A report issued this month found that nearly 1,000 tigers had been killed in the last decade as part of illegal trade. The numbers are based on tiger seizures from 11 of the 13 countries that still have wild tiger populations. That is 100 tigers a year falling victim to poachers. When estimates put the wild population at 3,500 individuals or less, loss of 100 a year to poachers is devastatingly high.

{ Promega Connections | Continue reading }

Tigers survive in 40% less area than they occupied a decade ago. (…)

Three tiger subspecies - the Bali, Javan, and Caspian - have become extinct in the past 70 years. The six remaining subspecies - Amur, Bengal, Indochinese, Malayan, South China, and Sumatran - live only in Asia, and all are threatened by poaching and habitat loss.

{ WWF | Continue reading }

{ Scientists discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy | NY Times | full story }

{ Interborough Subway, 14 St. to 42nd St., New York, May 21, 1905 | More: Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, 1899 | video }

related { 50 Reasons to Be Pretty Damn Euphoric You Live in New York City }

{ Von Bruenchenhein’s drawing made with ballpoint pens, rulers and French curves, 1965 | Von Bruenchenhein’s hyper-productive creative existence is receiving its first in-depth museum exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum. | NY Times | full story }

…an essential difference between genetics, the study of a fixed inheritance in DNA, and epigenetics, which is the study of how the environment affects those genes, causing different ones to be active at different rates, times and places in the body.

Evolutionary approaches to human behavior have often been framed in terms of “good” and “bad”: Why did homosexuality evolve if it’s “bad” for the genes, because it reduces the chance that they’ll be passed on to a new generation? Why wouldn’t an impulsive temperament be “selected against,” seeing as its possessors would be more likely to fall off cliffs? Some thinkers have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain why a “maladaptive” behavior hasn’t disappeared. (…)

When we focus on particular genes in your particular cortex turning “on” and “off,” the selective forces of evolution aren’t our concern. They’ve done their work; they’re history. But your genes, all “winners” in that eons-long Darwinian process of elimination, still permit a range of human behavior. That range runs from a sober, quiet conscientious life at one extreme to, say, playing for the Rolling Stones at the other. From the long-term genetic point of view, everything on that range, no matter how extreme, is as adaptive as any other. Because the same genes make them all possible.

In other words, the epigenetic idea is that your DNA could support many different versions of you; so the particular you that exists is the result of your experiences, which turned your genes “on” and “off” in patterns that would have been different if you’d lived under different conditions.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

photo { Hiroshi Watanabe }

{ 1. Steven Brahms | 2. Robert Davies }

{ Nouveau York party at Le Bain, The Standard New York, October 31, 2010 | photo: Keetja Allard }

When we change our appearance, for example, by getting a haircut, friends will often note that we look different, but they may not be able to pinpoint exactly what has changed. This may result from our tendency to process faces holistically rather than by individual features.

In a recent study published in Psychological Science, volunteers were shown an image of a face or a house, followed by a similar image that may or may not have changed [images]. The volunteers were better at detecting that a change had occurred in faces than in houses, but they were surprisingly better at identifying which feature had changed in houses than in faces.

These findings suggest that holistic and feature-specific processing may be both advantageous and disadvantageous, depending on the nature of the task.

{ APS }

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The history of philosophy abounds in thinkers who, having concluded that the truth is ineffable, have gone on to write page upon page about it. One of the worst offenders is Kierkegaard, who argues in a hundred ways that the ultimate is inexpressible, that truth is “subjectivity,” that the meaning of life can be given by no formula, no proposition, no abstraction, but only by the concrete experience of surrender whose content can never be given in words.

The same idea occurs in Schopenhauer, for whom the truth of the world is Will, which cannot be represented in concepts. Schopenhauer devoted roughly 500,000 words to this thing that no words can capture. And he set a fashion that continues to this day.

I am currently reading a mercifully short book by Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, in which the argument is stated on the first page  — namely, that since music works through melodies, rhythms and harmonies and not through concepts, it contains no messages that can be translated into words. There follows 50,000 words devoted to the messages of music — often suggestive, poetic and atmospheric words, but words nevertheless, devoted to a subject that no words can capture.

{ Roger Scruton/Big Questions Online | Continue reading }

photo { Shelbie Dimond }

Raymond Moore recently described a study about the influence of romance novels on condom use. Erotic romance as a genre generally focuses on spontaneous and passionate sex. Since rubbers don’t exactly scream passion, love scenes rarely mention their use.

Researchers at Northwestern University were interested in how novels affected attitudes toward condom use in readers. They surveyed college students about their reading habits and found that students who read more romance novels had more negative attitudes towards condom use and less intention to use condoms.

{ Livia Blackburne | Continue reading }

photo { Barnaby Roper }

China may not matter quite as much as you think

It is hard to exaggerate the Chinese economy’s far-reaching impact on the world, from small towns to big markets. It accounted for about 46% of global coal consumption in 2009, according to the World Coal Institute, an industry body, and consumes a similar share of the world’s zinc and aluminium. In 2009 it got through twice as much crude steel as the European Union, America and Japan combined. It bought more cars than America last year and this year looks set to buy more mobile phones than the rest of the world put together, according to China First Capital, an investment bank.

In China growth of 9.6% (recorded in the year to the third quarter) represents a slowdown. China will account for almost a fifth of world growth this year, according to the IMF; at purchasing-power parity, it will account for just over a quarter. (…)

Since the crisis, China has shown that its economy can grow even when America’s shrinks. It is not entirely dependent on the world’s biggest economy. But that does not mean it can substitute for it.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

photo { Thomas Prior }

{ Funky Forest - After School Club | more | Thanks Glenn }

Steve Miller is justifiably proud of the manicured grounds around his stately stucco home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. So he was nonplussed last year when he discovered that someone had been tossing plastic bags of dog excrement into the sculptured shrubs around a palm tree in his front yard.

