Items tagged with Study
If you have ever been harassed while playing an online game, you are far from alone. That is not to say that this revelation will come as any consolation, but according to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a not-for-profit civil rights organization, harassment in online games is disturbingly prevalent. In a study that ADL says is a first of its kind, of the more than 1,000 respondents between the ages of 18 and 45 years old who play online multiplayer games, 74 percent said they experienced some form of harassment. Around two-thirds (65 percent) of respondents reported being the recipient of severe harassment, which includes things like physical threats, stalking, and sustained...
Read more...
We all know that Google gathers a plethora of data on us as we surf the web and stay logged into Google accounts. You might think that Chrome's incognito mode allows you to surf the web anonymously where Google isn't tweaking results of your searches based on what it knows about you, but you would be wrong. You might even think that if you don't log into your Google account, you are anonymous; again that isn't the case according to a recent study. DuckDuckGo, a search company that competes with Google, conducted the study, and it aimed to see just how big of an issue Google's so-called "Filter bubble" is. The company describes Filter Bubble as the manipulation of your search results based on...
Read more...
If Hasbro had any sense, it would an iPhone game piece to the board game Monopoly, and dip it in gold so that it stands out among the others. After all, owning an iPhone is top indicator of wealth, right? Right!? Hey, don't shoot the messenger, we're just passing along what the National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago came up with in a new study. "Knowing whether someone owns an iPad in 2016 allows us to guess correctly whether the person is in the top or bottom income quartile 69 percent of the time," the study states. "Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016." If you want some context for...
Read more...
Creature comforts inside automobiles are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with a larger emphasis placed on the infotainment system. However, drivers should use caution when fiddling around with in-vehicle electronics. There have been numerous reports and studies of the ill effects of distracted driving, and it is no longer mostly relegated to texting. New research commissioned by the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety underscores what previous studies have already indicated—that distracted driving is a growing problem. The study points out that it can take around 40 seconds to program a car's navigation system. In a vehicle that is traveling at a speed of just 25...
Read more...
It's hard for many of us to trust the studies that seem to come out on a daily basis covering a variety of topics. You can find studies on the same subject that come down on completely different sides of the topic depending on who funded them. You might expect a study commissioned by the European Commission (EC) to be made public no matter what the results were, but that certainly wasn't the case with an EC study conducted back in 2015 looking into a link between digital piracy and the decline in legal sales. Why was the report unpublished to the public for two years? The reason is simple: The study found no link between illegal downloads and a reduction in legitimate purchases of digital goods...
Read more...
It's a funny thing, I've killed more people over the years than I care to remember. Some of them I shot down in the streets because they were invading my turf, and others I ran over with a car—it's hard to avoid plowing through pedestrians when driving on the sidewalk. Of course, all of this happened in a virtual landscape, and not once did I feel compelled to repeat my heinous actions in the real world. That's weird, because study have study have shown that in-game violence leads to real-world crimes. So, what gives? As absolutely shocking as this may sound, the studies were wrong. We'll give you a moment to pick your jaw up off the floor. Now brace yourself before reading further. Ready for...
Read more...
You wouldn't know it by the way people with smartphones tend to ignore their physical surroundings in favor of whatever is on their digital screens, but use of social media apps is down. That's according to market research firm SimilarWeb, which compared data on Android apps over a yearlong period. What the study found was that in almost all countries, Android users are spending less time on all four major social media apps, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. In some territories, the drop was significant. That was the case for Twitter usage in France, which dropped from an average of 19.8 minutes per day in the first quarter of 2015 to 13.12 minutes in the first quarter of...
Read more...
Today's video games can cost more to make than a blockbuster movie. The level of graphical detail is pretty amazing in some cases, and when you throw in ambient sound effects and an engaging storyline, it's easy to be sucked into a virtual world. It shouldn't really be surprising, then, that college students enjoy being scared by horror games, according to a recent study.What's perhaps eye opening, however, is that researchers in the U.S. found that playing games scares people more than watching movies. That's based on the findings of assistant professor Nicole Martins and student Teresa Lynch from Indiana University. The duo surveyed 269 college kids with questions about their experiences playing...
