Pass the Doritos, Scientists Develop Computer Game Targeted At Healthy Choices 81
MojoKid writes: Psychologists at the University of Exeter and Cardiff University have published a study that demonstrates how a simple computer game can help people lose weight. Participants in the study who played the specialized game lost and average of 1.5 pounds in the first seven days, and 4.5 pounds after six months. They also reduced their daily caloric consumption by 220 calories. Dr. Natalia Lawrence led the team of researchers that developed the computer game for the study. It was designed to train people to resist unhealthy food snack foods through a "stop versus go" process. Participants sat in front of a Pentium 3 PC running Matlab software on a 17-inch monitor. They were then instructed to press certain keys when images of things like fruits and clothes would appear, indicating a "go." But for images of calorie-dense foods (chips and cake, for example) they were instructed not to do anything, indicating a "stop" action.
Redundant (Score:5, Funny)
I believe we already had that game. I distinctly remember, the cake is a lie.
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No, no, you squat to *un*load! Sheesh!
Ugh... (Score:4, Funny)
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It makes me so depressed... I'm going to get a big dish of ice cream.
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What is worse is that they think it is a good idea to train people like animals. I mean, yeah, we *are* animals but I thought we were sort of moving past the idea of training them in some circles? Next they will want to chain us up and make us do work like elephants or programmers or something.
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"that and the needed hardware exists in a modern home"
dunno, I am a old computer nerd and I would have to dig to find a windows 98 box
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I dunno either, but my main home server is a PIII, running primary dns, dhcp, smtp and a few other services, and average load in the 0.01 range. It's been running pretty much non-stop since 2003.
There's really no need to upgrade just to upgrade, if the box can do its job without breaking a sweat and can be kept patched up to date.
If PIII machines were available and could run the software, why not?
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You could probably replace your old P3 by a Raspberry Pi and lower the power required for your server a hundredfold. And with the power required by a P3 and the cost of the Raspberry Pi, it would probably only take a few months to pay for itself.
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I don't think you're aware of just how power frugal the PIII is. The TDP is 27.9W, which is far less than most laptop CPUs burn these days. And given that the average load is in the 0.01 range, it uses far less. It has run fanless since 2003. Energy is not the issue here.
But a point is the reliability of larger die fabs. Can a Raspberry Pi be reasonably expected to run for 10+ years?
Also, the Pi comes with a single 10/100 Ethernet port, running on a CPU-bottlenecked USB 2.0 bus. Just dealing with a no
What's in a name? (Score:4, Funny)
Why is it called "Pass the Doritos"?
Because "Spot the Fruit" would have been misunderstood.
Calories? (Score:2)
How many calories in a pound of cotton?
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How many calories in a pound of cotton?
In a pound I do not know, but in 100g I would say around 500 kcal that a human cannot absorb.
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The conversion factor used in determining the caloric value of foods (from its constituent parts) was determined by drying them out, putting them in a little furnace and setting them on fire. I only wish I were making this up. But it just made me think, if you set the cotton on fire... etc etc
Best video game for losing weight is ... (Score:3)
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Clearly, you've never watched me play video games. My wife says watching me play makes her tired.
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"Moving" does not trigger any kind of fat loss. Only stimulating lipolysis [nih.gov] can.
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You've never experienced the touch of a woman other than your mother, have you?
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Happily married for over thirty years. Two of my three daughters graduated from college with STEM degrees (third daughter has a BA degree). All are working full time. Sorry your prejudices don't fit me, but this is a poorly written article about a psychology student's non-scientific experiment.
Being married and having children does not prevent you from being a right wing misogynist, which the use of "SJW" in your original post indicates is the case.
That's nuthin (Score:2)
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"I typically gain 20 lbs over the winter, then lose it over the summer"
I spose it depends where you live.
" plus rain and crappy weather."
Here it doesn't rain in the winter, its too cold for that.
I'd much rather be outside in the winter time, with a temperature of below 255K than in the summer when its above 300 and 100% humidity
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You get 100% humidity, eh? You swim to work?
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It sure feels like it, only the water is body temperature or above.
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Want faster weight loss add an electric shock to the game ie munching game, eat the healthy food and avoid the bad food, accidentally eat the bad food and not only lose points but get an electric shock. Where you attack those electrodes, your choice but repeated painful negative reinforcement will guarantee pretty fast weight loss and a healthier diet. Of course it might cause public problems if people start screaming when they walk past a cake shop.
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When I find the pounds creeping back on (like they have been recently), I use an app called MyFitnessPal to record the food I'm eating and watch my caloric intake. This keeps me honest and usually results in at least and average of 1 pound per week weight loss. Add in exercise - which MyFitnessPal also records - and it's even more. Over 6 months, I'd lose about 26 pounds, not the 4 or 5 that this game is claiming.
