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.

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.

But then there's this: A scan of a full-page advertisement in a recent edition of the Flathead Beacon, the local paper, with photographs of 47 babies newly delivered in the Kalispell Regional Medical Center. All but one are fair-skinned with light-colored hair. "Wonderful white babies being born in Kalispell," the website reads. "What do the babies look like being born in your town?" Another item on the Pioneer Little Europe site depicts white families relaxing on the shore of a lake. A caption reads,"This is how white our beaches are, and I'm not talking about sand."

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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.  

As people move or are pushed by authorities out of their makeshift tent cities in Zuccotti Park and other public spaces in cities across the United States, the harsh registers and interests of the punishing state become more visible. The corporate state cannot fight any longer with ideas because their visions, ideologies and survival of the fittest ethic are bankrupt,  fast losing any semblance of legitimacy. Students all over the country are changing the language of politics while reclaiming pedagogy as central to any viable notion of agency, resistance and collective struggle.

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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

Richard Heinberg - What We Are For

By Richard Heinberg

19 November, 2011

Post Carbon Institute

http://countercurrents.org/heinberg191111.htm

Every activist engaged in combating human-caused climate change or specific elements of the current energy economy knows that the work is primarily oppositional. It could hardly be otherwise; for citizens who care about ecological integrity, a sustainable economy, and the health of nature and people, there is plenty to oppose—biomass logging in Massachusetts, mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia, natural gas drilling in Wyoming, poorly sited solar developments in California, river-killing dams in Chile and Brazil, and new nuclear and coal plants around the globe.

These and many other fights against destructive energy projects are crucial, but they can be draining and tend to focus the conversation in negative terms. Sometimes it’s useful to reframe the discourse about ecological limits and economic restructuring in positive terms, that is, about what we’re for. The following list is not comprehensive, but beauty and biodiversity are fundamentals that the energy economy must not diminish. And energy literacy, conservation, relocalization of economic systems, and family planning are necessary tools to achieve our vision of a day when resilient human communities are imbedded in healthy ecosystems, and all members of the land community have space enough to flourish.

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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.

I haven’t had a lot of chances to stand before a judge, but I am always really scared when I do. The most recent time, I emerged from more than 24 hours of “processing” in leg irons (I put “processing” in quotes to convey how much it sucked). We had been arrested early in the afternoon on January 11, 2008 at the Supreme Court, trying to unfurl a banner that said “Justice Denied.” In total, there were more than 90 of us inside the court building and on the steps outside, many dressed in orange jumpsuits and the rest wearing orange tee shirts under our jackets. Inside, after the banner was snatched away from us, we knelt down and began reading a statement together that described what men at Guantanamo had experienced of “U.S. justice.” We decided not to carry identification, symbolically and in a real way taking the names and identities of individual men at Guantanamo into U.S. courts and shedding some small bit of privilege and control that comes along with having a U.S. issued ID.

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Lynn Parramore - Back to the Future? Generation X and Occupy Wall Street

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet

Posted on November 16, 2011, Printed on November 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153100/back_to_the_future_generation_x_and_occupy_wall_street 

The following is an excerpt from AlterNet's forthcoming book, The 99%: How the Occupy Wall Street Movement is Changing America, which tells the gripping story of the emergence, expansion and influence of a phenomenon poised to transform our ideological landscape and unleash our potential to reinvent our society. 

The year was 1974. My family was gathered around the shrine of the living room television. I was four years old, aware only that something momentous must be happening to draw such rapt attention. A jowly, vaguely menacing-looking man with dark hair was reading a speech.

"What is it, Daddy?"

"The president is getting kicked out on his butt."

My introduction to the world of politics was learning that the leader of my country was a no-good crook. Welcome to Generation X.

People wonder why those born between 1965 and 1980 tend to be nihilistic and wary of commitment. Why many of us keep an ironic distance between ourselves and just about everything. That's because so many aspects of the culture we inherited were a form of lie told to us daily. And unlike previous generations, we never really got a hero. No FDR. No Camelot. Just one jerk after another trying to sell us snakeoil with a smile. The only president who even made an attempt to do things honestly, Jimmy Carter, was branded a fool.

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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.

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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".

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education court ruling, which officially desegregated U.S. schools in 1954, stated, "It is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if (he/she is) denied the opportunity of an education."

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