{ Study finds gene that predicts happiness in women }

Emotion recognition, a core component of emotional intelligence, is the general ability to recognize emotions. […]

For decades, researchers have known that skill in emotion recognition predicts positive outcomes in a wide range of contexts. From business executives to foreign service officers to elementary school principals, studies have shown a positive association between skill in emotion recognition and success in a wide variety of educational, workplace, or organizational contexts. Sensitivity to the internal states of colleagues, note the authors, can assist in coordinating activities and working independently. Emotion recognition, however, is a complex skill.

A person can express emotion by voice tones, facial expressions, body movements, or a combination of these “channels.” Each channel or combination can communicate a number of different emotions. […] Our facial expressions are, according to published research, highly controllable, express the information we choose to communicate, and as a result, “this information is more subject to impression management.” Emotion information conveyed through body movement or voice channels, however, may provide, according to the authors, a truer window into a person’s feelings. The ability to control the expression of emotion through these channels is more difficult, and requires more effort. […]

Emotion recognition is about reading social cues. The researchers label this skill “nonverbal eavesdropping.” […] Some people have problems when they lack the ability to read social cues around them. The study authors noted that some people have a different kind of problem with emotion recognition: They have the potential to “read too much” in a particular situation. […]

Sadness was the easiest emotion to recognize and fear the most difficult;

Accuracy did not differ across positive versus negative emotions;

Accuracy varied by channel, with emotions easier to recognize through facial photographs than vocal tone;

Anger and fear were more easier to recognize in the voice;

Happiness and sadness were relatively easier to recognize in the face;

Emotional eavesdropping ability varied significantly across emotions, with anger and fear were more easily eavesdropped than happiness or sadness;

{ Psycholawgy | Continue reading }

artwork { Pablo Picasso, Femme étendue lisant, 1952 }

Phenomenology is a philosophical method for uncovering the structure of lived experience by describing what it is like from a first person perspective. Rather than attempting to prove a set of objective facts, phenomenology tracks the way that a meaningful experience of the world emerges for someone in the total situation of their Being-in-the-world. It’s not that facts are unimportant, but rather that they are not meaningful in themselves; they become meaningful when they are experienced by someone in relation to a wider context or horizon.

What happens when that horizon shrinks to the space of a 6-by-9 cell?

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

What are the most important examples of lost or forgotten knowledge?

For example, as Matt Ridley states in The Rational Optimist, “nobody really knows how to use an Acheulean hand axe, and until recently nobody knew how to build a medieval siege catapult known as a trebuchet.”

{ Quora | Continue reading }

Grigori Perelman is one of the greatest mathematicians of our time, a Russian genius who solved the Poincaré Conjecture, which plagued the brightest minds for a century. At the height of his fame, he refused a million-dollar award for his work. Then he disappeared. Our writer hunts him down on the streets of St. Petersburg. […]

Word was that someone had solved an unsolvable math problem. The Poincaré conjecture concerns three-dimensional spheres, and it has broad implications for spatial relations and quantum physics, even helping to explain the shape of the universe. For nearly 100 years the conjecture had confused the sharpest minds in math, many of whom claimed to have proven it, only to have their work discarded upon scrutiny. The problem had broken spirits, wasted lives. By the time Perelman defeated the conjecture, after many years of concentrated exertion, the Poincaré had affected him so profoundly that he appeared broken too.

Perelman, now 46, had a certain flair. When he completed his proof, over a number of months in 2002 and 2003, he did not publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal, as protocol would suggest. Nor did he vet his conclusions with the mathematicians he knew in Russia, Europe and the U.S. He simply posted his solution online in three parts—the first was named “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications”—and then e-mailed an abstract to several former associates, many of whom he had not contacted in nearly a decade.

{ Brett Forrest | Continue reading }

If one day is not exactly 24hrs and is in fact 23hr 56 mins, shouldn’t the error add up, and shouldn’t we see 12AM becoming noon at some point in time?

You’re right that a “sidereal” day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds. But this is not a day in the everyday sense.

