Facebook is planning to sue Mark Zuckerberg. No, not that Mark Zuckerberg, [the founder of Facebook], but an Israeli businessman, formerly named Rotem Guez, who legally changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg in order to support a business that can only make sense in today’s ephemeral market: selling “likes” to companies who, you know, want to feel more “liked” in their online presence.

{ persuasive litigator | Time }

Measuring power and influence on the web is a matter of huge interest. Indeed, algorithms that distill rankings from the pattern of links between webpages have made huge fortunes for companies such as Google. One the most famous of these is the Hyper Induced Topic Search or HITS algorithm which hypothesises that important pages fall into two categories–hubs and authorities–and are deemed important if they point to other important pages and if other important pages point to them. This kind of thinking led directly to Google’s search algorithm PageRank. The father of this idea is John Kleinberg, a computer scientist now at Cornell University in Ithaca, who has achieved a kind of cult status through this and other work. It’s fair to say that Kleinberg’s work has shaped the foundations of the online world.

Today, Kleinberg and a few pals put forward an entirely different way of measuring power and influence; one that may one day have equally far-reaching consequences.

These guys have worked out how to measure power differences between individuals using the patterns of words they speak or write. In other words, they say the style of language during a conversation reveals the pecking order of the people talking.

“We show that in group discussions, power differentials between participants are subtly revealed by how much one individual immediately echoes the linguistic style of the person they are responding to,” say Kleinberg and co.

The key to this is an idea called linguistic co-ordination, in which speakers naturally copy the style of their interlocutors. Human behaviour experts have long studied the way individuals can copy the body language or tone of voice of their peers, some have even studied how this effect reveals the power differences between members of the group.

Now Kleinberg and so say the same thing happens with language style. They focus on the way that interlocutors copy each other’s use of certain types of words in sentences. In particular, they look at functional words that provide a grammatical framework for sentences but lack much meaning in themselves (the bold words in this sentence, for example). Functional words fall into categories such as articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, high-frequency adverbs and so on.

The question that Kleinberg and co ask is this: given that one person uses a certain type of functional word in a sentence, what is the chance that the responder also uses it?

To find the answer they’ve analysed two types of text in which the speakers or writers have specific goals in mind: transcripts of oral arguments in the US Supreme Court and editorial discussions between Wikipedia editors (a key bound in this work is that the conversations cannot be idle chatter; something must be at stake in the discussion).

Wikipedia editors are divided between those who are administrators, and so have greater access to online articles, and non-administrators who do not have such access. Clearly, the admins have more power than the non-admins.

By looking at the changes in linguistic style that occur when people make the transition from non-admin to admin roles, Kleinberg and co cleverly show that the pattern of linguistic co-ordination changes too. Admins become less likely to co-ordinate with others. At the same time, lower ranking individuals become more likely to co-ordinate with admins.

A similar effect also occurs in the Supreme Court (where power differences are more obvious in any case).

Curiously, people seem entirely unware that they are doing this. “If you are communicating with someone who uses a lot of articles — or prepositions, orpersonal pronouns — then you will tend to increase your usage of these types of words as well, even if you don’t consciously realize it,” say Kleinberg and co.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Whitman, F***ed Up In Minneapolis | Black & White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, until Jan 14 }

“Lord” Timothy Dexter (1748 – 1806) was an eccentric American businessman noted for a series of lucky transactions and his writing. (…)

He made his fortune by investing in Continental Dollars during the Revolutionary War, when they could be purchased for a tiny percentage of their face value. After the war was over, and the U.S. government made good on the dollars, he became wealthy. (…)

His 1802 memoir A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress is entirely misspelled and contains no punctuation. At first he handed his book out for free, but it became popular and was re-printed in eight editions. In the second edition Dexter added an extra page which consisted of 13 lines of punctuation marks. Dexter instructed readers to “peper and solt it as they plese.”