Put the game down, watch the food you're consuming, and get your body moving. You'll shed a
Scott Adams did it first: (Score:3)
Dilberito [metaurban.com] (archived copy)
Related blog post by Scott [dilbert.com]
Bacon GO/STOP? (Score:1)
How old is this 'news'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pentium 3? 17 inch monitor? How long ago did this happen?
News for nerds, stuff from last decade.
The numbers don't make sense (Score:2)
At 220 calories per day deficit over 6 months they would lose about 11 lbs of fat.
6*220*30/3500 = 11.3
At 220 calories deficit over 7 days, they would lose .4 lbs of fat.
220*7/3500 = .4
So the 1.5 lbs doesn't make sense (in reality they probably just depleted their glucose storage a little bit which lost a 1+ of water weight).
Worse than that actually... (Score:1)
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Dance Dance Revolution (Score:1)
If you play DDR every day, you'll lose a lot more than 4.5 pounds in 6 months.
Cheat code: (Score:2)
Eat the clothes and wear the fruit.
Link to the Original Study (Score:1)
OP links only to a popular article, which does not reference the original study. Here is the full text of Lawrence NS, Verbruggen F, Morrison S, Adams RC, Chambers CD (2015). Stopping to food can reduce intake. Effects of stimulus-specificity and individual differences in dietary restraint. Appetite, 85, 91-103.: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666314005194 [sciencedirect.com].
Yes, they used ancient equipment, without explaining why (although that would be irrelevant in a neuroscience paper). Perhaps a Ma
Oh, great... (Score:2)
Prior art (Score:1)
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When I'm twerking, I can get up to 1750 per hour. But let me tell you, it's not pretty.
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Twerking. I am old. I do not know what that is and I am not sure I want to Google it. I can not unsee things. I do know what DDR is. My daughter informed me. I am not going to ask her what twerking is. Well, I might if she is in front of a lot of her friends and it would embarrass her greatly. Payback and all that.
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My main source of knowing what "twerking" is comes from the Weird Al music video for Tacky (a parody of Pharrell Williams' Happy) when Jack Black "practices his twerking moves in line at the DMV." You are totally right about there being some things you just can't unsee.
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I have now been to Google and, well, I do not want to see Weird Al or Jack Black doing any twerking. I now have a strange urge to see Martha Stewart twerking, however. Having learned what it is and having thought about it, I should not ask my daughter what twerking is. However, if enough of her friends are around it is a fair question. ;)
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Let me help you out: No, you do not want to find out what twerking is from your daughter. :)
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Thank you. I have now gone to Google. It is nothing new it seems, we have been doing it for over 100 years. Then again, the vigor of youth has brought it to new levels.
Ummmmmm (Score:2)
If your funding is so bad that you can't afford anything newer than a P3 and a 17" CRT, I have to wonder just how good the research is that you do. Or maybe that you just don't understand how technology has changed.
I encountered the latter in my undergrad days. I was a psych major for a time, and as is tradition they force students to participate in experiments to get free subjects. So one of them was on Internet addiction. This was in the early 2000s, while broadband was not common it was not rare either a
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I've encountered things like this a number of additional times with psychology/sociology/behavioral researchers. Their grasp of computer technology is so poor that their studies are extremely flawed because they don't understand the tools they are using.
Yet the same people clamor about hiring practices in STEM fields, and study choices by women, without having any clear understanding how scince or technology work, themselves. Dunning-Kruger [wikipedia.org] at its finest.
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If your funding is so bad that you can't afford anything newer than a P3 and a 17" CRT, I have to wonder just how good the research is that you do. Or maybe that you just don't understand how technology has changed.
What difference would it make if you had the latest hi spec gaming machine and a couple of 36" flat screen monitors to play a simple yes/no game?
As a scientist in the field. (Score:2)
Paper is here. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.... [dropboxusercontent.com]
:
Lets mention a few things:
-Dr Lawrence has made here data available. That's something not enough people in this field have done, much to eve
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Pavlov would be proud... (Score:2)
Congratulations for rediscovering classical conditioning [wikipedia.org].
Games who's key point is not playing a game. (Score:2)
These are never good. In fact I think they can really not be called "games" as that sort of implies something someone does for entertainment.
More like "interactive social experiments". These are never fun, or entertaining, and rarely useful. I include all of the "games" where the goal is to make the player feel or think something.
I found a list of cheat codes (Score:2)
Hee hee.
Mmmm... Clothes... (Score:2)
It's great that I no longer want to eat chips and cake, but now I've got one hell of a craving to eat a cardigan sweater!