How would you fancy a holiday to Greece or Thailand? Would you like to buy an iPhone or a new pair of shoes? Would you be keen to accept that enticing job offer? Our lives are riddled with choices that force us to imagine our future state of mind. The decisions we make hinge upon this act of time travel and a new study suggests that our mental simulations of our future happiness are strongly affected by the chemical dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries signals within the brain. Among its many duties is a crucial role in signalling the feelings of enjoyment we get out of life’s pleasures. We need it to learn which experiences are rewarding and to actively seek them out. And it seems that we also depend on it when we imagine the future.

Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It’s the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be.

When we learn about new experiences, neurons that secrete dopamine seem to record the difference between the rewards we expect and the ones we actually receive. In encoding the gap between hope and experience, these neurons help us to repeat rewarding actions.

{ Not Exactly Rocket Science/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.

Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.

The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to detect cheating students, to compare language used in Edward III — published anonymously in 1596, when Shakespeare was 32 — with other plays of the period.

He discovered that playwrights often use the same patterns of speech, meaning that they have a linguistic fingerprint. The program identifies phrases of three words or more in an author’s known work and searches for them in unattributed plays. In tests where authors are known to be different, there are up to 20 matches because some phrases are in common usage. When Edward III was tested against Shakespeare’s works published before 1596 there were 200 matches.

{ Times | Continue reading }

photo { Shakespeare, The Cobbe Portrait, c. 1610 | More | The Cobbe portrait may be the only authentic image of Shakespeare made from life. }

So let’s look at Twitter in the context of Abraham Maslow’s concept of a hierarchy of needs, first presented in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation.”

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is most often displayed as a pyramid, with lowest levels of the pyramid made up of the most basic needs and more complex needs are at the top of the pyramid. Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are basic physical requirements including the need for food, water, sleep and warmth. Once these lower-level needs have been met, people can move on to higher levels of needs, which become increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the need for love, friendship and intimacy become important. Further up the pyramid, the need for personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment become important. Finally, Maslow emphasized the importance of self-actualization, which is a process of growing and developing as a person to achieve individual potential.

Twitter aims primarily at social needs, like those for belonging, love, and affection. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community or religious groups. Clearly, feeling connected to people via Twitter helps to fulfill some of this need to belong and feel cared about.

An even higher level of need, related to self-esteem and social recognition, is also leveraged by Twitter.

{ PsychologyToday | Continue reading }

photo { Juliane Eirich }

You’ve heard of Neuromarketing, which measures the neural activity of consumers (via fMRI or EEG) in response to various products or advertisements. Now, get ready for Genomarketing!

The Neuroethics & Law Blog has alerted us to a recent paper by De Neve and Fowler (2009) reporting that people with a specific low efficiency variant of the gene for monoamine oxidase A are significantly more likely to have credit card debt. (…)

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the authors found in that sample of 18-26 year olds,

Having one or both MAOA alleles of the low efficiency type raises the average likelihood of having credit card debt by 7.8% and 15.9% respectively. (…)

Is this the foreshadowing of a highly unethical marketing practice? Marketing based on MAO-A genotype, as determined from mailed-in credit card applications and payments? Credit card companies will have in-house labs to extract DNA from stamps and envelope flaps (Sinclair & McKechnie, 2000; Ng et al., 2007). Taking it one step further, entire marketing campaigns will be tailored to specific markers in an individual’s genome.

Not so fast. There are many limitations in the findings of De Neve and Fowler.

{ The Neurocritic | Continue reading }

neon { Martin Creed | Thanks Daniel! }

A Buddhist Koan says: “The master holds the disciple’s head underwater for a long, long time; gradually the bubbles become fewer; at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him: when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what truth is.”

The absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out: it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my “truth” and that I prepare what in love is Intractable.

{ Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments }

Roland Barthes died almost 30 years ago, on 26 March 1980, but his works continue to engage new and old readers with remarkable consistency.

{ London Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Bersa }

{ Erotika phone ad | via Copyranter }

{ Eero Saarinen, TWA Terminal, New York International (now John F. Kennedy International) Airport, New York, circa 1962. | Photo: Balthazar Korab }

{ Eero Saarinen, Patent drawing for pedestal chairs, June 7, 1960 }

{ A new show champions the sinuous legacy of Eero Saarinen | Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future | The Museum of the City of New York, from Nov 10, 2009 to January 31, 2010 | Press Realease | PDF | Catalog preview }

In October, online retailer Mailorama.fr announced that it would hand out envelopes stuffed with cash to passersby under the Tour Eiffel in central Paris. Some envelopes would contain ten euro bills; others might contain 500 euros. In all, organisers planned to give away between 40,000 and 100,000 euros.

