studies

Those who worry that violent video games are dangerous for all youths may want to hear what researchers had to say in a recent journal from the American Psychological Association.

According to the Review of General Psychology, the Texas A&M researchers examined 118 teens and found violent video games are actually quite safe for most youths to play. The only youths who shouldn't play violent video games, researchers found, are those who tend to be "highly neurotic, less agreeable, and less conscientious." Those who didn't posses those personality traits were not adversely affected by … Read more

For some of us, calculus was a long time ago, but it sure would have been easier if Math Center Level 2 been around. It's a package of precalculus and calculus tools from Tvalx, a tongue-twisting name for a company that specializes in math software. It's mostly designed for math students, but it's also useful to teachers and anyone who wants to brush up on their calculus skills or who just needs a good scientific calculator.

Math Center Level 2 combines several tools in one download. The small main interface has nothing more than Program and Help … Read more

An updated study has found that when it comes to blocking Web sites used in efforts to trick people into installing malware, Internet Explorer has widened its lead over the four other most-used browsers.

NSS Labs, a product analysis company, issued a third installment of an ongoing study of how well browsers avert socially engineered attacks that try to exploit a person's trust with a Web address that actually installs and runs malware. The upshot: "Windows Internet Explorer 8 provided the best protection against socially engineered malware," stopping 85 percent of the attacks at 562 sites.

In … Read more

Long viewed as a male-dominated hobby, video games are increasingly attracting the interest of women--a trend that hasn't gone unnoticed by the video game industry.

In an attempt to learn more about how the growing number of social games resonate with women, Q Interactive and Engage Expo surveyed 700 women to see how they really feel.

The researchers found that about 54 percent of those surveyed play social games every day, but only 42 percent of respondents consider themselves "gamers." Just 7 percent of women say that they're "obsessed" with games.

Q Interactive also … Read more

A new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows a "dramatic" rise in the amount of time children and teens spend using entertainment media, "especially among minority youth." The study, "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-year-olds," only focused on recreational use of media, not homework, school-related online research, or reading books for school.

The report, which was released Wednesday, showed that 8- to 18-year-olds "devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day." That adds up to more than 53 … Read more

Got a case of information overload? You're not alone.

A study released Wednesday from the University of California, San Diego, reports that the average American consumes a whopping 34GB of data and 100,000 words of information per day.

Over the course of 2008, Americans as a group gobbled up 3.6 zettabytes of data. (In case you missed the definition of "zettabyte" in your daily data binging, that's a million million gigabytes.) For all you visual learners out there, the researchers helpfully point out that 3.6 zettabytes is equal to the "information in … Read more

A new report from global public relations firm Weber Shandwick has found that when it comes to Fortune 100 companies, they just don't get Twitter...not yet anyway.

According to the study (PDF), which looked at how the world's 100 top companies used Twitter between late August and early September, the companies have a grand total of 540 Twitter accounts owned by just 73 companies; 27 firms don't participate in the microblogging tool/social network. Some 76 percent of those 540 accounts weren't "updated often" and 52 percent were not actively engaged, as measured … Read more

Bible Study Pro bills itself as a comprehensive Bible resource, with multiple versions, commentary, and plenty of other features to help with Bible study. Unfortunately, we found that much of the program's content must be ordered on CDs; the content that actually comes with the download is negligible.

The program's interface is fairly sleek and is reminiscent of Microsoft Office 2007 products. Navigation is arranged in panes, with a tree hierarchy displaying each book and chapter of the King James Version (the only one included with the program). Another pane displays the content of the selected book, and … Read more

A study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has found that most microbloggers are updating their status with "mundane" messages.

Curiously, the Finnish institute chose to examine the also-ran microblogging platform Jaiku. In sifting through 400,000 messages on Jaiku, HIIT found that the most common messages users send out include the words "working," "home," "work," "lunch," and "sleeping."

"Microblogging works because of the total control users have over their postings, but it is a hobby that seems to require a significant investment of time which … Read more