Everybody is African in origin. Barring a smattering of genes from Neanderthals and other archaic Asian forms, all our ancestors lived in the continent of Africa until 150,000 years ago. Some time after that, say the genes, one group of Africans somehow became so good at exploiting their environment that they (we!) expanded across all of Africa and began to spill out of the continent into Asia and Europe, invading new ecological niches and driving their competitors extinct.

There is plenty of dispute about what gave these people such an advantage—language, some other form of mental ingenuity, or the collective knowledge that comes from exchange and specialization—but there is also disagreement about when the exodus began. For a long time, scientists had assumed a gradual expansion of African people through Sinai into both Europe and Asia. Then, bizarrely, it became clear from both genetics and archaeology that Europe was peopled later (after 40,000 years ago) than Australia (before 50,000 years ago). (…)

Sea levels were 150 feet lower then, because the cold had locked up so much moisture in northern ice-caps, so not only were most Indonesian islands linked by land, but the Persian Gulf was dry and, crucially, the southern end of the Red Sea was a narrow strait.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

A group of computer security researchers have refined an innovative method of combatting identity theft. (…) Its method, described in the journal Information Sciences, “continuously verifies users according to characteristics of their interaction with the mouse.”

The idea of user verification through mouse monitoring is not new. As the researchers note, “a major threat to organizations is identity thefts that are committed by internal users who belong to the organization.”

To combat this, some organizations turn “physiological biometrics” to verify the identity of a computer user. But these techniques, such as fingerprint sensors or retina scanners, “are expensive and not always available,” the researchers write.

An alternative approach is the use of “behavioral biometrics.” Such a system compiles biometric data such as “characteristics of the interaction between the user and input devices such as the mouse and keyboard” and constructs a “unique user signature.”

{ Pacific Standard | Continue reading }

painting { Antonio Ciseri, Ecce Homo, 1871 }

Are straight people born that way? (…) We have to start with a more fundamental question: What do we mean when we say someone is “straight”? At the most basic level, we seem to be imagining female bodies that are specifically sexually aroused by male bodies, and vice versa.

Laboratory studies (…) suggest that, while such people probably do exist — at least in North America, where many sexologists have focused their attentions – it’s not uncommon for straight-identified people to be at least a little aroused by the idea of same-sex relations.

The media has tended to broadcast the news that gay-identified men and straight-identified men have quite discernible arousal patterns when they are shown various kinds of sexual stimuli. And that’s true. But if you look closely at the data, you’ll see that most straight-identified men do tend to show a little bit of arousal across sex categories (as do gay-identified men).

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

painting { Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856 }

It is possible to have Hunger-Games-like situations where everyone strongly expects everyone to fight until only one is left standing. And yes, in such situations you are better off hitting first, before they can hit you. But the first question you should always ask is, just how sure are you that you are in fact in such a situation.

This is what I think every time I hear people talk about inevitable future conflicts, be they Earth v. alien, robots v. humans, human v. animal, west v. east, rich v. poor, liberal v. conservative, religious vs. athiest, smart v. dumb, etc. Yes, if enough folks will see this as unrestrained war to the death, then you should consider striking first. And yes, there probably will be some sort of war eventually. But if you are wrong about the war being likely soon, you could cause vast needless destruction.

{ Overcomingbias | Continue reading }

photo { Facundo Pires }

Cockroaches are actually highly social creatures; they recognize members of their own families, with different generations of the same families living together.

Cockroaches do not like to be left alone, and suffer ill health when they are.

And they form closely bonded, egalitarian societies, based on social structures and rules. Communities of cockroaches are even capable of making collective decisions for the greater good.

By studying certain species of cockroach, we may even be able to learn some insights into how more advanced animal societies evolved, including our own.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

From what I previously understood, people would ingest mushrooms, and if they were in a negative state of mind, they’d have a “bad trip.” If they were with friends, with other people tripping, they were more likely to have a “good trip.” Aspects of these trips seemed to include lots of visual and auditory hallucinations: “halos” glowing around light sources, warping colors, maybe some synesthesia.

So I just figured that magic mushrooms must hyper-activate the parts of the brain that perceive color and sound, to the point where people perceive things that aren’t even there.

However, recent research out of the U.K. says that, surprisingly, I’ve got it all backwards. (…)

Within a minute or two, the test subjects started to feel the effects of the psilocybin, and the researchers gave them fMRIs during their trips. Surprisingly to me, and to the scientists, brain activity and blood flow decreased by up to 20% during the influence of the drug, and these decreases were proportional to the reported intensity of the trip. (…) The thought behind this finding is that when people do shrooms, pathways in the brain that would normally restrict cognition are temporarily turned off, allowing people to cognate at higher levels than ever before. Some of these same cognition-restraining pathways are overactive in cases of depression, but I won’t go so far as to suggest shrooms as a treatment for depressive disorders.

