Man with Tourette Syndrome not allowed to board plane after saying ‘bomb.’

Machines with the ability to attack targets without any human intervention must be banned before they are developed for use on the battlefield, campaigners against “killer robots” urged on Tuesday.

Snakelike robots developed by the lab can aid search and rescue operations in collapsed buildings.

Dubai police add Ferrari to fleet of patrol cars weeks after unveiling Lamborghini.

Crime is going down, but no one really knows why.

Record number of killers and rapists being released from upstate prisons, many returning to NYC. The freshly sprung rogues are a dark remnant of the crack epidemic that plagued the city in the 1980s and 1990s, when homicides hit an all-time high and drug dealers ruled entire blocks of the city.

Men are, by a huge margin, the sex responsible for violent, sexual and other serious crime. The cost of masculine crime.

Research suggests that mental illnesses lie along a spectrum — but the field’s latest diagnostic manual still splits them apart.

We all know scrotal testicles evolved to keep sperm cooler than the rest of the body, but evolutionary psychology’s activation hypothesis explains so much more.

An “electronic tattoo” containing flexible electronic circuits can now record some complex brain activity as accurately as an EEG.

Speed of light may not be constant, physicists say.

Energy Department Backs New Way to Make Diesel from Corn.

Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor.

3D-printed gun may be unveiled soon.

In one study, phantom phone vibrations were experienced by 68% of the people surveyed, with 87% of those feeling them weekly, and 13% daily. [Thanks Tim]

The Salesman’s Guide To Manipulating Your Friends.

PBS Frontline documentary: The Retirement Gamble. “Their incentive is to sell you a product that makes them a higher commission, not necessarily a product that maximizes your chances of saving more.”

The difference between legal and illegal drugs is about history and business, but not science.

Why is it so hard to quit smoking?

Crashing Through Manhattan In The Fake Google Driverless Car.

Japanese Marinated Soft Boiled Egg for Ramen (Ajitsuke Tamago). [Thanks Max!]

I’m looking for a group of volunteers who are willing to embark on an honesty experiment with me. For 30 days, we’ll all commit to being honest with ourselves and others.

Harvard Age Guessing Game Claims To Be Accurate Just By Analysing Clicking Patterns.

Past predictions of what newspapers might look like in the future.

The aim of this guide is to provide practical guidance on the preparation of trophy heads.

Welcome to adverCar.com, where you get paid to drive to work! Earn up to $100 a month the easy way- by driving as you normally do in a day.  

The 19 most expensive photographs ever sold.

Sunset Boulevard, 1883.

Rocketman.

On July 16, 2012, a painting by a little-known artist sold at Christie’s for $74,500, nearly ten times its high estimate of $8,000. The work that yielded this unexpected result — an acrylic teal-hued painting of a rocky coast called “Nob Hill” — was not the work of a 20-something artist finishing up his MFA. It was a painting created in 1965, and the artist, Llyn Foulkes, is 77 years old and has been working in relative obscurity in Los Angeles for the past 50 years. In March, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles mounted a retrospective of his work, which will travel to the New Museum in June, marking the first time Foulkes will have had a retrospective at a New York museum. […]

The new interest in older artists isn’t just about scholarly rediscovery. The interest has less to do with the necessity of unearthing historical material to understand an artist’s career arc and more to do with feeding an insatiable market. “Unlike the past model where most galleries hosted one new exhibition every four to six weeks, many galleries now have two or more new exhibitions every turn-over,” said Todd Levin, and art advisor and director of Levin Art Group. “There’s a increasing need to fill the constantly expanding number of exhibition opportunities.”

Today, there are some 300 to 400 galleries in New York compared with the roughly 70 galleries in New York in 1970. As for the number of shows galleries mount each year, that has likewise increased: Gagosian mounted 63 last year at its galleries worldwide, David Zwirner had 14 shows at its spaces in New York and London, and Pace had 36 across its three galleries in New York, Beijing, and London.

