Thursday, September 4, 2008

GamING AND SURGEons


BOSTON — Parents, don’t put away those video games just yet — today’s gamer may be tomorrow’s top surgeon.
Researchers who gathered in Boston for the American Psychological Association convention detailed a series of studies suggesting that video games can be powerful learning tools — from increasing younger students’ problem-solving potential to improving the suturing skills of laparoscopic surgeons.
One study even looked at whether playing “World of Warcraft,” (Currency: wow gold ) the world’s biggest multiplayer online game, can improve scientific thinking.
The conclusion? Certain types of video games can have benefits beyond the virtual thrills of blowing up demons.
In one Fordham University study, 122 students in fifth, sixth and seventh grades were asked to think out loud for 20 minutes while playing a game they had never seen before. Researchers studied the children’s statements to see if playing the game improved cognitive and perceptual skills.
While older children seemed more interested in just playing the game, younger children showed more interest in setting up a series of short-term goals needed to help them learn the game.
“The younger kids are focusing more on their planning and problem solving while they are actually playing the game, while adolescents are focusing less on their planning and strategizing and more on the here and now,” said Fordham psychologist Fran Blumberg, who conducted the research last year and plans to submit it for publication. “They’re thinking less strategically than the younger kids.”
Studies by Iowa State University psychologist Douglas Gentile and Dr. James Rosser, chief of minimally invasive surgery at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, compared surgeons who play video games to those who don’t.
The edge went to gamer surgeons, they found, even after taking into account differences in age, years of medical training and the number of laparoscopic surgeries performed. In laparoscopic procedures, surgeons use small incisions, thin surgical tools and video cameras to see inside the body.
One study of 33 laparoscopic surgeons found that those who played video games were 27 percent faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37 percent fewer errors than those who didn’t.
Advanced video game skills also were a good way to predict suturing abilities, according to their study, which was published in the Archives of Surgery in 2007.
Research that Gentile and Rosser conducted for a second as-yet-unpublished study of 303 laparoscopic surgeons found that those who played video games requiring spatial skills and hand dexterity performed better at those skills when tested later compared to surgeons who didn’t play, Gentile said.
“The single best predictor of their skills is how much they had played video games in the past and how much they played now. Those were better predictors of surgical skills than years of training and number of surgeries performed,” Gentile said. “So the first question you might ask your surgeon is how many of these (surgeries) have you done and the second question is Are you a gamer?’”
Some video games even appear to sharpen scientific thinking skills.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison looked at a random sample of 2,000 chat room posts about “world of warcraft” to see what the players were discussing. The game is set in a fantasy world where players hunt, gather and battle to move their characters to higher levels. Players who work together succeed faster.
The research found that the game encouraged scientific thinking, like using systems and models for understanding situations and using math and testing to investigate problems. The vast majority of the discussion participants, 86 percent, shared knowledge to solve problems and 58 percent used systematic and evaluative processes, researchers found.
The forums show that gamers are “creating an environment in which informal scientific reasoning practices are being learned,” said Sean Duncan, a doctoral student who worked on the “world of warcraft” report with lead author Constance Steinkuehler. The paper is set for publication in the Journal of Science Education and Technology.
The news wasn’t all good.
Other studies confirmed earlier research that found students who played violent games tended to be more hostile, less forgiving and believed violence to be normal compared to those who played nonviolent games. And those who played more entertainment games did poorer in school and were at greater risk of obesity.
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Posted by JImmy at 03:44:03 | Permalink | No Comments »