{ Try Nerdy | Continue reading }

photo { Stefan Heyne }

To justify its sky-high valuation, Facebook will have to increase its profit per user at rates that seem unlikely, even by the most generous predictions. Last year, we looked at just how unlikely this is.

The issue that concerns many Facebook users is this. The company is set to profit from selling user data but the users whose data is being traded do not get paid at all. That seems unfair.

Today, Bernardo Huberman and Christina Aperjis at HP Labs in Palo Alto, say there is an alternative. Why not  pay individuals for their data? (…)

If buyers choose only the cheapest data, the sample will be biased in favour of those who price their data cheaply. And if buyers pay everyone the highest price, they will be overpaying.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

drawing { Tracey Emin, Sad Shower in New York, 1995 }

In 2009, the United States crossed a digital Rubicon: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data. (…)

Placing a voice call, compared to streaming The Hangover 2 on Netflix or uploading a video clip of your friend’s latest freestyle BMX trick to YouTube, consumes virtually no bandwidth. (…)

And our calls are getting shorter.

{ The Wilson quaterly | Continue reading }

The New York Times dropped another bomb on Apple’s “iEconomy” this weekend with an expose that shows how the world’s biggest corporation evades billions of dollars in taxes by creating subsidiaries in low-tax states and countries like Nevada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the British Virgin Islands. (…)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Apple spent $2.3 million on lobbying last year and its lobbying expenditures have been steadily increasing over the past decade – in 2000, it only spent $360,000 on lobbying.

A big chunk of this is spent lobbying specifically on tax policy, especially repatriation legislation, which lets firms bring profits held overseas back to the United States at a cheaper tax rate. One bill in particular, the Freedom to Invest Act of 2011, would save companies like Apple, Google, and Cisco $78.7 billion, paid for by the American people.

{ Republic Report | Continue reading }

The first perspective produces legislative atrocities like the proposed New York City bill that would have penalized taxi drivers for transporting prostitutes. (…)

I’m in favor of legalizing all forms of sex work for adults—not because I think it’s necessarily such great work, but because I think being a legal worker is better than being an illegal worker.

{ Jacobin | Continue reading }

Drawing on the metaphor of ‘Prozac’, Prozac leadership encourages leaders to believe their own narratives that everything is going well and discourages followers from raising problems or admitting mistakes. Prozac is used to denote and symbolize a widespread social addiction to excessive positivity. Problems can occur, particularly if this positivity is seen to be discrepant with everyday experience. For example, if leaders repeatedly promise that ‘things can only get better’ but over time this does not happen, followers can become increasingly sceptical and cynical. This article warns that Prozac leadership, whether in corporate, political or other settings, can damage performance by eroding trust, communication, learning and preparedness.


{ SAGE | Continue reading }

photo { Erik Wåhlström }

Albert Tirrell and Mary Bickford had scandalized Boston for years, both individually and as a couple, registering, as one observer noted, “a rather high percentage of moral turpitude.” Mary, the story went, married James Bickford at 16 and settled with him in Bangor, Maine. They had one child, who died in infancy. Some family friends came to console her and invited her to travel with them to Boston. Mary found herself seduced by the big city. (…)

James came to Boston at once, found Mary working in a house of ill repute on North Margin Street and returned home without her. She moved from brothel to brothel and eventually met Tirrell, a wealthy and married father of two. He and Mary traveled together as man and wife, changing their names whenever they moved, and conducted a relationship as volatile as it was passionate; Mary once confided to a fellow boarder that she enjoyed quarreling with Tirrell because they had “such a good time making up.” (…)

Choate kept that case in mind while plotting his defense of Tirrell, and considered an even more daring tactic: contending that Tirrell was a chronic sleepwalker. If he killed Mary Bickford, he did so in a somnambulistic trance and could not be held responsible.

{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }

photo { Linus Bill }

Brain neuroimaging studies continue to outline the structural and functional abnormalities in disorders of mood. A relatively consistent finding has been a reduced volume of the brain hippocampus in major depressive disorder. Studies of hippocampal volume in the less common bipolar disorder have been inconsistent–some studies have found reduced hippocampal volumes while others have not.

