The contest, an unusual collaboration between industry and academic scientists, featured one-minute matches between 16 world-class “memory athletes” from all over the world as they met in a World Cup-like elimination format. The grand prize was $20,000; the potential scientific payoff was large, too. […]

Simon Reinhard, 35, a lawyer who holds the world record in card memorization (a deck in 21.19 seconds), and Johannes Mallow, 32, a teacher with the record for memorizing digits (501 in five minutes) […]

“We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us,” said Henry L. Roediger III, the psychologist who led the research team, “is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention.”

The technique the competitors use is no mystery.

People have been performing feats of memory for ages, scrolling out pi to hundreds of digits, or phenomenally long verses, or word pairs. Most store the studied material in a so-called memory palace, associating the numbers, words or cards with specific images they have already memorized; then they mentally place the associated pairs in a familiar location, like the rooms of a childhood home or the stops on a subway line. […] “When I see the eight of diamonds and the queen of spades, I picture a toilet, and my friend Guy Plowman,” said Ben Pridmore, 37, an accountant in Derby, England, and a former champion. […]

Now and then, a challenger boasts online of having discovered an entirely new method, and shows up at competitions to demonstrate it. “Those people are easy to find, because they come in last, or close to it,” said another world-class competitor, Boris Konrad, 29.

Anyone can learn to construct a memory palace, researchers say, and with practice remember far more detail of a particular subject than before.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

Kidnapper sues hostages

A train passenger who was showered in human excrement while using a broken train toilet was offered an umbrella as ‘compensation’.

Relying on a GPS device placed in a decoy pill bottle, police officers tracked an armed man suspected of robbing a pharmacy on Friday afternoon and fatally shot him during a confrontation on the Upper East Side [NY Times]

Nearly 1,800 U.S. law enforcement agencies have dropped the polygraph in favor of newer computer voice stress analyzer (CVSA) technology

Nazarian’s team at Hyde at the Bellagio has put together the “$250,000 Package,” which comes with a 30-liter bottle of Armand de Brignac “Ace of Spades” Champagne and the privilege of flipping the switch to turn on the casino’s famous musical fountains.

Procrastination is a common phenomenon — but new research suggests that “pre-crastination,” hurrying to complete a task as soon as possible, may also be common.

The impact of stress on brain function is increasingly recognized. Various substances are released in response to stress and can influence distinct neuronal circuits, but the functional advantages of having such a diversity of stress mediators remain unclear.

Your brain processes more thoughts and feelings during meditation than when you are simply relaxing.

We found evidence of the cheerleader effect—people seem more attractive in a group than in isolation.

Science fact and fiction behind fat loss (Part 2)

Why Dieting Does Not Usually Work

The Case for Junk DNA

Jellyfish are the most energy efficient swimmers, new metric confirms

Yes, Your Internet Is Getting Slower

The Mathematics Of Murder: Should A Robot Sacrifice Your Life To Save Two?

The Robot Car of Tomorrow May Just Be Programmed to Hit You

Square is the latest example of a struggling industry segment that may never take off. Mobile Wallets Are Doomed

The Curious Case of the $2 Bill

The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age

Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood: Writing the Script for Gay Liberation

Madison Square Park, Washington Square Park, Union Square Park, and Bryant Park used to be cemeteries. There are 20,000 bodies buried in Washington Square Park alone. Central Park is larger than the principality of Monaco. It takes 75,000 trees to print a Sunday edition of the New York Times. 41 random facts about New York
For those of you looking for some problems and puzzles to brood over

Forget the 3D Printer: 4D Printing Could Change Everything

Beauty micrometer

Correction fluid and permanent marker on September 2007 issue of Vogue Magazine

Strip box

“Neuroreductionism” is the tendency to reduce complex mental phenomena to brain states, confusing correlation for physical causation. In this paper, we illustrate the dangers of this popular neuro-fallacy, by looking at an example drawn from the media: a story about “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” in women. We discuss the role of folk dualism in perpetuating such a confusion, and draw some conclusions about the role of “brain scans” in our understanding of romantic love.