The head of the Paris police warned that the stunt might attract trouble and looked into ways of preventing it under public order acts, but eventually gave official approval to the organisers. Come Saturday, though, it was set to go ahead. More than 5000 people - many youngsters from the city’s “sensitive” neighbourhoods - gathered on the Champs de Mars to await the Mailorama bus which would distribute the dosh.

The police became worried about the crowd’s mood and asked the company to call off the stunt; Mailorama obliged, but some fortune seekers became angry and attacked police and passersby. A car was overturned and more than a dozen rioters arrested.

The French interior ministry has indicated that it will file a lawsuit against Mailorama; the mayor of the VIIth arrondisement, Rachida Dati, has demanded that the City of Paris also bring charges against the company.

{ Eursoc | Continue reading |+ videos }

In the same way that people do not always leave 15% of their bill as a tip (even though this is the norm) but rather adjust it up or down as a function of other factors (e.g., service quality), one would expect that the price paid for an engagement ring might too be linked to several extraneous variables.

Lee Cronk and Bria Dunham published a paper recently in Human Nature wherein they sought to explore this exact issue. They sent out a short survey to 1,000 married couples and asked several questions including the income and age of each member of the couple, as well as how much was spent on the engagement ring. (…)

They found that both men’s and women’s incomes were positively correlated to the amount spent on an engagement ring. (…). Furthermore, the authors uncovered a negative correlation between the amount spent on a ring and the bride’s age. In other words, the younger the bride, the larger the expenditure.

{ PsychologyToday | Continue reading }

illustration { Kristian Hammerstad }

Here’s a consolation prize to the millions who recoil in bafflement from cellphone companies’ labyrinthine price plans, with their ever more intricate arrays of minutes, messages and megabytes: Economists don’t understand them, either.

“The whole pricing thing is weird,” said Barry Nalebuff, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management. “You pay $60 to make your first phone call. Your next 1,000 minutes are free. Then the minute after that costs 35 cents.”

To economists, it simply doesn’t make sense to make chatterboxes pay that penalty. After all, most businesses tend to give discounts to customers who buy more.

It would be easy to see the cellphone companies simply as avaricious oligopolists trying to gouge consumers for every penny they can. And in some senses they are aiming to maximize revenue, at least as much as the market will let them. (…)

Neither the cellphone companies nor their customers, as it turns out, always act in the rational way that economists might predict. Consumers often put immediate gratification and the avoidance of unpleasant surprises above their long-term interests.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

illustration { Chris Ware }

The movement to ban smoking in New York City has grown so quickly that no place seems immune — certainly not restaurants or bars, and public beaches and parks may not be far behind. Now the efforts are rapidly expanding into the living room.

More landlords are moving to prohibit smoking in their apartment buildings, telling prospective tenants they can be evicted if they light up in them. (…)

And the typical smoker’s refuge — directly outside the building — is also off limits; tenants must agree not to smoke on any of the sidewalks that wrap around the building.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

We’re in the middle of a huge platform shift in computing and most of us don’t even know it. The transition is from desktop to mobile and is as real as earlier transitions from mainframes to minicomputers to personal computers to networked computers with graphical interfaces. And like those previous transitions, this one doesn’t mean the old platforms are going away, just being diminished somewhat in significance. All of those previous platforms still exists. And desktops, too, will remain in some form when the mobile conversion is complete, though we are probably no more than five years from seeing the peak global population of desktop computers. We’d be there right now if we’d just figured out the I/O problem of how to stash a big display in a tiny device. But we’re almost there. That’s what this column is largely about.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

The major fall art auctions may not have sold everything on offer, but collectors showed a renewed willingness to bid up top examples of artists’ work. (…) New York’s two chief auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s International, brought in about $596 million combined from their semi annual sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art in the past two weeks. The total surpassed the houses’ $409 million spring sales in May, a gain that could signal a measure of returning confidence in high-end art values. (…)

For auction houses, these sales also marked the return of the guarantee, a financial mechanism in which an auction house promises to buy a work if it doesn’t sell at auction. Guarantees offer potential sellers a risk-free reason to part with their best pieces, but Sotheby’s and Christie’s stopped offering deal-sweeteners after suffering an estimated $63 million combined loss from unsold guaranteed artworks last November.

