Using within-state variation in employment and unemployment, we find that recreational exercise tends to increase as employment decreases. In addition, we also find that individuals substitute into television watching, sleeping, childcare, and housework. However, this increase in exercise as well as other activities does not compensate for the decrease in work-related exertion due to job-loss. Thus total physical exertion, which prior studies have not analyzed, declines.

{ National Bureau of Economic Research | Continue reading }

{ Going to the store by David Lewandowski }

{ Domestic cats have been genetically modified to resist the feline form of AIDS in a new study that could have significant implications for health researchers working to protect humans from the virus. | Cosmos | Smithsonian }

related { Missing Colorado cat found in New York }

Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults.

The first full series of scans of the developing adolescent brain showed that our brains undergo a massive reorganization between our 12th and 25th years. The brain doesn’t actually grow very much during this period. It has already reached 90 percent of its full size by the time a person is six, and a thickening skull accounts for most head growth afterward. But as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade. (…)

This process of maturation, once thought to be largely finished by elementary school, continues throughout adolescence. Imaging work done since the 1990s shows that these physical changes move in a slow wave from the brain’s rear to its front, from areas close to the brain stem that look after older and more behaviorally basic functions, such as vision, movement, and fundamental processing, to the evolutionarily newer and more complicated thinking areas up front. The corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s left and right hemispheres and carries traffic essential to many advanced brain functions, steadily thickens. Stronger links also develop between the hippocampus, a sort of memory directory, and frontal areas that set goals and weigh different agendas; as a result, we get better at integrating memory and experience into our decisions. At the same time, the frontal areas develop greater speed and richer connections, allowing us to generate and weigh far more variables and agendas than before.

When this development proceeds normally, we get better at balancing impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules, ethics, and even altruism, generating behavior that is more complex and, sometimes at least, more sensible. But at times, and especially at first, the brain does this work clumsily. It’s hard to get all those new cogs to mesh.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading }

painting { Gustav Klimt, Bildnis Helene Klimt, 1898 }

Historically, the international significance of a language has depended on four key factors: demography (that is, the number of native speakers of the language in question); the military might of the native speakers; the economic power of the native speakers; and, finally, the cultural or political significance of what was written in the language.

Nicholas Ostler suggests that, in the 21st century, the military factor will be replaced by new technological and political factors: translation technology is going to help people communicating in different languages, while nationalistic claims in favour of certain languages will limit the spread of English and other contenders for the role of lingua franca. David Graddol, in his comprehensive report for the British Council, gives priority to the demographic factors and stresses the growth of global, post-modern multilingualism.

The foothold of the English language in North America after the multinational colonization that started in the early 17th century was attributed by 19th century commentators in part to the technical and aesthetic virtues of English – its clarity and grammatical simplicity – just as the past pre-eminence of French in Europe was due to its diplomatic polyvalence.

As for Russian, the life expectancy of Russians has been declining since the 1970s, and it is well established that Russia’s fertility rate is among the lowest in the world. The population of Russia is expected to fall by 30 to 50 million by the year 2050, resulting in a national headcount of around 100 million people, as against today’s 141 million. Although the anomalous mortality rate of the Russian male population may be reversed in the next few decades if social conditions improve, the overall demographic trend is unlikely to change – notwithstanding recent pro-fertility measures introduced by Prime Minister Putin. By contrast, the world’s population is expected to grow by almost one and half times by 2050.

{ Global Brief | Continue reading }

related { How Much Can You Say in 140 Characters? A Lot, if You Speak Japanese }

A cold-blooded serial killer is on the loose. His name is Gustave. (…)

Gustave is reputed to have devoured hundreds of villagers, snatching them from the banks of the Rusizi and the northeastern shores of Lake Tanganyika. Faye estimates that the massive crocodile measures 20 feet long, weighs one ton (2,200 pounds), and is 60 years old (wild crocs, on average, live to age 45). Trained herpetologists agree that Gustave could be that large and that he is certainly one of the most infamous man-eaters of all time.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading | Wikipedia }

related { Herpetology is the branch of zoology concerned with the study of amphibians (frogs, toads, salamanders…) and reptiles (snakes, lizards, turtles, crocodilians…) | Wikipedia }