Dexter announced his death and urged people to prepare for his burial. About 3,000 people attended his mock wake. The crowd was disappointed when they heard a still-living Dexter screaming at his wife that she was not grieving enough.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Literary historian Paul Collins discusses Lord Timothy’s lasting appeal | NPR | Life of Lord Timothy Dexter }

Robotics is a game-changer in national security. We now find military robots in just about every environment: land, sea, air, and even outer space. They have a full range of form-factors from tiny robots that look like insects to aerial drones with wingspans greater than a Boeing 737 airliner. Some are fixed onto battleships, while others patrol borders in Israel and South Korea; these have fully-auto modes and can make their own targeting and attack decisions. There’s interesting work going on now with micro robots, swarm robots, humanoids, chemical bots, and biological-machine integrations. As you’d expect, military robots have fierce names like: TALON SWORDS, Crusher, BEAR, Big Dog, Predator, Reaper, Harpy, Raven, Global Hawk, Vulture, Switchblade, and so on. But not all are weapons–for instance, BEAR is designed to retrieve wounded soldiers on an active battlefield.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

According to the research, in modern America the average income required to be happy day-to-day, to experience “emotional well being” is about $75,000 a year. According to the researchers, past that point adding more to your income “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness, or stress.” A person who makes, on average, $250,000 a year has no greater emotional well-being, no extra day-to-day happiness, than a person making $75,000 a year. In Mississippi it is a bit less, in Chicago a bit more, but the point is there is evidence for the existence of a financiohappiness ceiling. The super-wealthy may believe they are happier, and you may agree, but you both share a delusion.

{ You Are Not So Smart | Continue reading }

photo { Joel Meyerowitz, Spinning Christmas Tree, New York City, 1977 }

“I’m sorry” is infamous for its inadequacy. It often seems flippant, insincere, or incomplete, as in “I’m sorry you feel that way” or “I’m sorry, but…” (…)

Researchers found evidence to support the widely-held assumption that women apologize more frequently than men. They also found, however, that women reported committing more offenses than men, and this difference fully accounted for the apology finding. In other words, men apologized for the same proportion of the offenses that they believed they had committed — they just didn’t report committing as many offenses.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

related { Why Some People Say ‘Sorry’ Before Others }

The exchange of gifts at a wedding is customary in cultures all around the world. To my knowledge, however, there are no cultures in which bride and groom traditionally trade poisonous presents. (…)

If we were worried the bride might be brutally devoured on her way to the reception (by her new in-laws, perhaps), a gift of this kind might be precisely what she needs to stay alive.

An unlikely dilemma? For humans, perhaps so — but not for insects. And there are indeed certain species of insects whose mating rituals feature precisely this kind of gift, generally one given by the groom to the bride. His intentions in so doing are strictly honorable, of course, for females who receive such presents are better-equipped to deter predators.

{ Puff the Mutant Dragon | Continue reading }

Coker has come up with a recipe for success called the branded viral movie predictor algorithm. According to the algorithm, the four ingredients required for a video to go viral are congruency, emotive strength, network involvement, and something called “paired meme synergy.”

First, the themes of a video must be congruent with people’s pre-existing knowledge of the brand it is advertising. “For example, Harley Davidson for most people is associated with Freedom, Muscle, Tattoos, and Membership,” Coker explained on his website. Videos that strengthen that association meet with approval, “but as soon as we witness associations with the brand that are inconsistent with our brand knowledge, we feel tension.” In the latter case, few people will share the video, and it will quickly “go extinct.”

Second, only viral-produced videos with strong emotional appeal make the cut, and the more extreme the emotions, the better. Happy and funny videos don’t tend to fare as well as scary or disgusting ones, Coker said

Third, videos must be relevant to a large network of people — college students or office workers, for example.

And last, Coker came up with 16 concepts — known on the Internet as “memes” — that viral-produced videos tend to have, and discovered that videos only go viral if they have the right pairings of these concepts.

For example, the concept he calls Voyeur, which is when a video appears to be someone’s mobile phone footage, works well when combined with Eyes Surprise — unexpectedness. These also work well in combination with Simulation Trigger, which is when “the viewer imagines themselves being friends [with the people in the video] and sharing the same ideals,” he said.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

At thirty-eight, Kiehl is one of the world’s leading younger investigators in psychopathy, the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population. (Female psychopaths are thought to be much rarer.) Psychopaths don’t exhibit the manias, hysterias, and neuroses that are present in other types of mental illness. Their main defect, what psychologists call “severe emotional detachment”—a total lack of empathy and remorse—is concealed, and harder to describe than the symptoms of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. This absence of easily readable signs has led to debate among mental-health practitioners about what qualifies as psychopathy and how to diagnose it. (…)