{ Artinfo | Continue reading }

photo { Diane & Allan Arbus, Self-portrait, 1947 }

{ Mark Steinmetz }

You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. “I have a lot of cooling equipment to make sure my house doesn’t catch on fire,” says Moore, who leads research at computer security company Rapid7. […]

Moore’s census involved regularly sending simple, automated messages to each one of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices connected to the Internet around the world (Google, in contrast, collects information offered publicly by websites). Many of the two terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) worth of replies Moore received from 310 million IPs indicated that they came from devices vulnerable to well-known flaws, or configured in a way that could to let anyone take control of them.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Miro, Blue III, 1961 }

{ Decoding The City: The Road Graffiti Placed by Utility Workers. }

Proponents of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) claim that certain eye-movements are reliable indicators of lying. According to this notion, a person looking up to their right suggests a lie whereas looking up to their left is indicative of truth telling. Despite widespread belief in this claim, no previous research has examined its validity. […]

Three studies provided no evidence to support the notion that the patterns of eye-movements promoted by many NLP practitioners aid lie detection. This is in line with findings from a considerable amount of previous work showing that facial clues (including eye movements) are poor indicators of deception.

{ PLoS | Continue reading }

We’re basically asking the 70 year-old fuselage of a DC-9 to go supersonic. […] Same with the ad industry model.

The system is set up to reward layers, reward churn (hours-based work) and reward quick, incremental successes Vs. real ‘innovation’ or cutting edge and efficient ideas that could transform business. Whether that’s evidenced by brand managers who simply need to move the needle in order to get promoted or ad execs who need to get an award to jump up in a position, it’s apparent everybody’s pushing for short term gains, small passes that move the needle just a few points and add enough time and layers to bill.

This is what clients are paying for, encouraging and perpetuating. Starting with the pitch process (albeit, the first massive outlay is from agencies themselves. But if they win your business – they’ll get it back).

Client processes are what keep that status quo in place. Agencies are not innovating their own model fast enough only because they can’t. The agency model of the now is still making all the money. But it’s the model of the 1960′s.

One example is media. Often, agencies are presented with a media schedule before there’s even a concept. […] It’s kind of like handing us an expensive megaphone and only then being told to try to soothe a baby to sleep. […]

(there are plenty of those ‘innovative’ ideas sitting around anyway, but most don’t get made in a system that rewards overspending Vs. outthinking).

{ Tim Geoghegan | Continue reading }

{ Boards of Canada code found hidden in messageboard banner; might include title of new record | Fact | full story }

I’d get online and look up and 40 minutes would have gone by, and my reading time for the night would have been pissed away, and all I would have learned was that, you know, a certain celebrity had lived in her car awhile, or that a cat had dialled 911. […] It’s interesting because (1) this tendency does seem to alter brain function and (2) through some demonic cause-and-effect, our technology is exactly situated to exploit the crappier angles of our nature: gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity. It’s almost as if totalitarianism thought better of the jackboots and decided to go another way: smoother, more flattering – and impossible to resist.

{ George Saunders/Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Claudine Doury }

As most of us over at io9 have come to understand, Kinja sucks tremendous balls, but not just any balls; the balls Kinja sucks are actually singularities, over the event horizon of which it has passed, so that it may achieve infinite sucking.

{ reluctant.meatbag/gawker | Continue reading }

In 1884, Scientific American asked and answered the famous question, “if a tree were to fall on an uninhabited island, would there be any sound?” […] “If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.” […]

Dolphins, for instance, hear 150–150,000 Hz oscillations, whereas humans hear in the range of 20–20,000 Hz. We perceive only as much of reality as our mechanisms of transduction, our sensory organs, afford us. The remainder, the un-transduced portion, is lost to oblivion (or to instrumentation). Transduction induces both veridical representation and editorializing on the biological value of events and objects, such as fright at the apprehension of threat. Morality, perhaps counterintuitively, begins with editorialized sensation. […]

