The tumor that appeared on a second scan. The guy in accounting who was secretly embezzling company funds. The situation may be different each time, but we hear ourselves say it over and over again: “I knew it all along.”

The problem is that too often we actually didn’t know it all along, we only feel as though we did. The phenomenon, which researchers refer to as “hindsight bias,” is one of the most widely studied decision traps and has been documented in various domains, including medical diagnoses, accounting and auditing decisions, athletic competition, and political strategy. […]

Roese and Vohs propose that there are three levels of hindsight bias. […] The first level of hindsight bias, memory distortion, involves misremembering an earlier opinion or judgment (”I said it would happen”). The second level, inevitability, centers on our belief that the event was inevitable (”It had to happen”). And the third level, foreseeability, involves the belief that we personally could have foreseen the event (”I knew it would happen”).

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

images { 1. Joao Penalva | 2 }

{ Because identical twins develop from a single zygote, they have the same genome. This removes genetics as a variable telling scientists that the differences they observe between the individuals are caused almost solely by environmental factors. Recent studies have shown that many of these environmentally induced differences are acquired via the epigenome. | The University of Utah | full story | Thanks to Patrick/xcorr.net }

{ 1. Jean Rouet, Untitled, 1960 | 2. Irving Penn, Palm of Miles Davis, New York, 1986 }

{ 3. Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, First x-ray, 1901 | 4 }

{ Edward Weston, Shell, 1927 | Chuck Jones, Spies, 1942 }

{ Why identical twins differ—despite having the same DNA }

images { Walt Disney with elephant at the American Museum of Natural History }

{ 1 | 2 }

{ 1. Peter Holzhauer | 2 }

{ 1 | 2 }

{ 1 | 2 }

images { 1 | 2 }

{ 1. Steen Larsen | 2. Caitlin Teal Price }

{ 1 | 2. Yul Brynner photographed by Sid Avery, 1958 }

1985. Five lionesses at the Singapore Zoo are put on birth control after the lion population increases from 2 to 16.

{ Wikipedia }

images { 1. Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910 | 2. Veterinary Anatomical Illustrations, 1898-1925 }

related { Women who use contraceptives like birth control pills experience memory changes, according to new research }

{ 1 | 2 }

Lisa and Louise Burns, the actresses who played the Grady daughters, are identical twins; however, the characters in the book and film script are merely sisters, not twins.

{ Wikipedia }

Stuart Ullman: My predecessor in this job left a man named Charles Grady as the Winter caretaker. And he came up here with his wife and two little girls, I think were eight and ten. And he had a good employment record, good references, and from what I’ve been told he seemed like a completely normal individual. But at some point during the winter, he must have suffered some kind of a complete mental breakdown. He ran amuck and killed his family with an axe. Stacked them neatly in one of the rooms in the West wing and then he, he put both barrels of a shot gun in his mouth.

{ Quotes from The Shining, 1980 }

Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967. The Grady Twins are a reference to Diane Arbus’s photo. Stanley Kubrick was a friend of the photographer.

{ The Shining: A Rough Guide By Stuart Gray }

{ 1 | 2 }

The concept that the gut and the brain are closely connected, and that this interaction plays an important part not only in gastrointestinal function but also in certain feeling states and in intuitive decision making, is deeply rooted in our language.

Recent neurobiological insights into this gut–brain crosstalk have revealed a complex, bidirectional communication system that not only ensures the proper maintenance of gastrointestinal homeostasis and digestion but is likely to have multiple effects on affect, motivation and higher cognitive functions, including intuitive decision making.

{ Nature Reviews Neuroscience }

images { 1 | 2 }

{ Stranger moves into foreclosed home, citing little-known Texas law }

images { 1. Young Kyu Yoo | 2. John Portman }

{ Willem Claesz Heda, Still Life With Oysters, Rummer, And Silver Tazza,1634 }

{ Grant Cornett }

Sybil accounts are fake identities created to unfairly increase the power or resources of a single malicious user. Researchers have long known about the existence of Sybil accounts in online communities such as file-sharing systems, but have not been able to perform large scale measurements to detect them or measure their activities. In this paper, we describe our efforts to detect, characterize and understand Sybil account activity in the Renren online social network (OSN). We use ground truth provided by Renren Inc. to build measurement based Sybil account detectors, and deploy them on Renren to detect over 100,000 Sybil accounts. We study these Sybil accounts, as well as an additional 560,000 Sybil accounts caught by Renren, and analyze their link creation behavior. Most interestingly, we find that contrary to prior conjecture, Sybil accounts in OSNs do not form tight-knit communities. Instead, they integrate into the social graph just like normal users. Using link creation timestamps, we verify that the large majority of links between Sybil accounts are created accidentally, unbeknownst to the attacker. Overall, only a very small portion of Sybil accounts are connected to other Sybils with social links. Our study shows that existing Sybil defenses are unlikely to succeed in today’s OSNs, and we must design new techniques to effectively detect and defend against Sybil attacks.

{ arXiv | Continue reading }

images { 1. Vitaly Virt | 2. Melvin Sokolsky }