A sidereal day is how long it takes the earth (on average) to make one rotation relative to the faraway stars and other galaxies in the sky.

If you find a star that is directly above you at midnight one night, the same star will be directly above you again at 11:56:04 p.m. the next evening.

Similarly, if you were sitting on the star Proxima Centauri looking through a powerful telescope at earth, you would see Toledo, Ohio, go by every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds.

However, we don’t keep time by the faraway stars — we measure time by a much closer star, the sun! And we are actually in orbit around the sun, orbiting in the same direction that the earth is spinning on its own axis. From our perspective, the sun goes a little slower in the sky because we are also orbiting around it.

How fast are we orbiting around the sun? We make one full orbit every year, or roughly 366.25 sidereal days.

So after a year, the faraway stars will have done 366.25 rotations around the earth, but the sun will only have done 365.25 rotations. We “lose” a sunset because of the complete orbit. (The extra quarter day is why we need a leap year every four years.)

So there are 365.25 “mean solar days” in 366.25 “sidereal” days. How long is a “mean solar day”? Let’s do the math: One sidereal day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds, or 86164 seconds. Multiply this by 366.25 sidereal days in a year, and you get 31557565 seconds. Divide by 365.25 solar days, and we get that a solar day is…. 86,400 seconds. That’s 24 hours exactly!

{ Quora | Continue reading }

Clever Nigerian letter scammers found ways to adapt. These days, instead of just masquerading as monarchs, some also pose as wealthy foreign businessmen on dating websites. […]

Now fraudsters who work the phone try to get you to call them. […]

Timeshare owners who’ve been swindled of upfront fees by phony resellers are now being re-contacted by so-called “fraud recovery” specialists. […]

In bank vestibules with several ATMs, crooks place “Out of Service” signs on non-tampered ATMs in order to get customers to use a neighboring ATM on which they already placed a skimmer.

{ The Saturday Evening Post | The Sneakiest New Scams | Continue reading }

Two traits that set humans apart from other primates—big brains and the ability to walk upright—could be at odds when it comes to childbirth. Big brains and the big heads that encase them are hard to push through the human birth canal, but a wider pelvis might compromise bipedal walking. Scientists have long posited that nature’s solution to this problem, which is known as the “obstetric dilemma,” was to shorten the duration of gestation so that babies are born before their heads get too big. As a result, human babies are relatively helpless and seemingly underdeveloped in terms of motor and cognitive ability compared to other primates.

“All these fascinating phenomena in human evolution—bipedalism, difficult childbirth, wide female hips, big brains, relatively helpless babies—have traditionally been tied together with the obstetric dilemma,” said Holly Dunsworth, an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island and lead author of the research. “It’s been taught in anthropology courses for decades, but when I looked for hard evidence that it’s actually true, I struck out.” The first problem with the theory is that there is no evidence that hips wide enough to deliver a more developed baby would be a detriment to walking, Dunsworth said. Anna Warrener, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University and one of the paper’s co-authors, has studied how hip breadth affects locomotion with women on treadmills. She found that there is no correlation between wider hips and a diminished locomotor economy.

Then Dunsworth looked for evidence that human pregnancy is shortened compared to other primates and mammals. She found well-established research to the contrary. “Controlling for mother’s body size, human gestation is a bit longer than expected compared to other primates, not shorter,” she said. “And babies are a bit larger than expected, not smaller. Although babies behave like it, they’re not born early.”

For mammals in general, including humans, gestation length and offspring size are predicted by mother’s body size. Because body size is a good proxy for an animal’s metabolic rate and function, Dunsworth started to wonder if metabolism might offer a better explanation for the timing of human birth than the pelvis.

{ Medical Xpress | Continue reading }

photo { Steve McCurry }

Gibbons on helium reveal soprano voice.

Robot learns to recognise itself in mirror.

Man With World’s Deepest Voice Can Hit Infrasonic Notes.

Chimps have better sex than humans.

Man Survives Steel Rod Through His Head. Related: Phineas Gage.

Chinese family car can be driven by remote control.

Iran bans women from more than 70 university degree courses.

