Focus: Addiction: Video Game Use in the Treatment of Amblyopia: Weighing the Risks of Addiction

Video games have surged in popularity due to their entertainment factor and, with recent innovation, their use in health care. This review explores the dual facets of video games in treating vision impairment in amblyopia as well as their potential for overuse and addiction. Specifically, this review examines video game addiction from a biopsychosocial perspective and relates the addictive qualities of video games with their use as a therapeutic treatment for amblyopia. Current literature supports both the identification of video game addiction as a disease, as well as the therapeutic potential of video games in clinical trials. We show the need for clinicians to be aware of the dangers associated with video game overuse and the need for future studies to examine the risks associated with their health care benefits.     

Against Anonymity

In ‘New Threats to Academic Freedom’ 1 1 Minerva, F. . New Threats to Academic Freedom . Bioethics 2013 ; DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12066 .
Francesca Minerva argues that anonymity for the authors of controversial articles is a prerequisite for academic freedom in the Internet age. This argument draws its intellectual and emotional power from the author's account of the reaction to the on‐line publication of ‘ After‐birth abortion: why should the baby live?’ 2 2 Giubilini, A. & Minerva, F. . After‐birth Abortion. Why Should the Baby Live? J Med Ethics 2013 ; 39 : 261 – 263 .
– an article that provoked cascades of hostile postings and e‐mails. Reflecting on these events, Minerva proposes that publishers should offer the authors of controversial articles the option of publishing their articles anonymously. This response reviews the history of anonymous publication and concludes that its reintroduction in the Internet era would recreate problems similar to those that led print journals to abandon the practice: corruption of scholarly discourse by invective and hate speech, masked conflicts of interest, and a diminution of editorial accountability. It also contends that Minerva misreads the intent of the hostile e‐mails provoked by ‘After‐birth abortion,’ and that ethicists who publish controversial articles should take responsibility by dialoguing with their critics – even those whose critiques are emotionally charged and hostile.     

Performance Evaluation of WAP and Internet Protocols over W-CDMA Networks

This paper compares the performance of WAP 1.x to that of Internet protocols. We implement a WAP client and a WAP gateway based on the WAP version 1.1 and assess the overall response time to compare it to those of HTTP and TCP. We use a W-CDMA emulator to evaluate WAP 1.x performance in high-speed wireless networks such as 3G. The results show that all protocols have comparable performance (i.e., response time) except when transmitting large content sets (e.g., multimedia data files), in which case HTTP/TCP offers better performance than WAP 1.x. We also evaluate WAP specific functions such as the binary encoding of WAP headers and WML contents. While binary encoding is effective for small content sets, its effectiveness and performance are questionable for large content sets. Based on the results of our evaluation, we conclude that standard Internet protocols (i.e., HTTP/TCP) are suitable for high-speed wireless networks such as 3G.     

生命科学数据库BIOSIS Previews信息资源的查询

生命科学数据库BIOSIS Previews是科技人员有效地利用Internet网络查找国外生命科学信息的世界著名数据库。本文对如何利用BIOSIS Previews查询生命科学相关学术文献作了介绍。     

The economics of altruistic punishment and the maintenance of cooperation

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent findings suggest that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism maintaining cooperation among humans. We experimentally explore the boundaries of altruistic punishment to maintain cooperation by varying both the cost and the impact of punishment, using an exceptionally extensive subject pool. Our results show that cooperation is only maintained if conditions for altruistic punishment are relatively favourable: low cost for the punisher and high impact on the punished. Our results indicate that punishment is strongly governed by its cost-to-impact ratio and that its effect on cooperation can be pinned down to one single variable: the threshold level of free-riding that goes unpunished. Additionally, actual pay-offs are the lowest when altruistic punishment maintains cooperation, because the pay-off destroyed through punishment exceeds the gains from increased cooperation. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that punishment decisions come from an amalgam of emotional response and cognitive cost-impact analysis and suggest that altruistic punishment alone can hardly maintain cooperation under multi-level natural selection. Uncovering the workings of altruistic punishment as has been done here is important because it helps predicting under which conditions altruistic punishment is expected to maintain cooperation.     

