Bob spoke about how people tend to walk faster in larger cities, with this relationship surprisingly consistent. (…)

The early movers in this area of research were Bornstein and Bornstein, who between 1972 and 1974 went to 15 countries across Europe, North America and Asia and measured the speed of pedestrians. They took a 50 feet stretch in similar downtown areas of each city and measured the speed of single, unencumbered walkers traversing that distance.

The slowest walkers were from Itea, Greece (population 2,500), who took an average of 22 seconds to cover the 50 feet. In Prague, a city of over 1 million, the pedestrians covered the distance in a flying average of 8.5 seconds.

{ Jason Collins | Continue reading }

related { Peter Jacques Band, Walking on music, 1979 }

{ 1 | 2 }

Imagine a world where people lacked confidence. We would scarcely be able to face a new day, struggling to summon the courage to show our work to our bosses or apply for a new job. Surgeons would be racked with doubt about upcoming operations. Military commanders would hesitate at key moments when decisiveness was essential.

Confidence is so vital even for the mundane activities of everyday life that we take it for granted. (…) Confidence is widely held to be an almost magic ingredient of success in sports, entertainment, business, the stock market, combat and many other domains. At the same time, confidence can be dangerous.

Confidence in excess—overconfidence—can easily burn out of control and cause costly decision-making errors, policy failures, and wars. For example, overconfidence has been blamed for a string of major disasters from the 1990s dotcom bubble, to the 2008 collapse of the banks, to the ongoing foot-dragging over climate change (“it won’t happen to me”). These events are no blip in the longer timeline of human endeavor. Historians and political scientists have blamed overconfidence for a range of fiascos, from the First World War to Vietnam to Iraq.

We may be surprised by the recurring problem of overconfidence—why don’t people learn from their mistakes? As the archetypal self-doubter Woody Allen suggested, “Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.” But the recurrence of overconfidence is no surprise to psychologists.

All mentally healthy people tend to have so-called “positive illusions” about our abilities, our control over events, and our vulnerability to risk. Numerous studies have shown that we overrate our intelligence, attractiveness, and skill. We also think we have better morals, health, and leadership abilities than others. (…)

Positive illusions appear to be undergirded by many different cognitive and motivational biases, all of which converge to boost people’s confidence. This is dangerous because people are more likely to think they are better than others, which makes aggression, conflict, and even war more likely. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it: “The bottom line is that all the biases in judgment that have been identified in the last 15 years tend to bias decision-making toward the hawkish side.”

{ Seed magazine | Continue reading }

One in five teenagers in America can’t hear rustles or whispers, according to a study published in August in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

These teenagers exhibit what’s known as slight hearing loss, which means they often can’t make out consonants like T’s or K’s, or the plinking of raindrops. The word “talk” can sound like “aw.”

The number of teenagers with hearing loss — from slight to severe — has jumped 33 percent since 1994.

Many researchers attribute this widespread hearing loss to exposure to sound played loudly and regularly through headphones. (Earbuds, in particular, don’t cancel as much noise from outside as do headphones that rest on or around the ear, so earbud users typically listen at higher volume to drown out interference.)

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Loud bangs, bright flashes, and intense shocks capture attention, but other changes – even those of similar magnitude – can go unnoticed. Demonstrations of change blindness have shown that observers fail to detect substantial alterations to a scene when distracted by an irrelevant flash, or when the alteration happen gradually.

Here, we show that objects changing in hue, luminance, size, or shape appear to stop changing when they move. This motion induced failure to detect change, silencing, persists even though the observer attends to the objects, knows that they are changing, and can make veridical judgments about their current state. Silencing demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance.

During silencing, rapidly changing objects appear nearly static, which raises an immediate question: What is the perceived state at any given moment? To illustrate, consider an observer who fails to notice an object change gradually from yellow to red. One possibility is that the observer always sees yellow, never updating his percept to incorporate the new hue – this is freezing, erroneously keeping hold of an outdated state. Another possibility is that he always sees the current hue (e.g. yellow, orange, then red) but is unaware of the transition from one to the next – this is implicit updating.

