In a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers at Arizona State demonstrated that male faces are more likely than female faces to “grab” the anger from an adjacent face, while female faces are more likely to “grab” happiness.
Jellyfish will not plague our oceans in the future as was previously thought, say researchers who have found no evidence for global increases in jellyfish blooms.
Despite media claims over the past few years that worldwide jellyfish numbers are increasing at an alarming rate, there has been no database of jellyfish numbers to back this up.
artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Rebound, 1955 }
What does “free time” mean to you? When you’re not at work, do you pass the time — or spend it?
The difference may impact how happy you are. A new study shows people who put a price on their time are more likely to feel impatient when they’re not using it to earn money. And that hurts their ability to derive happiness during leisure activities.
Treating time as money can actually undermine your well-being,” says Sanford DeVoe, one of two researchers at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management who carried out the study.
photo { Scarlett Hooft Graafland }
Stanley Kubrick: I’ve always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we’re looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone. But The Shining didn’t originate from any particular desire to do a film about this. The manuscript of the novel was sent to me by John Calley, of Warner Bros. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: “Jack must be imagining these things because he’s crazy”. This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing. (…) It’s not until Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker who axed to death his family, slides open the bolt of the larder door, allowing Jack to escape, that you are left with no other explanation but the supernatural. The novel is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters. (…)
I hope that ESP and related psychic phenomena will eventually find general scientific proof of their existence. There are certainly a fair number of scientists who are sufficiently impressed with the evidence to spend their time working in the field. If conclusive proof is ever found it won’t be quite as exciting as, say, the discovery of alien intelligence in the universe, but it will definitely be a mind expander. In addition to the great variety of unexplainable psychic experiences we can all probably recount, I think I can see behaviour in animals which strongly suggests something like ESP.
{ Visual Memory | Three Interviews with Stanley Kubrick | Continue reading }
image { Desiree Dolron | Entitled Xteriors, this group of nine seamlessly constructed works have the quality of Old Master paintings, although they are in fact digital photographic composites of several different faces. }
When we see a company like Arnold Bread create this product roster, something else is going on:
100% whole wheat, 12 Grain, 7 Grain, German Dark Wheat, Health Nut, Healthy Multi-grain, Honey Whole Wheat, Oatnut, Country Oat Bran, Country Wheat, Country White, Country Whole Grain White, Healthfull 10 Grain, Healthfull Flax and Fiber, Healthfull Hearty Wheat, Healthy Nutty Grain, Double Fiber, Double Protein, Grains & More Flax and fiber, Triple Health, Dutch Country 100% whole Wheat, Butter Split Top, Extra Fiber, Premium Potato, Premium White, Rye Everything, Rye and Pump, Pumpernickel, Rye Seedless, Melba Thin, Rye with Seeds, Soft Family 100% Whole Wheat, Soft Family Classic White, Soft Family Honey Wheat, Soft Family Whole Grain White, Brick Oven Whole Wheat, Brick Oven Premium White, Premium Italian, Stone Ground, Light 100% Whole Wheat.
By my count, there are 40 kinds of bread, and that is just counting the sliced breads, not the thins or buns. Is there really anyone in this world who loves the Arnold 10-grain, but can’t stand the 7-grain or 12-grain? (…) The motivator here isn’t making the customer happier, it’s the oft-neglected fourth ‘P’ of marketing: placement. Even if the supermarket carries only half the varieties that Arnold offers, all of a sudden they are hogging a big part of the bread aisle.
Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads. Hundreds of other companies have also staked claims on people’s online data by depositing software called cookies or other tracking mechanisms on people’s computers and in their browsers. If you’ve mentioned anxiety in an e-mail, done a Google search for “stress” or started using an online medical diary that lets you monitor your mood, expect ads for medications and services to treat your anxiety.
Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.
Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”
Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.” (…)
In 2007 and 2008, the online advertising company NebuAd contracted with six Internet service providers to install hardware on their networks that monitored users’ Internet activities and transmitted that data to NebuAd’s servers for analysis and use in marketing. For an average of six months, NebuAd copied every e-mail, Web search or purchase that some 400,000 people sent over the Internet.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s control is based on the structure of Facebook’s shares. Facebook is proposing to go public with a dual-class share structure. Public shareholders will purchase Class A shares that have one vote apiece. Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook employees and current Facebook investors will hold Class B shares, which have 10 votes apiece. This is a deviation from the one share one vote norm followed by most publicly traded companies.
Eight years after the company’s founding, Mr. Zuckerberg has retained a remarkable percentage of Facebook’s ownership — he currently owns 28.4 percent of the Class B shares.
This alone does not give Mr. Zuckerberg total control over Facebook.
