A new study shows that images of the left side of the face are perceived and rated as more pleasant than pictures of the right side of the face, possibly due to the fact that we present a greater intensity of emotion on the left side of our face.
photos { Rob Steel | Thomas Macker }
The study compared the software-generated ratings given to more than 22,000 short essays, written by students in junior high schools and high school sophomores, to the ratings given to the same essays by trained human readers.
The differences were minute.
Studies have indicated that redheads may be more sensitive to pain and may need more anesthetics to numb them.
A research published in the Journal of American Dental Association found that painful experiences at the dentist might cause more anxiety for men and women with red hair, who were twice as likely to avoid dental care than people with dark hair.
Universal mind uploading is the concept (…) that the technology of mind uploading will eventually become universally adopted by all who can afford it, similar to the adoption of modern agriculture, hygiene, and permanent dwellings. The concept is rather infrequently discussed, due to a combination of 1) its supposedly speculative nature and 2) its “far future” time frame. Yet some futurists, such as myself, see the eventuality as plausible by as early as 2050. (…)
Mind uploading would involve simulating a human brain in a computer in enough detail that the “simulation” becomes, for all practical purposes, a perfect copy and experiences consciousness, just like protein-based human minds. If functionalism is true, as many cognitive scientists and philosophers believe, then all the features of human consciousness that we know and love — including all our memories, personality, and sexual quirks — would be preserved through the transition. By simultaneously disassembling the protein brain as the computer brain is constructed, only one implementation of the person in question would exist at any one time, eliminating any unnecessary philosophical confusion. Whether the computer upload is “the same person” is up for the person and his/her family and friends to decide. (…)
An upload of you with all your memories and personality intact is no different from you than the person you are today is different than the person you were yesterday when you went to sleep, or the person you were 10-30 seconds ago when quantum fluctuations momentarily destroyed and recreated all the particles in your brain.
Oh, Sallie Mae. Like a foxy country girl in some daisy dukes. Healthy and sun-kissed Miss Sallie Mae from Georgia, from that bountiful South where time moves slow and the fields just can’t help but produce.
Thinking about death can actually be a good thing. An awareness of mortality can improve physical health and help us re-prioritize our goals and values, according to a new analysis of recent scientific studies. Even non-conscious thinking about death – say walking by a cemetery – could prompt positive changes and promote helping others.
Past research suggests that thinking about death is destructive and dangerous, fueling everything from prejudice and greed to violence. Such studies related to terror management theory (TMT), which posits that we uphold certain cultural beliefs to manage our feelings of mortality, have rarely explored the potential benefits of death awareness.
photo { Rachel Hulin }
In an act of transformation worthy of any magician, scientists have converted scar tissue in the hearts of living mice into beating heart cells. If the same trick works in humans (and we’re still several years away from a trial), it could lead us to a long-sought prize of medicine – a way to mend a broken heart.
Large eggs must have thick shells, which make it difficult for the developing embryo to ‘breathe’ by exchanging gases with the outside world. This places an upper limit on egg size.
So, even though they grew into giants as adults, dinosaurs were forced to produce relatively tiny young. Titanosaur hatchlings, for example, were nearly 2,500 times smaller than the 4-tonne adults. By contrast, the live-born calf of an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is about 25 times smaller than its mother.
When the young of large animals start out small, they must grow through a large size range before reaching adulthood, and compete with species of many different sizes as they do so.
Codron and his colleagues developed a model that suggests that there was intense competition among small and medium-sized dinosaurs, so that it was difficult for medium-sized adults to make a living, and adults had to keep growing until they reached very large sizes to gain a competitive edge.
But being big also has drawbacks. When an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period (65 million years ago) wiped out most large-bodied animals, there were so few small dinosaur species that the group was almost obliterated, with only the birds surviving. However, the many small mammals alive at the time were well suited to a world that favored diminutive species.
15-year-old arrested for hacking 259 companies.
Human-made earthquakes reported in central U.S.
Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution believed to be the likely cause. Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists. [thanks GG]
In a study appearing this month in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, MIT researchers report that emissions from cars, trucks, planes and power plants cause 13,000 premature deaths in the United Kingdom each year.
What to do with frozen cows stuck in cabin at 11,200 feet?
Japanese scientists regenerate human hair on bald mouse. The team says it will take about a decade before it can be applied to patients.
“If you want to test a man’s character, give him power,” said Abraham Lincoln. It’s a truism that power magnifies personality — but is it true? A new study says no.
