Social hierarchies are quite complicated. In the animal world hierarchies are wildly different based on social contexts, species, and environmental factors. For some animals, such as bull elephant seals, hierarchies are unstable—individuals spend a relatively short times at the top of the food chain—and what these alpha males get in terms of mating preferences, they pay dearly for in terms of physical fighting, aggressive confrontation, and threats from other male rivals. In unstable hierarchies, it’s hard to be at the top.

Most hierarchies are much more stable than the example of the bull elephant seal. For instance, in human social life, social hierarchies are typically stable within a specific context. For example, you and your boss aren’t likely to switch roles halfway through the year. And there is good reason for that. If people were allowed to switch willy-nilly between high and low status roles, it would be hard to know who to turn to for advice or guidance, whose directions should be followed, and who should take responsibility for the group’s failures. (…)

Hierarchies, in this case, are an essential way in which people can organize their social lives around others. So in some instances, having some people with low status and some people with high status is good. (…)

There are, of course, some important caveats to this reasoning. (…) A large history of research on socioeconomic status suggests that being low in socioeconomic status is bad for your health. In short, you die sooner when you are lower in socioeconomic status relative to others.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

Creative cultural transmission as chaotic sampling

First, Chaos: Some formula produce unpredictable trajectories, for instance the Lorenz attractor. Here’s what part of a trajectory looks like:

You can play with the dynamics using this applet.

The trajectory will not pass through the same point twice, but is not completely random. Lorenz attractors have been used to re-sample sequences in the following way: Imagine you have a sequence of musical notes. Pick a starting point on the Lorenz trajectory and associate each note with successive points. Now you have your notes laid out on the Lorenz attractor so that for any point in the space you can find the closest associated note. If you start on the Lorenz trajectory from a different point, you can sample the notes in a different sequence. This sample will be different from the original, but tends to preserve some of the structure. That is, the Lorenz attractor scrambles the sample, but in a chaotic way, not a random one.

{ Replicated Typo | Continue reading }

related { Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1968 }

As Zadie Smith argued in a recent New York Review of Books article, Facebook’s private-in-public mode of operation traps us:

It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.)

The juvenile mentality built in the medium pushes us to broadcast our private lives and expect that the details we share will be obsessively dissected. We sense, more or less consciously, that with the capability to broadcast our lives comes an obligation to be entertaining. (…)

Thanks to social media, we are no longer obliged to disguise our voyeuristic impulses. Voyeurism has been culturally legitimized. We can turn to the real events of our lives as we have retold them and to the reactions they have prompted. On the internet, our personal lives have become our television shows.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

related { Facebook Lost Nearly 6 Million Users in U.S. in May }

Sleep is More Important than Food

Say you decide to go on a fast, and so you effectively starve yourself for a week. At the end of seven days, how would you be feeling? You’d probably be hungry, perhaps a little weak, and almost certainly somewhat thinner. But basically you’d be fine.

Now let’s say you deprive yourself of sleep for a week. Not so good. After several days, you’d be almost completely unable to function. That’s why Amnesty International lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

So why is sleep one of the first things we’re willing to sacrifice as the demands in our lives keep rising? We continue to live by a remarkably durable myth: sleeping one hour less will give us one more hour of productivity. In reality, the research suggests that even small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our health, our mood, our cognitive capacity and our productivity.

Many of the effects we suffer are invisible. Insufficient sleep, for example, deeply impairs our ability to consolidate and stabilize learning that occurs during the waking day. In other words, it wreaks havoc on our memory.

So how much sleep do you need? When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours. That means just 2.5 percent of us require less than 7 hours of sleep a night to feel fully rested. That’s 1 out of every 40 people.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

More than one-third of American adults wake up in the middle of the night on a regular basis. Of those who experience “nocturnal awakenings,” nearly half are unable to fall back asleep right away. Doctors frequently diagnose this condition as a sleep disorder called “middle-of-the-night insomnia,” and prescribe medication to treat it.

Mounting evidence suggests, however, that nocturnal awakenings aren’t abnormal at all; they are the natural rhythm that your body gravitates toward.

