{ Drugmoneyart | watch the video }

{ Yugop.com }

unrelated:

Errors in the way physicists estimate the effects of dark matter and dark energy on the leftover heat from the Big Bang has thrown their existence into doubt, say British scientists.

Physicists’ general model of the universe includes two ‘dark’ concepts.

Dark energy is a force that explains the way that galaxies accelerate away from each other, while dark matter was postulated to explain the observations that galaxies have more mass than can be accounted for by stars and gas.

Evidence for the ‘dark side’ comes primarily from studies of the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB), the leftover ‘glow’ from the Big Bang, which has been analysed in detail by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a NASA satellite telescope launched in 2001 that provided the first full-sky map of the CMB.

Now, some scientists say errors in the WMAP data may be larger than expected.

This would mean that there is no need to include dark matter and dark energy in models of the cosmos.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

If you’re having trouble getting a date, French researchers suggest that picking the right soundtrack could improve the odds. Women were more prepared to give their number to an ‘average’ young man after listening to romantic background music, according to research that appears today in the journal Psychology of Music, published by SAGE.

There’s plenty of research indicating that the media affects our behaviour. Violent video games or music with aggressive lyrics increase the likelihood of aggressive behaviour, thoughts and feelings – but do romantic songs have any effect? This question prompted researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob from the Université de Bretagne-Sud along with Lubomir Lamy from Université de Paris-Sud to test the power of romantic lyrics on 18-20 year old single females. And it turns out that at least one romantic love song did make a difference.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource. And I don’t mean self-control only in the sense of turning down cookies or alcohol, I mean a broader sense of self-supervision—any time you’re paying close attention to your actions, like when you’re having a tough conversation or trying to stay focused on a paper you’re writing. This helps to explain why, after a long hard day at the office, we’re more likely to snap at our spouses or have one drink too many—we’ve depleted our self-control.

And here’s why this matters for change: In almost all change situations, you’re substituting new, unfamiliar behaviors for old, comfortable ones, and that burns self-control. Let’s say I present a new morning routine to you that specifies how you’ll shower and brush your teeth. You’ll understand it and you might even agree with my process. But to pull it off, you’ll have to supervise yourself very carefully. Every fiber of your being will want to go back to the old way of doing things. Inevitably, you’ll slip. And if I were uncharitable, I’d see you going back to the old way and I’d say, You’re so lazy. Why can’t you just change?

This brings us back to the point I promised I’d make: That what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. Change wears people out—even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.

{ Fast Company | Continue reading }

A recent study of an ancient language provides new insights into the nature of linguistic evolution. (…)

Dr. Kiparsky’s research focuses on the reasons why languages change over time, and the mechanisms by which this change occurs. Linguistic change differs from biological evolution and socio-cultural change because of the way language is organized and learned. Languages are passed on by example, but each is governed by a coherent set of rules that conform to a common set of organizing principles. Linguistic change is typically initiated by children as they make “intelligent” errors in seeking the simplest way of navigating the languages they are learning. By studying linguistic change, we gain new insights into how language is organized and how children learn language.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

How to Prevent Language Extinction

The 7 billion inhabitants of Earth currently speak about 6000 different languages. That may seem a healthy multitude but it turns out that just five of these languages dominate. More than half the population speak English, Russian, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish. These together with the next hundred most popular languages account for 95 per cent of speakers. A mere 5 per cent of the global population speak the rest and two thirds of these lingos are in danger of extinction.

That’s a perilous state of affairs. With the death of a language, the planet loses an irreplaceable cultural phenomenon. The fear is that the big five may crush all before them, pushing weaker languages into oblivion and leaving a cultural desert in their wake.

That fear has been exacerbated by mathematical models describing how one language can dominate another and showing how easily extinctions happen.

Today, however, there is better news. The relentless march of dominant languages may not be as inevitable as these early models seemed to show.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Emma Hardy }

{ Why Summer Begins Monday | Artwork: Richard Prince, Untitled (Sunset), 1981 }

Studying the interactions between people in ever increasing detail reveals entirely new patterns of human behaviour–and poses challenges for network science.

The study of networks has changed the way we think about our world and the way that societies organise themselves within it. In particular, the discovery that many real world networks can be thought as small worlds, in which most nodes are not neighbours but can be reached by a small number of jumps, has had a profound impact.

But until now, most studies have focused on networks as static affairs in which the links between nodes do not change in any significant way.

That is beginning to change as data becomes available from mobile phones and RFID tags that tease apart the nature of human behaviour and interaction in detail that has never before been possible.

Today, Lorenzo Isella at the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Turin and friends reveal an interesting example in which the interactions between humans in similar but not identical circumstances leads to subtle but important differences in the network of connections between them. (…)

Isella and co have examined data taken from RFID cards that recorded the interactions between people at two different events: an exhibition at the Science Gallery, a museum in Dublin, and a conference at the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Italy.