The hippocampus is an important brain region to understand in the mood disorders. The hippocampus has a key role in memory. Patients with mood disorders commonly display impairments in mood including deficitis in autobiographical memory. Unipolar depression appears to increase risk for later development of Alzheimer’s disease. Hippocampal volume reduction is a common finding in Alzheimer’s disease. (…)

Lithium is noted to have significant neuroprotective effects.  (…) It is possible that bipolar patients treated with lithium may experience less hippocampal atrophy than those not treated with lithium.

{ Brain Posts | Continue reading }

charcoal on paper { Marius de Zayas, John Marin and Alfred Stieglitz, ca. 1912–13 }

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. Although there were several competing theories as to the etiology of the Black Death, it has been conclusively proven via analysis of ancient DNA from plague victims in northern and southern Europe that the pathogen responsible is the Yersinia pestis bacterium. Thought to have started in China, it travelled along the Silk Road and reached the Crimea by 1346.

From there it was probably carried by Oriental rat fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships. It spread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe.

The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60 percent of Europe’s population, reducing world population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in the 14th century.

The aftermath of the plague created a series of religious, social and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe’s population to recover. The plague returned at various times, killing more people, until it left Europe in the 19th century.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

These persecutions were the burning of Jews between 1348 and 1351, when in anticipation of, or shortly after, outbreaks of plague Jews were accused of poisoning food, wells and streams, tortured into confessions, rounded up in city squares or their synagogues, and exterminated en masse.

{ Oxford Journals | Continue reading }

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

I read somewhere — and the person who wrote this was not a mountaineer but a sailor — that the sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head…

{ Primo Levi | Continue reading }

painting { Pieter Bruegel, The Triumph of Death, c. 1562 }

For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.

Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.

Yet in recent years, the climate change skeptics have seized on one last argument that cannot be so readily dismissed. Their theory is that clouds will save us.

They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.

Their theory exploits the greatest remaining mystery in climate science, the difficulty that researchers have had in predicting how clouds will change. The scientific majority believes that clouds will most likely have a neutral effect or will even amplify the warming, perhaps strongly, but the lack of unambiguous proof has left room for dissent.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Whitman }

In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory.

Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)—only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones—over two times better, in fact. (…)

Your mind (…) wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion.

The Zeigarnik Effect that has been demonstrated many times, in many contexts – but each time I see it or read about it, I can’t help but think of (…) Socrates’ reproach in The Phaedrus that the written word is the enemy of memory. (…)

Ernest Hemingway telling George Plimpton in his 1958 Paris Review interview that, “though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

{ Maria Konnikova/Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Picasso, Le peintre et son modèle, 1914 }

How awesome is this treasure trove of emails, documents, files et al. placed online by the NY Fed?

Some of the emails between Lehman execs are laughable — naive, silly, hubristic, childish.

But my favorite piece simply has to be the Morgan Stanley research report from June 30, 2008 “Overweight Rating” on Lehman Brothers — “Bruised, Not Broken, Poised for Profitability.” 60 days later, Lehman Brothers filed what was then the largest bankruptcy in the United States. 

{ Ritholtz | Continue reading }

hatchet { Christopher Roth }

The internet is no stranger to crime. From counterfeit and stolen products, to illegal drugs, stolen identities and weapons, nearly anything can be purchased online with a few clicks of the mouse. The online black market not only can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, but the whole process of ordering illicit goods and services is alarmingly easy and anonymous, with multiple marketplaces to buy or sell anything you want.

Understanding how the market thrives—unregulated and untraceable—can give you a better sense of the threats (or resources) that affect you and your business.

In our scenario we are going to legally transfer $1,000 USD out of a regular bank account and into a mathematical system of binary codes, and then enter a neighborhood of the Internet largely used by criminals. This hidden world anyone lets purchase bulk downloads of stolen credit cards, as well as a credit card writer, blank cards, some “on stage” fake identities—and maybe even a grenade launcher they’ve had their eyes on.

A journey into the darker side of the Internet starts with two open-source programs: Bitcoin and the Tor Bundle.

{ CSO | Continue reading }

artwork { General Idea, Miss General Idea Glove Pattern (Form Follows Fetish), 1975 }

For eight days running, YouTube’s front page had been taken over by “botted” videos—videos whose views had been artificially inflated by software programs designed to trick YouTube’s servers—and as far as YouTubers could tell, YouTube’s owner, the mighty Google, seemed powerless to stop them.

Google did eventually stop the worst of the bots, fixing a vulnerability in how the site counts mobile views. But the botting problem is far from over. And the episode leaves a lot of lingering questions over the site’s future.

{ DailyDot | Continue reading }

related { Hulu, which attracted 31 million unique users in March under a free-for-all model, is taking its first steps to change to a model where viewers will have to prove they are a pay-TV customer to watch their favorite shows. | NY Post }