This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time. I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it: though all my actions are bent on erasing the consequences of previous actions and though I manage to achieve appreciable results in this erasure, enough to open my heart to hopes of immediate relief, I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to erase. Therefore I must calculate carefully every move so as to achieve the maximum of erasure with the minimum of recomplication.

{ Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1979 | Continue reading }

If on a winter’s night a traveler begins with a chapter on the art and nature of reading, and is subsequently divided into twenty-two passages. The odd-numbered passages and the final passage are narrated in the second person. That is, they concern events purportedly happening to the novel’s reader. (Some contain further discussions about whether the man narrated as “you” is the same as the “you” who is actually reading.) These chapters concern the reader’s adventures in reading Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Eventually the reader meets a woman, who is also addressed in her own chapter, separately, and also in the second person.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Todd McLellan }

Measuring power and influence on the web is a matter of huge interest. Indeed, algorithms that distill rankings from the pattern of links between webpages have made huge fortunes for companies such as Google. One the most famous of these is the Hyper Induced Topic Search or HITS algorithm which hypothesises that important pages fall into two categories–hubs and authorities–and are deemed important if they point to other important pages and if other important pages point to them. This kind of thinking led directly to Google’s search algorithm PageRank. The father of this idea is John Kleinberg, a computer scientist now at Cornell University in Ithaca, who has achieved a kind of cult status through this and other work. It’s fair to say that Kleinberg’s work has shaped the foundations of the online world.

Today, Kleinberg and a few pals put forward an entirely different way of measuring power and influence; one that may one day have equally far-reaching consequences.

These guys have worked out how to measure power differences between individuals using the patterns of words they speak or write. In other words, they say the style of language during a conversation reveals the pecking order of the people talking.

“We show that in group discussions, power differentials between participants are subtly revealed by how much one individual immediately echoes the linguistic style of the person they are responding to,” say Kleinberg and co.

The key to this is an idea called linguistic co-ordination, in which speakers naturally copy the style of their interlocutors. Human behaviour experts have long studied the way individuals can copy the body language or tone of voice of their peers, some have even studied how this effect reveals the power differences between members of the group.

Now Kleinberg and so say the same thing happens with language style. They focus on the way that interlocutors copy each other’s use of certain types of words in sentences. In particular, they look at functional words that provide a grammatical framework for sentences but lack much meaning in themselves (the bold words in this sentence, for example). Functional words fall into categories such as articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, high-frequency adverbs and so on.

The question that Kleinberg and co ask is this: given that one person uses a certain type of functional word in a sentence, what is the chance that the responder also uses it?

To find the answer they’ve analysed two types of text in which the speakers or writers have specific goals in mind: transcripts of oral arguments in the US Supreme Court and editorial discussions between Wikipedia editors (a key bound in this work is that the conversations cannot be idle chatter; something must be at stake in the discussion).

Wikipedia editors are divided between those who are administrators, and so have greater access to online articles, and non-administrators who do not have such access. Clearly, the admins have more power than the non-admins.

By looking at the changes in linguistic style that occur when people make the transition from non-admin to admin roles, Kleinberg and co cleverly show that the pattern of linguistic co-ordination changes too. Admins become less likely to co-ordinate with others. At the same time, lower ranking individuals become more likely to co-ordinate with admins.

A similar effect also occurs in the Supreme Court (where power differences are more obvious in any case).

Curiously, people seem entirely unware that they are doing this. “If you are communicating with someone who uses a lot of articles — or prepositions, orpersonal pronouns — then you will tend to increase your usage of these types of words as well, even if you don’t consciously realize it,” say Kleinberg and co.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Whitman, F***ed Up In Minneapolis | Black & White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, until Jan 14 }

“Lord” Timothy Dexter (1748 – 1806) was an eccentric American businessman noted for a series of lucky transactions and his writing. (…)

He made his fortune by investing in Continental Dollars during the Revolutionary War, when they could be purchased for a tiny percentage of their face value. After the war was over, and the U.S. government made good on the dollars, he became wealthy. (…)

His 1802 memoir A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress is entirely misspelled and contains no punctuation. At first he handed his book out for free, but it became popular and was re-printed in eight editions. In the second edition Dexter added an extra page which consisted of 13 lines of punctuation marks. Dexter instructed readers to “peper and solt it as they plese.”