He has also entered into voting agreements with other Class B shareholders, including shares held by the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker. These agreements give Mr. Zuckerberg voting control over an additional 30.6 percent of the Class B shares. Mr. Zuckerberg even retains control over about half of these shares if he decides to leave Facebook. Post-I.P.O., he will control at least 57.1 percent of the Class B shares, potentially more if some investors sell their B shares in the offering. This will give him complete voting control over the company.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s consent will be required if the company is sold. Unlike most public companies, Facebook will not have a nominating committee for its directors comprising the independent directors on Facebook’s board. Instead, all of the directors will be selected by the board itself, a group that will be appointed by Mr. Zuckerberg. He can also remove and replace any director at any time.
Nor is this going to change any time soon.
Facebook’s organizing documents dictate that when Class B shares are transferred, they typically will convert into the low-vote Class A shares. It is likely that, over time, Mr. Zuckerberg will hold onto the bulk of his Class B shares as other holders of Class B shares sell off their stakes.
This is the rub of the dual-class shares.Mr. Zuckerberg can also sell down his shares. But until the Class B shares comprise less than 9.1 percent of the outstanding Facebook shares, the holders of the Class B shares control Facebook.
Given this low threshold, Mr. Zuckerberg, 27, is likely to have enough Class B shares to give him control of the company for a long, long time, despite the fact that he will have a much smaller economic stake. In fact, other shareholders are more likely to sell their Class B shares more quickly than Mr. Zuckerberg, who appears to want to manage Facebook for the long-term.
As a result, his control over Facebook could increase over time.
{ DealBook/NY Times | Continue reading }
Consider the 843 million monthly users and the 450 million daily users. Those sound like enormous numbers — but what do they really mean? (…) If you click on a Like button any given day, you are counted by Facebook as an active user that day.
From the S-1:
Daily Active Users (DAUs). We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day.
All of those people clicking all of those “Like” buttons are counted as active that day, EVEN IF THEY NEVER GO TO FACEBOOK.COM.
Think of what this means in terms of monetizing their “daily users.” If they click a like button but do not go to Facebook that day, they cannot be marketed to, they do not see any advertising, they cannot be sold any goods or services. All they did was take advantage of FB’s extensive infrastructure to tell their FB friends (who may or may not see what they did) that they liked something online. (…)
It helps to explain why Facebook’s valuation may be so greatly exaggerated.
What’s happened to depictions of nature in children’s picture books?
A group of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist J. Allen Williams Jr. studied the winners of the American Library Association’s prestigious Caldecott Medal between 1938 (the year the prize was first awarded) through 2008. They looked at more than 8,000 images in the 296 volumes, and found decreasing depictions of nature and animals. (…)
Specifically, they find images of built and natural environments were “almost equally likely to be present” in books published from the late 1930s through the 1960s. But in the mid-1970s, illustrations of the built environment started to increase in number, while there were fewer and fewer featuring the natural environment.
The average human vocabulary consists of approximately 20,000 word families, yet only 6000-7000 word families are required to understand most communication.
One possible explanation for this level of redundancy is that vocabulary size is selected as a fitness indicator and is used for display. Human vocabulary size correlates highly with measurable intelligence and when choosing potential mates individuals actively prefer other correlates of intelligence, such as education.
Here we show that males used more low frequency words after an imaginary romantic encounter with a young female shown in a photograph relative to when they viewed photographs of older females. Females used fewer low frequency words when they imagined a romantic encounter with a young male shown in a photograph relative to when they viewed photographs of older males.
images { 1. Veerle Frissen | 2 }
The aim of this study was to define the risk factors for hand amputations using the records of a hospital in Turkey specializing in hand and microsurgery.
It examined over 6.5k hand injuries and reveals that left-handed individuals had a five times greater relative risk of sustaining an amputating injury than right-handed individuals. (…)
An important reason seems to be the use of meat-grinders which are among the top ten objects involved, both for men and women.
photo { Mandy-Lyn Antoniou }
Only after 18 years as a barista in New York did his boss, the cafe’s owner, feel qualified to return home to show off his coffee-making skills. Now, at Bear Pond’s main branch, he stops making espressos at an early hour each day, claiming that the spike on the power grid after that time precludes drawing the voltage required for optimal pressure.
