The risk of waking from a general anaesthetic while under the surgeon’s knife is extremely small - about one in 15,000 - research reveals.

Out of nearly 3 million operations in 2011 there were 153 reported cases. […] A third - 46 in total - were conscious throughout the operation.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

The incidence of accidental awareness during general anaesthesia (AAGA) is reported by several studies to be surprisingly high, in the range of 1–2 per 1000 general anaesthetics administered. These studies employ a direct patient questionnaire (usually repeated three times over a period of up to 30 days postoperatively) known as the ‘Brice protocol.’ It is also reported that a high proportion of patients experiencing AAGA suffer psychological problems including posttraumatic stress disorder. There are in fact very few studies reporting an incidence of AAGA much lower than this, an exception being that of Pollard et al., who found an incidence of 1:14 500. However, their methods might be criticised as they administered the questionnaire only twice over a 48-h period, which might only detect two thirds of cases . Anecdotally, anaesthetists do not perceive the incidence of AAGA to be so high. A small Japanese study found that only 21 of 172 practitioners had known of an incident of AAGA under their care, with an overall incidence of just 1:3500. In a larger UK survey of over 2000 consultants, Lau et al. reported that anaesthetists estimated the incidence to be approximately 1:5000, similar to the estimated incidence reported previously by 220 Australian anaesthetists of between 1:5000 and 1:10 000.

{ Anaesthesia/Wiley | Continue reading }

The capacity to deceive others is a complex mental skill that requires the ability to suppress truthful information. The polygraph is widely used in countries such as the USA to detect deception. However, little is known about the effects of emotional processes (such as the fear of being found guilty despite being innocent) on the physiological responses that are used to detect lies. The aim of this study was to investigate the time course and neural correlates of untruthful behavior by analyzing electrocortical indexes in response to visually presented neutral and affective questions. […]

The ERP data [An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event] show the existence of a reliable neural marker of lying in the form of an increased amplitude of the N400 component (which likely indexes conscious control processing) in frontal and prefrontal regions of the left hemisphere between 300 and 400 ms post-stimulus. Importantly, this marker was observed to be independent of the affective value of the question.

{ PLoS | Continue reading }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }

unrelated { Is gratitude always good? No. }

Insomnia, euphoria, anxiety and obsession; modern science shows us that these symptoms are just as likely to be found in someone who is deeply in love as someone who is having mental problems. Should these people be once again diagnosed as having “lovesickness”, as they would have been in the past? […]

Although lovesickness is not used as a medical diagnosis anymore, recent research in the fields of clinical psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience has more fully consolidated the pathological components of passionate love, showing that people in love are not so different from patients suffering bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and substance-related disorders.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

You are insolvent when you can’t pay your debts. Households and firms have struggled with insolvency for centuries. Insolvency is usually a balance sheet concept based around the valuation of assets. When the value of your assets is less than the value of your liabilities, you are insolvent. Usually you work out a repayment schedule with your creditors via a restructuring process.

For countries the notion of national insolvency is a newer, and potentially very misleading, idea. Countries aren’t corporations. Technically almost every country would be insolvent if if was asked to pay all of its debt using its available assets. All governments in practice secure their national debts on their abilities to levy taxes. You can’t really repossess a country, in fairness. When a sovereign borrows too much, it either pushes the debt into the future by rolling over its debt, or failing that, defaults on some or all of the debt. The history of sovereign debt is in fact the history of sovereign default. Defaults tend to happen, in bursts, about every 30 years or so. But before the current crisis, very little attention was paid to this idea of national insolvency. There are very few mentions of national insolvency during the East Asian crisis of the late 1990s, for example.

{ HBR | Continue reading }

The theft of used cooking grease from city restaurants has risen in recent years thanks to the demand for “yellow grease” — a valuable ingredient in biodiesel.

Fla. House passes bill banning Internet cafes.

Blood monitoring implant tells your smartphone when you’re about to have a heart attack.

Motion-sensing wristband buzzes to tell health-care workers if they are washing their hands properly.

A huge study involving over 12,000 participants across 51 cultures from Argentina to Uganda has concluded that men tend to have more varied personalities than women. That male and female students tended to rate men’s personalities with more variability might say more about how men are perceived, than about how they actually are.

The Difference between being smart, educated, and intelligent.

Researchers use menstrual blood stem cells to treat heart failure.

Men and women get sick in different ways. Recent research in laboratory medicine has revealed crucial differences between men and women with regard to cardiovascular illness, cancer, liver disease, osteoporosis, and in the area of pharmacology

“On which side of the central seam in your pants, do you keep your penis?”