{ Motion Silences Awareness of Visual Change via Thoughts on thoughts | Continue reading }

photo { Christopher Williams }

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.

Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.

The editor of the journal, Charles Judd, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, said the paper went through the journal’s regular review process. “Four reviewers made comments on the manuscript,” he said, “and these are very trusted people.”

All four decided that the paper met the journal’s editorial standards, Dr. Judd added, even though “there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results.”

But many experts say that is precisely the problem. Claims that defy almost every law of science are by definition extraordinary and thus require extraordinary evidence. Neglecting to take this into account — as conventional social science analyses do — makes many findings look far more significant than they really are, these experts say. (…)

For more than a century, researchers have conducted hundreds of tests to detect ESP, telekinesis and other such things, and when such studies have surfaced, skeptics have been quick to shoot holes in them.

But in another way, Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper’s acceptance. (…)

In one experiment, Dr. Bem had subjects choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph; the other curtain hid nothing but a blank screen.

A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.

“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about a forthcoming article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) purporting to provide strong evidence for the existence of some ESP-like phenomenon. (…)

The controversy isn’t over whether or not ESP exists, mind you; scientists haven’t lost their collective senses, and most of us still take it as self-evident that college students just can’t peer into the future and determine where as-yet-unrevealed porn is going to soon be hidden (as handy as that ability might be). The real question on many people’s minds is: what went wrong? If there’s obviously no such thing as ESP, how could a leading social psychologist publish an article containing a seemingly huge amount of evidence in favor of ESP in the leading social psychology journal, after being peer reviewed by four other psychologists? (…)

Having read the paper pretty closely twice, I really don’t think there’s any single overwhelming flaw in Bem’s paper (actually, in many ways, it’s a nice paper). Instead, there are a lot of little problems that collectively add up to produce a conclusion you just can’t really trust.

Below is a decidedly non-exhaustive list of some of these problems. I’ll warn you now that, unless you care about methodological minutiae, you’ll probably find this very boring reading. But that’s kind of the point: attending to this stuff is so boring that we tend not to do it, with potentially serious consequences.

{ Tal Yarkoni | Continue reading }

{ Thobias Faldt }

{ Tony Stamolis }

{ John de Lima }

{ Me Company }

{ Our brief was to create an Annual Review that could also work as a promotional brochure }

The number of financial fraud cases put before the UK’s courts reached record levels in 2010, a report suggests. (…)

KPMG also highlighted the case of a group of men who were accused of using stolen credit card details to buy their own songs on iTunes, generating almost half a million pounds in royalties.

The men targeted the Apple and Amazon sites with 20 songs which they sold through the websites.

It is thought they then stole approximately 1,500 credit cards to buy the songs, and claimed back just under £469,000 in royalties.

{ BBC | Continue reading | via Chris Charfin/prefix }

photo { Moyra Davey }

Misfolded proteins are bad news. Not only are they involved in a number of nasty diseases, they also place potentially severe constraints on evolution. As we’ve discussed before, evolution depends on the ability to survive and function in the face of mutations.

A mutation that causes misfolding, so that instead of a nice functional protein you get gunk, causes a number of important problems. First, you’ve wasted all your effort in transcribing an mRNA from a gene, and then translating the mRNA to produce a protein. Second, you still have to make another one. Third, you have to get rid of the gunk, otherwise it may clog up essential functions

How large a problem is a misfolded protein for the cell, and what matters more, the diversion of protein production capacity or the need to get rid of the gunk? A recent paper from Allan Drummond’s lab reports the results of a determined and careful effort to find out.