According to historians and psychiatrists alike, it is the compressed, continuous eight-hour sleep routine to which everyone aspires today that is unprecedented in human history. We’ve been sleeping all wrong lately — so if you have “insomnia,” you may actually be doing things right.

“The dominant pattern of sleep, arguably since time immemorial, was biphasic,” Roger Ekirch, a sleep historian at Virginia Tech University. “Humans slept in two four-hour blocks, which were separated by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night lasting an hour or more. During this time some might stay in bed, pray, think about their dreams, or talk with their spouses. Others might get up and do tasks or even visit neighbors before going back to sleep.”

{ Life’s Little Mysteries | Continue reading }

photo { french zoo, 2001; i took the photo }

related { How losing just a few hours of sleep can take years off your life }

The exceptional thing about Apple is not that it’s the most valuable consumer-facing brand in the world, that it has a market cap larger than Microsoft, or that its stock performance over the past decade bested Google. No, what’s different about Apple is that for a really long time—more than 20 of the 33 years it has been on this earth—it was a niche player. (…)

For the first two-thirds of their existence on this planet, no mammal ever got much bigger or more ambitious than a modern-day rodent. They were niche players. For about 135 of the 200 million years they have existed, mammals lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs that had a death grip on all the available ecological niches in the tech ecosystem—mostly Microsoft—kept out other players through competitive exclusion. Competitive exclusion means, basically, that if someone’s already really good at being, for example, the top predator, there’s no room for anyone else to come in and assume that mantle.

Then something crazy happened—an asteroid strike, some climate change—and the dinosaurs, the largest creatures ever to walk the earth, were wiped out. In this analogy, it was the Internet, or the early days of the post-PC transition (e.g., the iPod) that eroded the lead of Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft is still with us, and this transition is far from complete—even the dinosaurs weren’t wiped out overnight, and plenty of their relatives are still with us today.

After that extinction event, all the advantages that Apple—and mammals—already possessed were suddenly useful. A high metabolism, good design, live birth, devices that “just work.” These things were present all along, but they were meaningless as long as something bigger and stronger was present to prevent a growth in the market share of Apple, or an expansion of the niches occupied by mammals.

Taken together, these forces explain how it’s possible that a company, or an entire class of animals, could spend so much time humming along in a tiny niche, and then achieve “overnight” success by deploying traits they had been developing all along.

{ Christopher Mims/Technology Review | Continue reading | Read more: How the Rise of Google’s Chromebook Is Like the Rise of Multicellular Life | And: The first commercial deployment of SPDY (vs HTTP), a protocol designed by Google to make websites faster, launched last week. }

photo { Jesse Chehak }

A local zoologist, Jamie Seymour, blamed King’s death on a nearly transparent jellyfish the size of a thumbnail. Covered from the top of its head to the tip of its four tentacles with millions of microscopic spring-loaded harpoons filled with venom, it’s one of at least ten related species of small jellyfish whose sting can plunge victims into what doctors call the Irukandji syndrome.

“The symptoms overwhelm you,” says Seymour, 40, who himself was stung by an irukandji on the lip, the only part of his body uncovered as he scuba-dived looking for specimens near an island off Cairns in late 2003. “On a pain scale of 1 to 10, it rated between 15 and 20,” he says, describing the vomiting, the cramps and the feeling of panic. “I was convinced I was going to die.” But he was lucky; not all species of irukandji administer fatal stings, and he recovered within a day. (…)

Most jellyfish are passive; they drift up and down in the water column, or are pulled to and fro by the tides and winds. They float through the oceans devouring tiny fish and microscopic creatures that bumble into their tentacles, and are no threat to humans.

