November 21, 2012icel

video Slightly Frosted: Fast Internet, Gamers Doing Surgery

Icel and Rotoou host Slightly Frosted, a new technology and gaming news talk show.

This time we talk about Google Fiber launching, Kim Dotcom plans to provide free internet to New Zealand, and are gamers better at simulated surgery than medical residents.

Video Description

Video Transcription

Icel: Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Slightly Frosted, our new YouTube video cast. I am Icel and today hosting the panel with me is Roto. Hello.

Roto: Hey, Icel. How are you?

Icel: I’m fine. Thank you.

Roto: So, what are we talking about today?

Icel: We have two stories, or actually three stories to talk about. Two of them have something to do with fast Internet connection. One is the Google Fiber Project in the US and another is the Kim.com revolutionary New Zealand fiber connection.

Roto: Yes. I heard about it.

Icel: And the second story we’ll cover later is the new study that gamers may actually be better at simulated surgery than medical residents. The Google fiber project is not something new. We knew about it for about, I don’t know, three years?

Roto: Ah, yeah, about that much. They planned it for quite a while.

Icel: Yes. They had kind of a lottery between different towns in the US. Each town suggested itself to be part of the project and the first one to have been selected to receive Google fiber is Hanover Heights in Kansas. It will be done in two stages. The first is the infrastructure. Google will come and connect the houses from outside to the fiber line. Then, you can register and they will come to your house and set up the Internet and so forth.

Roto: Oh, yes. They have a nice video with the nice guy explaining everything.

Icel: Yes. Do you remember what the reported speeds are for this project, internet speeds?

Roto: They said 1 gigabit. The fiber is capable of delivering 1 gigabit but it’s probably going to be one megabit of Internet. I’m not too sure.

Icel: According to the Wikipedia article about the Google fiber, it’s indeed 1 gigabit, both up and down. If you look at the table, they have this division into “gigabit plus television” and “only gigabit,” then “free Internet.” Are they saying which ever pays them gets the full gigabit Internet but everybody gets 5 megabits of Internet for free?

Roto: That’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

Icel: It connects up to the other story about Kim.com. He says he wants to buy, himself, a new fiber optic cable from the US to New Zealand and get free Internet for everybody.

Roto: The only thing I can say is, “Dream on, man.”

Icel: He says he’s going to pay for that from the lawsuit that he is going to file against the federal government in the United States for all the wrong doings.

Roto: And Hollywood.

Icel: Yes. And Hollywood studios, for all the wrongdoing they did to him.

Roto: Yes. They shut down Megaupload, so they must pay millions of millions of dollars. How much does he expect to get from these lawsuits, I wonder?

Icel: First off, the transpacific cable will be 12,000, almost 13,000 kilometers in length.

Roto: Yes.

Icel: And it will only support up to 100 megabits by 2019. 75% of the homes in New Zealand will be connected. New Zealand already has a fiber-optic cable. This will be the second one to be deployed and there is a company that tried to do that and they spent $6 million on it but, apparently, it’s not enough.

Roto: Yes. They say they need about 400 or maybe even $500 million to do it and that seems about right. I mean, they tried to do it and failed. They couldn’t get funds from the government and they couldn’t get funds out of New Zealand and just crashed.

Icel: They will need to find $300 million of private angel funding to get moving with this project.

Roto: It also says he needs to invest $200 million of his own, so about $500 million was a right assumption and he won’t own the line, by the way.

Icel: I don’t think he intends to.

Roto: No. He won’t be able to because the United States will never let him set foot in the United States and be company owned.

Icel: As soon as you buy something in the US, they can arrest them, by US laws. That’s what they did with Mega Upload. He had several servers hosted there. Also people talked about in the comments to the article that the US could just cut off the line from their end. That’s not provided with Internet connection.

Roto: Yes.

Icel: So, that’s a problem.

Roto: Well, as I said before, he can keep dreaming because I don’t think that will happen in the near future. His whole basis for free Internet in New Zealand, for the private sector, is going to be even harder to do.

Icel: It’s basically a propaganda, to get other Internet companies to come and invest in New Zealand so that his case will be stronger against the US and New Zealand wouldn’t want to deport him to the US. So far, the court there deemed all action against and illegal, but in March, I think, there is an international hearing of his case and they may just decide to hand them over to the US for whatever reason, even if it’s illegal. There is a strong lobby of the entertainment industry to get him locked away.

Roto: Yes. I guess so. Well, I do hope he’ll succeed in whatever he’s trying to do but I just can’t see it happening in the near future. This is what the Internet is going to be in the future, free for the private sector and the government and the business sector will have to pay an amount to get a better Internet connection but, in the meantime, I just can’t see it happening.

Icel: So, Internet billionaire is going to jail and maybe he will start working on his medical degree there. Segue. This is your item. Go.

Roto: Okay. So, the second item we have today is the study that was conducted in UGM what? UTMB?