{ It Takes 30 | Continue reading }

photo { Stephen Shore }

Author Rachel Aviv talked at length with a number of young people who had been identified as being ‘prodromal’ for schizophrenia, experiencing periodic delusions and at risk of converting to full-blown schizophrenia, following some of the at-risk individuals for a year.  In December’s Harper’s, Aviv offered a sensitive, insightful account of their day-to-day struggles to maintain insight, recognizing which of their experiences are not real: Which way madness lies: Can psychosis be prevented? [PDF](…)

This post is my more speculative offering, contemplating the relation of the content of delusions to the cultural context in which they occur. How do the specific details of delusions arise and how might the particularity of any one person’s delusions affect the way that a delusional individual is treated by others?  Are you mad if everyone around you talks as if they, too, were experiencing the same delusions?

{ Neuroanthropology | Continue reading }

From the point of view of natural right, Hobbes says, and Spinoza will take all of this up again but from the point of view of natural right, the most reasonable man in the world and the most complete madman are strictly the same. (…) The point of the view of natural right is: my right equals my power, the madman is the one who does what is in his power, exactly as the reasonable man is the one who does what is in his. They are not saying idiotic things, they are not saying that the madman and the reasonable man are similar, they are saying that there is no difference between the reasonable man and the madman from the point of view of natural right. Why? Because each one does everything that he can.

{ Deleuze | Continue reading }

{ My primary interest in visiting your Web site is to examine every page on the site before I finally find your hours of operation and phone number in illegible type in a graphical footer. | neversaidaboutrestaurantwebsites.tumblr.com | more }

The iconic French newspaper Le Monde is about to begin a new chapter of its complicated history. Last September, what remains France’s most influential paper changed hands (see story in NY Times).

Le Monde is now owned by a triumvirate: Xavier Niel, a telecom entrepreneur, provided the bulk of the €110m ($130m) injected in the venture; Matthieu Pigasse, head of Lazard France, and Pierre Bergé, co-founder of Yves Saint-Laurent fashion house. Now, as the paper prepares to replace its editor, the new owners’ turnaround operation faces tough challenges. (…)

The new shareholders — who define themselves as owners — were first viewed as saviors. Plenty of money, a strong industrial and financial track record for Xavier Niel and Mathieu Pigasse. As for the older Pierre Bergé (81), he was portrayed as the gentle philanthropist who arranged for Le Monde’s staff to retain a minority stake in the new capital structure. These idyllic feelings quickly evaporated as the paper’s management proved unable to present a well-thought-through strategic plan to their new bosses. After dawdling for a few months, the owners jumped to action, the hard way.

{ Monday Note | Continue reading }

The first brain scans of men and women having sex and reaching orgasm have revealed striking differences in the way each experiences sexual pleasure. While male brains focus heavily on the physical stimulation involved in sexual contact, this is just one part of a much more complex picture for women, scientists in the Netherlands have found.
The key to female arousal seems rather to be deep relaxation and a lack of anxiety, with direct sensory input from the genitals playing a less critical role.

The scans show that during sexual activity, the parts of the female brain responsible for processing fear, anxiety and emotion start to relax and reduce in activity. This reaches a peak at orgasm, when the female brain’s emotion centres are effectively closed down to produce an almost trance-like state.

The male brain was harder to study during orgasm, because of its shorter duration in men, but the scans nonetheless revealed important differences. Emotion centres were deactivated, though apparently less intensely than in women, and men also appear to concentrate more on the sensations transmitted from the genitals to the brain.

“Men find it more important to be stimulated on the penis than women find it to be stimulated on the clitoris,” Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen said.

This suggests that for men, the physical aspects of sex play a much more significant part in arousal than they do for women, for whom ambience, mood and relaxation are at least as important. (…)

The experiments also revealed a rather surprising effect: both men and women found it easier to have an orgasm when they kept their socks on. (…)

The scans also show that while women may be able to fool their partners with a fake orgasm, the difference is obvious in the brain. Parts of the brain that handle conscious movement light up during fake orgasms but not during real ones, while emotion centres close down during the real thing but never when a woman is pretending.

