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Study Proves Beer Makes You Smarter

Shane McGlaun — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 14:30:41 +0000

Guys this is fantastic news, the next time someone gives you a hard time for drinking too much beer, tell them you’re simply feeding your brain. As it turns out, in some quantities beer is apparently brain food. The magic number for your beer brain improvement appears to be a blood-alcohol level of 0.07%.

It seems that it takes the average person about two pints of beer to reach that level. I wager much more than that you would turn into the drooling, drunken idiot your friends think you are. The study was conducted by the University of Illinois in Chicago. The researchers set up a bar game with 40 participants and 20 of the participants got to drink two cold pints before playing.

Participants were given three words in a series and then challenged to name a fourth word that would continue the theme. One example is users being given the words blue, cottage, Swiss and then answering cheese. Interestingly, these researchers think the alcohol may account for the reason why good ideas come to people when you’re having a glass of wine at dinner. It may also explain why some drunks like Ernest Hemingway were also able to write some of the best literature ever.

[via NYDailyNews]

How to Avoid Internet Trolls

Shane McGlaun — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 11:00:52 +0000

In my line of work, you get to be intimately familiar with the scourge of the internet -trolls. Anyone that spends time writing online or posting in forms for anything will encounter the web troll. We all know the sort, the person whose sole purpose in life is to point out every typo, pick out small part of something you type and blow it way out of proportion, or spout fanboyism until you want to choke the digital life out of them.

A study has been published by Claire Hardaker, a lecturer at Lancaster University in the department of linguistics and English language. The study found the best way to deal with trolls is to ignore them. That is often easier said than done. A working definition of a troll is: “someone who constructs the identity of sincerely wishing to be part of the group in question, including professing or conveying pseudo-sincere intentions, but whose real intention(s) is/are to cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement.”

The solution to handling a troll is according to the study one of four things. “Trolling can (1) be frustrated if users correctly interpret an intent to troll, but are not provoked into responding, (2) be thwarted if users correctly interpret an intent to troll, but counter in such a way as to curtail or neutralise the success of the troller, (3) fail if users do not correctly interpret an intent to troll and are not provoked by the troller, or, (4) succeed if users are deceived into believing the troller’s pseudo-intention(s), and are provoked into responding sincerely. Finally, users can mock troll. That is, they may undertake what appears to be trolling with the aim of enhancing or increasing effect, or group cohesion.”

[via Guardian]

Robot Learns to Make Facial Expressions, is Rewarded With a Measly “Signal”

Lambert Varias — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:41:47 +0000

At least dogs get food when they get things right. This poor robot Einstein, made by computer scientists from the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, was given time to play with its 31 artificial facial muscles while “staring” at its reflection in the mirror. The robot was also equipped with a camera as well as facial recognition software, so that when it happened upon a human facial expression while it was experimenting, the software would send a “reward signal” to the robot. That must have been one hell of a signal.

The scientists’ next goal is to get the Einstein robot to socialize, and eventually robot tormentors tutors.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Marian Bartlett, a facial recognition expert who was a part of the experiment, said that the aim is to use robots to conduct one-on-one tutoring, which she says can improve learning “by as much as two standard deviations.” Sounds like they want our kids to go insane.

[via Wired]