Dexter announced his death and urged people to prepare for his burial. About 3,000 people attended his mock wake. The crowd was disappointed when they heard a still-living Dexter screaming at his wife that she was not grieving enough.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Literary historian Paul Collins discusses Lord Timothy’s lasting appeal | NPR | Life of Lord Timothy Dexter }

Your book starts with the idea, which was very prominent and commonly believed by a large group of people, that fat–eating fat and fat in your diet, particularly animal fat–isn’t good for you and it leads to heart disease. How did that come to be accepted wisdom in the medical profession?

First, let me say I think it’s still commonly believed by most people, and the latest dietary guidelines are trying to get us to limit our fat intake, and limit our saturated fat intake. This is an hypothesis that grew out of the observations of one very zealous University of Minnesota nutritionist in the 1950s, a fellow named Ancel Keys, who came up with this idea that dietary fat raised cholesterol, and it was raised cholesterol that caused heart disease. At the time there was effectively no meaningful experimental data to support–I’ll rephrase that: There was no experimental data to support that observation. It seemed plausible, though. It seemed plausible, compelling. Keys was a persuasive fellow. And by 1960 or so, the American Heart Association (AHA) got behind it in part because Keys and a fellow-proponent of this hypothesis, a cardiologist from Chicago named Jeremiah Stamler, got onto the AHA, got involved with an ad hoc committee, and were able to publish a report basically saying we should all cut our fat intake. This was 1961. Like I said, no data to support it; no experimental data at all. And once the AHA got behind it, it got a kind of believability. The attitude was: It’s probably right, and all we have to do is test it. Or, we’re going to believe it’s true, but we don’t have the data yet because we haven’t done the tests yet.

And researchers start doing the tests, experimental trials, taking a population. For instance, a famous study at the VA hospital in Los Angeles, where you randomize half of them to a cholesterol-lowering diet which is not actually low in fat, by the way–it’s low in saturated fat and high in polyunsaturated fat. And then the other half of your subjects eat a control diet and you look for heart disease over a number of years and see what happens. And trial after trial was sort of unable to prove the hypothesis true. But the more we studied it, the more people simply believed it must be true. And meanwhile, the AHA is pushing it; other observations are being compiled to support it even though in order to support it you have to ignore the observations that don’t support it. So, you pay attention to the positive evidence, ignore the negative evidence. One Scottish researcher who I interviewed memorably called this “Bing Crosby epidemiology” where you “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.” Basic human nature. But this is what happened. And as the AHA gets behind it, the journalists see the AHA as honest brokers of information on this, so they have no reason to doubt the AHA. And the AHA was honest brokers–they just were bad scientists. Or they were not scientists. So, then the press gets behind it, and as the press gets behind it, politicians begin to think maybe we should do something about it, and a Congressional subcommittee gets involved, run by George McGovern, that had originally been founded in the late 1960s to address hunger in America; and they did a lot of good things with school lunch programs and food stamps. And by the mid-1970s they were running out of things to do, so they decided: Since we’ve been dealing with under-nutrition, which is not enough food, they would get involved with over-nutrition, which is a problem of too much food and obesity and diabetes and heart disease. And they had one day of hearings, McGovern’s subcommittee, and they assign a former labor reporter from the Providence, RI, Journal to write the first dietary goals for the United States–the first document ever from a government body of any kind suggesting that a low fat diet is a healthy diet. And once McGovern comes out with this document, written by a former labor reporter who knew nothing about nutrition and health; now the USDA feels they have to get involved; and you get this kind of cascade or domino effect. To the point that by 1984 the National Institute of Health (NIH) holds a consensus conference saying that we have a consensus of opinion that we should all eat low fat diets, when they still don’t have a single meaningful experiment showing that a low fat diet or cholesterol lowering diet will reduce the risk of heart disease, or at least make you live longer. Because a few of the studies suggested that you could reduce the risk of heart disease but you would increase cancer. And not one study–the biggest study ever done, which was in Minnesota, actually suggested that if you put people on cholesterol-lowering diets you increase mortality; they had more deaths in the intervention group than the control group. (…)