Icel: University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Roto: Okay. Yes. Yes. I thought it was University somewhere. Anyway, they claim that teenage gamers are better at simulated surgery than medical residents there that practice for several years, even. And, to be honest, I don’t see it surprising too much. I mean, look at the last studies about gamers being better than others in other aspects of gaming.

For example, there was a study about MMO players, which say they’re better in socializing and  sometimes much better at teamwork. And there is a study of people playing games, puzzle games, and even FPS games.

They have a better visual perception than others. They could just find every little detail, everything. So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that gamers can operate certain aspects of surgery better than surgeons.

Now, I have to say, it’s not the operation itself. It’s the mechanical units that they operate. Loads of surgical projects today are just using robots to do it. So, we’re talking about operating those robots, not actually taking a knife and cutting someone up. So, I find it…

Icel: Likely.

Roto: Pretty likely, yes, to be. I mean two things that make games better than anything in the real world is you play games for fun. So, anything you do for fun is probably going to teach you much more than something you just learn because you think it’s good for you. The second thing is that games are competitive and competition usually helps much more than competition and universities, where competition is more about grades or stuff like this.

Icel: No. But we’re talking about medical residents, not medical students. Medical residents do compete against each other, for the right to have a spot in the medical team in the surgical hospital.

Roto: Yes. But it’s not a competition that takes place every second during that. I mean, you’re not operating the robots just to compete with others. You do this to practice and get better and then compete somewhere else.

Icel: Yes. They are not graded on the actual surgical task. The competition is more broad. It’s in the general performance in all aspects of their medical residency.

Roto: What do you mean?

Icel: I mean that, unlike gamers, who compete in the specific tasks they’re presented, for example, in a specific match, medical residents are put against each other more broadly. They are being examined for every aspect of the work, from how they treat the patient, the social skills, their memory, a lot of things. It’s not the specific gaming task they are rewarded for.

Roto: Like I said, it’s less of a competition and more who you are, really, because they’re a certain kind of people who will be better surgeons or better doctors and it has nothing to do with operating the robot itself. It’s kind of a competition even for the medical residents, but for a gamer, being inside a game, it’s a competition for these kind of tasks.

So, I think, we’ll see in the near future many more articles like this or they’ll actually find gamers to be much better than people who mastered their kind of work and certain aspects of their work because [they’re] games, because they’re fun, because they’re competitive in because they make you look at certain things differently and they make you better at these kinds of things, just like MMOs gets you better social skills.

Icel: That’s kind of weird, actually.

Roto: No. I mean, for example, when you play WoW and you’re going into a dungeon or an instance or doing a Boss , in any MMO really, you can’t do it by yourself. You have to rely on your teammates. You have to give them power to do stuff and you have the assurance, you think you have the assurance that they’ll do their best. So, this reliance is much better than what you find in life, where people are competing with each other even when they need to work as a team. So, I find it very likely, as we said before, that this kind of thing is better for gamers.

For example, if we look at people who solve puzzles, they’ll be better in solving certain puzzles in work, even in software engineering where there is not a puzzle but a recursive algorithm and other things that you need to solve, like puzzles. There’ll be better at it.

Icel: There’s the famous case of the game “Fold It”, the gameification of the Fold@Home Project, which, in order to solve the structure of proteins, they have grid computing system making hundreds of thousands and millions of tests. They took some of the later stages of stuff the computer did and put it into a puzzle game called “Fold It” and asked people to try and solve how the protein folds. Then, they presented the findings at some convention and found out that a group of gamers managed to solve the problem of folding certain proteins a lot faster than professors that work at it all their lives.

Roto: And, in some cases, even better because there were some puzzles which gamers solved and only they solved it and the mystery that the professor was puzzled by for years, they just solved in this conference.

And they solved it and professors found it to be very reliable. I mean, they had changed some stuff to match how proteins really work but they helped solve some of these puzzles. It’s amazing. I think you’ll find gamers to be better in some aspects and I think that what we think about gamers nowadays is that they become violent and they become socially awkward and stuff are an exaggeration and some of them, not lies, but misconceptions about this whole thing.

Icel: Well, as gaming becomes more mainstream, these things will become less frequent, I guess, although some of these misconceptions and stereotypes are being made by people like politicians. You heard about the case of the state representative, a woman who claimed to be a state representative in the US, she was accused of playing World of Warcraft and they say that this disqualified her from running for state representative. That was their campaign.

Roto: Wow. No. I never heard of it and I think this is just wrong.

Icel: That’s all we can say, “It’s wrong.”

Roto: I’m baffled at this because the whole point of an MMO is the exact opposite. They’ll be great in these kinds of things, great leaders, some of them. Of course it helps.

Icel: At the very least, it doesn’t hinder her in any way, the fact that she plays games.

Roto: Yes. It doesn’t hinder you in any way. I agree completely. This is just silly.

Icel: Okay. And, at this note, we will end the show for now. Thank you very much for participating.

Roto: Thank you for having me.

Icel: And we will see our viewers next time.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com