Bacteria have become increasingly resistant to the drugs we’ve come to rely on. Will humans lose the battle with microbes?

Brain imaging can predict how intelligent you are, study finds.

Social rejection can fuel imaginative thinking, study shows.

Creating an artificial jellyfish to model the human heart.

Fathers bequeath more mutations as they age.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have shown that 30 minutes of daily training provide an equally effective loss of weight and body mass as 60 minutes.

Physicists suggest selfishness can pay.

This paper considers the effects of music on intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people. It outlines how extensive active engagement with music can induce cortical reorganization. This may produce functional changes in how the brain processes information.

Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us.

Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger.

MasterCard Denies Plans For BitCoin Debit Card.

Google Fiber Is The Most Disruptive Thing The Company’s Done Since Gmail.

What is Macroecology?

The Talmud as a Business Guide.

Killers Shouldn’t Inherit from Their Victims…Or Should They?

She poisoned 21 people including her own mother, children and husbands. So why has no-one heard of Britain’s FIRST serial killer, Mary Ann Cotton?

Fatal Russian roulette refers to death following an act of extreme bravado in which the individual spins the cylinder of a revolver loaded with at least one cartridge, aims the muzzle at the head, and pulls the trigger. The majority of victims are men younger than 30 years who, in the presence of others, are under the influence of ethanol or other drugs. This is a 10-year (1993-2002) retrospective review of self-inflicted gunshot wounds of the head.

Can a Computer Tell Us What Makes Paris Look Like Paris?

Why Is the Night Sky Turning Red?

Can we now transmute base substances into gold?

Some futurists predict that we’ll be able to halt the aging process by the end of this century — if not sooner. Would it be boring if we could live forever?

The Internal Security Act allows the government of Singapore to imprison citizens indefinitely and without trial.

In a story that could be the plot for a film, one of the world’s pioneering anthropologists has been found to have been a member of both the Nazi SS and the French resistance during the Second World War.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Summary and Comments.

U.S. Casinos Discover Macau’s Murky Side.

The burglar who uses taxis to collect him from break-ins.

In West Virginia, however, the drug of choice was OxyContin, or “hillbilly heroin.” 

XO sauce was first created in Hong Kong sometime in the early eighties. It’s been called “the caviar of the East.”

Everyone Poops but Only Julian Assange Doesn’t Flush.

Pujol’s unique gift was based on his ability to “inhale” through his rectum. Air thus inhaled could be exhaled with force sufficient to extinguish a candle from a distance of a foot.

Rich girls are hot because their moms are hot. But they’re also insane because their dads are inbred sociopaths with Nazi fetishes. All of this makes dating one for a short period of time an excitingly weird mixture of prescription pills, naps, crazy arguments, depressing music, room service, therapists, tattoos that cost more than cars, jet lag, and guestlists. The Vice guide to dating rich girls.

People who have walked on the Moon.

I have given up.

For those who like to ride the horse in front of TV. [thanks Tim]

Hi.

Recently on Facebook a friend asked: “Hey, atheist friends, I need your help. I would like to listen and read what do you do when you lose somebody who you loved? I have tried several ways to ease the pain, but it is still there.” […]

My answer (edited):

I cope with the grief from the death of loved ones by contemplating the Cosmist possibility, described by many thinkers including Nikolai Fedorov, Hans Moravec and Frank Tipler, that future generations (or alien civilizations, or whatever) may develop technologies to resurrect the dead. A related idea is that our reality may be a “simulation” computed by entities in a higher-level reality, who may choose to copy those who die in our reality to another reality. Contemplating these possibilities is my way to cope with grief, I hope you will find your own way.

{ Turing Church | Continue reading }

In the fourth quarter of 2008, Nokia, which had long been the phone industry’s profit leader, sold 113 million devices worldwide, about 15 million of them smartphones. It made about $1.2 billion in profit on all those phones. That same quarter, Apple sold just 4 million iPhones. But that single device earned Apple a profit of $1.3 billion.