But those known as box jellyfish, for the shape of their bell, or body, are a breed apart. Also called cubozoans, they’re voracious hunters, able to chase prey by moving forward—as well as up and down—at speeds of up to two knots. They range in size from the various irukandji species to their big brother, the brutish Chironex fleckeri, which has a bell the size of a man’s head and up to 180 yards of tentacles, each lined with billions of cells bursting with deadly venom. Also known as a sea wasp or marine stinger, Chironex, which is far deadlier than irukandji, boasts powerful stingers, or nematocysts, strong enough to pierce the carapace of a crab and quick enough to shoot out at the fastest speed known in the natural world—up to 40,000 times the force of gravity. And unlike other jellyfish, a box jellyfish can see where it’s going and alter its course accordingly; like an eerie creature sprung from science fiction or a horror movie, it has four separate brains and 24 eyes, providing it a 360-degree view of its watery world.

“A Chironex fleckeri can kill a human in one minute flat,” says Seymour, widely considered the world’s foremost box jellyfish researcher. (…)

“We hardly know anything about their lifestyle, how they breed, where they come from, how fast they grow, how long they live, or even how many species there are,” says Lisa-ann Gershwin, a 41-year-old California stockbroker-turned-jellyfish taxonomist. “But they’re like other cubozoans: they’re really neat, like aliens. They split from the other jellyfish, the scyphozoa, more than 300 million years ago, long before dinosaurs walked the earth, and have been making their own way along the evolutionary path ever since.” (…)

Death comes quickly to Chironex victims because—unlike venomous snakes, which inject a glob of venom that must pass through the lymphatic system before draining into the rest of the body—Chironex shoots its venom into the bloodstream, giving the venom a direct pathway to the heart.
In addition to their stinging cells, box jellyfish have another superlative weapon in their hunt for prey: one of the world’s most effective sets of eyes.

On a windy day at a beach 40 miles north of Cairns, I help a team led by Dan Nilsson, a zoology professor at Sweden’s Lund University and a renowned expert on animal eyes. (…) “They swim like fish, not like jellyfish,” he says with a smile. He plucks one from the bucket and shows me what keeps it from bumping into things: four tiny black dots, containing the jellyfish’s 24 eyes, on strands connected to each side of the cube of jelly. Under the microscope, Nilsson has detected in each dot something he calls a sensory club, which is an organ with a set of six eyes, including four that are—much like the eyes of other jellyfish—simply pits, limited to detecting light intensity in various directions. But the two other eyes in each sensory club have more in common with human eyes than the eyes of other jellyfish, with lenses, corneas and retinas. One eye, which points obliquely downward at all times, even has a mobile pupil that opens and closes. The other major eye points upward. “We’re not exactly sure what these eyes are doing,” Nilsson says, although he believes they may help the jellyfish “position itself in the right place where there is plenty of food.” They also help the animal situate the shoreline and the horizon—to avoid being dumped on the beach by a wave—and see obstacles that would tear its delicate tissue, such as a coral reef, a mangrove tree or a pier.

They also have the same stomach—or, rather, stomachs. Because a box jelly, as Jamie Seymour puts it, “charges around the ocean all day hunting mobile prey, prawns and fish,” its metabolic rate is ten times that of a drifting jellyfish. So, to swiftly access the energy it needs, the box jellyfish has developed a unique digestive system, with separate stomachs in each of its tentacles. All box jellies turn their food into a semi-digested broth in the bell, and then feed it down through the tentacles to be absorbed. Since a Chironex can have up to 60 tentacles, each as long as 3 yards, in effect it has up to 180 yards of stomach.

If box jellyfish eyes are a puzzle, its four primitive brains—positioned on each side of its body and attached to it by the same strand that anchors its eyes—are an enigma. Can the four separate brains communicate with each other? If so, do they merge the images they receive from the 24 eyes into one image? And how do they manage if different eyes detect radically different images? Nilsson shrugs. “They’ve evolved a rather advanced system unlike any other animal on earth,” he says. “But we have no idea what’s going on in their four brains, and I suspect it will be a long time before we find out.”

{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }

Despite its primitive structure, the North American comb jellyfish can sneak up on its prey like a high-tech stealth submarine, making it a successful predator. Researchers, including one from the University of Gothenburg, have now been able to show how the jellyfish makes itself hydrodynamically ‘invisible’.