Evolution has given humans a huge advantage over most other animals: middle age.
Scientists Trace Evolutionary History of What Mammals Eat.
50 years of bird poop links DDT with changing bird menus.
Scientists Use Satellites, Poop to Count Emperor Penguins.
When did our ancestors stop sleeping in trees?
How Drones are Changing Warfare.
Boeing prepares an ultra-secure smartphone.
With rising popularity of Internet-enabled TVs, the usual array of attacks and exploits will soon be coming to a screen near you. Your TV will be hacked.
Amazon’s Cloud Carries 1 Percent of the Internet.
As recently as 2004, the Cincinnati/North Kentucky Airport (CVG) was a major hub for Delta, and offered nonstop flights to 129 major cities, including Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Paris. Today, the number of flights through CVG has fallen by two-thirds, and an entire concourse stands eerily empty. How a thirty-year-old policy of deregulation is slowly killing America’s airline system—and taking down Cincinnati, Memphis, and St. Louis with it.
Why Netflix Never Implemented The Algorithm That Won The Netflix $1 Million Challenge.
Publishers who want to stay in business are going to have to start selling books without digital rights management. DRM locks customers into individual ebookstores and devices, which is the primary way that Amazon perpetuates its stranglehold on this market.
What Amazon’s ebook strategy means.
Drug smugglers and human traffickers have seized control of a narrow corridor of untamed Arizona desert along the U.S.–Mexico border, turning ranches — and even backyards — into killing fields. A visit to the most lawless place in America.
Investigating the massive corruption of the Chinese military.
Copenhagen frequently tops rankings of the world’s happiest, most liveable and best-designed cities. What Copenhagen can teach the world.
A magician sued a rival magician for copying one of his most famous illusions. The case promises to test the boundaries of copyright law as it applies to magic tricks.
What’s the origin of “the opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings?”
#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes. #19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. Pixar story rules.
The World’s Rudest Hand Gestures.
The instruments of critical theory can take down any piece of contemporary art by treating it as a symptom of the inequalities of the society that produced it. The art objects don’t become racist, sexist, or classist, but are revealed as inevitably so as superstructural products of a capitalist society. I don’t mean to make it sound like that means this line of critique isn’t valuable, because I think it’s right-on nearly all the time. But does that mean so-called “fine art” is fully subsumed by control society?
I don’t think so, lately I’ve been feeling like we’re about to see art (and not just individual artists) sprint ahead of its criticism for the first time in decades. And watching the critical side in denial as art whooshes past is painful.
‘Quantified pure existentials’ are sentences (e.g., ‘Some things do not exist’) which meet these conditions: (i) the verb EXIST is contained in, and is, apart from quantificational BE, the only full (as against auxiliary) verb in the sentence; (ii) no (other) logical predicate features in the sentence; (iii) no name or other sub-sentential referring expression features in the sentence; (iv) the sentence contains a quantifier that is not an occurrence of EXIST.
Colin McGinn and Rod Girle have alleged that stan- dard first-order logic cannot adequately deal with some such existen- tials. The article defends the view that it can.
{ Disputatio | PDF }
unrelated { A few new words: Doxing, Errbody, Grok, Muppies… }
Humans can only process small amounts of information at a time (consciously that is… the estimate is that we handle 40,000,000 pieces of information every second, but only 40 of those make it to our conscious brains). One mistake that web sites make is to give too much information all at once. (…) Think progressive disclosure.
Vets have been trying to explain strange symptoms in 21 cats that arrived in North-East Scotland, between 2001 and 2010. The animals appeared to have a slowly-progressing neurological disease. This paper observes how the cats walk with an odd gait with stiff, extended tails. Dubbed “robotic cats” due to their movements, they presented a veterinary oddity not seen before.
Cats with a slightly different but possibly related condition have been spotted in Sweden and Austria, where it was referred to as “staggering disease.” One of authors suggests “All the cats included in our study, and most of the cats reported with ‘staggering disease’, belong to the rural population accustomed to hunting birds and rodents”. It can be speculated that the agent may be transmitted from these animals to cats. The authors conclude that the late onset age of this disease, its slow progression, peculiar clinical signs and the data from the tests suggest these cats were affected by the same unique, previously unreported condition.
{ Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery/SAGE | Continue reading }
When it comes to diagnosing depression in teens, differentiating mental illness from normal mood swings can be difficult. But it can be a crucial diagnosis, given that untreated depression in youth makes them more vulnerable to later substance abuse, social maladjustment, physical illness and suicide.