Japanese women in Japan have very low rates of breast cancer. So when Japanese women come to the United States, by the second generation they have rates of breast cancer as high as any other ethnic group, and one possibility is it’s because they come over here and they eat more fat. But the problem with those observational studies, those comparisons, is you don’t know what you are looking at. So, you focus on fat because that’s what your hypothesis is about–and this is an endemic problem in public health–and you just don’t pay attention to anything else. So, sugar consumption is very low in Japan and very high here. So, maybe it’s sugar that’s the cause of heart disease, or the absence of sugar is the reason the Japanese are so relatively healthy; and if you don’t look at sugar, you don’t know.

{ Gary Taubes/EconTalk | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Mapplethorpe }

The most extreme proponent of anti-natalism is probably David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been, which maintains that:

(1) Coming into existence is always a serious harm. (2) It is always wrong to have children. (3) It is wrong not to abort fetuses at the earlier stages of gestation. (4) It would be better if, as a result of there being no new people, humanity became extinct.

{ EconLib | Continue reading }

One of the better-known psychology factoids is that 80% of people tend to think they are above average (if you don’t know this, you’re clearly in the “below-average” 20%).

A new study explains this tendency by finding evidence for what the researchers call the “better-than-my-average-effect.”

Essentially, we evaluate how we really are by looking at our best performances, but when we evaluate others we tend to focus on their average performance.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind.” (…)

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood. (…)

Cross-linguistic research shows that, generally speaking, every culture has a folk model of a person consisting of visible and invisible (psychological) aspects. While there is agreement that the visible part of the person refers to the body, there is considerable variation in how different cultures think about the invisible (psychological) part. In the West, and, specifically, in the English-speaking West, the psychological aspect of personhood is closely related to the concept of “the mind” and the modern view of cognition. (…)

In Korean, the concept “maum” replaces the concept “mind.” “Maum” has no English counterpart, but is sometimes translated as “heart”. Apparently, “maum” is the “seat of emotions, motivation, and “goodness” in a human being.” (…)

The Japanese have yet another concept for the invisible part of the person — “kokoro.” “Kokoro” is a “seat of emotion, and also, a source of culturally valued attention to, and empathy with, other people.”

{ Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists | Continue reading }

painting { Eugène Delacroix, Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, 1824 }

1. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas reasoned that the universe must have a First Cause, to which he assigned the name God.

2. Modern physicists in their way are likewise in search of a First Cause. (…)

A useful proxy for the First Cause is energy. (…) Yet no one thinks energy bears any resemblance to God in the traditional religious sense. It has neither knowledge nor will. It’s not a person. It doesn’t summon us to paradise or command us to embrace the good and shun evil. It provides our lives with no meaning. It’s just there.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

photo { Christiane Wöhler Friedebach }

It is not new to talk about the need to acquire “irreplaceable” skills. But what is not properly appreciated is the scope of the challenge this poses to people in all kinds of jobs, and the exact defining characteristic of what will make a skill “irreplaceable.”

The basic rule of economics after the Industrial Revolution is: if a task can be automated, it will be. Or to put it differently, if a worker can be replaced by a machine, he will be. Call it the principle of expendability. The only thing that has changed since the first power loom is the number and nature of the tasks that can be automated. The first thing the Industrial Revolution did was to automate physical tasks. But now we are beginning to automate mental tasks, and what we are just beginning to see is the scope of the mental work that can be automatized. It is much wider than you probably think.

An awful lot of work that is usually considered to require human intelligence really doesn’t. Instead, these tasks require complex memorization and pattern recognition, perceptual-level skills that can be reduced to mechanical, digitized processes and done by a machine. These include many tasks that currently fill the days of highly educated, well paid professionals.

