Dynamic Journal

Study shows losers are more likely to harass women online

A new study suggests that people who lose in online games are more likely to harass women.

Written by a pair of researchers from the University of New South Wales and Miami University of Ohio and published by the Public Library of Science, the study investigated player communication during 126 Halo 3 matches.

Dividing matches into three groups, the researchers would either stay silent, or play recorded statements like "good game everyone" in male and female voices.

The researchers tracked responses from players, comparing their tones against wins/losses, skill rankings, and kill/death ratios.

Not only did the "female" players receive more negativity than their male counterparts, but that negativity scaled up the less skill the commenting player had.

The conclusion is that those players who perform poorly are more likely to harass female players, while their harassment of male players remains about level.

The results would seem to confirm suspicions that harassment of women online is at least in part due to perceived disruption of "male" spaces – sore losers can't handle being beaten by women.

'Ragtime' Author E.L. Doctorow Dies in New York at 84

NEW YORK — Few minds were as playful and as serious as E.L. Doctorow's.

Conjurer of old-time gangsters and ragtime stars. Commentator on wars and presidents and the laws of the land. Student of political and literary history and how they tell us who we are now.

Doctorow, who died Tuesday at age 84, was the rare American writer to move gracefully between lives as engaged citizen and solitary inventor.

"Underlying everything — the evocative flashes, the dogged working of language — is the writer's belief in the story as a system of knowledge," he wrote in the introduction to his essay collection "Creationists," published in 2006. "This belief is akin to the scientist's faith in the scientific method as a way to truth."

Doctorow was among the most honored authors of the past 40 years. His prizes included the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle award and both competitive and honorary National Book Awards.

He forged his reputation around a series of novels — most set in and around New York City — that carried readers from the 1800s to modern times. Mixing fictional characters with historical figures, he looked back to the Civil War ("The March"), the post-Civil War era ("The Waterworks"), the turn of the 20th century (the million-selling "Ragtime"), the 1930s ("Billy Bathgate," ''Loon Lake," ''World's Fair") and the Cold War ("The Book of Daniel").

"I don't know what I set out to do," Doctorow told The Associated Press in 2006. "Someone pointed out to me a couple of years ago that you could line them up and in effect now with this book, 150 years of American history. ... And this was entirely unplanned."

A balding man with a soft goatee and impish expression, Doctorow was little known to the general public before age 40, but by late middle age was not just a popular author but a kind of wise man and liberal conscience. He might write an open letter to then-President George H.W. Bush and urge him not go to war against Iraq or, to some boos, criticize the second President Bush and second Iraq War in a commencement speech at Hofstra University on Long Island.

Crazy pictures from Japan show a nearly 60ft tall life-size RX-78-2 Gundam robot. Word so far is that the rocket packs are NOT operable. What a relief.