{ Times | Continue reading }

photo { Germaine Krull }

Sometime in late 2011, according to the UN Population Division, there will be seven billion of us. (…)

Leeuwenhoek concluded there couldn’t be more than 13.385 billion people on Earth—a small number indeed compared with the 150 billion sperm cells of a single codfish! This cheerful little calculation, writes population biologist Joel Cohen in his book How Many People Can the Earth Support?, may have been the first attempt to give a quantitative answer to a question that has become far more pressing now than it was in the 17th century. Most answers these days are far from cheerful.

And the explosion, though it is slowing, is far from over. Not only are people living longer, but so many women across the world are now in their childbearing years—1.8 billion—that the global population will keep growing for another few decades at least. (…)

With the population still growing by about 80 million each year, it’s hard not to be alarmed. Right now on Earth, water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing. Close to a billion people go hungry each day. Decades from now, there will likely be two billion more mouths to feed, mostly in poor countries. There will be billions more people wanting and deserving to boost themselves out of poverty. If they follow the path blazed by wealthy countries—clearing forests, burning coal and oil, freely scattering fertilizers and pesticides—they too will be stepping hard on the planet’s natural resources. How exactly is this going to work?

{ National Geographics | Continue reading }

photo { Andres Gonzalez }

The Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. (…) The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world’s leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.

Japan, of course, also experienced many years of rapid economic growth and is still an export powerhouse. But it was never a plausible candidate to be No. 1. The Japanese population is less than half that of the United States, which means that the average Japanese person would have to be more than twice as rich as the average American before Japan’s economy surpassed America’s. That was never going to happen. By contrast, China’s population is more than four times that of the United States. The famous projection by Goldman Sachs that China’s economy will be bigger than that of the United States by 2027 was made before the 2008 economic crash. At the current pace, China could be No. 1 well before then.

{ Foreign Policy | Continue reading }

photo { Christopher Schreck }

Last March, the small Parisian gallery 12 Mail devoted itself to a retrospective of one of my favorite publications: Didier Lestrade’s pioneering gay zine Magazine. The walls were collaged with the incredibly influential homoerotic photography and drawings featured in Magazine throughout the course of its seven-year run from 1980 through 1987, as well as framed portraits of legendary interview subjects such as Sylvester, Jimmy Somerville, Divine, Edmund White, Erté, and Tom of Finland. With the younger generation’s interest reignited, Didier has now begun uploading the entire Magazine archive to his website, as a gift to both the fans and the Tumblr crowd, who he hopes will go crazy grabbing pictures and articles for their own sites. After many years working as an outspoken AIDS activist, founding and leading the first French chapter of ACT UP, and co-founding Têtu, Lestrade moved to the French countryside, where he’s busy writing for minorites.org and working on his next book. We spoke by phone last week.

{ Butt | Continue reading }

photo { Magazine, Number 3/4, page 85 | more: The entire collection of Magazine, 1980-1987 }

{ Kalon | Hut-Hut, a playful reinterpretation of the rocking horse. $1,595 }

{ Mark Ronson & The Business Intl - Bang Bang Bang }

The thing makes a full circle with 20 years inside of it. Amazing, isn’t it? And what wonderful years and sad ending ones. I am back in the little house. It hasn’t changed and I wonder how much I have. For two days I have been cutting the lower limbs off the pine trees to let some light into the garden so that I can raise some flowers. Lots of red geraniums and fuchsias. The fireplace still burns. I will be painting the house for a long time I guess. And all of it seems good.

There are moments of panic but those are natural I suppose. And then sometimes it seems to me that nothing whatever has happened. As though it was the time even before Carol. Tonight the damp fog is down and you can feel it on your face. I can hear the bell buoy off the point. The only proof of course will be whether I can work — whether there is any life in me.

{ John Steinbeck, letters | This Recording | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

photo { Tony Stamolis }