Read more...
We always knew that watching videos of cats was good for a few laughs, hence why so many of our work days are interrupted by having to watching "just one more clip." If that sounds familiar, don't beat yourself up over it -- a new study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior suggests that watching videos of cats may also be good for your health. The study pinged nearly 7,000 people and asked them how viewing cat videos affected their moods. Of those surveyed, over a third (36 percent) described themselves as a "cat person" and nearly two-thirds (60 percent) said they have an affinity for both dogs and cats. Survey subjects noted less tendencies towards feeling anxious, sad, or annoyed after...
Read more...
Consider it an unfortunate sign of the times we live in that companies have to set aside enormous funds to contend with the cost of cyber related crimes. We're not talking chump change here -- according to a study by security firm Ponemon Institute that was funded by International Business Machines, the average cost of a data breach is now $3.8 million. That's up from $3.5 million a year ago and includes fees for investigating the breach, hiring experts to fix whatever security issue the hackers exploited, offering credit monitoring services for affected customers, and so forth. It adds up fast and shows why cyber crimes aren't just annoying, but a financial burden in many cases. What's not included...
Read more...
At this point, the resetting of a mobile phone to a from-the-factory state is something we have all done, perhaps simply to get a fresh start with a device that has become sluggish and over-burdened with years of downloaded flotsam. But more likely, we do it for the purpose of selling the phone or passing it along to a friend or family member. We rely on such a reset to completely wipe the phone of any trace of our having used it, all settings and sensitive data. The results of a study performed in the UK by University of Cambridge researchers entitled Security Analysis of Android Factory Resets, however, now show that emails, text messages, Google access tokens and other...
Read more...
For whatever reason, there are certain songs that, once heard, tend to play over and over again in your head. It's quite annoying, and try as you might, there's no easy way to purge the unwanted tune from memory, or so we've always thought. Well, guess what? Not only is it possible to get one of these so called "earworms" to wiggle on out, it's as simple as chewing on a stick of gum. So says a new study on the subject conducted by researchers at the University of Reading's Centre for Cognition Research and School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences. What the study found was that chewing on gum interferes with articulatory motor programming. In doing so, the number of unwanted musical...
Read more...
It's said that a single bad apple can ruin the whole bunch, but Internet trolls are even worse. They not only ruin what could have been an engaging discussion on an interesting topic with intelligent individuals, but they often manage to go undetected until that moment when all hell breaks loose. And then the ban hammer drops, sometimes taking out good members who got caught up in a flame war. Turns out this doesn't have to be the case. Researchers from Stanford University and Cornell University studied online discussions from news site CNN, political site Breitbart, and gaming site IGN spanning 18 months, 1.7 million users, and nearly 40 million posts with more...
Read more...
By now it's been beaten into all of our heads that text messaging or otherwise farting around on a mobile phone while driving is a bad idea. Study after study shows that bad things are prone to happen when we take our eyes off the road and fixate them on our phones or other objects, but according to research by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the problem is worse than previously thought. Far worse. In what's being billed as the most comprehensive research ever conducted into crash videos of teen drivers, it was found that distraction as a whole was a factor in nearly 6 out of 10 moderate-to-severe accidents. That's about four times as many as previously thought based on information obtained...
Read more...
If you grew up watching The Jetsons like I did, you might have thought we'd all be commuting in flying cars by now. We're still a long ways from that kind of technology, though in its place are self-driving cars like the ones Google has been experimenting with. According to a new study, it won't be all that long before autonomous vehicles become a part of everyday life. Not only that, but we'll have lots of reasons to kick back and sing "Everything is Awesome" as our self-driving cars whiz through traffic and deliver us all to our destinations safely and more efficiently than we're currently able to do in our manually driving vehicles. The study, which was released today by McKinsey & Company,...