In January of 2007, Kiehl arranged to have a portable functional magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner brought into Western—the first fMRI ever installed in a prison. So far, he has recruited hundreds of volunteers from among the inmates. The data from these scans, Kiehl hopes, will confirm his theory, published in Psychiatry Research, in 2006, that psychopathy is caused by a defect in what he calls “the paralimbic system,” a network of brain regions, stretching from the orbital frontal cortex to the posterior cingulate cortex, that are involved in processing emotion, inhibition, and attentional control. (…)

The inmate was being shown a series of words and phrases, and was supposed to rate each as morally offensive or not. There were three kinds of phrases: some were intended as obvious moral violations, like “having sex with your mother”; some were ambiguous, like “abortion”; and some were morally neutral, like “listening to others.” The computer software captured not only the inmate’s response but also the speed with which he made his judgment. The imaging technology recorded which part of the brain was involved in making the decision and how active the neurons there were. (…)

Neurons in the brain consume oxygen when they are “firing,” and the oxygen is replenished by iron-laden hemoglobin cells in the blood. The scanner’s magnet temporarily aligns these iron molecules in the hemoglobin cells, while the imaging technology captures a rapid series of “slices”—tiny cross-sections of the brain. The magnet is superconductive, which means it operates at very cold temperatures (minus two hundred and sixty-nine degrees Celsius). The machine has a helium cooling system, but if the system fails the magnet will “quench.” Quenches are an MRI technician’s worst fear; a new magnet costs about two million dollars.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading | Read more: The Disconnection of Psychopaths }

The ability to trust, love, and resolve conflict with loved ones starts in childhood—way earlier than you may think. That is one message of a new review of the literature in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

“Your interpersonal experiences with your mother during the first 12 to 18 months of life predict your behavior in romantic relationships 20 years later,” says psychologist Jeffry A. Simpson, the author, with University of Minnesota colleagues W. Andrew Collins and Jessica E. Salvatore. “Before you can remember, before you have language to describe it, and in ways you aren’t aware of, implicit attitudes get encoded into the mind,” about how you’ll be treated or how worthy you are of love and affection.

While those attitudes can change with new relationships, introspection, and therapy, in times of stress old patterns often reassert themselves.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Hot guys tend to underestimate women’s interest in them, while other men, particularly those looking for a one-night stand, are more likely to think a woman is much more into them than she actually is, a new study says.

Women, however, showed the opposite bias — they routinely underestimated men’s interest in them.

This sort of self-deception may help both men and women play the mating game successfully, suggest the researchers, a team of psychologists from the University of Texas, Austin. The findings also fits with past research showing that guys are clueless on the subtleties of nonverbal cues from women, taking a subtle smile as a sexual come-on, for instance.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

The question confronting us today is: who owns the Geosynchronous Orbit?

In recent years, “parking spots” in the geosynchronous orbit have become an increasingly hot commodity. According to the NASA, since the launch of the first television satellite into a geosynchronous orbit in 1964, the number of objects in Earth’s orbit has steadily increased to over 200 new additions per year. This increase was initially fueled by the Cold War, during which space was a prime area of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet over two decades after the end of the US-Soviet space race, even the global financial crisis that began in 2007 does not seem to have diminished the demand for telecommunications satellites positioned in GSO. This ongoing scramble to place satellites in GSO prompted some developing equatorial countries to assert sovereignty over the outer space “above” their territorial borders, presumably with the hope of extracting rent from the developed countries that circulate their technologies overhead. So far, the international community has rejected this notion, but the legal status of the GSO remains in limbo.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Roman Signer }

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a severe form of premenstrual syndrome (PMS), afflicting 3% to 8% of women. It is a diagnosis associated primarily with the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. Up to one-third of women diagnosed with PMDD report residual symptoms into the first 2 or 3 days of the follicular phase.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Intense emotional experiences frequently occur with bodily sensations such as a rapid heart rate or gastrointestinal distress.

It appears that bodily sensation (interoception) can be an important source of information when judging one’s emotional. How the brain processes interoception is becoming better understood.

However, how the brain integrates interoceptive signals with other brain emotional processing circuits is less well understood.