She found that 20 percent of the models on the agency’s books were in debt to the agency. Foreign models, in particular, seem to exist in a kind of indentured servitude, she writes, often owing as much as $10,000 to their agencies for visas, flights, and test shoots, all before they even go on their first casting call. And once a model does nab a job, the pay is often meager. (…)

Why do so many models operate against their own economic interests? Mears details how, in the fashion world, there is typically an inverse relationship between the prestige of a job and how much the model gets paid. A day-long shoot for Vogue pays a paltry $150, for instance, while a shoot for Britain’s influential i-D magazine, which Mears calls “one of the most sought-after editorial clients for a model,” pays absolutely nothing, not even the cost of transportation or a copy of the magazine for the model’s portfolio.

The alternative to high-fashion poverty is to be a “money girl,” working for catalogs and in showroom fittings, jobs that pay well and reliably. The best-paid model at Mears’ agency, for instance, was a 52-year-old showroom model with “the precise size 8 body needed to fit clothing for a major American retailer. She makes $500/hour and works every day.” But the commercial end of modeling is widely derided within the industry as low-rent, as mere work without glamour. Once a model has done too many commercial jobs, she is thought to have cheapened herself, and it’s exceedingly difficult for her to return to high fashion.

{ Slate | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

photo { Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Untitled (Chicago), 1948 }

People directly experience only the here and now. It is impossible to experience the past and the future, other places, other people, and alternatives to reality. And yet, memories, plans, predictions, hopes, and counterfactual alternatives populate our minds, influence our emotions, and guide our choice and action. How do we transcend the here and now to include distal entities? How do we plan for the distant future, understand other people’s point of view, and take into account hypothetical alternatives to reality? Construal level theory (CLT) proposes that we do so by forming abstract mental construals of distal objects.

Thus, although we cannot experience what is not present, we can make predictions about the future, remember the past, imagine other people’s reactions, and speculate about what might have been. Predictions, memories, and speculations are all mental constructions, distinct from direct experience. They serve to transcend the immediate situation and represent psychologically distant objects.

Psychological distance is a subjective experience that something is close or far away from the self, here, and now. Psychological distance is thus egocentric: Its reference point is the self, here and now, and the different ways in which an object might be removed from that point—in time, space, social distance, and hypotheticality—constitute different distance dimensions.

According to CLT, then, people traverse different psychological distances by using similar mental construal processes.

{ Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance | PubMed | Continue reading }

artwork { Morten Hemmingsen }

{ via Copyranter }

Nick Neave and colleagues at Northumbria University used motion-capture technology to record the movements of 19 men dancing to a basic drum beat. Each dancer was then mapped onto a computer-generated avatar, and 37 heterosexual women were asked to rate the avatars on their dancing prowess.

By correlating the women’s ratings with the avatars’ movements, the scientists were able to come up with a recipe for successful boogieing. The three factors that most contributed to high dance scores were ‘neck internal/external rotation variability’ (head shaking), ‘trunk adduction/abduction variability’ (sideways bending) and ‘right knee internal/external rotation speed’ (twisting speed).

These movements, claims the study, may provide signals of a man’s suitability as a sexual partner by indicating his physical strength, health or genetic quality.

{ the.soft.anonymous | Continue reading }

bonus:

{ A surprising new study suggests that people can track a scent across a grassy field–at least if they’re willing to get down on their hands and knees and put their noses to the ground. | Science | full story | Thanks Tim }

The first letter I’m going to read—I’m not going to tell you who the recipient is until I finish the letter. It’s a letter from a father to a son.

“My dear son,”—this is an actual letter.

“I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today. (…)

“I am a practical man, and for the life of me, I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek? I have read, in recent years, the deliberations of Plato and Aristotle, and was interested to learn that the old bastards had minds which worked very similarly to the way our minds work today. I was amazed they had so much time for deliberating and thinking, and was interested in the kind of civilization that would permit such useless deliberation. Then I got to thinking that it wasn’t so amazing after all, they thought like we did, because my Hereford cows today are very similar to those ten or twenty generations ago.