{ Savulescu & Earp | Continue reading }

photo { John Gutmann, Naked Breasts, Covered Face, 1939 }

Millionaire playboy and Instagram celebrity Dan Bilzerian is best known of late for chucking a 90-pound porn star, Janice Griffith, off his mansion roof during a shoot for Hustler, and missing the pool. Griffith is now threatening to sue Bilzerian:

We investigate the possibility that a decision-maker prefers to avoid making a decision and instead delegates it to an external device, e.g., a coin flip. In a series of experiments the participants often choose lotteries between allocations, which contradicts most theories of choice such as expected utility but is consistent with a theory of responsibility aversion that implies a preference for randomness. A large data set on university applications in Germany shows a choice pattern that is also consistent with this theory and entails substantial allocative consequences.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Sandler }

{ Collapse of Antarctic ice sheet is underway and unstoppable but will take centuries | What Caused a 1300-Year Deep Freeze? }

quote { Krzysztof Kieślowski, The Decalogue I, 1988 }

The highest European Union court decided on Tuesday that Google must, in some cases, grant users a so-called right to be forgotten that includes the removal of links to embarrassing legal records.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Research in India suggests Google search results can influence an election | Biased search rankings alter the voting preferences of undecided voters }

images { 1 | 2. Gregory Reid }

Scientists have discovered a single gene that can boost a person’s IQ by about six points

Why Every Racist Mentions Their Black Friend

Arguing Too Much Increases Premature Death Risk: Study

Birth of new brain cells might erase babies’ memories

What doesn’t kill you may make you live longer: McGill research finds unexpected link between cell suicide and longevity

What does not kill me makes me stronger: Study suggests improved survivorship in the aftermath of the medieval Black Death)

Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)

Microprocessors configured more like brains than traditional chips could soon make computers far more astute about what’s going on around them.

Any time you email somebody who uses GMail, Google has that email.

Taking a photo against a white background? Amazon owns the patent on that

Transform any text into a patent application

Anti-Surveillance Mask Lets You Pass As Someone Else

Firms almost never have enough data to justify their belief that ads work

The true story of Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient.

How 10 Minutes of Mild Exercise Gives Your Brain a Boost

Why Don’t We Eat Swans Anymore?

As tweens in the 1990s, before online porn and sex advice were as ubiquitous as they are now, we learned sex from magazines.

He said he was hired with a mandate to clean up the building, which meant “trying to get all those people who were involved with drugs out.” Duarte began by winning the residents’ trust, which he did by hiring the most destructive young male tenants to work for him.

How much would it cost to protect New York City from the next superstorm Sandy?

Google Nest Spoof By German Activists

Boxes for rocks

Woman tattoos herself with her own selfie

The US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) said the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) had so many problems we effectively need to tear it up and start again. The way forward, it said, is a new research programme to discover the brain problems that underlie mental illnesses.

That research is now taking off. The first milestone came earlier this year, when the NIMH published a list of 23 core brain functions and their associated neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and genes – and the behaviours and emotions that go with them (see “The mind’s 23 building blocks”). Within weeks, the first drug trials conceived and funded through this new programme will begin. […]

Criticism of psychiatry has been growing for years – existing treatments are often inadequate, and myriad advances in neuroscience and genetics have not translated into anything better. Vocal opponents are not confined to the US. Last week, the new UK Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry launched a campaign claiming that drugs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics often do more harm than good.

What’s more, many suspect that commonly used labels, such as depression and schizophrenia, merely group together people sharing some superficial symptoms, when their underlying brain disorders are quite different.

Genetic studies, for instance, suggest that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, supposedly distinct conditions, involve mutations in many of the same genes. And diagnostic confusion between the disorders is common. […]

So what do the mind’s 23 building blocks consist of? The best mapped-out anatomically is the brain’s fear circuitry, thanks to years of scaring volunteers as they lie in fMRI scanners. This system is probably involved in phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another is the related circuitry that deals, not with present danger, but with vaguer fears that something bad might happen in future. “That circuit is very relevant to rumination and anxiety,” says Cuthbert.

Another five neural systems are components of the brain’s reward circuitry, which is active when we find something pleasurable – like eating or sex – and drives us to repeat the experience. These can malfunction when people are addicted to drugs or alcohol.

The reward system, says Cuthbert, is very powerful because one of the most important things that organisms need to learn is to seek out things like food and water. “Drug abuse hijacks that system so the cues create urges that are very hard to resist,” he says.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Behind the scenes of the NY redesign

That includes using Github instead of SVN for version control, Vagrant environments, Puppet deployment, using requireJS so five different versions of jQuery don’t get loaded, proper build/test frameworks, command-line tools for generating sprites, the use of LESS with a huge set of mixins, a custom grid framework, etc.

{ Source | Continue reading }

The term ‘perspective’ comes from the language of vision. We literally see things from and with a particular perspective. Our eyes are located at a particular point in space, from which some things are visible and others are not, e.g. the top of the table, but not its underneath. A scene looks different from different perspectives. […]

Nietzsche is saying that philosophical beliefs about truth and goodness are part of a particular perspective on the world, a short-sighted, distorting perspective. One of its most important distortions is that it denies that it is a perspective, that its truths are unconditional, that it represents the world as it truly is. But philosophers are wrong to think that it is possible to represent or hold beliefs about the world that are value-free, ‘objective’, ‘disinterested’. […]

We can support Nietzsche’s argument by an evolutionary account of human cognition. We can’t possibly take in everything around us. We must be selective in order to survive at all. So from the very beginning, our intellects are responsive to our interests, our biological instincts and all that develops from them – our emotions, desires and values. So we do not and cannot experience the world ‘as it is’, but always selectively, in a way that reflects our values. […]

If Nietzsche claims that all our knowledge is from a particular perspective, then his claims about perspectives and his theory of perspectivism must itself be from a particular perspective. So is what he says about perspectives objectively true or not?

{ Michael Lacewing | PDF }

image { Camille Henrot, still from The Strife of Love in a Dream, 2011 }

Why were old scientific instruments put together with an apparent wish to make them beautiful, and not just coldly functional?

First, there is obviously a selection effect at work here of the kind that all historians and curators are familiar with. What tends to get preserved is not a representative cross-section of what is around at any time, but rather, what is deemed to be worth preserving. […]

Second, there were of course no specialized scientific-instrument manufacturers in the early modern period. When investigators like Galileo and Boyle wanted something made that they could not make themselves, they would go to metalsmiths, carpenters, potters and the like, who inevitably would have brought their own craft aesthetic to the objects they made.

[Third,] they were catering to a particular clientele that their products reflected. Reeve was making microscopes and so forth for the wealthy dilettantes. […] Scientific instruments were used to delight and entertain their noble patrons. […] For such a display, it was important that a device be impressive to look at.

{ Philip Ball | Continue reading }

{ Zhang Huan, 49 Days, 2011 | more }

What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world’s most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?

According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations — Washington is full of them — that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization’s Web site.

The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. […]

And let’s not even get started on the situation in academia, where the country’s best and brightest compete for the honor of seeing their life’s work locked away behind some publisher’s paywall.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league.

In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.

Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.

Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. […]

The process described by Cutting evokes a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls “cumulative advantage”: once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still.

{ Intelligent Life | Continue reading }

art { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (crown of thorns), circa 1982 | Bill Connors }

Brain Injury Turns Man Into Math Genius

Chinese police to patrol streets of Paris to protect high-spending tourists

Can you tell a person’s gender by their video game avatar? According to a new study, a male gamer who chooses to play as a female character will still display signs of his true gender.

“It’s simple, the less stress you have the better your memory.” The facial expression that fights memory loss

A helmet that delivers electro-magnetic impulses to the brain has shown promise in treating people with depression

Lack of sleep not only makes you ugly and sick, it also makes you dumb

A study that was published a few years ago in Nature suggests that indeed our initial inclination is to cooperate with others. We are only selfish if we are allowed to reflect.

What’s the evidence on using rational argument to change people’s minds?

In fact, nearly everyone working in cognitive science is working on an approach that someone else has shown to be hopeless

You might not realize it, but every time you order dinner digitally, you subconsciously order more

How do you price a bottle of milkshake?

Silicon Valley investors and startups are trying to improve our food.

A startup is seeking approval to sell powderized alcohol

Biologists Create Cells With 6 DNA Letters, Instead of Just 4

Controlling fear by modifying DNA

The CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. [Thanks Tim]

An influential report concludes that prohibition and the war on drugs have failed

Brooklyn is getting poorer

10 Most Stressed Out Cities In America

Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault debate, 1971 (full video)

How to be perfect

Chalk Warfare 3.0

Dear Leader Tongue Scraper

Have you ever found someone particularly sexy without knowing why? It could be that you are lured in by their pheromones, invisible chemical signals that can subtly alter a person’s mood, mindset, or behavior. According to new research published last week in Current Biology, men and women give off different signals, but you subconsciously only respond to the gender you find attractive. And when you smell these pheromones, the object of your affection instantly appears even sexier in your mind.

{ Popular Science | Continue reading }

It was only a few decades ago that incision and suction were recommended snakebite first aid. However, concerns arose about injuries and infections caused when laypersons made incisions across fang marks and applied mouth suction. Meanwhile, several snakebite suction devices (eg, Cutter’s Snakebite Kit, Venom Ex) were evaluated, and it was determined that they were neither safe nor effective. So, recommendations changed, and mechanical suction without incision was advocated instead. It seemed intuitive that suction alone would probably remove venom and should not cause harm. However, when the techniques were studied rigorously, quite the opposite was discovered.

One of the most popular suction devices, the Sawyer Extractor pump (Sawyer Products, Safety Harbor, FL), operates by applying approximately 1 atm of negative pressure directly over a fang puncture wound (or wounds) without making incisions. […] Although each of these 3 studies was done independently of each other and using different methodology, they arrive at the same conclusion: the Extractor does not work, and it could make things worse.

{ Annals of Emergency Medecine | PDF }

Researchers have known for decades that the eye does much more than just detect light. The dense patch of neurons in the retina also processes basic features of a scene before sending the information to the brain. For example, in 1964, scientists showed that some neurons in the retina fire up only in response to motion. What’s more, these “space-time” detectors have so-called direction selectivity, each one sensitive to objects moving in different directions. But exactly how that processing happens in the retina has remained a mystery. […]

Although researchers have imaged the retina microscopically in ultrathin sections, no computer algorithm has been able to accurately trace out the borders of all the neurons to map the circuitry. […]

Enter the EyeWire project, an online game that recruits volunteers to map out those cellular contours within a mouse’s retina.

{ Science | Continue reading }

Artist who tied a live rooster to his penis found guilty of exhibitionism

Drunken British woman, traveling with her parents, busted for allegedly having loud sex on Las Vegas flight

Geophysicists link fracking boom to increase in earthquakes

You don’t always know what you’re saying. People’s conscious awareness of their speech often comes after they’ve spoken, not before.

People can only recognize two faces in a crowd at a time – even if the faces belong to famous people.

What makes women attractive depends on how healthy the place they live is

Difference between how men and women choose their partners

Two teams of scientists published studies on Sunday showing that blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice, rejuvenating their muscles and brains. [NY Times | Nature]

Bleeding wound? Relax and roll a cigarette

2.2 million Americans are diagnosed with certain types of skin cancer annually, up more than 50% in the past decade

Antibiotic resistance is now rife across the entire globe

Immortality through advanced technology and primitive diet

We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects.

In real sex, the man is supposed to place his balls into the woman’s pussy, and then her pussy flexes and crushes the balls.

The Pocket Guide to Bullshit Prevention

Spritz, the materials claim, “reimagines” and “reinvents” reading

How NYC’s gay bars thrived because of the mob

Video Reveals 140 Years Of Change At Specific NYC Locations

Latrine odor judge