Month: November 2023

Enlarge (credit: University of Arizona)

The hugely popular British quiz show Mastermind has been a fixture on BBC television since its debut in 1972, spawning multiple international versions as well as a video game and countless parodies. Now it has inspired researchers at the University of Arizona, Tucson, to use several recent seasons as a "real-world" lab to study physiological responses to stress, according to a new paper published in the journal Psychophysiology. The findings reaffirmed some prior conclusions of lab-based studies and contradicted others. The Arizona team also found that random variations in the time the host takes to ask different questions means that Mastermind is not perfectly "fair" when it comes to determining the winner.

Why a game show? According to the authors, it's because lab-based experiments in psychology have inherent limitations, in that it is simply too difficult to accurately reproduce complex human cognition in such a controlled setting—particularly when studying things like stress and cognition. "The stakes are too low, the tasks too simple, participants are often bored, and the equipment, such as MRI scanners, too cumbersome, making lab-based experiments a poor reflection of real-world cognition," the authors wrote.

A seminal 1927 study by Eric Ponder and W.P. Kennedy on whether blinking increases when people are under stress is an illustrative case. Ponder and Kennedy initially tried to prove this connection in a lab-based setting with participants hooked up to clunky, uncomfortable devices to measure blink frequency. But they only succeeded in generating the appropriate degree of stress in the test subjects once, when a frustrated participant became genuinely angry. They turned instead to surreptitiously measuring the blink frequency of witnesses under hostile cross-examination in a courtroom. That did the trick, confirming Ponder and Kennedy's hypothesis that blinking does indeed increase in stressful situations.

Enlarge / The OnePlus 11. (credit: OnePlus)

The release of Android 14 to the rest of the Android ecosystem is slowly happening. Today, OnePlus is joining the party, with the flagship OnePlus 11 getting the update. The company posted the news on its forum.

The update is first launching in India, OnePlus' biggest market, but there's no reason for other markets to not get the update quickly. Phone manufacturers like to roll out these new Android updates slowly, and for now, the "stable" release is opt-in via the beta program.

What will you be getting with your exciting new Android 14 update? Honestly, there's not a lot to care about here. OnePlus' OS is now so heavy that it paves over many of the Android 14 changes. A customizable lock screen was one of the few user-facing changes in Android 14, but OnePlus, which has its own lock screen, isn't offering that. You should still get the included performance improvements, a block for often-malicious old app updates, and one or two permission changes. The small update size is probably why companies are getting the new Android release out the door in record time this year. The OS was released 44 days ago, and Xiaomi, Samsung, and OnePlus have all started rolling it out.

Enlarge / Candy-coated color correction. (credit: Valve)

With the release of the Steam Deck OLED this week, Valve has greatly improved on the "ho-hum" screen that was our biggest complaint about the original Steam Deck. But Valve hasn't forgotten about users who are still stuck using that old LCD display. Thursday's stable release of SteamOS version 3.5.5 offers a suite of free, system-level updates to improve and tweak the display performance on the original Steam Deck.

The release notes for the new SteamOS boast of much-needed improvements to the "default color rendering" on the Steam Deck LCD, which should help the older hardware "emulate the sRGB color gamut, resulting in a slightly warmer and more vibrant color appearance," Valve writes. Even better, a new "adjust display colors" option in the settings menu now lets users easily adjust both the color vibrancy and color temperature to best fit their preferences and the games they're playing. Before the new update, these kinds of options were only available to users who went to the trouble of installing third-party plug-ins. Now, Valve has finally brought these basic adjustments to the Steam Deck-owning masses.

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  Native color vibrancy shows "the color rendering for Steam Deck prior to this update" [credit: Kyle Orland / Valve ]

The results, as you can see in the gallery of off-screen photos above, can have a dramatic impact on the look of in-game scenes. You can see a noticeable difference going from "Native" color vibrance (which Valve describes as "the color rendering for Steam Deck prior to this update") to the new "default" sRGB rendering. There's an even bigger change when you crank the vibrance slider all the way to "Boosted," which Valve says should "emulate a wider-gamut display appearance, resulting in increased apparent vibrance."

Enlarge (credit: Leon Neal / Staff | Getty Images Europe)

Outcry over antisemitic content on X (formerly Twitter) continues as the White House condemns a post from X owner Elon Musk and IBM halts advertising on the platform after a Media Matters report showed one of its ads was placed next to pro-Hitler content.

"IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination, and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation," an IBM spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ars.

Media Matters' report came a day after X owner Elon Musk sparked outrage by endorsing an X post that referenced an antisemitic conspiracy theory that “hordes of minorities” are flooding Western countries and claimed that Jews have been "pushing hatred" against White people. Since Musk responded to that post—saying, "you have said the actual truth"—it has been viewed more than 1 million times. The exchange drew so much controversy that a White House spokesperson, Andrew Bates, released a statement condemning Musk's post.

Enlarge / A baby with measles. (credit: CDC)

The World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are sounding the alarm over the global rise of measles cases, deaths, and outbreaks as vaccination rates struggle to recover from a crash during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between 2000 and 2019, estimated worldwide coverage of the first dose of a measles-containing vaccine rose from 72 percent to 86 percent. But amid the global public health crisis in 2020, the vaccination rate fell to 83 percent, and then to 81 percent in 2021—the lowest since 2008.

According to a new joint report by WHO and the CDC published this week, coverage of first-dose measles vaccines recovered slightly in 2022, rising to 83 percent. But of 194 WHO countries, only 65 (34 percent) reached a target vaccination rate of 95 percent or above for the first measles vaccine. Further, two doses are needed to stop the disease, and the estimated coverage rate for two doses was only 74 percent in 2022, up from 71 percent in 2021. Overall, the gains in vaccination weren't enough to prevent a comeback from the highly contagious and sometimes deadly virus.