Churchland describes her project as examining the platform upon which morality is constructed. Her thesis is that the platform is maternal attachment to young. The largest single factor in human brain evolution is our exaggerated juvenile phase, during much of which we are helpless. This surely exerted strong selective pressure for parental behavior, care for kin. Churchland argues this is the forerunner of care for kith and strangers. Haidt, drawing from cross-cultural psychology, argues that the normative bedrock is not monolithic. He proposes six innate dimensions about which we are predisposed toward moralizing: harm-care, fairness-cheating, liberty-oppression, loyalty-betrayal, authority-subversion and sanctity-degradation.

{ The American Interest | Continue reading }

{ The guy on the roof… why is he hiding behind such heavy pixelation? }

Researchers placed an atomic clock on the ground, and another one in a high speed aircraft. The scientists found that less time passed on the clock in the plane. The faster we move, the slower time passes; and if we travel fast enough, theoretically we could go backwards.

{ IEET | Continue reading }

{ Irena Fabri }

Despite an understanding of the perception and consequences of apologies for their recipients, little is known about the consequences of interpersonal apologies, or their denial, for the offending actor.

In two empirical studies, we examined the unexplored psychological consequences that follow from a harm-doer’s explicit refusal to apologize.

Results showed that the act of refusing to apologize resulted in greater self-esteem than not refusing to apologize. Moreover, apology refusal also resulted in increased feelings of power/control and value integrity, both of which mediated the effect of refusal on self-esteem.

{ European Journal of Social Psychology/Wiley | Continue reading }

U.S. government to spend $890K on nothing.

High Frequency Trading and the Hacked Associated Press Twitter Account.

Scientists Unsure Why Female Flies Expel Sperm and Eat It.

Humans feel empathy for robots.

Their research provides the first evidence that people’s visual biases change when surrounded by members of their own group. “Having one’s group or posse around actually changes the perceived seriousness of the threat,” said Joseph Cesario, lead author on the study and assistant professor of psychology.

There were approximately 32 million users of psychedelic drugs in the United States in 2010.

1 million hours of psychiatrist time wasted yearly on phone approval for hospitalization.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events. [NY Times]

Eye Tracker Finds Which Ads Actually Stick, Pushes ‘Cost-Per-Visual’ As New Madison Avenue Currency. [Thanks Tim]

New research shows how Shakespeare’s grammatical trickery excites the “language network.”

Slash (/): Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore.

3 September 1967, the day Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.

Cell towers disguised (poorly) as trees.

Graphic Designer Dad Illustrates His Kids’ Lunch Bags Almost Every Day Since 2008.

There Were Penguins on the Floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Siamese mug.

Car wash gif.

The problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions, say advocates of “big data”. Software that crunches piles of information can spot things that may not be apparent to the naked eye. […]

Some insights are counter-intuitive. […] For customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better.

{ Economist | Continue reading }

acrylic and oilstick on canvas { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Light Blue Movers, 1987}

Face recognition is supposed to be fast. However, the actual speed at which faces can be recognized remains unknown. To address this issue, we report two experiments run with speed constraints. […]

Results indicate that the fastest speed at which a face can be recognized is around 360–390 ms. Such latencies are about 100 ms longer than the latencies recorded in similar tasks in which subjects have to detect faces among other stimuli.

{ Frontiers | Continue reading }

{ Ren Hang }

Can the friend of my friend be my enemy?

Structural balance theory considers the positive or negative ties between three individuals, or triads, and suggests that “the friend of my enemy is my enemy” triangle is more stable and should be more common than “the friend of my friend is my enemy” triangle. Another configuration, “the friend of my friend is my friend,” is considered to also be a stable configuration in the social network. The last possible triangle, “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy,” presages an unstable state, according to the theory.

The potential power of structural balance theory is its ability to predict patterns in the structure of the whole social network and also predict changes that occur over time, as unstable triads are expected to change to stable ones.

{ NIMBioS | Continue reading }