These data sets are quite different. At the Science Gallery, researchers recorded 230,000 interactions between 14,000 people over a period of three months. At the conference, they recorded 10,000 interactions between 100 people over three days.

People’s behaviour at these events were obviously different. At the museum, people arrived at different times and streamed through the gallery in just a few hours. At the conference, the attendees tended to stay on site and make repeated contacts over several days.

So it’s hardly surprising then that the average number of contacts made at the conference was more than double those made at the museum (roughly 20 v 8).

The networks were also different. It turns out that the pattern of interactions between attendees at the conference formed a small world network while the pattern at the museum often did not. So it is much harder to link visitors to the museum to each other using a small number of steps through the network.

These differences have an important implication which Isella and co were able to draw out by studying the way that infectious agents such as memes or viruses might spread through the respective networks.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

Brain study shows that the opinions of others matters

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) in collaboration with Aarhus University in Denmark have found that the ‘reward’ area of the brain is activated when people agree with our opinions.

The study, published today in the journal Current Biology, suggests that scientists may be able to predict how much people can be influenced by the opinions of others on the basis of the level of activity in the reward area.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Marco Ovando }

Children with Tourette’s Syndrome, the neurodevelopmental condition characterised by involuntary motor and verbal tics, have superior timing abilities compared with their healthy age-matched peers, a new study suggests.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

A French drug company is seeking to offer American women something their European counterparts already have: a pill that works long after “the morning after.”

The drug, dubbed ella, would be sold as a contraceptive — one that could prevent pregnancy for as many as five days after unprotected sex. But the new drug is a close chemical relative of the abortion pill RU-486, raising the possibility that it could also induce abortion by making the womb inhospitable for an embryo. (…)

The last time the Food and Drug Administration vetted an emergency contraceptive — Plan B, the so-called morning-after pill — the decision was mired in debate over such fundamental questions as when life begins and the distinction between preventing and terminating a pregnancy. (…)

Plan B, which works for up to 72 hours after sex, was eventually approved for sale without a prescription, although a doctor’s order is required for girls younger than 17. The new drug promises to extend that period to at least 120 hours. Approved in Europe last year, ella is available as an emergency contraceptive in at least 22 countries.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Much of the time groups of people end up thinking and doing things that group members would never think or do on their own. This is true for groups of teenagers, who are willing to run risks that individuals would avoid. It is certainly true for those prone to violence, including terrorists and those who commit genocide. It is true for investors and corporate executives. It is true for government officials, neighbourhood groups, social reformers, political protestors, police officers, student organisations, labour unions and juries. Some of the best and worst developments in social life are a product of group dynamics, in which members of organisations, both small and large, move one another in new directions.

{ Spectator | Continue reading }

photo { Joan Jett and Lita Ford }

{ Campbell’s chooses “neuromarketing” over consumer feedback in rebranding its iconic soup cans | Fast Company | full story }

Last week, while many of us were distracted by the oil belching forth from the gulf floor and the president’s ham-handed attempts to demonstrate that he was sufficiently engaged and enraged, Gallup released a stunning, and little noticed, report on Americans’ evolving views of homosexuality. Allow me to enlighten:

1. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. (You have to love the fact that they still use the word “relations.” So quaint.)

2. Also for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.

3. This new alignment is being led by a dramatic change in attitudes among younger men, but older men’s perceptions also have eclipsed older women’s. While women’s views have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 49 who perceived these “relations” as morally acceptable rose by 48 percent, and among men over 50, it rose by 26 percent.

I warned you: stunning. (…)

(I now return you to Day 46 of the oil spill where they finally may be making some progress.)

{ Charles M. Blow/NY Times | Continue reading }

The first thing to remember about probability questions is that everyone finds them mind-bending, even mathematicians. The next step is to try to answer a similar but simpler question so that we can isolate what the question is really asking.

So, consider this preliminary question: “I have two children. One of them is a boy. What is the probability I have two boys?”

This is a much easier question, though a controversial one as I later discovered. After the gathering ended, Foshee’s Tuesday boy problem became a hotly discussed topic on blogs around the world. The main bone of contention was how to properly interpret the question. The way Foshee meant it is, of all the families with one boy and exactly one other child, what proportion of those families have two boys?

To answer the question you need to first look at all the equally likely combinations of two children it is possible to have: BG, GB, BB or GG. The question states that one child is a boy. So we can eliminate the GG, leaving us with just three options: BG, GB and BB. One out of these three scenarios is BB, so the probability of the two boys is 1/3.

Now we can repeat this technique for the original question. Let’s list the equally likely possibilities of children, together with the days of the week they are born in. Let’s call a boy born on a Tuesday a BTu. Our possible situations are:

▪ When the first child is a BTu and the second is a girl born on any day of the week: there are seven different possibilities.

