Sony’s New Lip-Reading Technology Could Boost Accessibility—or Invade Privacy
The endowment effect occurs when people assign a higher value to an item they own thanto the same item when they do not own it. In a meta-analysis and three laboratory experiments, we show for the first time that ownership has no effect on beliefs about either: (a) the quality of the item or (b) the appropriate market price for the item.
Are couples with daughters more likely to divorce than couples with sons?
Law Firm Giving Away Free Divorce for Valentine’s Day
Sexual Practices and Satisfaction among Gay and Heterosexual Men in Romantic Relationships: A Comparison
Non-violent offenders serving time for drug use or possession should be freed immediately and their convictions erased, according to research published in the peer-reviewed The American Journal of Bioethics.
Previous research suggests that “Duchenne smiles,” indicated by the combined actions of the orbicularis oculi (cheek raiser) and the zygomaticus major muscles (lip corner puller), signal enjoyment. This research has compared perceptions of Duchenne smiles with non-Duchenne smiles among individuals voluntarily innervating or inhibiting the orbicularis oculi muscle. Here we used a novel set of highly controlled stimuli: photographs of patients taken before and after receiving botulinum toxin treatment for crow’s feet lines that selectively paralyzed the lateral orbicularis oculi muscle and removed visible lateral eye wrinkles, to test perception of smiles. Smiles in which the orbicularis muscle was active (prior to treatment) were rated as more felt, spontaneous, intense, and happier. Post treatment patients looked younger, although not more attractive.
Social cooling refers to the idea that if “you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.”
The Man Who Turned Credit-Card Points Into an Empire [NY Times]
Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, owns 7,002 Bitcoin [about $220 million] that he cannot retrieve because he lost the password to his digital wallet. He lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail. [NY Times]
A roundup of research on US presidential transitions
“Relative frequency of hashtags that call for execution by hanging”
NASA spacecraft discovers there may be fewer galaxies than we thought
Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming
Discovered within the last ten years, formicamycins have great potential because, under laboratory conditions, superbugs like MRSA do not become resistant to them. However, Streptomyces formicae only produce the antibiotics in small quantities.
Information abundance, like all markets of abundance, is bad for the average person but great for a small number of people
How did Zoroaster speak? What did he speak? When did he speak? There seems to be a lot of dissension, even among Iranists, concerning the basic facts of his life and times.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is an anti-stream of consciousness novel
Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks don’t notice when the words in a sentence are jumbled up, which shows that they don’t really understand language at all.
Stockfish evaluates about 100 million positions per second using rudimentary heuristics, whereas Leela Chess evaluates 40 000 positions per second using a deep neural network trained from millions of games of self-play. They also use different tree search approaches.
How Seinfeld’s Costumers Built One of TV’s Most Iconic Wardrobes
The Serpentine Illusion