How To Earn Gold In World of Warcraft

by Patrick G. Moore
It is very important to earn wow gold in World of Warcraft. Player cannot survive in the game without Gold. There are many ways you can earn Gold, legal and illegally. Generally, there are five basic ways people make gold in the world of warcraft.
Gathering. There are many things you can gather in the game. The items you can gather such as leather, herbs, ore, linen, fish, wool, stones, gems and many more. Many players begin to make gold by gathering. If you can find rare items such as rare herb, you can get several gold for it. The benefit of becoming a gatherer is you don’t have to spend gold to earn gold. All you need is the time to gather the items. A reminder for new gatherers, always sell your item at the auction. Even if there is no one interested to buy your items, keep on posting it in the auction and soon you will get a buyer. Constant buyer is always out there waiting to buy the right items. You can get more information at Top Wow Leveling Guide.
Farming. It is not recommended to start farming is you are below level 40. Usually farming is taken by players with level 55 or more. To do farming, you need to kill named boss a few times to get a drop. However, beware that farming will take more time than gathering to make gold but the payout would be higher, as much as 3%. There is a possibility that you can make
20g or 200g and even 2000g a day depends on the drops of the day. You can check www.thottbot.com to see the drop rate. Remember to always sell your item at the auction. There are more people in the auction on weekends, as much as 3 times during normal weekdays. A tip to remember, always sell the items on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Keep the items in the bank from Monday to Thursday.
The Crafter. If you are not the type who likes to gather, then be a crafter. However, you need to have about 10 to 20 wow gold to spend as you will need to buy ingredients whether you want to venture into leatherworking, blacksmithing or alchemy and tailoring. This is not recommended for those who just started to make Gold as you might not have the experience to earn Gold using this method and in the end you earn nothing at all. You can learn more about making Gold at Top Wow Leveling Guide.
Buy low and sell High. To be able to buy low and sell high, you must have some Gold first at least 10 Gold to get started. The strategy is simple. What you need to do is to buy items at the lowest price and sell them back at a higher price. Always watch out for items with WTS (Want To Sell). Usually players who sell items this way want to get Gold fast so what you can do is send them a private message asking how much the items cost or simply saying that you will offer X amount of Gold for it. Then you negotiate with the seller to get the lowest price but keep in mind, you must keep the price below the selling price or else you will not gain any profit. You need to know the market price for the items you intend to buy and learn the Supply vs. Demand rules and regulation. If you can do this well, you can earn between 1 to 2000g of wow gold in one day.
Control the market. To control the market, you have to have at least 10g of Gold but 200g of Gold would be better to start off. What you do is identify a market, large glimmering shards for our example, and start to up the price on it. What you do is to identify a market such as large glimmering shards and start to up the price on it. A stack of one large glimmering shard is selling for 90 silver. Let’s say there are 10 shards up at the Auction House. To control the market, you would have to buy out all of the large glimmering shards. Then, you would go back and sell them for any price you want to set as you are the only supply for large glimmering shards. Let’s sell them for 1 gold 80 silver. The truth is that people are used to buying at 90 silver and will not buy them for the first week. At the same time, you must have at least 3 to 5 items up at any given time for the price you have set. If they are not yours but are at 1 wow gold 80 silver, it would not be a problem. If someone puts them up for less, immediately buy them out. After about a week of doing this, people will start to accept that the price of a large glimmering shard is now 1.8g. Other people selling the shards will think that they have been selling at 1.8g, so they will put them up for that amount as well. Now, all you have to do is sell off all of your large glimmering shards at 1.8g and you just made twice what you invested at first.
About the Author:
Get more information about World of Warcraft Gold Earning Tips, check out Dereks Gold Mastery Guide . Learn how to earn gold in world of warcraft Earn Gold In WOW and read more about World of Warcraft latest news at Top WOW Leveling Guide.

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Posted by JImmy at 03:42:16 | Permalink | No Comments »

Online game demons are far from virtual Part Two

Now all this talk of fake money, virtual worlds and fantasy lives might leave many of you addled. Don’t we have enough to worry about in the real world? What’s not hard to understand is that there’s a lot at stake in this multimillion-dollar industry that gains new fans every year. To put it into context using some rough numbers, senior lecturer David Grundy at
Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University said, “Star Wars is generally thought of as being the biggest movie of all time at around [a] $1 billion take. “Thriller” still is about the biggest song ever recorded, with sales of $500 million. One MMO game alone, world of warcraft, a game which many of your readers will have never heard of, has for almost four years dominated PC game sales and revenues, with estimated global proceeds of over $4 billion.”It is, simply put, the biggest single entertainment product ever,” said Grundy, who is co-author of a virtual security blog, MetaSecurity.net. By comparison, consider the 1 million copies of Age of Conan that Norwegian firm Funcom sold this year and the 700,000 subscribers who pay about $15 a month to role-play with thousands of players around the world. That amounts to an income stream of $10.5 million a month. That’s why, Grundy says, “criminals are targeting the online gaming world” and why giant Microsoft Corp. warned developers at a recent games conference in Seattle: “Those of you who are working on massively multiplayer online games, organized crime is already looking for you.”There’s real money at stake, and should players feel less secure about these online games, they could stop playing, can’t stop grinding for wow gold .Players, Grundy said, should “consider everything they ever type into their computer. Every user name and password they ever use, every bank code they use and so forth.”In a recent demonstration of ISE’s findings, analyst Gabe Landau logged into Age of Conan to highlight the vulnerabilities. He showed how sending a routine invitation to visit his player’s team Web site using two booby-trapped links to another player could allow him to read confidential files. Data could include anything from passwords to bank account numbers off the other player’s computer. To protect real players of the game, the other player in ISE’s demonstration was Landau’s colleague, Dan Caselden. In the second serious breach, ISE said vulnerabilities in Anarchy Online allowed them to read files and take over the other player’s computer, which could then be used to launch attacks on Web sites or send spam. “It’s a whole new world of electronic fraud,” Bono said. It’s also a huge headache for game makers like Funcom, which was notified of ISE’s findings almost six weeks ago.Before anyone panics, Funcom said Thursday that it has patched the holes. “Security vulnerabilities can appear in all Internet-based software, from Web browsers to online games, and defeating them is a constant challenge for all developers,” said Funcom product manager Erling Ellingsen. “This is something we take very seriously, and we constantly have a team of dedicated engineers working on preventing this from happening. The issues in question here have already been corrected by our engineers for both Anarchy Online and Age of Conan. Also, we have not received any reports that these security vulnerabilities were misused before they were corrected.”Ellingsen said that the fixes took time because Funcom engineers had to test the patches and then issue them to players. When a player logs in to the game, the patch is immediately downloaded to their computer, he said. “It is definitely a good thing,” Ellingsen said of ISE’s keen eye for security gaps. “Whenever anyone can point to something we need to fix, we appreciate it.”Bono said tests run by ISE on Thursday showed that Funcom’s patches no longer allow them to read files on both games. But it said both games still have a bug that allows ISE to crash players’ computers. “This is just a good example of our goal to make people more aware of the risks out there,” Bono said. “Online games are a huge attack surface for bad guys. There aren’t a lot now, but as these games continue to grow, the tide will turn.”After all, it’s not all fun and games, people. There are far scarier things out there than virtual demons. Dan Thanh Dang’s column also appears Thursdays.
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Posted by JImmy at 03:41:27 | Permalink | No Comments »