“I don’t know. I don’t identify with the term ‘rich.’ But I think I make a shit-ton of money,” a 24-year-old Google employee making low six figures told me. Tech has brought very young, very rich people to the Bay Area like never before. And the changes to our cultural and economic landscape aren’t necessarily for the better.

Google’s increasingly aggressive effort to steal online retail from Amazon is turning into one of the most intriguing business battles of the year.

This paper provides the most comprehensive discussion to date of whether so-called automated, autonomous, self-driving, or driverless vehicles can be lawfully sold and used on public roads in the United States. [Stanford | PDF]

When the British eventually moved in on the swamp, they found that of the nine hundred troops that originally fled into the swamp, only around twenty seriously wounded and weakened Japanese soldiers were left. In all, about 500 Japanese soldiers escaped from Ramree despite the intense blockade instituted to stop them. If Wright’s claim is true, however, the Ramree crocodile attacks would be the worst in recorded history. [Thanks Tim]

Scaffolds and sidewalk sheds on the rise in New York.

Two hero lawyers have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art over the museum’s attempts to make its absurd but optional $25 admission fee appear to be mandatory.

Yesterday NY Hardcore scene photographed by Brooke Smith (the actress who played the woman in the well in Silence of the Lambs).

The F-word can only be used once in a PG-13 movie.

Edward Mordake supposedly had an extra face on the back of his head, which could neither eat nor speak, although it could laugh and cry. [Thanks Tim!]

I am looking for a DJ that plays in the pacha basement to help me give the illusion that I am playing with them for 1 hr. [Craigslist]

Quantum Archaeology (QA) is the controversial science of resurrecting the dead including their memories. It assumes the universe is made of events and the laws that govern them, and seeks to make maps of brain/body states to the instant of death for everyone in history.

Anticipating process technologies due in 20 – 40 years, it involves construction of the Quantum Archaeology Grid to plot known events filling the gaps by cross-referencing heuristically within the laws of science. Specialist grids already exist waiting to be merged, including cosmic ones with trillions of moving evolution points. The result will be a mega-matrix good enough to describe and simulate the past. Quantum computers and super-recursive algorithms both in their infancy may allow vast calculation into the quantum world, and artificial intelligence has no upper limit to what it might do.

{ Transhumanity | Continue reading }

photo { Erwin Olaf }

Would Time Travellers Affect Security Prices?

Financial markets in a world with time travel would look very different from ours. But would time travellers come to our time, making our markets look like theirs? This paper discusses this issue and related matters such as the problem of prediction in financial economics, the nature of security prices, the social and mental nature of financial reality, and the relation of Financial Economics to Physics. It presents a solution to the problem of bilking behaviour of time travellers, and gives a definite answer to the title question.

{ Richard Hudson | Continue reading }

art { Alexander Calder, Gibraltar, 1936 }

Imagine a team at a ski company that’s faced with a big problem: When skiers make sharp turns at high speeds, the edges of their skis lift from the snow, causing the skiers to sometimes lose control. The team needed to lessen the vibrations of its skis. But how? Eventually, they found a great solution in an unlikely place: the music industry. In some violins, they discovered, there’s a special layer — a metal grid — that helps to stabilize the instrument, and reduce unwanted vibrations. Problem solved. The ski company adapted the metal grid idea into its ski design.

This type of solution is called an analogous solution, and it’s more common than you may think. In fact, I’d estimate that nearly 90% of new solutions are really just adaptations from solutions that already exist — and they’re often taken from fields outside the problem solver’s expertise.

Analogous solutions are extremely beneficial to businesses because they reduce time to market, and they can get stalled projects moving again. But for a long time they weren’t easy to find. If you didn’t accidentally happen upon a solution, you were simply out of luck.

This is why I wanted to develop a system that could make accidental discoveries a more predictable and regular occurrence […] which resulted in Analogy Finder, a program that mines the U.S. Patent Database for analogous solutions.

{ HBR | Continue reading }

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt and that is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty.

{ SAGE | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }

Baerg was challenged by a Cornell colleague to investigate whether black widows were harmless or poisonous. […] He made extensive observations of black widow behavior and its venom’s effects on rats. Baerg used himself as an experimental subject to test the effects of the venom on humans. He induced a black widow to bite the third finger of his left hand, but the bite was apparently superficial, and he suffered no symptoms besides a “slight, sharp pain.” Baerg repeated the test the following day, this time allowing the spider’s fangs to remain inserted for five seconds. During the next three days, Baerg recorded his symptoms and reactions, creating the first account of the effects of the black widow spider bite on humans; it was published in the March 1923 edition of The Journal of Parasitology (vol. 9, no. 3). Baerg observed the swelling and pain that followed the spider’s bite, noting that, as the symptoms spread to his shoulder, chest, and hips, he had problems with breathing and speech. He also noted that the “doctor advises that I go to bed.” He recalled the experience later, saying that the pain was severe and different from anything he had ever experienced. Baerg induced numbers of arachnids to bite or sting him over the successive years and recorded the resulting effects.