Now, auction houses are gingerly stepping back into such deals, but they’re mostly shifting the risk to third parties, typically dealers or collectors who agree to pay the seller a prearranged price for the work if it doesn’t ultimately fetch a higher price at auction.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

artwork { Robert Gober, Untitled, 1993–94 | Beeswax, wood, glassine, and felt-tip pen }

A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.

The fishermen leaned into the nets, grunting and grumbling as they tossed the translucent jellyfish back into the bay, giants weighing up to 200 kilograms (450 pounds), marine invaders that are putting the men’s livelihoods at risk.

The venom of the Nomura, the world’s largest jellyfish, a creature up to 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter, can ruin a whole day’s catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets here in northwest Japan’s Wakasa Bay.

“Some fishermen have just stopped fishing,” said Taiichiro Hamano, 67. “When you pull in the nets and see jellyfish, you get depressed.”

This year’s jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan. (…)

In 2007, a salmon farm in Northern Ireland lost its more than 100,000 fish to an attack by the mauve stinger, a jellyfish normally known for stinging bathers in warm Mediterranean waters. Scientists cite its migration to colder Irish seas as evidence of global warming.

{ AP/San Francisco Chronicle | Continue reading }

illustration { Ernst Haeckel }

Tonight I met the guy who once made a living designing the classic pinball machines.  And he designed the two pinball machines, Black Knight in 1980 and High Speed in 1986 that are bookends for a period when the most important stuff I was learning about life was learned within a few feet of at least one of these machines.

It turns out these were also major turning points in the history of pinball itself.  In 1980, pinball went digital, multi-ball, and multi-media starting with the game Black Knight.  Black Knight brought pinball to a new level, literally speaking because it was among the first games with ramps and elevated flippers, but even more importantly because it brought a new challenge that drew in and solidified a pinball crowd.  In doing so it also set the pinball market on a path that would eventually lead to its demise.

In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever.  Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players.  They had two instruments at their disposal:  the score required for a free game, and the match probability. (…)

…match probability: you win a free game if the last two digits of your score match an apparently random draw.  While adjustments to the high-score threshold is textbook price theory, the adjustments to the match probability is pure behavioral economics.  Let’s clear this up right away. No, the match probability is not uniform and yes, it is strategically manipulated depending on who is playing and when.  For example, if the machine has been idle for more than three minutes, the match probability is boosted upward.  You will never match if you won a free game by high score.  And it gets more complicated than that.  Any time there are two or more players and they finish a game with no credits left, one player (but only one) is very likely to match.

{ Cheep Talk | Continue reading }

The video game boom of the 1980s, however, signaled the end of the boom for pinball. Arcades quickly replaced rows of pinball machines with games like Asteroids and Pac-Man, which earned incredible amounts of money compared to the pinballs of the day. Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb continued to quietly make pinballs while they also manufactured video games in much higher numbers.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

artwork { Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Bronze Pinball Machine with Woman Affixed Also (Version 1), 1980 | Bally’s Modified Playboy pinball machine }

{ Mike Kelley, Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms, 2009 | Acrylic on wood panels, steel video monitors, DVD players | Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, NYC, until December 23, 2009 }

Lindsay Lohan is unhireable. How does she pass the time? She shops. She’ll buy anything (except groceries) and she’ll spend hours looking for it. She takes friends, family, girlfriends, anyone. She loves to shop. Yawn. The only transaction of hers we want to see caught on film is when she goes to her dealer. Deliver some footage of that and we’ll start paying attention.

{ Six Paparazzi Set-Ups We Never Want to See Again | Gawker | Continue reading }

related { In the latest of many recent incidents involving Lindsay Lohan and freebies, the star tried to scam $15,000 worth of clothes and accessories from an L.A. boutique }

{ A new technique for measuring the accessibility of a city shows why Paris is more accessible than London. }

I just love this (…) even though it’s a year old… “Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is leaving “to build an extensible enterprise productivity suite, along with a high-level open-source software development toolkit, built for the Web from the ground up.” In English, please?

{ AdScam | Continue reading }

illustration { Noma Bar }

{ Flight Simulator Game Chair | The V1 computer desk }