From the monthly archives: July 2006

Non-competitive tetherball

By On 31/07/2006 ·

Our backyard tetherball pole (left) was replaced with a non-competitive variant (right). “It was just all about winning or losing” one eight-yeard old girl told me.

As you can see, the new one does not specify a “win” state signalling that the game is simply about keeping the [...]

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Video game violence and physiological desensitization

By On 27/07/2006 ·

“The effect of video game violence on physiological desensitization to real-life violence” is the title of a very recent article by Nicholas L. Carnagey, Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman.

It can be found here.

The good Dr. Castronova has scathing comments over at Terranova.

Article [...]

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Soccer players are excellent game theorists

By On 27/07/2006 ·

Turns out that penalty kick behaviour conforms beautifully with game theoretical predictions.

Economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta of Brown University has studied thousands of penalty kicks. Penalty kicks are theoretically wonderful since they constitute 2-player zero-sum games where players have very few available strategies and where [...]

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Front page draft

By On 25/07/2006 ·

A really quick front page draft. The font strikes me as somewhat presumptious. Any comments?

Update: This one is probably better

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The active 1%

By On 20/07/2006 ·

Writes Charles Authur of The Guardian:

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of
100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with
it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just
view it.

That’s very fine and [...]

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