Take doctors. A recent article by Farhad Manjoo, the technology columnist for Slate, describes how computers have begun to automate the screening of cervical cancer tests. A task that used to be done by two physicians, who could only process 90 images per day, can now be done with better results by one doctor and a machine, processing 170 images per day. (…)

One more example. I recently came across a story about a composer and music theorist who created a computer program that writes cantatas in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. (A cantata is a short piece with a well-defined structure, which makes the task a little easier.) The climax of the story is a concert in which an orchestra played a mixture of the computer’s compositions and actual Bach cantatas. An audience of music experts could not reliably determine which was which.

{ Robert Tracinski/Real Clear Markets | Continue reading }

illustration { Julian Murphy }

Researchers are great at finding correlations between lifestyle and health. Here are four study results you’ve probably seen.

1. People who have a drink or two each day live longer.

2. People who own pets live longer.

3. People who exercise 20 minutes a day live longer.

4. Religious people live longer.

What do all four of those lifestyle choices have in common in terms of a possible root cause explanation? Read the list again and see if you can find it. (…) The pattern I noticed is that each of the lifestyle choices directly lowers stress by improving a person’s attitude.

My hypothesis is that stress is the root cause of most health problems.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

“Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”

Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase “yeah, right” was used, it was uttered sarcastically. Entire phrases have almost lost their literal meanings because they are so frequently said with a sneer. “Big deal,” for example. When’s the last time someone said that to you and meant it sincerely? (…)

“It’s practically the primary language” in modern society, says John Haiman, a linguist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }

1. Figure out what you’re so passionate about that you’d be happy doing it for 10 years, even if you never made any money from it. That’s what you should be doing.

(…)


10. Successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don’t want to do.

{ ABC | via WSJ }

photo { Loretta Lux }

I think for a long time there was an assumption that men were the proper human beings and women were sort of an inferior copy; and the question was: Could women be almost as good as men? Then there was a brief period of arguing that there were no differences, that they were equal. But since about 1980 almost all the literature on gender differences either says women are better or some say there are still no differences. But it’s become sort of taboo to see men as superior in any way. I look at things as the world is more built on tradeoffs, and any lasting difference is likely to be because of a tradeoff. So, being better at one thing is likely to be connected to being not as good at something else. (…)

A lot of people argue that women are more social than men. What are some of the other dimensions that women are allegedly superior to men in tradeoffs? Being more social is an important one. I think being less aggressive and competitive and all those things. I think there’s just general assumption that it would be better if men were more like women, and the Psychology of Men’s groups and the American Psychological Association say that there’s a lot of assumptions that men should change to be more like women. More empathetic, express themselves better, show their feelings, cry more–those sort of things. (…)

My sense is we really have changed the way we bring up children. It’s a much more girl-centered environment. I don’t have as much contact with the schools, but my wife goes there and so on, and she says: It seems like with each decision they have to make, if there’s one way that’s better for boys and one better for girls, they feel like it would be sexist to do the way that’s better for boys, so they just do the way that’s better for girls. Over and over all those decisions get made like that; and especially girls are more desired as students there; they mature a little bit faster. (…) Women generally run the schools and they are making the decisions; and the girls are the better students. And they are trying quite earnestly to be fair to both, but each time it seems, well, we should do it the way that’s better for girls. So, we end up kind of raising our boys like girls, which is probably not going to produce the best results. (…)

The real experts on intelligence come in and say: Well, in adulthood there is a tiny difference; that the male is slightly higher than the female. In measured IQ tests? On IQ tests. But it’s such a small difference as to be trivial. The more meaningful difference is the greater difference at the extremes. My sense is it goes with the difference rates of reproduction. In essence, males are nature’s way of rolling the dice, because if you think of it constantly experimenting, to try a new variation or a new mutation, most of those experiments will turn out badly. Every so often you will have one that turns out well and moves the species forward. So, you want the bad ones to be flushed out of the gene pool right away and not reproduce. Whereas you want the good ones to reproduce a lot. And male reproductive variance is like that. In other words, some men have no children at all, and some men have a lot of children. Whereas women tend to cluster in the middle. Relatively few women throughout history have had no children at all. Certainly fewer women than men have gone childless.