Such obsessive—some might say insane—pursuit of perfection, in coffee and cuisine, clothes and comforts, isn’t unusual in Japan. (…)
Japan has become the most culturally cosmopolitan country on Earth, a place where you can lunch at a bistro that serves 22 types of delicious and thoroughly Gallic terrines, shop for Ivy League–style menswear at a store that puts to shame the old-school shops of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend the evening sipping rare single malts in a serene space that boasts a collection of 12,000 jazz, blues and soul albums. The best of everything can be found here, and is now often made here: American-style fashion, haute French cuisine, classic cocktails, modern luxury hotels. It might seem perverse for a traveler to Tokyo to skip sukiyaki in favor of Neapolitan pizza, but just wait until he tastes that crust.
related { Researchers: Major Earthquake Likely To Strike Tokyo By 2016 }
In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel was spending $2,500 a month on rubber bands just to hold all their cash.
(…)
Carly Simon’s dad is the Simon of Simon and Schuster. He co-founded the company.
(…)
When the mummy of Ramses II was sent to France in the mid-1970s, it was issued a passport. Ramses’ occupation? “King (deceased).”
(…)
According to NASA’s FAQ page, “There are no plans at this time to send children into space.”
(…)
Horses can’t vomit.
Anderson contends that the past 20 years have seen a total stagnation in the production of new cultural aesthetics. In other words, the end of the 50s looked nothing like the end of the 70s, but 1989 looks remarkably similar to 2009.
photo { Kathy Lo }
If you watch a person using the net, you see a kind of immersion: Often they are very oblivious to what is going on around them. But it is a very different kind of attentiveness than reading a book. In the case of a book, the technology of the printed page focuses our attention and encourages a linear type of thinking. In contrast, the internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. We are immersed because there’s a constant barrage of stimuli coming at us and we seem to be very much seduced by that kind of constantly changing patterns of visual and auditorial stimuli. When we become immersed in our gadgets, we are immersed in a series of distractions rather than a sustained, focused type of thinking. (…)
It is important to realize that it is no longer just hyperlinks: You have to think of all aspects of using the internet. There are messages coming at us through email, instant messenger, SMS, tweets etc. We are distracted by everything on the page, the various windows, the many applications running. You have to see the entire picture of how we are being stimulated. If you compare that to the placidity of a printed page, it doesn’t take long to notice that the experience of taking information from a printed page is not only different but almost the opposite from taking in information from a network-connected screen. With a page, you are shielded from distraction. We underestimate how the page encourages focussed thinking – which I don’t think is normal for human beings – whereas the screen indulges our desire to be constantly distracted.
related { Digital Suicide and the Biopolitics of Leaving Facebook }
painting { Joyce Pensato }
Most American bookstores stock a plurality of titles on sex differences. One popular series explains (figuratively) that men are from Mars, women from Venus, and that understanding these differences can demystify and provide behavioral guidelines on a date, in the bedroom, while raising children and, after things fall apart, when starting over following a breakup. Among other things, such popular books reflect and reinforce popular stereotypes that women are more emotional than men, particularly regarding sadness. Scientific evidence, in contrast, makes quite clear that the sexes are more similar than different in emotional experience, suggesting that stereotypes generally overstate emotional sex differences.
The contrast between popular stereotypes about emotional sex differences versus scientific demonstrations of those sex differences naturally raises the question: Why don’t people’s personal emotional experiences dissuade beliefs in stereotypic sex differences? If women and men don’t experience emotions of different intensity, why do they believe that they do? We think that one reason is that stereotypes can influence people’s memory of their own emotions, which consequently reinforce stereotypic sex differences. We hypothesize, specifically, that stereotypes influence memory of emotion such that people recall their own emotions more stereotypically when the relative accessibility of those stereotypes is high. Procedures that increase stereo- types’ relative accessibility, such as cognitive load and priming, should therefore increase stereotypic sex differences in emotion memory.
(…)
The results of three experiments provide evidence that the relative accessibility of stereotypes about sex difference influences people’s memory of very recent emotions.
photo { Francesco Nazardo }
Man stuck in mud for 3 days, is rescued.
FDA approves computer chip for humans.
The DJ was hit by a cab that crashed into his hotel room while he was sleeping.
Women are better at parking than men, study says.
McDonald’s confirmed that it has eliminated the use of ammonium hydroxide — an ingredient in fertilizers, household cleaners and some roll-your-own explosives — in its hamburger meat.
Ultrasounds Before Abortions? Only if Men Get Rectal Exams for Viagra, Virginia Lawmaker Says.
Zapping testicles with ultrasound can reduce sperm counts and might be used in the future as an inexpensive, reliable and reversible male contraceptive, according to U.S. researchers.
Children today reach puberty earlier and adulthood later. The result: A lot of teenage weirdness.
The neuroscience of happiness. New discoveries are shedding light on the activities that make us happy. An expert explains.
A club drug called “Special K” is generating a lot of buzz among researchers who study depression. That’s because “Special K,” which is actually an FDA-approved anesthetic named ketamine, can relieve even suicidal depression in a matter of hours.
Psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, may help people with depression.
If you are an evening person, you’re probably at your creative peak early in the day. In contrast, if you’re a morning person, then the evening is the best time for musing.
Powerful people feel taller than they are.
Study: Most People Lie on Weight Surveys.
Many people continue to smoke after being diagnosed with cancer.
Although around two thirds of us would prefer to die at home, in the developed world the trend in recent years has been for the majority to spend their final days in an institutional setting. But according to this study the tide has now turned and an increasing number of people in the UK are dying at home.
You’re running late for work and you can’t find your keys. What’s really annoying is that in your frantic search, you pick up and move them without realizing. This may be because the brain systems involved in the task are working at different speeds: the system in the brain that deals with movement is running too quickly for the visual system to keep up.
How Space Debris Is Spinning Out of Control.
Pac-Man Proved NP-Hard By Computational Complexity Theory. The classic ’80s arcade game turns out to be equivalent to the travelling salesman problem, according a new analysis of the computational complexity of video games.
The Pirate Bay’s New Plan to Destroy Capitalism: Downloading physical goods.
Facebook’s estimated PSR is 26 times greater than the average of these comparable companies. Facebook’s IPO will be way overvalued.
Do you spend more or less time on Facebook now than you did a year ago?
People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading.
The science of backward weather forecasting.
I think we should let elephants loose in Australia. Australia has a long history of ecological disaster from alien species – so why is ecologist David Bowman proposing adding yet another?
“We were already sure Caravaggio projected images of his sitters, but we have now found mercury salt in his canvases, which is light-sensitive and used in film.” Was Caravaggio the first photographer?
Artist David Hockney denies attacking Damien Hirst for using assistants to complete his works.
Artist Mike Kelley Dead at 58, an Apparent Suicide.
Is Modern Finance Ruining Modern Art? [Thanks Joe!]
This is a masterful map. And the secret is in its careful attention to design.
What Does a Conductor Do? A critic decides to find out—by stepping up to the podium himself.
Why Stories Sell: Transportation Leads to Persuasion.
His headstone reads: “Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office of Metropolitan Life Building.” This happened the day after Valentine’s day, on February 15th, 1909—which also happened to be his 15th birthday. And to clarify, an ink eraser is not an eraser, it’s more like a knife.
How Brooklyn Got Its Groove Back.
Flying People in New York City. [video]
The Big Benefits for Restaurateurs Who Think Small.
Tony lives in the same building as his brother and sister in law. They have all been addicted to heroin for around 25 years. Inhabitants of Vancouver’s Sketchy East Side Photographed by Claire Martin.
25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore.
We visit Kokoro HQ, part of the Sanrio Group responsible for one of the most famous Japanese exports, Hello Kitty. Since their inception on 1984 Kokoro have created various ‘ofrobots.’ [video ]
The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World.
Dictionary. Michael Jackson sampler.
Brain-Dead Teen, Only Capable Of Rolling Eyes And Texting, To Be Euthanized. The parents of 13-year old Caitlin Teagart have decided to end her life, saying she can now do nothing but lay on the couch and whine about things being “gay.”
Anatomical Cross-Sections made with quilled paper by Lisa Nilsson.
This study provides a descriptive account of kissing behavior in a large sample of undergraduate college students and considers kissing in the context of both short-term and long-term mating relationships.
Kissing was examined as a mate assessment device, a means of promoting pair bonds, and a means of inducing sexual arousal and receptivity. A total 1,041 college students completed one of three questionnaires measuring kissing preferences, attitudes, styles, and behaviors.
Results showed that females place more importance on kissing as a mate assessment device and as a means of initiating, maintaining, and monitoring the current status of their relationship with a long-term partner.
In contrast, males place less importance on kissing, especially with short-term partners, and appear to use kissing to increase the likelihood of having sex. The results suggest that kissing may play an important role as an adaptive courtship/mating ritual.
photos { Erwin Olaf }
What are some actual examples of the law of unintended consequences in action?
American citizens often complain about how high CEO salaries are. The SEC attempted to mitigate this, and required CEO salaries to be publicly disclosed. As a result, they increased approximately three-fold between 1976 and 1993, going from 36 times the average worker pay to 131 times the average worker pay. “It encouraged other CEOs to demand higher pay, since now they had hard data telling them they were underpaid.”
When San Francisco banned giving away toys with happy meals that exceeded a certain percentage of fat, McDonald’s responded by offering the toys with purchase of a happy meal and a 10 cent contribution to charity. They also stopped selling the toys without happy meal purchase, meaning you now have to buy the meal to get the toy.
images { 1. Claudio Oliverio | 2 }