These numbers provide the backstory to an industry in panic. If you were a phone maker watching the iPhone’s sudden rise in 2008, you had to make a quick decision. […]

One option was to do nothing. A lot of firms opted for this path—Nokia and RIM, for instance, seem to have decided that the iPhone was a blip, a cultish device that would never reach mass appeal. […] Another option was to try to leapfrog Apple. […] This was Palm’s idea. […] Then there was a third choice. You could just copy Apple. […] On Friday, a federal jury decided that Samsung was guilty of doing just that.

{ PandoDaily | Continue reading }

Researchers have confirmed what many suspected - pop music over the last five decades has grown progressively more sad-sounding and emotionally ambiguous. They analyzed the tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor) of the most popular 1,010 pop songs identified using year-end lists published by Billboard magazine in the USA from 1965 to 2009. Tempo was determined using the beats per minute of a song, and where this was ambiguous the researchers used the rate at which you’d clap along. The mode of the song was identified from its tonic chord - the three notes played together at the outset, in either minor or major. Happy sounding songs are typically of fast tempo in major mode, whilst sad songs are slow and in minor. Songs can also be emotionally ambiguous, having a tempo that’s fast in minor, or vice versa.

The researchers found that the proportion of songs recorded in minor-mode has increased, doubling over the last fifty years. The proportion of slow tempo hits has also increased linearly, reaching a peak in the 90s. There’s also been a decrease in unambiguously happy-sounding songs and an increase in emotionally ambiguous songs.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

In a series of four experiments Milkman found that dealing with uncertainty exhausts self-control, and thus makes it more likely you’ll choose a “want” option (i.e. behaviors that are hedonistic, irresponsible, or aimed at short-term gain) over a “should” option (i.e. behaviors aimed at long term-gain.) […]

The study also hints at why habits are so important. If you get home from work and stop to think “will I go to the gym today?”, that uncertainty is already starting to sap your ability to control your gym-avoiding tendencies. But if you get home knowing you’ll go to the gym because you’ve gone on 23 consecutive Tuesdays, it will be easier to actually go.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

art { Xu Zhen }

Consciousness is restricted to a subset of animals with relatively complex brains. The more scientists study animal behavior and brain anatomy, however, the more universal consciousness seems to be. A brain as complex as the human brain is definitely not necessary for consciousness. On July 7 this year, a group of neuroscientists convening at Cambridge University signed a document officially declaring that non-human animals, “including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses” are conscious.

Humans are more than just conscious—they are also self-aware. Scientists differ on the difference between consciousness and self-awareness, but here is one common explanation: […] To be conscious is to think; to be self-aware is to realize that you are a thinking being and to think about your thoughts. […]

Numerous neuroimaging studies have suggested that thinking about ourselves, recognizing images of ourselves and reflecting on our thoughts and feelings—that is, different forms self-awareness—all involve the cerebral cortex, the outermost, intricately wrinkled part of the brain. The fact that humans have a particularly large and wrinkly cerebral cortex relative to body size supposedly explains why we seem to be more self-aware than most other animals.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

Facebook is planning on using Instagram to roll out a radical new advertising platform which is capable of following users’ emotions in real time and target advertisements based on how they are feeling. The platform - internally codenamed the Tom Parsons Project (TPP) - will “combine Instagram’s vast user base and high daily use rate with advancements in facial recognition technology to connect users with products which most fit their immediate needs.”

In the new TPP-enabled Instagram whilst you are taking a photo with your smartphone’s rear-facing camera the TPP software will discreetly activate the front facing camera and lock onto the image of your face. The app’s facial recognition function will then record the precise positioning of your facial features and send them to Facebook’s database where the firm will assign an emotion to the facial pattern and log your emotional state.

The company will then use a highly advanced algorithm which combines this new emotional data with the demographic data Facebook already has to create a near perfect ad targeting system. […]

“If you’re a woman with cyclical mood issues due to the harshness of your menstrual cycle, the new Instagram should be able to accurately predict when your cycle is peaking and connect you to valuable products and services which may reduce your discomfort before your moods become a burden on others.”

Privacy advocates are expected to protest the new technology, but legal experts say the method is legal in the United States so long as it’s disclosed in Instagram’s new Terms of Service Agreement.

