Which way is up? the way people hold the control for video games varies. Which way is up? the way people hold the control for video games varies. Why do some gamers invert their controls? Scientists now have answers, but they're not what you think F ive years ago, on the verge of the first Covid lockdown, I wrote an article asking what seemed to be an extremely niche question: why do some people invert their controls when playing 3D games? A majority of players push down on the controller to make their onscreen character look down, and up to make them look up.

Beneath an old Queenslander on the south side of the Brisbane River, beside a garage with a hand-painted sign that reads "recording" and above a computer in a cluttered spare room, is a Post-it note. The home – "not unlike Bluey's" – belongs to Bryce Corbett and doubles as an unofficial headquarters of the children's news podcast he founded and co-presents, Squiz Kids. Daily episodes tackle a headline story – like South Australia's proposal to ban children from social media – covered to inform, but not frighten, kids. The coating: a bit of fun science, pop culture and, of course, animal stories – the alligator that came to school, the world's funniest crab joke. Corbett's chat, too, is professional yet upbeat.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. There's nothing like a nostalgic song to transport you back to a special time and place -- and now a new study has shown that music could help protect those memories for a lifetime. Researchers at the University of Exeter discovered that people who "engage in music" over the course of their lives tend to have improved memory and better overall brain health as they age, according to a press release. The findings were published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active area of research in modern linguistics and cognitive science. We can view current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a spectrum, from being fully arbitrarily determined to being largely semantically determined. For the latter case, there is a formulation of the neo-Whorfian hypothesis, which claims that even inanimate noun gender influences how people conceive of and talk about objects (using the choice of adjective used to modify inanimate nouns as a proxy for meaning). We offer a novel, causal graphical model that jointly represents the interactions between a noun's grammatical gender, its meaning, and adjective choice. In accordance with past results, we find a relationship between the gender of nouns and the adjectives which modify them. However, when we control for the meaning of the noun, we find that grammatical gender has a near-zero effect on adjective choice, thereby calling the neo-Whorfian hypothesis into question.

Corbett, in making Cree#, wanted to go beyond replacing English keywords (commands like "let" and "print") with Cree keywords in a static list. For one thing, Cree is a morphemic language and he wanted Cree#'s signifiers to hold programmatic meaning at the syllabic level, which is highly unusual in programming languages. To program in Cree#, we need to understand not only Cree linguistics but also its cultural logic. To declare a variable (which can be thought of as a storage location for data), one must put it in either a mînisiwat, a berry bag, or maskihkîwiwat, a medicine bag. If the variable is everyday or transient, it would go in the berry bag.

They'll be coming into your life -- at least your business life -- sooner than you think. Though its time horizon can't be predicted,artificial intelligence (AI) promises to foundationally influence modern society, for better or worse. A sub-genre of AI -- machine learning -- has garnered particular attention from the pundits for its potential impact on the world's most important industries. Due to the resulting hype, massive amounts of talent and resources are entering this space. But what is machine learning and why should we care about it in the first place?

It is one of the most contentious aspects of video game playing – a debate where opposing sides literally cannot see each other's perspective. When the Guardian ran an article asking why a large minority of game players invert the Y axis on their controls – meaning that they push their joypad's thumb stick down to move upwards on the screen – the response was huge. Hundreds of comments vociferously arguing why axis inversion was the only way to navigate a game world, and hundreds more incredulously arguing the opposite. The purpose of the article was to discover reasons for this dichotomy in visual perception. Was axis inversion just a habit picked up from playing flight simulators or did it point to fundamental differences in how people perceive themselves in virtual worlds?

Imagine you are playing a video game where you're looking out over an explorable world. You have a controller in your hand and you want your character to look or move upwards: in what direction do you push the joystick? If the answer is "up", you're in the majority – most players push up on a stick, or slide a mouse upwards, to instigate upward motion in a game. A significant minority of players start every new game they play by going into the options and selecting "Invert Y axis", which means when they push up on the stick, their onscreen avatar looks or moves downwards. To both sets of players, their own choice is logical and natural, and discussions about the subject can get quite fraught – as I found when I tweeted about it a few weeks ago. Is there anything definite that neuroscientists or psychologists can tell us about this schism?

Today's rapid pace of technological change has fundamentally transformed the global outsourcing scene, making outsourcing part of every successful company's strategy. Properly developed, strategic outsourcing substantially lowers costs, risks, and fixed investments while greatly expanding flexibility, innovative capabilities, and opportunities for creating higher value-added and shareholder returns. Traditionally, the main driving factor behind IT & BPO outsourcing was cost-reduction. But lately, apart from cost-reduction, global companies outsource to access knowledge, talent, innovation and expertise that is available and ready to be put into use. It's a knowledge economy, and in knowledge economies global companies gain access to global capabilities and access global knowledge with the aim to stay current, innovate or transform their companies.

Though its time horizon can't be predicted, artificial intelligence (AI) promises to foundationally influence modern society, for better or worse. A sub-genre of AI -- machine learning -- has garnered particular attention from the pundits for its potential impact on the world's most important industries. Due to the resulting hype, massive amounts of talent and resources are entering this space. But what is machine learning and why should we care about it in the first place? The answer is that, in the broadest sense, machine learning models are an application of AI in which algorithms independently predict outcomes.