▪ When the first child is a girl born on any day of the week and the second is a BTu: again, there are seven different possibilities.

▪ When the first child is a BTu and the second is a boy born on any day of the week: again there are seven different possibilities.

▪ Finally, there is the situation in which the first child is a boy born on any day of the week and the second child is a BTu – and this is where it gets interesting. There are seven different possibilities here too, but one of them – when both boys are born on a Tuesday – has already been counted when we considered the first to be a BTu and the second on any day of the week. So, since we are counting equally likely possibilities, we can only find an extra six possibilities here.

Summing up the totals, there are 7 + 7 + 7 + 6 = 27 different equally likely combinations of children with specified gender and birth day, and 13 of these combinations are two boys. So the answer is 13/27, which is very different from 1/3.

It seems remarkable that the probability of having two boys changes from 1/3 to 13/27 when the birth day of one boy is stated – yet it does, and it’s quite a generous difference at that. In fact, if you repeat the question but specify a trait rarer than 1/7 (the chance of being born on a Tuesday), the closer the probability will approach 1/2.

Which is surprising, weird… and, to recreational mathematicians at least, delightfully entertaining.

{ Magic numbers: A meeting of mathemagical tricksters | NewScientist | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Owen }

If you have an imagination, you don’t have to be the protagonist in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine to travel through time. If you’ve ever eagerly awaited (or painfully dreaded) an upcoming birthday, recalled winning the lottery (don’t you wish), or fantasized about eating lunch while listening to your teacher drone on about why the river in the novel symbolizes the birth of modern civilization, you’ve mentally traveled through time.

Mental time travel is what got me through some of my postdoctoral days; watching spots (proteins) move across a computer screen was usually less than riveting. Besides alleviating boredom, the ability to use past experience (retrospection) to predict future scenarios (prospection) is extremely useful; you’ll be far more careful about when and where you leave your bicycle outside if it gets stolen.

{ National Association of Science Writers | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kalvar }

The claim that “no one understands quantum mechanics” is often attributed to Richard Feyman, who said that to illustrate the perceived “randomness” that is at the heart of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM. The unfortunate consequence of this phrase is that we now have people using it to claim that we know NOTHING about QM, and that no one understands it.

Without even going into what QM is, let’s consider the following first and foremost: we have used QM to produce a zoo of devices and techniques ranging from your modern electronics to medical procedure such as MRI and PET scans, etc. Already one can question whether this is a symptom of something that no one understands? When was the last time you place your life and the lives of your loved ones in something that NO ONE understands? That is what you do when you fly in an airplane or drive in a car that nowadays use modern electronics. All of these depend on QM for their operations!

The issue here is what is meant by the word “understand”. In physics, and among physicists, we usually consider something to be “fully understood” when it has reached a universal consensus that this is the most valid description of a phenomenon. We say that we understand Newton’s Laws because it is well-tested and we know that it definitely work within a certainly range of condition. (…)

So in physics, the criteria to say that we understand something is very, very strict. It requires a well-verified theory that matches practically all of the empirical observations, and a general consensus among experts in the field that agree with it. This means that in many instances, physicists would tend to say that we don’t understand so-and-so, because there are many areas of physics that haven’t been fully answered, verified, or have reached a general consensus. To us, this does not allow us to say that we have understood it. But it certainly does not mean we know NOTHING about it. (…)

Do we understand QM? Damn right we do! Do we understand it COMPLETELY? Sure if what we mean by “completely” only includes things that we can test and measure. QM is THE most successful theory of the physical world that human has invented up to now and no experimental observation so far has contradicted it. So that alone is a very strong argument that we DO understand QM. However, if we ask if we understand how QM comes up with all the correct predictions of what nature does, or if there’s anything underlying all the QM’s predictions, then no, we don’t. (…)

I’ve been known to reply, whenever I get another question such as this, that we understand QM MORE than you understand your own family members. Why? I can use QM to make QUANTITATIVE predictions, not just qualitative ones, and make these predictions uncannily accurate. When was the last time you can do that with your family member consistently, day in, day out, a gazillion times a second? We use QM to do that and more.

{ Physics and physicists | Continue reading }

artwork { Joseph Beuys }

White men with brown eyes are perceived to be more dominant than their blue-eyed counterparts. However, a blue-eyed man looking to make himself appear more dominant would be wasting his time investing in brown-coloured contact lenses. A new study by Karel Kleisner and colleagues at Charles University in the Czech Republic has found that brown iris colour seems to co-occur with some other aspect of facial appearance that triggers in others the perception of dominance.