“I am amazed that you would adopt Plato and Aristotle as a vocation for several months, when it might make pleasant enjoyable reading for you in your leisure time as relaxation at a later date. For the life of me, I cannot understand why you should be vitally interested in informing yourself about the influence of the Classics on English literature. It is not necessary for you to know how to make a gun in order to know how to use it. It would seem to me that it would be enough to learn English literature without getting into what influence this or that ancient mythology might have had upon it. (…)

“I hope I am right. You are in the hands of Philistines, and dammit, I sent you there. I am sorry.

“Devotedly,

DAD.”

Quite a remarkable letter. The recipient of this letter was Ted Turner. And while I think Ted Turner’s father is right about most classicists and classics professors and universities, I don’t think he’s right about the classics. And I believe that it was the crypto-classicist in Turner—his exposure to the wisdom of Greece and the culture of Greece, and to those paradigms of thought and understanding and excellence, the vision that he was exposed to in his studies in the classics—that may have played some role in making him the visionary that he was. I like to believe that Ted Turner created CNN somehow out of his studies in the classics. Because, really, if you think about it, what he did was take the television set—which, at that point, was a kind of fishbowl that made the world smaller—and he really transformed it into a window on the world.

{ Herbert Golder | Continue reading }

statue { Zeus, King of the Gods, God of the Sky, Thunder and Lightning, and Law, Order and Justice }

A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

There was no trace of it anywhere — no leukemic cells in his blood or bone marrow, no more bulging lymph nodes on his CT scan. His doctors calculated that the treatment had killed off two pounds of cancer cells.

A year later, Mr. Ludwig is still in complete remission. Before, there were days when he could barely get out of bed; now, he plays golf and does yard work.

Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients. The research, they say, has far to go; the treatment is still experimental, not available outside of studies.

But scientists say the treatment that helped Mr. Ludwig may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer. And not just for leukemia patients: other cancers may also be vulnerable to this novel approach — which employs a disabled form of H.I.V.-1, the virus that causes AIDS, to carry cancer-fighting genes into the patients’ T-cells. In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

As onions are sliced, cells are broken, allowing enzymes called alliinases to break down amino acid sulphoxides and generate sulphenic acids.

A specific sulfenic acid, 1-propenesulfenic acid, formed when onions are cut, is rapidly rearranged by a second enzyme, called the lachrymatory factor synthase, giving syn-propanethial-S-oxide a volatile gas known as the onion lachrymatory factor (LF).

The LF gas diffuses through the air and eventually reaches the eye, where it activates sensory neurons, creating a stinging sensation. Tear glands produce tears to dilute and flush out the irritant. Chemicals that exhibit such an effect on the eyes are known as lachrymatory agents.

Supplying ample water to the reaction while peeling onions prevents the gas from reaching the eyes. Eye irritation can, therefore, be avoided by cutting onions under running water or submerged in a basin of water.

Another way to reduce irritation is by chilling, or by not cutting off the root of the onion (or by doing it last), as the root of the onion has a higher concentration of enzymes.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

In a series of two experiments, Smith and colleagues show that memory in women is sensitive to male voice pitch, a cue important for mate choice because it can indicate genetic quality as well as signal behavioral traits undesirable in a long-term partner. (…)

The authors found that women had a strong preference for the low pitch male voice and remembered objects more accurately when they have been introduced by the deep male voice.

{ Springer | Continue reading }

Yahoo has a bureaucracy problem that I attribute to former CEO Terry Semel, who hired legions of vice presidents. (…) Since Semel didn’t seem to get what Yahoo was about, he hired lots of people to keep him from having to personally deal with it.

Here’s how my friend Randy put it: “My beef with Yahoo is that they have way too many layers (I might have the exact titles wrong, but the number of layers is right) — associates, senior associates, managers, senior managers, directors, senior directors, general managers, VPs, SVPs, EVPs, regional presidents. This is absolutely crazy. They have more VP-level employees than you could ever imagine. Their product and engineering talent sits under all of these layers. It’s no wonder they’re not a technology company anymore. That’s what they need to fix first — flatten the company. Firing a bunch of senior execs who can’t get it done and not replacing them would go a long way.”

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

Anyone who has ever been out in the rain too long or soaked for hours in a tub knows the prunelike effect it can have on your hands and feet. Conventional wisdom suggests it is nothing more than the skin absorbing water.