{ Roy Baumeister/EconTalk | Continue reading }

Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.

The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb.

The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

painting { Wilhelm Gallhof, The Coral Chain, circa 1910 }

This is what you can really learn about a person by understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, media, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The internet writ large is desperately invested in the idea that liking, say, The Wire, says something of depth and importance about the liker, and certainly that the preference for this show to CSI tells everything.

Likewise, the internet exists to perpetuate the idea that there is some meaningful difference between fans of this band or that, of Android or Apple, or that there is a Slate lifestyle and a This Recording lifestyle and one for Gawker or The Hairpin or wherever. Not a word of it is true. There are no Apple people. Buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a Budweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are differences here is only our longest con.

This endless posturing, pregnant with anxiety and roiling with class resentment, ultimately pleases no one. Yet this emptiness doesn’t compel people to turn away from the sorting mechanism. Instead, it draws them further and further in.

{ Freddie deBoer/The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

drawing { Al Hirschfeld, Raul Julia in The Tempest, 1981 }

In a world where nearly half the population is male—the sex with higher levels of testosterone and its potential for causing aggressive behavior—the female majority, by better translating emotions into words, must have mitigated countless dangerous conflicts. We should not underestimate the role that may have been played by this verbally skilled, moderating majority in the evolution of language itself.

Of all the calls, hoots, and screeches issued by our chimpanzee relatives, the only ones that sound a little like human speech are the coos exchanged in quiet moods by mothers with their young; the first language may have been “motherese.”

{ The NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Billy Kidd }

Had my parents not happened to meet when they did, and happened to conceive at the moment they did, with a specific pair of egg and sperm, I wouldn’t be here. (…)

I recently came across a lovely (if statistically questionable) visual demonstration. (…) It incorporates probabilities ranging from our parents’ first encounter to our unbroken line of ancestors to the emergence of the first single celled organism, concluding with the following analogy:

The probability that we as unique individuals came to be is equivalent to “the probability of 2 million people getting together each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice, and they all come up with the exact same number - for example, 550, 343, 279, 001. The odds that you exist at all are basically zero.”

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

Sylvia Beach (1887 - 1962) was an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris. (…)

Beach dreamed of starting a branch of Monnier’s book shop in New York that would offer contemporary French works to American readers. Since her only capital was USD$3,000 which her mother gave her from her savings, Beach could not afford such a venture in New York. However, Paris rents were much cheaper and the exchange rates favorable, so with Monnier’s help, Beach opened an English language bookstore and lending library that she named Shakespeare and Company. Four years beforehand, Monnier had been among the first women in France to found her own bookstore. Beach’s bookstore was located at 8 rue Dupuytren in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.

Shakespeare and Company quickly attracted both French and American readers - including a number of aspiring writers to whom Beach offered hospitality and encouragement as well as books. As the franc dropped in value and the favorable exchange rate attracted a huge influx of Americans, Beach’s shop flourished and soon needed more space. In May 1921, Shakespeare and Company moved to 12 rue de l’Odéon.

Shakespeare and Company gained considerable fame after it published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, as a result of Joyce’s inability to get an edition out in English-speaking countries. Beach would later be financially stranded when Joyce signed on with another publisher, leaving Beach in debt after bankrolling, and suffering severe losses from the publication of Ulysses.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

What do people die from? And how many of those deaths are caused by mistakes, that we make in human decision-making.

About a hundred years ago this was about 10 percent. Think about how could you kill yourself a hundred years ago by mistake. Maybe you pushed a rock over yourself or got into some bad accident.

A few years ago this percentage was a little bit more than 45 percent. Why? Because over the years as we’ve designed new technologies, we’ve created new ways for us to kill ourselves. Think about diabetes, obesity, smoking, texting while driving. We are creating all of those technologies without really understanding what human nature is and often those technologies are incompatible with us.

{ Dan Ariely/The European | Continue reading }