Sixty-two student participants, half of them female, rated the dominance and/or attractiveness of the photographed faces of forty men and forty women. All models were Caucasian, and all of them were holding a neutral expression. Men with brown eyes were rated consistently as more dominant than blue-eyed men. No such effect of eye-colour was found for the photos of women. Eye colour also bore no association to the attractiveness ratings.

Next the researchers used Photoshop to give the brown-eyed men blue eyes and the blue-eyed men brown eyes. The photos were then rated by a new batch of participants. The intriguing finding here was that the dominance ratings were left largely unaffected by the eye colour manipulation. The men who really had brown eyes, but thanks to Photoshop appeared with blue eyes, still tended to be rated as more dominant.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon, Billy Mudd, Trucker, Alto, Texas, May 7, 1981 }

During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.

The two groups showed marked differences. Brain activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups. The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.

The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.

When first publicized, the findings were greeted with cheers. By keeping lots of brain cells buzzing, Google seemed to be making people smarter. But as Small was careful to point out, more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain. (…)

What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.

{ Nicholas Carr/Wired | Continue reading }

In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears. (…)

For years I would read during breakfast, the coffee stirring my pleasure in the prose. You can’t surf during breakfast. Well, maybe you can. Now I don’t have coffee and I don’t eat breakfast. I get up and check my e-mail, blog comments and Twitter.

{ Roger Ebert/Chicago Sun-Times }

photo { Stephen Shore }

An earworm is a song going around in your head that you can’t get rid of. Some claim that earworms are like a cognitive itch, we scratch them by repeating the tune over and over in our heads.

In new research, Beaman & Williams (2010) asked 103 participants aged 15-57 all about their earworm experiences. Here’s what they found:

• Many earworms were pop songs, although adverts and TV/film themes and video game tunes were also mentioned.

• One-third generally experienced the chorus or refrain over and over again, but almost half said that it varied.

• 10% of participants reported that earworms stopped them doing other things.

• Contrary to popular belief those with musical training were no more likely to experience earworms. (…)

For most of us earworms are relatively untroubling. And if you are tempted to moan then just be thankful you’re not the 21-year-old described in a case report by Praharaj et al. (2009). This man had had music from Hindi films going around in his head against his will for between 2 and 45 minutes at a time, up to 35 times a day, for five years. Unfortunately even powerful drugs couldn’t stop the music.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

It sometimes feel like our minds are not on the same team as us. I want to go to sleep, but it wants to keep me awake rerunning events from my childhood. I want to forget the lyrics from that stupid 80s pop song but it wants to repeat them over and over again ad nauseam. (…)

Perpetual thoughts of food drive people to obesity, persistent negative thoughts cue depression and traumatic events push back into consciousness to be relived over and over again. (…)

Although it makes perfect intuitive sense to try and suppress unwanted thoughts, unfortunately the very process we use to do this contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more we try and push intrusive thoughts down, the more they pop back up, stronger than ever.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photos { Kate Moss photographed by Michael Thompson, 1993 }

related { Kate Moss shows off six piercings after visit to tattoo parlour, 2009 }

bonus:

In open water, there is often no place to hide. Some sharks have overcome this problem by making themselves invisible to both prey and predators, according to a new study. (…)

Lead author Julien Claes explained to Discovery News that about 50 different shark species, or more than 10 percent of all known sharks, are luminous. This means they can produce and emit light from their bodies. (…)

“I believe that what most surprised and excited me about this paper was the finding that the emission of light on the ventral surface of the sharks closely resembles the environmental light,” Coelho said, “allowing the sharks to efficiently camouflage themselves by counter-illumination, remaining invisible to both possible predators and potential prey.”

{ Discovery News | Continue reading }

Most people become stressed when lying, but new research shows that people with power feel just fine when lying — and are better at getting away with it.

Lying is costly, extracting physiological and cognitive tolls from most people. The body of research on lying consistently shows that people become stressed when they do not tell the truth. The speed with which they process information slows down, possibly because lying requires keeping track of the lie and the truth while simultaneously trying to suppress nervous habits or other signs that might give the liar away. (So-called lie-detector tests, or polygraphs, can’t actually determine if people are lying, but they can identify signs of physiological stress that are consistent with lying.)

Professor Dana R. Carney, who studies social judgment and decision making, noticed that in a different area of scientific study, psychologists have observed that power — defined as control over others’ social or monetary outcomes and always accompanied by feelings of power — enhances cognitive functions and makes people feel good. The effects of feeling powerful are precisely the inverse of those that most people experience when they lie.

“The overlap is remarkable. When you feel powerful, you feel good, you’re a little smarter in that you process information more quickly and are better at multitasking, and some evidence suggests you may be more physiologically resilient,” Carney says. “When you lie, you feel bad, your cognitive systems are overworked, and you are physiologically taxed. What if you put lying and power together? It’s a match made in heaven or a match made in hell.”

{ Columbia Business School | Continue reading | Thanks Douglas }