average 74 percent of its natural skin color.

The surgery involves using skin cells taken from normally-pigmented areas of the body and transferring them to the damaged area of skin. It is performed under local anesthesia.

“This surgery offers hope to vitiligo patients,” says Iltefat Hamzavi, M.D. a senior staff physician in Henry Ford’s Department of Dermatology and the study’s senior author and principal investigator. “The results achieved in our study were of obvious significance to our patients.”

The study are being presented at the 68th annual American Academy of Dermatology meeting in Miami.

While the initial results are preliminary and the procedure is still investigational, Dr. Hamzavi says Henry Ford hopes to offer the surgery as part of its treatment portfolio this fall. He says for some patients the surgery is more effective than standard treatments like light therapy and topical medications.

“Patients of color and those with vitiligo on one side of the body and in one area of the body may benefit most from this procedure,” Dr. Hamzavi says.

Vitiligo is a skin disease that causes the skin to lose color and develop white patches that vary in size and location. It affects about 1 in every 200 people in the United States, and is more noticeable in people with darker skin.

Vitiligo develops when cells called melanocytes are killed by the body’s immune system, causing the area of skin to turn white because the cells no longer make pigment. While there is no cure, vitiligo can be treated and managed with light therapy, creams and topical medications.

The surgery is known as melanocyte-keratinocyte transplantation or MKTP, and is performed in Europe, Asia and Middle East. It was performed at Henry Ford using the same technique developed by MKTP pioneer Sanjeev Mulekar, M.D., of the National Vitiligo Center in Saudi Arabia. Henry Ford is the first to perform MKTP in North America.

In Henry Ford’s study, 32 patients (18 male, 14 female) underwent surgery and ranged in age from 18 to 60. A total of 40 MKTP procedures were performed and researchers analyzed the outcomes of 29 of them. A procedure lasted 30 minutes to two hours and patients returned home the same day.

Of the 32 surgery patients, 23 were followed for up to six months after surgery. Eighteen patients received one treatment, four patients received two and one patient received three. The ethnicity of patients was Caucasian, South Asian, African American and Hispanic.

During MKTP, melanocyte cells, which produce pigment in the skin, hair and eyes, are harvested from an area of healthy skin and separated to make a skin cell mixture. This mixture then is applied to the treatment area and covered with a specially developed adhesive biologic dressing.

Treated areas included the hands, arms, legs, feet, face and stomach. The average size of the treated area during each procedure covered an area of 46 cm2, or roughly the size of a credit card.

The study was a collaboration with the National Center for Vitiligo, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and funded by the Shahani Foundation based in Michigan.

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Chemicals That Eased One Environmental Problem May Worsen Another

March 5, 2010 Leave a comment

Forests are being damaged by acid rain, which contains a corrosive ingredient that may result from the breakdown of chemicals introduced to help protect Earth’s ozone layer. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2010) — Chemicals that helped solve a global environmental crisis in the 1990s — the hole in Earth’s protective ozone layer — may be making another problem — acid rain — worse, scientists are reporting. Their study on the chemicals that replaced the ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) once used in aerosol spray cans, air conditioners, refrigerators, and other products, appears in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry A.

Jeffrey Gaffney, Carrie J. Christiansen, Shakeel S. Dalal, Alexander M. Mebel and Joseph S. Francisco point out that hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) emerged as CFC replacements because they do not damage the ozone layer. However, studies later suggested the need for a replacement for the replacements, showing that HCFCs act like super greenhouse gases, 4,500 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The new study adds to those concerns, raising the possibility that HCFCs may break down in the atmosphere to form oxalic acid, one of the culprits in acid rain.

They used a computer model to show how HCFCs could form oxalic acid via a series of chemical reactions high in the atmosphere. The model, they suggest, could have broader uses in helping to determine whether replacements for the replacements are as eco-friendly as they appear before manufacturers spend billions of dollars in marketing them.

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Top Hollywood names not among Oscar voters

March 5, 2010 Leave a comment

By Alexis ZotosPosted 2010/03/05 at 2:00 am EST

LOS ANGELES, Mar. 5, 2010 (Hollywood Reporter) — Taylor Lautner isn’t a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Director George Lucas arrives at the 67th annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, California January 17, 2010. REUTERS/Danny Moloshok

Nor is Woody Allen. Nor is George Lucas.

But Rupert Murdoch is. And so are Pedro Almodovar and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Wade through a list of the Academy’s 5,777 voting members (or at least try, since the Academy pretty much keeps it under lock and key) and you’d be surprised who’s part of the club and who isn’t.

Hollywood “bad boys” like screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, uber-agent Michael Ovitz and actor Christian Bale are all there. And so are obvious figures like Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates and Tom Hanks.

But some of Hollywood’s best-known names haven’t made the list, ranging from NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — who might seem an unlikely candidate with movies like “The Tooth Fairy,” but who is, after all, a box office favorite.

Joining the Academy is a rare privilege that’s accorded to roughly 100-plus new members per year. Members range from 15-year-old actress Dakota Fanning to 81-year-old composer Burt Bacharach, from German filmmaker Wim Wenders to Hollywood star Jennifer Aniston.

Invitations usually go out annually in late June, following a lengthy process that starts when two members “sponsor” a person and ends when the board of governors extends the invite.

After submitting reference letters and examples of their work, prospects are reviewed by the executive committee of the branch to which they are applying. Those approved are passed on to the general membership committee and finally to the board.

Oscar nominees in any given year are thrown into the mix of candidates, but that doesn’t mean they make the cut. Quality of work is one thing, but the Academy also likes its members to have a body of work behind them.

Among recent Oscar nominees, Anne Hathaway (“Rachel Getting Married”) and Viola Davis (“Doubt”) received invites — but Ellen Page, nominated for “Juno,” didn’t.

Similarly, after getting nominations for 2006′s “Brokeback Mountain,” actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were invited — but not their fellow nominee and co-star Michelle Williams. (Williams did get asked to join this past June.)

As to newcomers like “Twilight’s” Robert Pattinson or “Suberbad’s” Jonah Hill, they’ve yet to be invited — though the wait might be briefer than it was in the past, given that the Academy has been making a concerted push to bring younger members into the fold.

For the youngsters, getting an Oscar nomination may actually be easier than becoming an Academy member.

“It’s not uncommon for people with very few credits to receive a nomination,” says the Academy’s director of membership, Kimberly Roush, “whereas some people with many, many credits don’t get an Academy Award nomination. The committees are looking at the bigger picture.”

But perhaps not the entire picture: The Academy looks at the professional side but is quiet about people’s private lives. Hence the membership roster includes a number of jailbirds, like “Pulp Fiction” co-writer Roger Avary and Canadian entrepreneur Garth Drabinsky, and exiled sex offender Roman Polanski.

“We don’t have a felony clause,” Roush quips.

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