{ Encyclopedia of Arkansas | Continue reading }

art { Joan Miró, Painting (Head and Spider), 1925 }

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.” […]

A growing body of evidence shows that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Can an octopus use tools? Do chimpanzees have a sense of fairness? Can birds guess what others know? Do rats feel empathy for their friends? Just a few decades ago we would have answered “no” to all such questions. Now we’re not so sure.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Brooklyn man furious his roommate wanted to move out allegedly murdered her fish

[…]

“They were my babies! I can’t have children, so my pets are like my kids,” Brenda Alvarez said yesterday. “They were beautiful fish and cost about $25 each.” […]

Alvarez, 45, said she wanted to move out of the Nostrand Avenue apartment because of growing tension between the longtime friends. […]

Santiago allegedly roughed up Alvarez before turning on the fish. He killed them in front of her, she said. […]

Santiago, 47, was arrested and charged with animal cruelty and assault.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

{ Grace Jones photographed by Chris Cunningham, 2008 }

The Human Cannonball doesn’t usually remember much about each flight, aside from a quick impression of soaring through the air. […] She has just been shot out of a 24-foot-long air-compression cannon and travels between 75 and 100 feet at a force of 7 g. That’s greater force than a roller coaster, greater than a Formula One racecar, greater than the space shuttle. A force powerful enough to have caused some human cannonballs to pass out midflight. […] She’s in the air approximately three seconds.

{ Riverfront Times | Continue reading }

For years, publishers could count on bored shoppers waiting in the checkout line to pick up a magazine, get engrossed in an article, and toss it into their cart alongside the milk and eggs. Then came “mobile blinders.”

These days, consumers are more likely to send a quick text and check their Facebook feed than to read a magazine or develop a momentary craving for the gum or candy on display. […]

Hearst, which sells 15 percent of its U.S. magazines at retailers, is adding cardboard displays in places other than the checkout line. […]

The gum category […] declined 5.5. percent last year.

{ Businessweek | Continue reading }

photo { Luigi Ghirri }

Recent experimental psychology […] suggests that the best leaders — both male and female — seem to have relatively high testosterone, which is linked to decreased fear and increased tolerance for risk and desire to compete, and low cortisol, which is linked to decreased anxiety. Effective leadership is associated with hormone levels, and with this hormone profile, leaders are confident and willing to take risks, but not overly threatened or reactive to stressors. [..]

It turns out these two hormones, testosterone and cortisol, are very touchy, sensitive to social and physical cues and fluctuating a great deal over the course of a single day. As Sandberg mentioned in her book, our research shows that people can change their own hormone levels and behaviors, by “faking it” — by “power posing,” or adopting expansive, open nonverbal postures that are strongly associated with power and dominance across the animal kingdom (imagine standing with hands on hips and feet spread, like Wonder Woman). By holding these postures for just two minutes before entering a high-stress situation, people (both men and women) can increase their testosterone by about 20% and decrease their cortisol by about 25%.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

According to the studies he cited, 7 percent of people’s twitter followers are actually spambots; 30 percent of social media users are deceived by spambots and chatbots; and 20 percent of social media users accept friend requests from unknown people, 51 percent of which are not human. […] When it comes to “astroturfing” — the practice of creating fake grassroots movements to influence opinions — the hit ratio on email spams is about 12.5 million to 1. In order to create an astroturf movement on the scale of the anti-SOPA movement in 2011, every person on earth would have to receive the same spam message 8 times.

{ Gigaom | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

Fall asleep in the wrong position, and acid slips into the esophagus, a recipe for agita and insomnia.

Doctors recommend sleeping on an incline, which allows gravity to keep the stomach’s contents where they belong. But sleeping on your side can also make a difference — so long as you choose the correct side. Several studies have found that sleeping on the right side aggravates heartburn; sleeping on the left tends to calm it.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Those who have a tendency to migrate to the left of a double bed are apparently happier than their ‘right’ counterparts }

photos { Wally McNamee | Mitch Epstein }

Sexuality is seen as a crucial aspect of one’s identification and sexual desire is perceived as the core of one’s identity. Therefore, the emergence of an asexual identity constitutes a radical disruption of approaches to identity and epistemology in social science. This study explores a virtual community of asexual individuals who engage in discussions about contradictory processes of identification, the instability of sexual identities, gender relations and possi- ble representations of asexuality.

{ Graduate Journal of Social Science | PDF }