“Depression in adolescents affects basically every component of their thinking and makes everything very difficult psychologically and socially,” says Eva Redei, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Currently, a depression diagnosis in teens relies on their descriptions of symptoms and their physician’s subjective observations. But now a new study suggests there may be a surer, more objective way: a blood test that identifies major depression by looking for a specific set of genetic markers in the blood.
Nobody seems to love Facebook any more. People seem mostly tolerate it, because it’s convenient. And that’s why Facebook remains vulnerable.
Consumer-oriented social networking sites are like television networks: People will switch when there’s something better on another channel.
With its awkward design, 1990s-style layouts, weird privacy policies, and intrusive advertising, Facebook is vulnerable to the next best thing. Frankly, I think it’s just one online conversion program away from losing its customer base and becoming the next MySpace.
That’s not true of LinkedIn, though. LinkedIn is all about business and people’s resumes. Because its scope is limited to fundamentally dull information, LinkedIn is simply not vulnerable to something “cooler.”
One research group inside Facebook, known as the Data Team, is tasked with the challenge of mathematically sifting through that data to look for patterns that explain the how and why of human social interactions. The people who do that, mostly PhDs with research experience in computer and social sciences, look for insights that will help Facebook tune its products, but have also begun to publish their findings in the scientific community.
artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Mary Boone), 1984-1985 }
The outbreak of a new livestock disease in western Europe last year, particularly harmful to offspring, could move further into areas surrounding the worst affected countries in the next cycle of new births, scientists say.
Schmallenberg virus - named after the German town where it was first detected in November - infected sheep and cows on at least 2,600 farms in eight EU countries last year, most likely between August and October.
Thought to have been spread for hundreds of miles across Europe by biting midges and warm late summer winds, the virus has since been confirmed in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Spain and Britain.
I write as I await the birth of my second son. If trends about fatherhood continue as they have over the last several decades, the chances are that he will have children in his 40s, and (some of) my grandchildren will be in their 40s or 50s in the year 2112. What sort of world will they inhabit? (…)
The last century has been the age of political rights. Never in our history have so many people taken part in choosing their leaders and having a say in how their societies are governed. To be sure, this unparalleled expansion of civil and political rights remains incomplete. Yet it is profoundly significant, not only due to its transformative impact on the lives of billions, but also because so many other phenomena in recent history are connected to it. The rights revolution is intertwined with diverse trends such as the development of technology; sustained yet uneven economic growth; a general decline in war within recent decades; and a population explosion placing new pressures on our resources and environment.
In this essay I will first outline the 10 most important trends, starting with the rights revolution itself, that have defined our economic, social, and political lives over the last 100 years. Then I will discuss how the rights revolution has helped shape the other nine trends.
Happiness has long been regarded as one of the highest goals in human life. If our sense of happiness is closely connected to brain functions, future methods may allow us to control happiness through refined, effective brain manipulation. Can we regard such happiness as true happiness? In this paper I will make some remarks on the manipulation of the sense of happiness and illuminate the relationship between human dignity and happiness. (…)
The President’s Council on Bioethics’s 2003 report Beyond Therapy includes an extensive discussion of the morality of mood-improvement drugs such as SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). The report argues that while SSRIs can help patients live a better life by inducing calm, providing a background of well-being, and changing personality, such drugs create some fundamental ethical problems. First, one might come to “feel happy for no good reason at all, or happy even when there remains much in one’s life to be truly unhappy about.” Second, “SSRIs may generally dull our capacity to feel [psychic pain], rendering us less capable of experiencing and learning from misfortune or tragedy or empathizing with the miseries of others.” And third, those drugs “might shrink our capacity for true human flourishing.” To conclude, the report recommends those drugs be “sparingly” used so that we “are able to feel joy at joyous events and sadness at sad ones.”
The Council’s argument was made from the perspective of conservative or communitarian ethics, and it has been harshly criticized by proponents of technological advances as being overly sentimental. (…)
In order to further develop their argument, here I would like to make a thought experiment. Suppose we have a perfect happiness drug without any side effects, and, having taken that drug, the user is filled with a sense of happiness for a couple of days regardless of his or her experiences. (…) “Today my child was killed, but how happy I am now!” (…) This is a typical example of Beyond Therapy’s case in which a person feels “happy when there remains much in one’s life to be truly unhappy about.”