Terasawa and colleagues from Japan recently presented results of their research on this interaction of interoception and emotion.

{ Brain Posts | Continue reading }

photo { Matthew Genitempo }

{ I’d like to introduce a paper published last year in the journal Aquatic Mammals, which reports on two separate playful and – as you’ll see – uplifting encounters between bottlenose dolphins and humpback whales. | AnimalWise| full story }

Michael Jackson’s hair converted into roulette ball.

FDA cracks down on DIY sperm donor in Calif.

Woman’s breast implant disappears during Pilates.

A former Greek policeman who invented 19 fictional offspring to claim benefits for what would have been the largest family in Greece has been arrested for benefit fraud.

Toronto Zoo’s ‘gay’ penguins split as Buddy finds a female mate.

Iceland, where everyone’s related to Bjork. Genealogical website helps couples avoid incest.

Frogs can detect earthquakes.

Like humans, wasps recognize faces.

Can the width of a CEO’s face affect his firm’s performance?

What does it mean for your relationship when you find yourself stuck in a rut? A group of researchers decided to answer this question by examining how being bored now affects relationship satisfaction down the road.

How removing clothes changes the way the mind is perceived. More: The Psychology of Nakedness.

Naked mole rat: Even its sperm is weird. Previously: In addition to its longevity, naked mole-rats have an extraordinary resistance to cancer as tumors have never been observed in these rodents.

Chimpanzees more closely related to humans than previously thought.

Ecstacy users may be causing permanent harm to their brains, new research suggests.

Alcohol causes risky sexual behavior. (Until now, researchers were doubtful about the exact cause-and-effect relationship between alcohol consumption and unsafe sex.)

A group of investigators from the University of Iowa have published a case report about a 14 year old boy with severe antisocial behavior: He is aggressive, manipulative, and callous; features consistent with psychopathy. Other problems include: egocentricity, impulsivity, hyperactivity, lack of empathy, lack of respect for authority, impaired moral judgment, an inability to plan ahead, and poor frustration tolerance.

Deliberate skull deformations that tracks the practice of molding the shape of the skull from ancient times to the modern body modification scene.

Taxi driver training changes brain structure.

Why humans have a fear of snakes, even though they pose little threat in modern society.

Inverse zombies studied using anaesthesia.

The depressingly endless stream of papers that claim to have found that body posture somehow influences the contents of some cognition about the world. The latest “exciting” new finding claims that estimates of magnitude (size, amount, etc) are affected by your posture.

Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms.

“Most pumps are made of rigid materials,” says Nawroth. “For medical pumps inside the human body, we need flexible pumps because they move fluids in a much gentler way that does not destroy tissues and cells.” Nawroth is working with Caltech engineer John Dabiri, an expert on jellyfish propulsion.

This paper considers how people respond to space in restaurants.

Walking may have had wet start. Based on the way that primitive lungfish use their fins to move along tank bottoms, researchers argue for an underwater start to four-legged locomotion.

Male Physical Attractiveness Part II: Chicks Dig Scars. [Thanks Tim]

It is now possible to use dental X-rays to predict who is at risk of fractures.

In Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, the penis is connected directly to the brain.

In the last few months, search engines have banished much of the useless content that used to plague their results. How did they do it?

A new model of human interactions predicts how many people will purchase a product when a seller advertises it.

Netflix Looks Toward Original Content, Competition With HBO Go.

Google’s 3 Top Executives Have 8 Private Jets.

Louis CK’s Paypal Experiment Already a Success.

In his book, Isaacson incorrectly suggests Jobs created and wrote much of the “To the crazy ones” launch commercial. To me, this is a case of revisionist history. The Real Story Behind Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign.

Facebook’s Timeline turns your old updates into an unexpurgated biography.

Brick-and-mortar stores still have some reasons to exist. For the following reasons, the Internet still hasn’t turned us into full-on cyber-consumerists.

The 25 Most Valuable Blogs In America.

After successfully counterfeiting “lifestyle” drugs such as Viagra and Cialis, Xu had branched out into even more profitable life-saving medications, such as Plavix and Casodex, as well as Tamiflu for avian flu, which brought in profits more than 500 per cent higher than Viagra. How investigators unravelled Europe’s biggest-ever fake-medicine scam.

The True Origins of Pizza: Irony, the Internet and East Asian Nationalisms.