Online game demons are far from virtual Part One

The Baltimore-based computer security company that hacked into the sizzling, hot iPhone and broke the encryption on wireless gas payment cards and car keys used by millions of drivers is at it again. But this time, analysts there uncovered serious vulnerabilities in two highly popular fantasy worlds frequented by hundreds of thousands of online players around the globe.Using flaws discovered in the games’ coding, Independent Security Evaluators said it was able to read confidential files on massive multiplayer online (MMO) games Anarchy Online and its best-selling successor, Age of Conan. ISE, which will reveal the research today on its Web site (securityevaluators.com), said it was also able to take control of a player’s computer in the older game. The vulnerabilities, ISE says, expose a growing concern among industry experts. Many say players of such games should start worrying more about malicious attacks that can endanger confidential and financial data than the virtual battles that revolve around crushing demon skulls and laying siege to ancient towns. “Most people, by now, know not to open e-mails and click on links that aren’t from people they know,” said ISE security analyst Stephen Bono. “But players of these online games are more focused on whether they can walk through walls than whether someone can hijack their computer and steal personal data. The awareness is not there. That’s a big problem, since many of these virtual games involve online economies where real money is exchanged for virtual money and goods.
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Posted by JImmy at 03:40:06 | Permalink | No Comments »

Beware wife aggro!: Marriage, ‘World of Warcraft’ don’t always mix

“World of Warcraft” (Currency: wow gold ) is huge. There are more than 10 millions subscribers to the top massive multi-player online roleplaying game, so it figures that a good percentage of these people are married males.
know this because some of my in-game friends and guildies are married men, which led me to experience what can happen when wives get mad at their husbands for the amount of time spent on the game.
There is a term for this: wife aggro.
“Aggro” is the game terminology for what happens when a bad guy focuses on you. If you pull aggro off another player, especially in a raid when that player is the main tank, odds are you are dead — and quickly dead at that. If you get too close to a bad guy non-player character, or NPC, you come within his “aggro range” and he attacks you.
Wife aggro is what happens when a married man plays the game so much that he ignores his husbandly or fatherly duties — chores, spending time with the wife and/or kids, etc.
One of my guildies can only participate in raids for a set amount of time, or else he gets major wife aggro. But he’s smart and manages it well, quitting the game when he needs to. He’s also a great dad, so that helps a lot.
But others ignore wife aggro, to their detriment.
There are documented cases of divorce. The cause? “World of Warcraft.”
Yes, people out there have had broken marriages because of an online game. Sad, but very true.
Conversely, there also are love stories spawned by the game. I know of a few people who were a couple before they got the game and play it together. I know a few others who have “met” in the game and then got together … and continued playing together.
But the bottom line is this: If you’re in a relationship, make sure the game is just something you do now and then. Keep it at the “hobby” level. Addiction of any kind, even to a very cool and fun game, and marriage, or any other relationship, just don’t go well together.
Unless you’re both happily addicted.
Then you just have to make sure your character doesn’t advance too much further or get too better geared than your loved one … or the aggro will strike!
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world of warcraft gold

Posted by JImmy at 03:38:28 | Permalink | No Comments »