8 NEWSFEED Updates & Upgrades
We’ve all heard that too much screen time is bad for teen brains, but a new study says that, comparatively, regularly eating potatoes has nearly the same negative effects as screen use. The study, led by the director of research at the University of Oxford, Andrew Przybylski, found only 0.4% of adolescent well-being is related to screen use (slightly surpassing the negative effects of eating too many spuds). Smoking marijuana and being bullied were found to have 2.7 times and 4.3 times more negative association with adolescent mental health than screen use. The study acknowledges current empirical evidence that regular use of digital technologies negatively impacts the psychological well-being of young people, but questions the secondary analysis of large-scale social data sets. Though these data sets provide a valuable resource for investigations, their main variables and observations are often explored with a flexibility that marks small effects as statistically significant, leading to potential false positives and conflicting results. Professor Przybylski addresses these methodological challenges in the study by using information from other questions across three data sets to put the statistical findings on screen use into context. This method of analysis aims to remove bias by examining practical significance (as opposed to statistical significance). “Even when using the same data sets, each researcher brings different biases with them and analyses the data differently,” says Amy Orben, lecturer at University of Oxford and author of the study. “Of the three data sets we analysed, we found over 600 million ways to analyse the data. We calculated a large sample of these and found you could come up with a large range of positive or negative associations between technology and well-being – or no effect at all.” Przybylski says: “Bias and selective reporting of results is endemic to social and biological research influencing the screen time debate. We need to put these findings in context for parents and policymakers.” SCREENS ARE NOT BAD FOR YOU, NOR ARE POTATOES
5G GETS CLOSER
Qualcomm announced a new 5G modem – called Snapdragon X55 – and antenna ahead of the Mobile World Congress, which may help accelerate the roll-out of 5G. The Snapdragon X55 is Qualcomm’s second-generation 5G modem. While the first-generation X50 was integral to major 5G trials or launches, Qualcomm hopes the X55 will accelerate the roll-out of 5G on commercial devices, such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, connected cars, etc. The X55 is a seven-nanometre single chip that supports both full mmWave and the spectrum between LTE and mmWave. This gives the X55 an advantage: it can fall back on 4G connectivity. Qualcomm says this will help initial 5G deployments, allowing more sites to go up in a shorter time, as telcos will be able to merge existing 4G with the 5G spectrum. The mmWave set-up will enable the X55 to achieve download speeds
capable of up to 7Gbps and 3Gbps for upload. Of course, a modem can’t do all this without an antenna, so Qualcomm has also launched a new 5G mmWave antenna module alongside the seven-nanometre chip: the QTM525. Qualcomm’s vision is that, once the full mmWave spectrum is established, the Snapdragon X55 will be able to facilitate 8K 60fps VR video streaming and video editing with split processing between cloud and local hardware, as well as multi-person video chats with real-time voice translation and synthesis.
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