Does Internet and computer 'addiction' exist? Some case study evidence

It has been alleged that social pathologies are beginning to surface in cyberspace (i.e., technological addictions). To date, there is very little empirical evidence that computing activities (i.e., internet use, hacking, programming) are addictive. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the typical “addict” is a teenager, usually male, with little or no social life, and little or no self-confidence. This article concentrates on five case studies of excessive computer usage. It is argued that of the five cases, only two of them describe “addicted” subjects. Addiction components criteria were used in the assessment. The excessive usage in the majority of cases was purely symptomatic and was highlighted how the subjects used the Internet/computer to counteract other deficiencies

Aggressive behaviour in adult slot-machine gamblers: a qualitative observational study

Gambling is acknowledged to have many negative effects on the individual. However, from a psychological perspective, aggression as an outcome of gambling has been overlooked. This paper investigates the dynamics of the relationship between aggression and slot ma-chine gambling. A non-participation observation study observed a small group of aggressive individuals (n = 8; identified in a previous study) over a period of eight weeks. Four catego-ries of aggressive behaviour were confirmed from previous research (verbal aggression to-wards the gambling arcade staff; verbal aggression towards the slot machines; verbal aggres-sion towards other slot machine players; and physical aggression towards the slot ma-chines). From the in-depth observations, possible reasons motivating these types of aggres-sive behaviour are discussed. It is suggested that the frustration, guilt and embarrassment of losing are the prime causes of such aggression

Bayesian Inference for PCFGs via Markov Chain Monte Carlo

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Variations of Hodge Structure Considered as an Exterior Differential System: Old and New Results

This paper is a survey of the subject of variations of Hodge structure (VHS) considered as exterior differential systems (EDS). We review developments over the last twenty-six years, with an emphasis on some key examples. In the penultimate section we present some new results on the characteristic cohomology of a homogeneous Pfaffian system. In the last section we discuss how the integrability conditions of an EDS affect the expected dimension of an integral submanifold. The paper ends with some speculation on EDS and Hodge conjecture for Calabi-Yau manifolds

Extremal degenerations of polarized Hodge structures

We describe a Hodge theoretic approach to the question: In what ways can a smooth projective variety degenerate?Comment: v.2 (typos corrected), comments welcom

The attitudes, feelings and experiences of online gamers: a qualitative analysis

The playing of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) is now a highly popular leisure activity. The present study set out to explore the attitudes, experiences, and feelings of online gamers. The study entailed 71 interviews with online gamers (52 males, 19 females) from 11 different countries. Six main themes emerged from the analyses of the interview transcripts: (a) online gaming and integration into day-to-day lives; (b) online gaming, excessive play, and problems; (c) addiction; (d) psychosocial impact of online gaming; (e) online gaming, dissociation, and time loss; and (f) online gaming and the alleviation of negative feelings and mood states. These findings specifically showed how gamers used MMORPGs to alleviate negative feelings and provided detailed descriptions of personal problems that had arisen due to playing MMORPGs. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to previous qualitative and quantitative research in the area

Producing power-law distributions and damping word frequencies with two-stage language models

Standard statistical models of language fail to capture one of the most striking properties of natural languages: the power-law distribution in the frequencies of word tokens. We present a framework for developing statisticalmodels that can generically produce power laws, breaking generativemodels into two stages. The first stage, the generator, can be any standard probabilistic model, while the second stage, the adaptor, transforms the word frequencies of this model to provide a closer match to natural language. We show that two commonly used Bayesian models, the Dirichlet-multinomial model and the Dirichlet process, can be viewed as special cases of our framework. We discuss two stochastic processes-the Chinese restaurant process and its two-parameter generalization based on the Pitman-Yor process-that can be used as adaptors in our framework to produce power-law distributions over word frequencies. We show that these adaptors justify common estimation procedures based on logarithmic or inverse-power transformations of empirical frequencies. In addition, taking the Pitman-Yor Chinese restaurant process as an adaptor justifies the appearance of type frequencies in formal analyses of natural language and improves the performance of a model for unsupervised learning of morphology.48 page(s

Internet gambling: an overview of psychosocial impacts

Technological innovation has always played a role in the development of gambling behaviour, primarily through providing new market opportunities. Early prevalence studies of Intemet gambling in the UK, Canada and the US have shown that Intemet gambling is not a eause for concern at present. However, this seems likely to change as more people start to use the Internet for leisure activities. After a brief overview of gambling technologies and deregulation issues, this paper examines the impact of technology on gambling by highlighting salient factors in the rise of Intemet gambling (i.e., accessibility, affordability, anonymity, convenience, escape immersion/dissociation, disinhibition, event frequency, asociability, interactivity, and simulation). The paper also overviews some of the main social impacts surrounding Intemet gambling, such as protection of the vulnerable, Intemet gambling in the workplace, electronic cash, and unscrupulous operators. Recommendations for Internet gambling operators are also provided