Read more...
New research from the University of Missouri has found that iPhone separation can have "serious psychological and physiological effects," with participants showing poor performance on cognitive tests when not in possession of their Apple device. However, the way the study was conducted, it may not be the actual separation from an iPhone that affects people, but the inability to answer a ringing device. "Our findings suggest that iPhone separation can negatively impact performance on mental tasks," Russell Clayton, a doctoral candidate at the MU School of Journalism and lead author of the study, said. "Additionally, the results from our study suggest that iPhones are capable of becoming an extension...
Read more...
Here's a not-so-fun fact for your Friday workday -- there are 9 incidents per million users per day involving "manual hijacking," which is when professional attackers spend considerable time exploiting a single victim's account, often causing financial losses, Google says. Though they're not the most prominent types of attack, they're often severe in nature. This is one of the things that Google monitors, and by studying this type of hacker, the company has been able to improve its defenses against not only manual hijacks, but all kinds of hijacking. According to Google, it's been able to reduce overall hijackings by more than 99 percent over the last few years. Nevertheless, if a professional...
Read more...
Give a kid a pack of Oreo cookies and he'll feast for a few minutes. But offer the same kid an iPad for his stash of sweets and he'll gladly make that trade, spending the next several hours staring and tapping at a brightly lit LCD screen. We know this because the iPad is now the No. 1 brand among children ages 6-12, according to findings from the 2014 Young Love study, the nation's largest survey of brands among youth and families. The annual study ranks more than 250 brands each year and includes heavy-hitting names like McDonald's, Toys"R"Us, Nickelodeon, Disney, Super Mario, Cartoon Network, KitKat, M&Ms, and several others. Many of the ones that made it into the top 50 are candies or...
Read more...
It's not uncommon to pull up next to a car that's been driving erratically only to find that the driver is distracted with a smartphone. Hey, it's a sign of the times we live in, and while banning the use of handheld electronics while driving is one solution, hands-free operation is emerging as a compromise. Unfortunately, studies are finding that talking to your car may not be a safer alternative. In fact, there are at least two recent studies that suggest the problem of distracted driving is even worse when using voice-activated smartphones and dashboard infotainment systems, the Associated Press reports. While such systems allow drivers to keep their eyes on the road while making calls and...
Read more...
Still find yourself pissed off at Facebook for potentially messing with your head when it experimented on 700,000 users without their consent? Hey, it's all good, brother -- Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer posted a set of new guidelines that will help the world's largest social network do a better job at monkeying around with your brain. Honest. Are you lost? Let's back up a moment. Facebook published a paper this past summer revealing that it ran an "emotional contagion" experiment on hundreds of thousands of Facebook users without their knowledge or consent. In plain English, Facebook altered the feeds of certain users to contain fewer positive posts and more negative content, and vice versa....
Read more...
If you or your spouse spend a lot of time on Facebook, it can be pretty scary to see a study suggest there's a correlation between heavy Facebook use and divorce. However, it's important to note the distinction between "correlation" and "causation," which is to say that spending an inordinate amount of time on Facebook or any other social network won't necessarily drive your marriage into the dumps. The study appears in the July 2014 edition of Computers in Human Behavior, and in it, the researchers looked at the rise of Facebook use and the rate of divorce on a state-by-state basis. What they found was that a 20 percent increase in the number of Facebook users in a given stated is linked to...
Read more...
Let's not tread lightly here, we all know how the stereotypical video gamer is portrayed on TV, and perhaps in our own minds sometimes as well -- overweight, anti-social, hyperactive (especially on chat), lazy, living in their parents' basement, and the unflattering list goes on. Just reference the "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode of South Park to see several of those traits played out. It's amusing (the episode, that is), but are gamers getting a bad rap? Most definitely yes, a new survey reveals. First, let's talk about age and sex (as in gender). According to a study called "The New Face of Gamers" (PDF) by Lifecourse Associates commissioned by Twitch, the typical gamer is 31 years old and...
Read more...