But a number of questions have puzzled scientists. Why do “wet wrinkles” appear only on the hands and feet? And why are the most prominent wrinkles at the ends of the digits? Surgeons already know that cutting nerves in a finger prevents the wrinkling, suggesting the process is controlled by the nervous system.

Now a paper in the journal Brain, Behavior and Evolution offers more evidence that wet wrinkles serve a purpose: better grip and traction.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

gouache and pencil on paper { Dick Blair }

{ SETI@Home is a distributed computing initiative that analyses radio signals for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence. SETI@Home volunteers have identified some 4.2 billion signals. Most, if not all, of them are likely to be the result of noise or interference. | The Physics arXiv Blog }

A fundamental difficulty in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is, especially for systems with senses, environments, motivations and cognitive capacities which are very different to our own.

Although there is no strict consensus among experts over the definition of intelligence for humans, most definitions share many key features. In all cases, intelligence is a property of an entity, which we will call the agent, that interacts with an external problem or situation, which we will call the environment. An agent’s intelligence is typically related to its ability to succeed with respect to one or more objectives, which we will call the goal. The emphasis on learning, adaptation and flexibility common to many definitions implies that the environment is not fully known to the agent. Thus true intelligence requires the ability to deal with a wide range of possibilities, not just a few specific situations. Putting these things together gives us our informal definition: Intelligence measures an agent’s general ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments. We are confident that this definition captures the essence of many common perspectives on intelligence. It also describes what we would like to achieve in machines: A very general capacity to adapt and perform well in a wide range of situations.

{ Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter | Continue reading | PDF }

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to research aimed at tackling the full problem of artificial intelligence, that is, create truly intelligent agents. This sets it apart from most AI research which aims at solving relatively narrow domains, such as character recognition, motion planning, or increasing player satisfaction in games. But how do we know when an agent is truly intelligent? A common point of reference in the AGI community is Legg and Hutter’s formal definition of universal intelligence, which has the appeal of simplicity and generality but is unfortunately incomputable. (…)

Intelligence is one of those interesting concepts that everyone has an opinion about, but few people are able to give a definition for – and when they do, their definitions tend to disagree with each other. And curiously, the consensus opinions change over time: consider for example a number of indicators for human intelligence like arithmetic skills, memory capacity, chess playing, theorem proving – all of which were commonly employed in the past, but since machines now outperform humans on those tasks, they have fallen into disuse. We refer the interested reader to a comprehensive treatment of the subject matter in Legg (2008).

The current artificial intelligence literature features a panoply of benchmarks, many of which, unfortunately, are very narrow, applicable only on a small class of tasks. This is not to say that they cannot be useful for advancing the field, but in retrospect it often becomes clear how little an advance on a narrow task contributed to the general field. For example, researchers used to argue that serious progress on a game as complex as chess would necessarily generate many insights, and the techniques employed in the solution would be useful for real-world problems – well, no. (…)

Legg and Hutter propose their definition as a basis for any test of artificial general intelligence. Among the advantages they list are its wide range of applicability (from random to super-human), its objectivity, its universality, and the fact that it is formally defined.

Unfortunately however, it suffers from two major limitations: a) Incomputability: Universal intelligence is incomputable, because the Kolmogorov complexity is incomputable for any environment (due to the halting problem). b) Unlimited resources: The authors deliberately do not include any consideration of time or space resources in their definition. This means that two agents that act identically in theory will be assigned the exact same intelligence Υ, even if one of them requires infinitely more computational resources to choose its action (i.e. would never get to do any action in practice) than the other.

{ Tom Schaul, Julian Togelius, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Measuring Intelligence through Games, 2011 | Continue reading | PDF }

Most people detect a distinct sulfurous odor in their urine shortly after eating asparagus. However, there are some who seemingly do not notice the unpleasant odor.

Up until now, it has been unclear whether this is because these individuals do not produce the odor or because they cannot smell it.

Addressing this mystery from several angles, scientists from the Monell Center first used sophisticated sensory testing techniques to show that both explanations apply: approximately eight percent of the subjects tested did not produce the odorous substance, while six percent were unable to smell the odor. One person both did not produce the odor and was unable to smell it.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }