Seafood fraud comes in different forms, including species substitution — often a low-value or less desirable seafood item swapped for a more expensive or desirable choice — improper labeling, including hiding the true origin of seafood products, or adding extra breading, water or glazing to seafood products to increase their apparent weight. […]
One in five of the more than 25,000 samples of seafood tested worldwide was mislabeled.
{ Oceana | PDF }
polaroid photograph { Andy Warhol, Lobsters, 1982 }
food, drinks, restaurants, scams and heists |
September 7th, 2016
Many laboratory experiments show that people are often altruistic or care for fairness. We present data that reveal a darker side of human nature. We introduce the joy-of-destruction game. Two players each receive an endowment and simultaneously decide on how much of the other player’s endowment to destroy. Subjects play this game repeatedly. In one treatment, subjects can hide their destruction behind random destruction. In this treatment, money is destroyed in almost 40% of all decisions. We attribute this behavior to a visceral pleasure of being nasty. Under full information destruction is also observed, but rare. In this treatment, acts of destruction are followed by immediate retaliation.
{ Faculty of Economics and Management Magdeburg | PDF }
psychology, relationships |
August 30th, 2016
Some philosophers and physicians have argued that alcoholic patients, who are responsible for their liver failure by virtue of alcoholism, ought to be given lower priority for a transplant when donated livers are being allocated to patients in need of a liver transplant.
The primary argument for this proposal, known as the Responsibility Argument, is based on the more general idea that patients who require scarce medical resources should be given lower priority for those resources when they are responsible for needing them and when they are competing with patients who need the same resources through no fault of their own.
Since alcoholic patients are responsible for needing a new liver and are in direct competition with other patients who need a new liver through no fault of their own, it follows that alcoholic patients ought to be given lower priority for a transplant.
In this article, I argue against the Responsibility Argument by suggesting that in order for it to avoid the force of plausible counter examples, it must be revised to say that patients who are responsible for needing a scarce medical resource due to engaging in behavior that is not socially valuable ought to be given lower priority. I’ll then argue that allocating organs according to social value is inconsistent or in tension with liberal neutrality on the good life. Thus, if one is committed to liberal neutrality, one ought to reject the Responsibility Argument.
{ Bioethics }
food, drinks, restaurants, health |
August 29th, 2016
D. B. Cooper is a media epithet popularly used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the airspace between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on November 24, 1971, extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,170,000 in 2015), and parachuted to an uncertain fate. Despite an extensive manhunt and protracted FBI investigation, the perpetrator has never been located or identified. […]
He dictated his demands: $200,000 in “negotiable American currency”; four parachutes (two primary and two reserve); and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the aircraft upon arrival. […]
The FBI task force believes that Cooper was a careful and shrewd planner. He demanded four parachutes to force the assumption that he might compel one or more hostages to jump with him. […]
Agents theorize that he took his alias from a popular Belgian comic book series of the 1970s featuring the fictional hero Dan Cooper, a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot who took part in numerous heroic adventures, including parachuting. […]
In February 1980 an eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram, vacationing with his family on the Columbia River about 9 miles (14 km) downstream from Vancouver, Washington, and 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Ariel, uncovered three packets of the ransom cash, significantly disintegrated but still bundled in rubber bands, as he raked the sandy riverbank to build a campfire. FBI technicians confirmed that the money was indeed a portion of the ransom—two packets of 100 twenty-dollar bills each, and a third packet of 90, all arranged in the same order as when given to Cooper.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
photo { Robert Mapplethorpe, Untitled (Candy Darling), 1972 | one more }
crime, flashback |
August 4th, 2016
‘Sister Clones’ Of Dolly The Sheep Are Alive [Healthy ageing of cloned sheep]
If you’re over 40, working more than 25 hours a week could be affecting your intelligence, new research suggests.
Is empathy the result of gut intuition or careful reasoning? Research suggests that, contrary to popular belief, the latter may be more the case.
Biggest factor in divorce is the husband’s employment status, study
Airborne chemicals in cinema air varied distinctively and reproducibly with time for a particular film, even in different screenings to different audiences.
Genes influence academic ability across all subjects, latest study shows
study identifies brain areas altered during hypnotic trances
Thousands of fMRI brain studies in doubt due to software flaws which routinely produced false positives, resulting in errors 50 per cent of the time or more.
Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong.
7-Eleven Inc. and a tech startup called Flirtey have beaten Amazon to the punch in making the first drone delivery to a customer’s home in the U.S.
Norway is building the world’s first ‘floating’ underwater tunnels
3D-printed guns that evade metal detectors, lack serial numbers, are untraceable. Moreover, 3-D firearms makers would avoid background checking.
The big hack (A scenario that could happen based on what already has)
Photographer Files $1 Billion Suit Against Getty for Licensing Her Public Domain Images
New online literary magazine dedicated to poems and prose written by AI
The bloom of our Amorphophallus titanum, known to many as the corpse flower, is a horticultural jewel 10 years in the making. Corpse Flower Cam at NYBG
The Longest Word in the World (189,819 letters) [disputed whether it is a word]
Law Enforcement Guide To Satanic Cults, 1994 [video]
every day the same again |
July 29th, 2016
Pennsylvania woman pleads guilty in loud sex case, sentenced to jail
Hackers Can Use Smart Watch Movements To Reveal A Wearer’s ATM PIN More: Your Wearable Devices Reveal Your Personal PIN
Apple patent outlines a system which would allow venues to use an infrared emitter to remotely disable the camera function on smartphones.
Deutsche Bank is now worth just 17 billion euros ($18 billion). When the biggest bank in Europe’s biggest economy, with annual revenue of about 37 billion euros, is worth about the same as Snapchat — a messaging app that generated just $59 million of revenue last year — you know something’s wrong.
Psychologists have identified the length of eye contact that people find most comfortable (just over three seconds)
Benefits of drinking coffee outweigh risks, review suggests
Marketing Vegetables in Elementary School Cafeterias to Increase Uptake 90.5% more students took vegetables from the salad bar when exposed to the vinyl banner only, and 239.2% more students visited the salad bar when exposed to both the television segments and vinyl banners.
When the robot approached lone individuals, they helped it enter the building in 19 percent of trials. When approached by the cookie-delivery robot, 76 percent of the time.
The edible-insect industry has grown big enough to start lobbying Washington
Lionfish invading the Mediterranean Sea [ previously]
6.6 percent. That’s the amount the rent in San Francisco has gone up every year, on average, since 1956. It was true before rent control; it was true after rent control.
The 10,000-Hour Rule Was Wrong, According to the People Who Wrote the Original Study
Cattle Auctioneer
every day the same again |
July 7th, 2016
So, some asshole stole my snapshot, put it on reddit (which I didn’t know).
Last night, I posted my pic on reddit.
Now – I found out I got banned and accused of “stealing my own pic.”
Fuck the state of ‘creativity’ and ‘originality’ today. Fuck it.
Let the world implode inside of its own self-licking asshole.
Yes, these silly things mean something to people who actually CREATE anything. […]
No, it’s not yours to fucking ‘remix.’
No, it’s not ’shared’, to be owned by all – even if it’s free.
{ Tim Geoghegan on Facebook }
experience, social networks |
July 7th, 2016
Is our perceptual experience a veridical representation of the world or is it a product of our beliefs and past experiences? Cognitive penetration describes the influence of higher level cognitive factors on perceptual experience and has been a debated topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
{ Consciousness and Cognition | Continue reading }
photo { Can you think a thought which isn’t yours? A remarkable new study suggests you can }
ideas, psychology |
June 24th, 2016
It has become common practice for retailers to personalize direct marketing efforts based on customer transaction histories as a tactic to increase sales.
Targeted email offers featuring products in the same category as a customer’s previous purchases generate higher purchase rates. However, a targeted offer emphasizing familiar products could result in curtailed search for unadvertised products, as a closely matched offer weakens a customer’s incentives to search beyond the targeted items.
In a field experiment using email offers sent by an online wine retailer, targeted offers resulted in decreased search activity on the retailer’s website. This effect is driven by a lower rate of search by customers who visit the site, rather than a lower incidence of search.
{ Management Science | Continue reading }
related { This research demonstrates that a marketing claim placed on a package is more believable than a marketing claim placed in an advertisement }
marketing |
June 24th, 2016
Two hedge fund “quants” have come up with an algorithm that diagnoses heart disease from MRI images, beating nearly 1,000 other teams in one of the most ambitious competitions in artificial intelligence.
{ Financial Times | Continue reading }
Qi Liu and Tencia Lee, hedge fund analysts and self-described “quants,” didn’t know each other before they won the competition, beating out more than 1,390 algorithms. They met each other in a forum on the Kaggle site, where the competition was hosted over a three-month period.
{ WSJ | Continue reading }
health, technology, traders |
June 24th, 2016
I trained rats to trade on Wall Street. 