Sörgel based his solution for Pan-European power and self-sufficiency on the observation that, although significant amounts of water flow into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar (from the Atlantic Ocean) and the Dardanelles (from the Black Sea), its level stays the same, through evaporation. Hence his proposal to dam the Mediterranean at both ends, using the reduced inflow to generate massive amounts of hydroelectricity. The Atlantropa Project.

Freakonomics: Examination of a very popular popular-statistics series reveals avoidable errors.

Would-be space explorers, scientists, and a couple of crackpots gather at DARPA’s 100-Year Starship Symposium to try to get interstellar travel unstuck.

Imagine a bill covered with microscopic holes that make it glow slightly in the light. It’s tech borrowed from a butterfly, and it may soon be foiling counterfeiters around the world.

Laser tattoo removal gains popularity.

Inside the Vatican’s pornographic bathroom.

When she was found dead at 41, Carole Myers left a statement saying she had suffered Satantic child abuse at the hands of her parents. But did she?

I went to the bookstore and bought a book on counting called “Blackjack for Blood.” I practiced on decks of cards at home. I thought I had it down. I felt like I was ready.

Around 63 readers, identified by number in a program and on a giant screen to the right of the room, read portions of the text over a five-hour period.

Remembering Larry Levan, ‘The Jimi Hendrix Of Dance Music.’

Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935.

Top economists reveal their graphs of 2011.

5 Puzzling International Borders.

52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity.

Past and future of famous logos.

Lists of Note. [Thanks Glenn]

Why is there no blue food?

Have you ever?

What Did the World’s First Mug Shots Look Like?

Man models women’s push-up bra in Dutch ads.

Skunk tail and pig tail.

The Museum of Unnatural History.

Pussy pussy pussy marijuana.

Your book starts with the idea, which was very prominent and commonly believed by a large group of people, that fat–eating fat and fat in your diet, particularly animal fat–isn’t good for you and it leads to heart disease. How did that come to be accepted wisdom in the medical profession?

First, let me say I think it’s still commonly believed by most people, and the latest dietary guidelines are trying to get us to limit our fat intake, and limit our saturated fat intake. This is an hypothesis that grew out of the observations of one very zealous University of Minnesota nutritionist in the 1950s, a fellow named Ancel Keys, who came up with this idea that dietary fat raised cholesterol, and it was raised cholesterol that caused heart disease. At the time there was effectively no meaningful experimental data to support–I’ll rephrase that: There was no experimental data to support that observation. It seemed plausible, though. It seemed plausible, compelling. Keys was a persuasive fellow. And by 1960 or so, the American Heart Association (AHA) got behind it in part because Keys and a fellow-proponent of this hypothesis, a cardiologist from Chicago named Jeremiah Stamler, got onto the AHA, got involved with an ad hoc committee, and were able to publish a report basically saying we should all cut our fat intake. This was 1961. Like I said, no data to support it; no experimental data at all. And once the AHA got behind it, it got a kind of believability. The attitude was: It’s probably right, and all we have to do is test it. Or, we’re going to believe it’s true, but we don’t have the data yet because we haven’t done the tests yet.