{ The Daily Currant | Continue reading }

Then?

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, 17, 1914-1921 | Continue reading }

The tendency for experiences to create more happiness than material possessions is one scientific finding that’s recently received a lot of attention. While most media coverage about the joy of experiences has focused on the abstract question of how to be happy, evidence is building that beliefs about materialism and happiness can also have concrete implications for a person’s day-to-day to life.

For example, two recent studies have found a connection between materialism and poor money management. This means that convincing people material possessions aren’t the key to happiness won’t simply help them spend their Christmas bonus more wisely, it may also lead to better overall financial management.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

photo { Matthew Reamer }

On a Sunday night in May 1935, Victor Lustig was strolling down Broadway on New York’s Upper West Side. At first, the Secret Service agents couldn’t be sure it was him. They’d been shadowing him for seven months, painstakingly trying to learn more about this mysterious and dapper man, but his newly grown mustache had thrown them off momentarily. As he turned up the velvet collar on his Chesterfield coat and quickened his pace, the agents swooped in. […]

Secret Service agents finally had one of the world’s greatest imposters, wanted throughout Europe as well as in the United States.  He’d amassed a fortune in schemes that were so grand and outlandish, few thought any of his victims could ever be so gullible. He’d sold the Eiffel Tower to a French scrap-metal dealer. He’d sold a “money box” to countless greedy victims who believed that Lustig’s contraption was capable of printing perfectly replicated $100 bills. (Police noted that some “smart” New York gamblers had paid $46,000 for one.) He had even duped some of the wealthiest and most dangerous mobsters—men like Al Capone, who never knew he’d been swindled.

Now the authorities were eager to question him about all of these activities, plus his possible role in several recent murders in New York and the shooting of Jack “Legs” Diamond, who was staying in a hotel room down the hall from Lustig’s on the night he was attacked.

{ Smithsonian mag | Continue reading }

photo { André Kertész, Eiffel Tower (view down), 1929 }

Warhol’s apotheosis as the savior of abstract painting has been coming for years now, ever since sundry dealers, curators, critics, and historians decided that his Shadows, Oxidations, Camouflages, and Rorschachs were in the great tradition of Kazimir Malevich, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman. […]

Deitch begins by referring to abstraction as “a painting tradition that was once seen as essentially reductive” and “monolithic and doctrinaire”—but has “now become expansive.” In what sense were seminal abstract artists such as Kandinsky or de Kooning ever reductive? And what is more reductive than Warhol’s silly attempt at an all-over abstract painting included in this show, the bewilderingly boring 35-foot expanse of army surplus patterning entitled Camouflage?

Deitch would have us believe that Warhol had something to do with incorporating collage into abstract painting, although the truth is that Picasso and Braque were already doing that a century ago. There is nothing in this show that doesn’t have its origins in abstract painting long before Warhol got to work with his silkscreens.

{ Jed Perl/TNR | Continue reading }

A team of organizational behavior scientists recently examined nonharassing sexual behavior at work and its consequences for employees. They based their predictions on theories of power and gender and systematically examined men’s and women’s experiences of sexual behavior at work without imposing a positive or negative lens on the behavior. No prior studies had done this. The results show that workplace sexual behavior is enjoyed by some women and many men but it is generally associated with negative work-related and psychological outcomes, regardless of whether it is enjoyed or disliked.

Some may think it is “fun” or “good” or argue that sexual behavior at work is “typically harmless.” Others may suggest that sexual banter and sexual jokes may provide a fun and jovial atmosphere at work, or that workplace sexual flirtation can be flattering and lead to love or romance. But, these and other sexual behaviors in the workplace correlate with serious and substantial mental and psychological harm, even to those workers who said they enjoyed the experience. The researchers also found no evidence to support any positive evaluation of the effect of sexual behavior in the workplace or that it provides any benefit to employees who enjoy it.

{ Psycholawlogy | Continue reading }

related { Sexual Consent as Voluntary Agreement: Tales of ‘Seduction’ or Questions of Law? }