Cognitive Labs

In this case, a study population played the game Rise of Nations. After a while, they showed improvement on cognitive tests. This tells us what we already know - that complex tasks involving repetition and especially multi-tasking which demands a recurrent loop of attentiveness load can extend the boundary of cognitive ability.

Unless the specific variables of the game play map to quantitatively measurable scales of assessment, and this assumes that a set of qualitative or social choices with a very large and tenuous possibility frontier and unknown internal verisimilitude can be expressed mathematically, it's difficult to take the conclusion beyond the initial mild statement. Nolan Bushnell could just as easily have said that Pong was brain-boosting, or the video-disc game dragon's lair (the first anime-style game [no sprites] that could be controlled from a console) boosted the brain while the gamer waited for her/his pizza to get ready.



However, this means that more rigorous and focused studies of populations that already have been published exhibit that much more potentiality and promise. Our exploratory work with professional gamers (2005) exhibited as much.

Labels: bushnell, dragons, kramer, lair, nations, rise, risk

Just as people were ready to be dazzled by the bling of Olympic medals, it's time to take out that dusty game of Risk.

Roll the dice, send in three armies from Kamchatka.

What's starting as a little war in Georgia (the country north of Turkey and Armenia and Iran) is uncomfortably close to the oil fields of the Caucasus and the pipelines that take the crude for transshipment.

Georgia was in the USSR at the time of World War II and one of the objectives of the Wehrmacht's Army Group south during operation Barbarossa in 1941, which was to seize the land around the Volga, sweep around the Black Sea and hold the Caucasus oil fields since Germany had no other source of oil than limited supplies in Rumania. (Iran was occupied by Britain and the USSR in World War II and most of the petroleum-producing regions were under British hegemony)

The area in question is peninsular strip of land on the lower right hand side of the bluish region.

Labels: global, kamchatka, ossetia, risk

Eureka Alert reports that antacid drinks, or Acid Blockers, when used regularly by certain populations, may lead to increased risk of Cognitive Impairment.

Labels: acid blockers, antacids, risk