Generalist genes and the Internet generation: etiology of learning abilities by web testing at age 10

A key translational issue for neuroscience is to understand how genes affect individual differences in brain function. Although it is reasonable to suppose that genetic effects on specific learning abilities, such as reading and mathematics, as well as general cognitive ability ( g ), will overlap very little, the counterintuitive finding emerging from multivariate genetic studies is that the same genes affect these diverse learning abilities: a Generalist Genes hypothesis. To conclusively test this hypothesis, we exploited the widespread access to inexpensive and fast Internet connections in the UK to assess 2541 pairs of 10-year-old twins for reading, mathematics and g , using a web-based test battery. Heritabilities were 0.38 for reading, 0.49 for mathematics and 0.44 for g . Multivariate genetic analysis showed substantial genetic correlations between learning abilities: 0.57 between reading and mathematics, 0.61 between reading and g , and 0.75 between mathematics and g , providing strong support for the Generalist Genes hypothesis. If genetic effects on cognition are so general, the effects of these genes on the brain are also likely to be general. In this way, generalist genes may prove invaluable in integrating top-down and bottom-up approaches to the systems biology of the brain.     

Too Lonely to Die Alone: Internet Suicide Pacts and Existential Suffering in Japan

Most striking in the recent rise of suicide in Japan are the increase in suicide among young Japanese and the emergence of Internet suicide pacts. An ethnography of suicide-related Web sites reveals a distinctive kind of existential suffering among visitors that is not reducible to categories of mental illness and raises questions regarding the meaning of an individual “choice” to die, when this occurs in the context of an intersubjective decision by a group of strangers, each of whom is too afraid to die alone. Anthropology’s recent turn to subjectivity enables analyses of individual suffering in society that provide a more nuanced approach to the apparent dichotomy between agency and structure and that connect the phenomenon of suicide in Japan to Japanese conceptions of selfhood and the afterlife. The absence of ikigai [the worth of living] among suicide Web site visitors and their view of suicide as a way of healing show, furthermore, that analyses of social suffering must be expanded to include questions of meaning and loss of meaning and, also, draw attention to Japanese conceptions of self in which relationality in all things, including the choice to die, is of utmost importance.

公共卫生大数据研究进展——生物信息的新领域

大数据时代的公共卫生面临新的机遇和挑战。为了推动公共卫生大数据的应用,准确把握其内涵,开发针对性的解决方案,达到改善人们健康状况的目的,基于此对公共卫生大数据的现状进行了分析和论证。研究表明:通过对多个不同来源公共卫生数据进行收集和整理,能够形成公共卫生大数据,通过深入挖掘和分析,能够获取重大疾病影响因素、流行病的传播规律等信息,帮助医疗卫生人员和相关机构进行预测和评估,以便采取有效的管理手段和措施,保护人民健康,减少医疗花费。发现通过同生物信息技术相结合,公共卫生数据的获取、管理、分析、安全和应用方面都会有很大的发展空间。认为计算机技术的进一步应用,针对性的大数据挖掘方法开发,以及新型公共卫生人才培养,是发展这一领域的关键因素。     

城乡交错带景感生态规划的基本思路与实现

传统城市规划方法多集中在城市用地、人口规模和交通优先等方面,而较少关注城市环境质量和环境福利。要构筑一个与未来居民生活品质相适应的城市形态,城市生态规划就必须考虑更多样化的数据基础和可获得性的技术,尤其是居民对这些规划的实际感受,合理和科学的规划需要综合分析城市生态系统,包括自然和人为因素。一个新的概念和理论"景感生态学"能够将城市规划蓝图与人类感知相耦合。景感生态规划理应包括人类对规划的各种感知需求,包括视觉、听觉、味觉、嗅觉和触觉等。本文秉承景感生态学的基本理论,以西集镇为执行案例,探索性地针对城乡交错带开展景感生态规划,以阐明将居民感觉信息融入生态规划过程的挑战性和重要性。     

Location Selection for Active Services

Active services are application-specified programs that are executed inside the network. The location where the active service is executed plays an important role. The dynamic behavior of networks requires that the selection of the most suitable location to instantiate a service is done at run time. To dynamically place an active service, information about the network (topology, bandwidth) and the application (type of the service) is necessary. This paper describes a method to dynamically search for available active service locations in the Internet. To be deployed in the current Internet, a solution is required to scale well to large networks, and to demand as little changes to the Internet as possible, especially not at lower network layers. Finally, the solution must be flexible and customizable to take application requirements into account. The proposed solution makes use of the routing path between two end systems. Active service locations that are located close to the routing path are then found via DNS queries. The evaluation shows that the application pays an overhead at start up time. For applications that can tolerate a start up delay, we show with three experiments using a video and an image application that the quality of the application can be increased by a dynamic placement of active services.