Undead Astronauts

the great firewall prevents chinese citizens from “splitting the nation” and other trumped up petty bullshit. but most chinese don’t skirt the controls even though it’s not very difficult to do so. they just don’t care.

but once in awhile, ppl are motivated to give authority the finger, as many chinese did recently w/ regards to the firewall. what might have moved them to do so? political discontent? economic instability? extreme social injustice?

(more…)

Why am I oh so terribly not surprised…

“However, some players and officials are alleged to have accepted bribes from gambling websites to rig the games.

There has been little coverage of the event in the country’s mainstream media but the Korea Times website claims that the Korea e-Sports Association filed charges against individual players and coaches in March 2010. ”

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8623514.stm

Edit: I found a blog with more alleged information about it.  article here.

http://www.sc2blog.com/2010/04/20/serious-business-the-korean-starcraft-scandal-18-rating/

including some alleged names.

there are some really interesting results from neuroscience investigations into sports. as with videogaming, it looks like the brain changes with practice in sports, and athletes’ brains are more efficient than non-athletes’ brains.

The brain begins by setting a goal—pick up the fork, say, or deliver the tennis serve—and calculates the best course of action to reach it. As the brain starts issuing commands, it also begins to make predictions about what sort of sensations should come back from the body if it achieves the goal. If those predictions don’t match the actual sensations, the brain then revises its plan to reduce error. Shadmehr and Krakauer’s work demonstrates that the brain does not merely issue rigid commands; it also continually updates its solution to the problem of how to move the body. Athletes may perform better than the rest of us because their brains can find better solutions than ours do.

sports geniuses may be born, but they are also made. practice is required to optimize neural pathways for efficient calculation.

Even as practice changes the brain’s anatomy, it also helps different regions of the brain talk to one another. Some neurons strengthen their connections to other neurons and weaken their connections to still others. Early on, neurons in the front of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) are active. That region is vital for top-down control, which enables us to focus on a task and consider a range of responses. With practice, the prefrontal cortex grows quiet. Our predictions get faster and more accurate, so we don’t need so much careful oversight about how to respond.

the cool thing is that a group of researchers found a way to overclock practice sessions. they attached electrodes across relevant neural regions and had ppl practice a certain physical operation. the group w/ electrodes showed greater performance and longer lasting results after a period with no practice. this is potentially a huge deal. it’s somewhat akin to using performance enhancing drugs b/c an athlete can achieve greater results with the same amount of practice.

i’d imagine that this would most affect very technical sports and sports requiring reaction time, but less so pure performance sports. diving and ping-pong might get a boost from this research, but the 100m dash and weight lifting might not. this would have to affect videogaming as well.

pro-players of the future might have to jack-up when practicing to stay competitive b/c of the difficulty in banning such a practice. i mean how could u tell if someone has jacked if there aren’t chemical residues?

haven’t read the entire thing yet, but i’ll try to this weekend. the abstract suggests a very strange result however at first glance. the researchers found that heritability of IQ depends on the socio-economic status of the parents. wtf?

Scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children were analyzed in a sample of 7-year-old twins from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. A substantial proportion of the twins were raised in families living near or below the poverty level. Biometric analyses were conducted using models allowing for components attributable to the additive effects of genotype, shared environment, and non-shared environment to interact with socioeconomic status (SES) measured as a continuous variable. Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse.