Yeah, that entire field is going to have a hard time proving correlation = causation. It's almost impossible to obtain hard evidence and any experimental data is hindered by too many confounding variables. It's impossible to isolate the variable that causes the behaviour (if we presume it is only one, even).
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer
Who Am I?
The research is complicated to be sure. The effects are not simple, and interact with the larger context within which the media exposure occurs.
This
is a nice introduction to the state of the research as of the mid 1980's. It focuses on the effects of television.
This article examines the relationship between exposure to violent TV and personality traits such as risk taking behavior.
This article from 2007 examines the effect of violence in television, movies, video games, cell phones, and on the Internet, and does a good job of summarizing recent theory.
A study from 2015. "Hundreds of scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of participants and a wide range of empirical methods have investigated the effects of exposure to violent media. The studies show that: In experimental studies, even brief exposure to media can cause desensitization to real‐world violence, increases in aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and decreases in empathy and helping behavior. Short‐term effects of media violence and basic psychological processes produce cumulative effects over time, as explained by well‐established theories and research and social, developmental, and cognitive processes. Indeed, habitual exposure to media violence produces relatively stable changes in personality traits, such as trait aggression."
Of course, the big problem with this research is explaining why, if media violence has negative effects, youth violence has declined over the years even while media violence has held steady or increased. The answer is that other factors are also important: socialization by parents and schools, economic effects, and cultural changes. Media is just one of many factors that affect youth behavior, but that doesn't mean it isn't an important one.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Oy.
On a field as heavily investigated as this one, single studies are not proper evidence for anything. A meta study like the last one is better but I remember that they often have problems with cherry-picking individual studies, negligible clinical relevance, conflicts of interest and the fact that their logical chains often bear no relevance to real-life scenarios. FWIW, this one is among these which raise questions.
We are definitively not in the same boat as with climate change and its denial, where the evidence is indeed overwhelmingly in favour of one side.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Who Am I?
Even that article isnt claiming that violent media has no effect, merely that the effects were over-hyped, which perhaps they were, I don't know. His critiques of meta-analyses are correct, but that's true of all meta-analyses of all topics in psychology. Unfortunately despite flaws in the way research is published, we have no choice but to rely on the published studies that we have, and what we have seems to indicated a modest but reliable effect of media violence on behavior.
Policy statements by professional or governmental organizations are an entirely different kettle of fish, and I will frankly acknowledge that I am not very familiar with them. I don't know what they claimed, and if they went beyond "Media violence is one of many factors, and not necessarily the strongest one" then they went too far. Policy statements are not peer reviewed, after all.
For what it's worth, I dont believe that we can justify censorship based on the research, although I think it would be a good thing if our national culture didn't glorify violence so much.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Undulatory Swimming in Sand: Subsurface Locomotion of the Sandfish Lizard. Apparently it is physically possible for an animal to "swim" through sand.
Who Am I?
Maud'dib!
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Shai'halud!
In the name of being honest
Wow I bookmarked this and forgot to come back to read it
Cryo–electron microscopy breaks the atomic resolution barrier at last.
“This is just amazing,” says Melanie Ohi, a cryo-EM expert at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “To see this level of detail, it’s just beautiful.” Because the heightened resolution reveals exactly how complex cellular machines carry out their jobs, improvements in cryo-EM should yield countless new insights into biology.
To map protein structures, scientists have been using x-ray crystallography since the late 1950s. By bombarding crystallized proteins with x-rays and analyzing the way the x-rays ricochet off, scientists can work out a protein’s likely makeup and shape. Decades of improvements to the x-ray beams, detectors, and computer power have made the approach fast and accurate. But the approach doesn’t work well when proteins are exceptionally large, work in complexes such as the ribosome, or can’t be crystallized, as is the case with many proteins that sit in cell membranes.
In contrast, researchers using cryo-EM fire electrons at copies of frozen proteins that need not be crystallized; detectors record the electrons’ deflections, and sophisticated software stitches the images together to work out the proteins’ makeup and shape. Researchers in Japan had previously shown they could narrow the resolution to 1.54 angstroms—not quite reaching the point where they could distinguish individual atoms—in a gut protein called apoferritin, which binds and stores iron. Now, with the help of improvements in electron beam technology, detectors, and software, two groups of researchers—from the United Kingdom and Germany—have narrowed that to 1.25 angstroms or better, sharp enough to work out the position of individual atoms, they report today in Nature.
The enhanced resolution could accelerate a shift to cryo-EM already underway among structural biologists. For now, the technique only works with proteins that are unusually rigid. Next, researchers will strive to achieve similar sharp resolution with less rigid, large protein complexes, such as the spliceosome, a large complex of proteins and RNA molecules that cuts out “introns” from RNA destined to be converted into proteins.
Who Am I?
"Because the heightened resolution reveals exactly how complex cellular machines carry out their jobs, improvements in cryo-EM should yield countless new insights into biology."
Nice.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
In which scientists postulate that Acroporal corals developed climate modification techniques.
In the name of being honest
Not sure where to ask, but anyone knows good visual resources on Arctic sea ice coverage throughout the year?
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
A Self-inflicted Disaster
Would this work? It's from NASA. Though, someone else might find some better infographics
In which a scientist argues that life on other worlds would look suspiciously similar to Earth life mainly because evolutionary processes are governed by the same laws of nature. I've seen similar discussions about why we have 20 protein-forming amino acids and why exactly these 20 protein-forming amino acids ended up being the 20 protein-forming amino acids.
Lost in Space
It's an argument. That's about all I'll say there. I am taking an agnostic position on the nature of extraterrestrial life because no matter how we wrangle the statistics, we can't draw any conclusions from a sample size of one.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Who Am I?
I admit that bio-chemistry completely confuses me, but I know that simple organic molecules are found in space, so I think it's a reasonable assumption that any life in the universe would be related to those.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Given the same general starting conditions, perhaps. Temperatures, pressures, concentrations of starting materials, limiting reagents are liable to be quite different on different planets, though, which very much affects any chemistry. And, while there are definitely reasons carbon/organic seems a good system to base life around (such as versatility), it's not necessarily the only such system that might arise, given very different conditions.
Professional Forum Ninja
The prototypical example being nitrogenase, which has never managed to evolve into an oxygen-tolerant form and whose absence in plants is a nuisance in agriculture.
eta: Regarding my preceding post, as noted here it is also possible that the amino acid code arose by chance.
Edited by SeptimusHeap on Feb 26th 2021 at 9:55:09 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
A Self-inflicted Disaster
The American Physical Society will not have academic conferences in cities with a record of racist policing. The APS will consider whether the city has measures to prevent police brutality when choosing venues for their events.
Who Am I?
I just found out that they created bacteria that utilize two additional synthetic DNA bases (natural DNA only contains 4), that result in significantly larger number of potential amino acids within cells. Fascinating.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
'Space hurricane' in Earth's upper atmosphere discovered. I dunno however whether the "hurricane" analogy is a good one, though.
Who Am I?
An "electron storm" sounds like something out of the MCU.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Redmess
Man, everyone is talking about that snail, aren't they?
Optimism is a duty.
"Solid" is a pretty euphemistic term, given how contentious most of the research on the matter is. And while I don't normally put a lot of faith in US courts, the fact that some of them have found it questionable enough to throw out child protection laws (Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association) certainly does not vouch for its credibility.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman