Girls’ brains can begin maturing from the age of 10 while some men have to wait until 20 before the same organisational structures take place, Newcastle University scientists have found.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

Men who have daughters also grow less attached to traditional gender roles: they become less likely to agree with the statement that “a woman’s place is in the home,” for instance, and more likely to agree that men should wash dishes and do other chores. Having a sister, however, has the opposite effect, making men more supportive of traditional gender roles, more conservative politically, and less likely to perform housework.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

This article examines the reasons for the Chihuahua breed’s popularity in contemporary western society by looking at two sets of data: Chihuahua handbooks and The Simple Life show, starring Paris Hilton and her Chihuahua Tinkerbell. The article argues that the Chihuahua is a holy anomaly. […]

The Chihuahua – or the bonsai wolf – transcends two binary oppositions fundamental to contemporary westerners: subject/object and nature/culture.

{ SAGE }

A study on the effect of always agreeing with your wife had to be abandoned after it became intolerable for husband.

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Christopher Williams }

The good and bad things about stories is they’re a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You’re always left with the same few stories. There’s the old saying, just about every story can be summed up as, “A stranger came to town.” There’s a book by Christopher Booker, he claims there are really just seven types of stories. There’s monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. You don’t have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you’re telling yourself the same things over and over again. […]

So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like “this” instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be.

{ Tyler Cowen/LessWrong | Continue reading }

Children evacuated from swimming pool after prosthetic leg mistaken for paedophile.

Hospital security guards sent an “uncooperative” patient who was “refusing to talk or move” home in a taxi, though he was dying or already dead.

Man banned from every supermarket in Britain for masturbating in Sainsbury’s meat aisle. He can now only enter a supermarket when accompanied by an adult.

Scientists say they have been able to successfully print new eye cells that could be used to treat sight loss.

The faces on LEGO Minifigures are becoming increasingly angry and less happy. The influence of LEGO is immense. The researchers state that on average each person on earth owns approximately 75 bricks.

6 in 10 13-year-old girls, compared to 4 in 10 boys the same age, are afraid of gaining weight or getting fat.

Genetic factors contribute to being skinny.

Exposure to dogs and livestock early in life can lessen the chances of infants later developing allergies and asthma.

Susana Soares has created a simple way of harnessing bees to screen for a number of diseases, including cancers, like tumors of the lung and ovaries.

Snowy winters are something that animals have evolved to overcome or even use to their advantage.

Although the new calculations predict that a collapse of the universe is now more likely than ever before, it is actually also possible, that it will not happen at all.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem Comes To Life

Firms are increasingly resorting to litigation—some of it extraordinarily unpleasant—to prevent employees from moving to rivals.

Expert says a group, with strong footing in financial sector, could be behind Bitcoin phenomenon. And: Bitcoin lost almost 50% of its value overnight after BTC China said it could no longer accept deposits in the Chinese currency.

With a new setting, someone wearing Glass only has to wink at you to take a photo.

Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars

Parsing the Fed: How the Statement Changed

The Man Who Duped Millionaires Into Paying Big Bucks For Fake Wine .

I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System

We’re devaluing your miles. 10 things airlines won’t tell you.

2013 Black List / most liked unproduced screenplays circulating around Hollywood

Gaga stole our style, say twins.

Following yesterday’s post about a SantaCon Santa who was allegedly caught by a filmmaker having his North Pole publicly waxed by a naughty little elf, Gawker received an “urgent” email from a man claiming to be Santa’s lawyer.

More Santa.

The auto-playing ads will appear on both the desktop version of Facebook and the mobile app for Android and iOS phones. But the ads won’t gobble up a bunch of costly data while playing. Facebook said the videos will download ahead of time while the user is within range of Wi-Fi, not while using cellular data like 4G. The app has to be open for the ad to download. The video ad is stored on the phone – how much storage it takes up is an open question — and then played at the appropriate scroll point.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

related { Facebook saves everything you type - even if you don’t publish it }

Although there has been some empirical research on earworms, songs that become caught and replayed in one’s memory over and over again, there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the more general concept of the musical hook, the most salient moment in a piece of music, or the even more general concept of what may make music ‘catchy’. […]

Every piece of music will have a hook – the catchiest part of the piece, whatever that may be – but some pieces of music clearly have much catchier hooks than others. […]

One study has shown that after only 400 ms, listeners can identify familiar music with a significantly greater frequency than one would expect from chance. […]

We have designed an experiment that we believe will help to quantify the effect of catchiness on musical memory. […] Hooked, as we have named the game, comprises three essential tasks: a recognition task, a verification task, and a prediction task. Each of them responds to a scientific need in what we felt was the most entertaining fashion possible. In this way, we hope to be able recruit the largest number of subjects possible without sacrificing scientific quality.

{ Music Cognition Group | PDF | Download the Game }

Neuman examined three common types of fallacious arguments:

• The false cause fallacy.
• The appeal to the people fallacy.
• The appeal to ignorance fallacy.

An argument using the false cause fallacy […]: I watered my lawn and then it rained. It must have rained because I watered my lawn.

An argument that appeals to the people […]: Most people believe that extraterrestrials exist, so you should too.

An argument that includes an appeal to ignorance […]: We know that Big Foot exists, because no one has been able to prove that it doesn’t.

Neuman’s idea is that the ability to detect fallacious arguments, such as these, is related to skill in drawing inferences from text. In order to test his idea, Neuman measured student’s performance on detection of argument fallacies, deductive logic, and the inference process in reading comprehension.

He found that comprehension was significantly related to spotting fallacies. Performance on the pure deductive logic task was not.

{ Global Cognition | Continue reading }

image { Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman, Production still from Shadow, 2010 }

Damnatio memoriae is the Latin phrase literally meaning “condemnation of memory” in the sense of a judgment that a person must not be remembered. […] The intent was to erase someone from history, a task somewhat easier in ancient times, when documentation was much sparser. […]

Any truly effective damnatio memoriae would not be noticeable to later historians, since, by definition, it would entail the complete and total erasure of the individual in question from the historical record.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

In previous research, acoustic characteristics of the male voice have been shown to signal various aspects of mate quality and threat potential. But the human voice is also a medium of linguistic communication. The present study explores whether physical and vocal indicators of male mate quality and threat potential are linked to effective communicative behaviors such as vowel differentiation and use of more salient phonetic variants of consonants. […]

[T]aller, more masculine men display less clarity in their speech and prefer phonetic variants that may be associated with masculine attributes such as toughness.

{ Human Nature/Springer | Continue reading }

We evaluated the impact of different presentation methods for evaluating how funny jokes are. We found that the same joke was perceived as significantly funnier when told by a robot than when presented only using text.

{ Dr. Hato | PDF }

Ongoing projects: Adding farting to the joking robots.

{ Dr. Hato | Continue reading }

{ Samantha West The Telemarketer Robot Who Swears She’s Not a Robot | more }

This research project focused on the potential spread of bacteria when blowing out candles on a birthday cake. […] We tested whether salivating before blowing out the candles over icing would affect the outcome. To simulate a realistic party atmosphere, this procedure included consuming a slice of fresh pizza prior to blowing on the candles. We determined that a higher level of bacteria was transferred with this procedure than the previous testing. These results led us to conclude that bacteria expelled from the mouth can, in fact, contaminate birthday cakes and other potential food samples.”

{ via Improbable | Continue reading }

photo { Maurizio Di Iorio }

The New York Times has an important article on how Attention Deficit Disorder, often known as ADHD, has been ‘marketed’ alongside sales of stimulant medication to the point where leading ADHD researchers are becoming alarmed at the scale of diagnosis and drug treatment.

It’s worth noting that although article focuses on ADHD, it is really a case study in how psychiatric drug marketing often works.

This is the typical pattern: a disorder is defined and a reliable diagnosis is created. A medication is tested and found to be effective – although studies which show negative effects might never be published.

It is worth noting that the ‘gold standard’ diagnosis usually describes a set of symptoms that are genuinely linked to significant distress or disability.

Then, marketing money aims to ‘raise awareness’ of the condition to both doctors and the public. This may be through explicit drug company adverts, by sponsoring medical training that promotes a particular drug, or by heavily funding select patient advocacy groups that campaign for wider diagnosis and drug treatment.

This implicitly encourages diagnosis to be made away from the ‘gold standard’ assessment – which often involves an expensive and time-consuming structured assessment by specialists.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

Specifically, they reported that men’s brains had more connectivity within each brain hemisphere, whereas women’s brains had more connectivity across the two hemispheres. Moreover, they stated or implied, in their paper and in statements to the press, that these findings help explain behavioral differences between the sexes, such as that women are intuitive thinkers and good at multi-tasking whereas men are good at sports and map-reading. […]

So, the wiring differences between the sexes aren’t that large. And we don’t really know their functional significance, if any. […]

[L]et’s set this new brain wiring study in the context of previous research. Verma and her team admit that a previous paper looking at the brain wiring of 439 participants failed to find significant differences between the sexes. What about studies on the corpus callosum – the thick bundle of fibres that connects the two brain hemispheres? If women really have more cross-talk across the brain, this is one place where you’d definitely expect them to have more connectivity. And yet a 2012 diffusion tensor paper found “a stronger inter-hemispheric connectivity between the frontal lobes in males than females”. Hmm. Another paper from 2006 found little difference in thickness of the callosum according to sex. Finally a meta-analysis from 2009: “The alleged sex-related corpus callosum size difference is a myth,” it says.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

A small sample of the more credulous media uptake:

“Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal”, The Guardian 12/2/2013

“Striking differences in brain wiring between men and women”, EarthSky 12/3/2013
“Is Equal Opportunity Threatened By New Findings That Female And Male Brains Are Different?”, Forbes 12/3/2013

”The hardwired difference between male and female brains could explain why men are ‘better at map reading’ and why women are ‘better at remembering a conversation’”, The Independent 12/3/2013

”Sex and Brains: Vive la différence!”, The Economist 12/7/2013

“Differences in How Men and Women Think Are Hard-Wired”, WSJ 12/9/2013
“Brains of women, men are actually wired differently”, New Scientist 12/12/2013
“Gender differences are hard-wired”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 12/15/2013

Some more thoughtful reactions:

“Study: The Brains of Men and Women Are Different… WIth A Few Major Caveats”, Forbes 12/8/2013
“Do Men And Women Have Different Brains?”, NPR 12/13/2013
“Time to ditch the ‘Venus and Mars’ cliche”, The New Zealand Herald 12/14/2013

{ Language Log | Continue reading }

art { Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Sylvette David in Green Chair, 1954 }

For every 1,000 people who undergo general anesthesia, there will be one or two who are not as unconscious as they seem — people who remember their doctors talking, and who are aware of the surgeon’s knife, even while their bodies remain catatonic and passive. For the unlucky 0.13 percent for whom anesthesia goes awry, there’s not really a good preventive. That’s because successful anesthetization requires complete unconsciousness, and consciousness isn’t something we can measure.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Bots now ‘account for 61% of web traffic.’

NASA Admits Google Execs Flew Private Jets with Cheap Government Fuel

Today’s young women are the first in modern history to start their careers making nearly as much as men.

Do Animals Have Orgasms?

New Pacemaker is small enough to be delivered through blood vessels into the heart.

Remember Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy champion? What If IBM’s Watson Dethroned Google?

Zero-rupee notes are an Indian anti-corruption gimmick now attracting worldwide interest.

In his performance art piece “Eating People,” Zhu photographs himself cooking and eating a human fetus that he divided into five parts. [Thanks Tim]

Place one fruit on a mirrored pedestal. Take the rest of the day off. [Thanks Tim]

List of films featuring powered exoskeletons, which are also known as powered armor, exoframes, or exosuits.

iArm

Mark Zuckerberg is a success story, having gone from Hollywood sociopath and interview nightmare to mere super-dork. He’s awkward, but much of the alienating superweirdness has been coached away. But Instagram honcho Kevin Systrom is still one bizarre, robotic dude.

{ Valleywag | Continue reading + video }

Features of fictional folk are more extreme than in reality; real folks are boring by comparison. Fictional folks are more expressive, and give off clearer signs about their feelings and intentions. Their motives are simpler and clearer, and their actions are better explained by their motives and local visible context. Who they are now is better predicted by their history. […]

In real life, coincidence happens all the time. But in fiction […] Your readers will refuse to believe it.

{ via overcoming bias | Continue reading }

photo { Mick Haggerty, Mickey Mondrian, 1976 }

The eminent sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that life is a series of performances, in which we are all continually managing the impression we give other people. […]

But recently we have learned that some of our social responses occur even without conscious consideration. […] [L]ab experiments show that when people happen to be holding a hot drink rather than a cold one, they are more likely to trust strangers. Another found that people are much more helpful and generous when they step off a rising escalator than when they step off a descending escalator—in fact, ascending in any fashion seems to trigger nicer behavior. […]

Neuroscientists have found that environmental cues trigger immediate responses in the human brain even before we are aware of them. As you move into a space, the hippocampus, the brain’s memory librarian, is put to work immediately. It compares what you are seeing at any moment to your earlier memories in order to create a mental map of the area, but it also sends messages to the brain’s fear and reward centers. Its neighbor, the hypothalamus, pumps out a hormonal response to those signals even before most of us have decided if a place is safe or dangerous. Places that seem too sterile or too confusing can trigger the release of adrenaline and cortisol, the hormones associated with fear and anxiety. Places that seem familiar, navigable, and that trigger good memories, are more likely to activate hits of feel-good  serotonin, as well as the hormone that rewards and promotes feelings of interpersonal trust: oxytocin.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Dennis Stock }