And researchers start doing the tests, experimental trials, taking a population. For instance, a famous study at the VA hospital in Los Angeles, where you randomize half of them to a cholesterol-lowering diet which is not actually low in fat, by the way–it’s low in saturated fat and high in polyunsaturated fat. And then the other half of your subjects eat a control diet and you look for heart disease over a number of years and see what happens. And trial after trial was sort of unable to prove the hypothesis true. But the more we studied it, the more people simply believed it must be true. And meanwhile, the AHA is pushing it; other observations are being compiled to support it even though in order to support it you have to ignore the observations that don’t support it. So, you pay attention to the positive evidence, ignore the negative evidence. One Scottish researcher who I interviewed memorably called this “Bing Crosby epidemiology” where you “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.” Basic human nature. But this is what happened. And as the AHA gets behind it, the journalists see the AHA as honest brokers of information on this, so they have no reason to doubt the AHA. And the AHA was honest brokers–they just were bad scientists. Or they were not scientists. So, then the press gets behind it, and as the press gets behind it, politicians begin to think maybe we should do something about it, and a Congressional subcommittee gets involved, run by George McGovern, that had originally been founded in the late 1960s to address hunger in America; and they did a lot of good things with school lunch programs and food stamps. And by the mid-1970s they were running out of things to do, so they decided: Since we’ve been dealing with under-nutrition, which is not enough food, they would get involved with over-nutrition, which is a problem of too much food and obesity and diabetes and heart disease. And they had one day of hearings, McGovern’s subcommittee, and they assign a former labor reporter from the Providence, RI, Journal to write the first dietary goals for the United States–the first document ever from a government body of any kind suggesting that a low fat diet is a healthy diet. And once McGovern comes out with this document, written by a former labor reporter who knew nothing about nutrition and health; now the USDA feels they have to get involved; and you get this kind of cascade or domino effect. To the point that by 1984 the National Institute of Health (NIH) holds a consensus conference saying that we have a consensus of opinion that we should all eat low fat diets, when they still don’t have a single meaningful experiment showing that a low fat diet or cholesterol lowering diet will reduce the risk of heart disease, or at least make you live longer. Because a few of the studies suggested that you could reduce the risk of heart disease but you would increase cancer. And not one study–the biggest study ever done, which was in Minnesota, actually suggested that if you put people on cholesterol-lowering diets you increase mortality; they had more deaths in the intervention group than the control group. (…)

Japanese women in Japan have very low rates of breast cancer. So when Japanese women come to the United States, by the second generation they have rates of breast cancer as high as any other ethnic group, and one possibility is it’s because they come over here and they eat more fat. But the problem with those observational studies, those comparisons, is you don’t know what you are looking at. So, you focus on fat because that’s what your hypothesis is about–and this is an endemic problem in public health–and you just don’t pay attention to anything else. So, sugar consumption is very low in Japan and very high here. So, maybe it’s sugar that’s the cause of heart disease, or the absence of sugar is the reason the Japanese are so relatively healthy; and if you don’t look at sugar, you don’t know.

{ Gary Taubes/EconTalk | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Mapplethorpe }

After four decades of largely unfulfilled hopes—Dec. 23 marks 40 years since President Nixon declared war on cancer—scientists have hit on a potential cure that few thought possible a few years ago: vaccines. If they succeed, cancer vaccines would revolutionize treatment. They could spell the end of chemotherapy and radiation, which can have horrific side effects, which tumor cells often become resistant to, and which often make so little difference it would be laughable were it not so tragic: last week, for instance, headlines touted two new drugs for metastatic breast cancer even though studies failed to show that they extend survival by a single day. Vaccines could make such “advances” a thing of the past. And they could make cancer as preventable, with a few jabs, as measles.

“Could” is the key word. Cancer vaccines are still being tested. Patients, doctors, and scientists know only too well that seemingly wondrous cancer therapies can flame out. But progress is accelerating. In 2010, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first-ever tumor vaccine, called Provenge, to treat prostate cancer. Scores of other vaccines are in the pipeline. Over the summer, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania unveiled what they call a cancer “breakthrough 20 years in the making”: a vaccine against chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) that has brought about remissions of up to a year and counting—and which its inventors believe can be tweaked to attack lung cancer, ovarian cancer, myeloma, and melanoma. Vaccines against pancreatic and brain cancer are also being tested. “For the first time,” says Disis, who has a $7.9 million grant from the Pentagon to develop a preventive vaccine, “clinical trials [of cancer vaccines] are demonstrating anti-tumor efficacy in numbers of patients with cancer, not just one or two unique individuals.”

{ Newsweek | Continue reading }

Scientists at the University of Sheffield believe decision making mechanisms in the human brain could mirror how swarms of bees choose new nest sites.

Striking similarities have been found in decision making systems between humans and insects in the past but now researchers believe that bees could teach us about how our brains work.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

How to Gamble If You’re In a Hurry

The beautiful theory of statistical gambling, started by Dubins and Savage (for subfair games) and continued by Kelly and Breiman (for superfair games) has mostly been studied under the unrealistic assumption that we live in a continuous world, that money is indefinitely divisible, and that our life is indefinitely long.

Here we study these fascinating problems from a purely discrete, finitistic, and computational, viewpoint, using Both Symbol-Crunching and Number-Crunching (and simulation just for checking purposes).

{ arXiv | Continue reading }