{ PhysOrg | Continue reading }

It is clear that the heavy burden of private and public debt in a number of periphery countries— Greece, Ireland, Portugal—is so large that a debt restructuring and reduction will eventually have to occur, thus imposing—slowly or sharply—a capital loss on these periphery agents’ foreign creditors (mostly financial institutions in the core).

So, how can competitiveness be restored and growth resume in the periphery?

One way would be for the euro to sharply fall in value toward—say—parity with the U.S. dollar. But with Germany being uber-competitive, the core running current-account surpluses and the ECB always more hawkish than the Fed, there is little chance that the euro would fall sharply enough to restore the competitiveness of the PIIGS.

A second solution would be to take the German reform approach: Accelerate structural reforms to increase productivity growth and keep a lid on wage growth below productivity growth to reduce unit labor costs. But this will not work: Structural reforms show their gains only in the medium term—in the short run, they can actually reduce growth as you shed labor and capital from declining firms and sectors; also, it took 15 years for Germany to reduce unit labor costs by keeping wage growth below productivity growth; if Greece, Portugal, etc. start today, the benefit in terms of competitiveness and growth will occur only in a decade, too late to be politically acceptable.

A third option is deflation: If the PIIGS could reduce prices and wages by 5% per year for five years, you would get the necessary cumulative compound fall of 30% in nominal prices/wages to restore competitiveness. The problem with the deflation route to a real depreciation is twofold.

First, deflation is associated with persistent recession and no social or political body could accept another five years of recession to reduce prices/wages by 30%; Argentina tried the deflation route to a real depreciation, but after three years of an ever-deepening recession gave up and decided to default and exit its currency board peg.

Second, even if by some miracle deflation was feasible and successful, the real value of the already-high private and public debts would rise sharply (a balance-sheet effect), forcing even-larger defaults and debt reductions. (…)

If the euro is not going to fall sharply, if reducing unit labor cost takes too long to restore competitiveness and growth and if deflation is unfeasible or (if achieved) self-defeating, there is only one other way for the PIIGS to restore competitiveness and growth: Leave the monetary union, go back to national currencies and thus achieve a massive nominal and real depreciation. (…)

Scenarios that are inconceivable today might not be so far-fetched five years from now. (…) Debt reduction will not be sufficient to restore competitiveness and growth. So, unless the latter can be achieved in other ways, the option for PIIGS of exiting the monetary union will become dominant as the benefits of staying in will be lower than the benefits of exiting, however bumpy or disorderly that exit may end up being.

Messy marriages lead to messy divorces, but if the marriage doesn’t work, even the threat of a messy divorce cannot keep couples together that are not a long-term match.

{ Nouriel Roubini via John Mauldin | Continue reading }

In the coming decades, Europe’s influence on affairs beyond its borders will be sharply limited, and it is in other regions, not Europe, that the 21st century will be most clearly forged and defined. (…)

The current euro zone financial crisis should not obscure the historic accomplishment that was the building of an integrated Europe over the past half-century. The continent is largely whole and free and stable. Europe, the principal arena of much 20th-century geopolitical competition, will be spared such a role in the new century — and this is a good thing.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Walker Pickering }