“It was a pile of at least 10 bags,” said Mr. Miller, 55, who owned a dance costume business in Bristol, Pa., before retiring to Florida in 2005. (…)

Mr. Miller went to a local electronics store and bought a $400 do-it-yourself video surveillance kit. In so doing, he joined the ranks of outraged homeowners who are recording their neighbors’ misdeeds. Attracted by the declining prices and technological advances of such devices, these homeowners are posting the videos online to shame their neighbors or using them as evidence to press charges. (…)

A month’s worth of video footage clearly showed one of his neighbors slinging bags of dog feces into his yard. (…) Mr. Miller showed the video evidence to his community’s security patrol. “They were stunned, and wrote the guy a citation for improper waste disposal, littering and leash law violations.”

Moreover, the neighbor had to pick up all that he had tossed. Mr. Miller also had some fun at the neighbor’s expense, posting a video on YouTube with a suitably silly soundtrack and narration. (…)

There are countless videos online that are intended to settle scores between neighbors. Whereas such disputes were once confined to the individuals involved, now they can have a much wider audience, whose members often take sides and post comments.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Owens }

Eighty per cent of adults in the US and the UK are moderate users of the psychoactive drug, caffeine.

Of all the effects it has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion.

This was demonstrated in a study by Pearl Martin and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia (Martin et al., 2005). In their experiment they tried to convince participants to change their minds about the controversial issue of voluntary euthanasia.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Charles Brittin, Arrest at Los Angeles Federal Building Protest, 1965 }

Americans less healthy than English, but live as long or longer, study finds

Researchers found that while Americans aged 55 to 64 have higher rates of chronic diseases than their peers in England, they died at about the same rate. And Americans age 65 and older — while still sicker than their English peers — had a lower death rate than similar people in England, according to findings published in the journal Demography. (…)

“If you get sick at older ages, you will die sooner in England than in the United States,” Smith said. “It appears that at least in terms of survival at older ages with chronic disease, the medical system in the United States may be better than the system in England.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Real-time holographic video displays could be near

Holograms may seem like an original invention from some science fiction films. A famous scene often mentioned in this context is that from Star Wars where Princess Leia records an important holographic message, ending with the words “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi“.

Such visions of holograms aren’t fiction. In a paper published in Nature, Nasser Peyghambarian, Pierre-Alexandre Blanche and colleagues from the College of Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona demonstrate a holographic system that is capable of displaying holograms at speeds approaching almost that of video capability. (and sure enough, they do mention Star Wars in the abstract of the paper…)

Holograms have been invented in 1947 by Dennis Gabor. They are made by shining a laser beam on an object and then recording the laser light reflected by the object on a photographic film. Simultaneously, a reference beam of the same laser is directly guided to the photographic film, where it causes an interference of the two beams. The interference pattern stored in the photographic film not only contains information on the light intensity (as in conventional photos) but also the phase difference between the two laser beams. The phase difference is a measure of the three-dimensional shape of the object. Together, intensity and phase contain the complete information of a light beam.

{ All That Matters | Continue reading }

photo { Ryan Bailey }

What is electricity? It’s moving electrons.

Every living thing moves electrons around, not just in nerves but also in metabolism (oxidize one thing, reduce another).

Is it possible to use this metabolic electricity to communicate with man-made devices? If you could, you might be able to make very sensitive biosensors, or even use bacteria to charge your batteries.

The first question you would need to address is whether you could get the electrons generated by metabolism out to the surface of the cell where they could be captured by a metal electrode.

Several species of bacteria do this naturally. One of the best-studied of these is Shewanella oneidensis, and the reason it needs to move electrons to the surface of the cell is so that it can use metal oxides as electron acceptors when there’s no oxygen around: in effect, these bacteria “breathe” metal.  Lots of applications have been suggested based on this unusual property, including uses in bioremediation.

{ It Takes 30 | Continue reading }

photo { Lina Scheynius }

Recently there was a discussion in the TwoPlusTwo “News, Views, and Gossip” forum, now closed, about a new video casino game that might be of interest to poker players. Called, “Texas Hold’em Heads Up Poker”, it’s a slot machine style console that contains a computer that plays regular old heads-up limit Texas hold ‘em against players who care to put up their money.

What’s especially intriguing is that there’s no rake of any kind charged. Assuming it’s not cheating, which seems unlikely for a machine licensed in Nevada and built by a reputable manufacturer, the only way it can win in the long term is if it plays better than its opponents. That’s an intriguing proposition to anyone interested in the game of poker.

I have a background in software development, game theory, and have been writing an article series for Two Plus Two Magazine reviewing research on developing effective poker playing software, so investigating a game such as this one is right up my alley.

{ TwoPlusTwo | Continue reading }

The best poker players are masters of deception. They’re good at manipulating the actions of other players, while masking their own so that their lies become undetectable. But even the best deceivers have tells, and Meghana Bhatt from Baylor University has found some fascinating ones. By scanning the brains and studying the behaviour of volunteers playing a simple bargaining game, she has found different patterns of brain activity that correspond to different playing styles. These “neural signatures” separate the players who are adept at strategic deception from those who play more straightforwardly.

{ Discover Magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Helen Korpak }

You write in Art is Work that the very famous “I ‘Heart’ New York” logo you designed was originally proposed as something else.

It was just a little typographical solution with two lozenges and a word in it, two ovals, and the word inside it; it was not in any way distinguished. But I always thought the whole thing was going to be a three-month campaign.

{ Interview with Milton Glaser | The Believer | Continue reading | Images: I Love NY and New York magazine logotypes designed by Milton Glaser | video: The “I Love New York” Ad Campaign Origin }

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