heres some thing that most of have known for a long time

Monty - the one and only

Media Violence Isn’t the Real Problem, Surgeon General Says
Violence in computer games and other media has little to do with making America’s youth more violent themselves.
That’s the unnoticed surprise conclusion of the recent report by the Office of the Surgeon-General on the causes of youth violence. The full text of the report, issued Jan. 17, was made publicly available on the web this week. While saying more research is needed, the report admits there is little current evidence to back claims that media violence is a notable factor in leading young people to commit crimes.

“Some studies suggest that long-term effects exist, and there are strong theoretical reasons that this is the case. But many questions remain,” the report concludes. Parents and educators should help children become more critical consumers of games and TV, the report says. But before trying to regulate the media, legislators should devote their efforts to encouraging the necessary research on what remains a poorly understood topic, it adds.

The report’s conclusions defy the expectations of media observers, who had said in advance of its release that this would be a turning point in the debate over the effects of violent media. A widely distributed article in the Los Angeles Times had claimed the report would instead find that “repeated exposure to violent entertainment during early childhood causes more aggressive behaviour throughout the child’s life.”

Although the Times said it based its conclusions on a draft of the actual report, it’s difficult to find anything in the final report that backs that statement up. Even the quote from the draft cited by the Times, “exposure to violent media plays an important causal role” does not appear to have made it into the final version.

Indeed, the report says, media violence apparently plays no role at all in late-onset violence (children whose record of violent crime begins in adolescence) and only a minor role in early-onset cases (children who start engaging in violent behavior toward others before the age of 11). Even in those cases, exposure to media violence is only rated the tenth most significant risk factor by the report, behind poor parenting and parents who are themselves violent, and far behind poverty, substance use and natural aggressive tendencies in determining which children eventually commit crimes. If violent media has any impact, in other words, it has its effect before a child reaches puberty.

Contrary to recent claims by leading medical and psychiatric associations, the report says there’s no solid evidence yet to base any conclusions about computer games on, at all. “Theoretically, the influence of these interactive media might well be greater than that of television and films, which present a passive form of exposure, but there are no studies to date of the effects of exposure to these types of media violence and violent behavior… The impact of video games on violent behaviour remains to be determined.”

The Times article’s other claim, that the report would say statistical evidence on the connection of real violence to media violence was as strong as lung cancer’s connection to smoking, is also absent in the final version.

Giving the media such a clean bill of health was likely a disappointment to anti-Hollywood advocates such as Kansas senator Sam Brownback. The Times had quoted him as saying this report would serve to push media producers to decrease the level of violence in games and films: instead it appears to only provide new ammunition for pro-Hollywood lobby groups like the Motion Picture Association. It’s unclear how a report that had been expected to be so critical would end up so different from what had been predicted in the press.

The report is the second major government study in a few months that downplays the role of violent media in making people commit crimes. Last fall the Federal Trade Commission released a report that also raised doubts about the conventional wisdom on this subject. This latest report, like the FTC study, was commissioned in the wake of the 1999 Columbine high school shootings.

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Blitzkrieger

common sense at last?

Excelsior

i doubt it.
i think you're gonna have to deal with nonsense claims that quake makes people violent as long as there are "concerned housewives". your only course of action to prevent this is train them all in computer science. then they might see things differently.
by that logic, i must be really boring for playing cm3 for so long.

Excelsior

and that is clearly wrong.

now back to matlab....