{ Brooklyn, Summer of 1974 | more }

You talk a lot in the book about the power of creativity and innovation, and I’m very sympathetic to that. But not everybody has creative jobs. What about those folks? Well, first of all, not everybody wants a creative job, either. I’ve met plenty of people in my life who really do want to come in at 9, be given a list of tasks they must accomplish; and they want to be able to go home when the clock strikes 5. They are not really interested in creativity. That’s fine. Or at least on the job. From your point of view, what about those who do seek to demonstrate their creativity and do not have an outlet in their workplace? As I say in the book, there are certainly plenty of people who have miserable jobs, miserable bosses. They may also have miserable home lives, as well. But when you look at the data, and if you take the United States in particular and ask, are you satisfied or pretty satisfied in your job, the numbers are pretty high. About 2/3 or more than 2/3 of the working population are satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs. Is it for me to judge whether you should be satisfied? The UPS man is trotting up to my door as we speak. He looks happy; pay is decent wages. Would I be happy? My back might ache after a couple of days on the job. The question is, in what kind of society, with what kind of political and economic system, are people given a greater choice among occupations? If you look back through history, we’ve been on this march towards more freedom; using Milton Friedman’s words, freedom to choose what sort of jobs. Back in olden times, if your father was a blacksmith, you would be a blacksmith; and your forefather was a blacksmith. Same is true of various vocations. We all know the reason families might have the surname Smith was because their entire family going back a thousand years in Europe were smiths and blacksmiths. We now no longer have those constraints, and I think that gives us greater opportunity for creativity, even if it turns out that there are discontented people, legitimately, who can’t quite figure out how to do it. I live in southern California, and they say every cab driver here has a screenplay in his trunk. He doesn’t want to be driving a cab. He wants Steven Spielberg to call him up for a meeting. Probably not going to happen. But is there another society, another form of economic matter that can make that more likely? I don’t really think so.

{ Todd Buchholz/EconTalk | Continue reading }

{ Okinawans are among the world’s longest-lived people. More important, elders living in this lush subtropical archipelago tend to enjoy years free from disabilities. Okinawans have a fifth the heart disease, a fourth the breast and prostate cancer, and a third less dementia than Americans. A lean diet may be a factor. “A heaping plate of Okinawan vegetables, tofu, miso soup, and a little fish or meat will have fewer calories than a small hamburger,” says Makoto Suzuki. “And it will have many more healthy nutrients.” What’s more, many Okinawans who grew up before World War II never developed the tendency to overindulge. They still live by the Confucian-inspired adage “hara hachi bu–eat until your stomach is 80 percent full.” | National Geographic | Continue reading }

{ For one month, the ants, which usually thrive on seeds, are being fed a steady diet of McDonald’s Happy Meals. They even get the toys. The ants are housed in a roughly 6-by-10-foot plexiglass farm that is packed with Perlite pebbles and sealed with clear packing tape and nylon panty hose. Elizabeth Demaray, an artist based in Brooklyn, worked hand in hand with Dr. Christine Johnson, a scientific assistant at the American Museum of Natural History who specializes in ant research. | NY Times, 2010 | Continue reading }

{ More than half of the women in a recently published survey reported that near the end of their pregnancies, they took it upon themselves to try to induce labor, mostly by walking, having sex, eating spicy food or stimulating their nipples. | Ohio State University | Continue reading }

photo { Mark Borthwick }

The potentially lasting implications of day-to-day couple conflict on physical and mental well-being are revealed in a study published today in the journal Personal Relationships. (…)

The study found that all participants across the sample as a whole experienced sleep disruption after conflict. There was however the greatest degree of sleep disruption amongst individuals who were highly anxious in their relationship. The lowest degree of sleep disruption was found amongst individuals who strongly avoided emotional attachment.

Conflict was also found to have repercussions for next-day mood. However, some participants found their mood negatively affected more than others. Individuals more at ease with emotional attachment found their mood was affected more than did individuals less comfortable being intimate with others.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

{ 1. Chris on Senior Day, 1977 | 2. Pricilla, Jones Beach, 1969 | 3. Reflector: Jones Beach, 1972 | Joseph Szabo }

Humans and other animals express power through open, expansive postures, and they express powerlessness through closed, contractive postures. But can these postures actually cause power?

The results of this study confirmed our prediction that posing in high-power nonverbal displays (as opposed to low-power nonverbal displays) would cause neuroendocrine and behavioral changes for both male and female participants: High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk; low-power posers exhibited the opposite pattern.

In short, posing in displays of power caused advantaged and adaptive psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes, and these findings suggest that embodiment extends beyond mere thinking and feeling, to physiology and subsequent behavioral choices.

That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.

{ SAGE | Continue reading | More: 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance }

It was 1985. I was 12 and standing next to my mother in a police station in Greenwich Village. She was a pretty red-haired gal in her late 30s, but the three police officers she was talking to weren’t looking at her. They were looking at the bag of crack vials she had in her hands, confused about what they were. I wasn’t confused. We had a lot of crack vials in our apartment at that point. Hundreds of them. My brothers and I played with them in Washington Square Park. We carried them around in our pockets the way other kids carried marbles.

I didn’t know then that this encounter would inspire a movement; that a group of local mothers would decide to do what the befuddled police would not: reclaim Washington Square Park from the drug dealers. (…)

My parents moved into our apartment at 32 Washington Square West in 1975. Over the next decade we watched as an army of dealers and their customers took over the heart of Greenwich Village. As a kid, I knew you didn’t ride your bicycle into the park, because a junkie would take it from you. The park’s arch, built as an imitation of the Arc de Triomphe, was covered in graffiti. When the city painted over it in 1981, Mayor Ed Koch applied the last stroke of white paint, then remarked, “That’ll last about an hour.”

{ John Carney/NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Kathe Kollwitz, Death and a Woman Struggling for a Child, 1911 }

…looking at all the ways the conscious is just the littlest bit of what’s happening in the brain. Your brain does these massive computations under the hood all the time. And a hunch essentially is the result of all those computations. So it’s exactly like riding a bicycle, the way you don’t have to be consciously aware, in fact you cannot be consciously aware. Your consciousness has no access to the operations running under the hood that allow you to ride the bicycle, or for that matter that allow you to recognize somebody’s face. you don’t know how you recognize somebody’s face, you just do it effortlessly.

In both of these cases, it’s very hard to write computer programs to do this stuff, to ride a bicycle or recognize somebody’s face, because there’s massive computation going on there that’s required. Your brain does this all effortlessly and the hunch is when it serves up the end result of those computations.

Essentially the conscious mind is like a newspaper headline in the sense that all it ever wants is the summary, it doesn’t need to know all the details of how something happened, it just wants to know.

{ David Eagleman/Wired | Continue reading }

Cramer’s company, HyperStealth Biotechnology Corporation… (…)

Over the past 10 years, Cramer, 43, has created more than 8,000 unique camouflage patterns. Ultimately none may have more influence than his most recent design. In April, the United States Army issued a request for proposals for a new family of camouflage patterns to replace the Universal Camouflage Pattern design that’s been the Army’s general-issue print since 2004. Cramer is expected to be among the top contenders for the contract to create a family of patterns and palettes that can function nearly anywhere in the world. (…)

The next half-step breakthrough in concealment might well be something called “adaptive camouflage.” “We’re working on materials that can change their color, shape, and brightness, depending on the surrounding environment.”

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

Not many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic—but Pauline Réage could. Make that Dominique Aury. No: Anne Desclos.

All three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Forty years after the publication of the French novel Histoire d’O, the full truth was finally made public. Even then, some still considered it the most shocking book ever written. When the book came out, its purported author was “Pauline Réage,” widely believed to be a pseudonym. Although shocking for its graphic depictions of sadomasochism, the novel was admired for its reticent, even austere literary style. It went on to achieve worldwide success, selling millions of copies, and has never been out of print. (…)

Desclos (or, rather, Aury, as she became known in her early thirties) was obsessed with her married lover, Jean Paulhan. She wrote the book to entice him, claim him, and keep him—and she wrote it exclusively for him. It was the ultimate love letter. (…)

Story of O, the title of the English edition, is an account of a French fashion photographer, known only as O, who descends into debasement, torment, humiliation, violence, and bondage, all in the name of devotion to her lover, René. Over the course of the novel she is blindfolded, chained, flogged, pierced, branded, and more.

{ Guernica | Continue reading }

photo { J. Kursel }

Synthetic drugs that use legal compounds but mimic the highs of everything from marijuana to cocaine are proliferating among do-it-yourself pharma labs across the country. Bad trips—and fatal side effects—are increasing, too.

{ BusinessWeek | Continue reading }

bonus:

{ photos by Jeremy Hu | Art Basel, June 2011 | Artist? }