An Amazonian tribe has no abstract concept of time, say researchers.

The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space - as in our idea of, for example, “working through the night.”

The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognize events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept. (…)

“We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

“Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events. What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

The Amondawa language has no word for “time,” or indeed of time periods such as “month” or “year.”

The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.

But perhaps most surprising is the team’s suggestion that there is no “mapping” between concepts of time passage and movement through space.

Ideas such as an event having “passed” or being “well ahead” of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the “mapping hypothesis.” But in Amondawa, no such constructs exist.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

{ It looks as if Ruby was a button collector and seamstress, and poor Mr. Kittner was her display model. | Thanks Tim! }

“After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, ‘I’m looking at five to seven years.’ So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, ‘Easy! Tell them you’re mad! They’ll put you in a county hospital. You’ll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.’”

“How long ago was this?” I asked.

“Twelve years ago,” Tony said.

Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you’re 17 and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don’t need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarise the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That’s what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter was a bullet from a gun, and if you received a love letter from him, you’d go straight to hell.

Plagiarising a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off. Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange and David Cronenberg’s Crash. Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal. (…)

Tony said the day he arrived at the dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD) unit, he took one look at the place and realised he’d made a spectacularly bad decision. He asked to speak urgently to psychiatrists. “I’m not mentally ill,” he told them. It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy. (…)

“I know people are looking out for ‘nonverbal clues’ to my mental state,” Tony continued. “Psychiatrists love ‘nonverbal clues’. They love to analyse body movements. But that’s really hard for the person who is trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way?” (…) “I volunteered to weed the hospital garden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad.” (…)

I didn’t know what to think. Unlike the sad-eyed, medicated patients all around us, Tony had seemed perfectly ordinary and sane. But what did I know?

The next day I wrote to Professor Anthony Maden, the head clinician at Tony’s unit at Broadmoor – “I’m contacting you in the hope that you may be able to shed some light on how true Tony’s story might be.” (…)

A week passed and then the email I had been waiting for arrived from Professor Maden. “Tony,” it read, “did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison.” (…)

“Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy.” (…)

Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, Maden explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

The intentional torts of trespass against land and chattels, and the underlying property interests which they protect, are surely a foundation of any legal system that supports the private production of goods and services. The prevalence of these causes of action against theft—technically, involuntary transfers—even prior to the earliest development of common law legal systems supports this intuition.

But the trespass tort and its related causes of action presuppose a common set of normative expectations that identifies the set of goods to which the underling theft prohibition applies. If there were no widely obeyed norm against trespass of land and conversion of property, it would be exceedingly costly to enforce the formal laws against it, or in the absence of supplemental state enforcement, to undertake self-help measures to do so. That consensus may appear to be well-settled with respect to real property (my house) and most forms of tangible property (my car). That normative consensus tracks a positive consensus. Despite periodic intellectual fashions to the contrary, empirical evidence is clear that secure property rights are a critical ingredient in economic growth. (…)

However, any such consensus is often unsettled with respect to intangible goods—ideas and the various technologies and forms of expression in which those ideas are embodied—and, especially, to the set of creative goods protected by copyright. There are more than a handful of serious commentators who refuse to extend, or decline to presumptively extend, the empirically-grounded logic behind property rights in land and tangible assets to property rights in ideas, forms of expression and other intangible assets.

{ Jonathan M. Barnett, What’s So Bad About Stealing? | SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Doug DuBois }

Quantification — describing reality with numbers — is a trend that seems only to be accelerating. From digital technology to business and financial models, we interact with the world by means of quantification.

While we all interact with the world through more-or-less inflexible models, mathematics contributes to this lack of flexibility because it is seemingly precise and objective. Even though mathematical models can be very complex, you can use them without understanding them very well. A trader need not really understand the financial engineering models that he may use on daily basis. This uncritical acceptance amounts to the assumption that reality is identical to our rational reconstruction of reality — for example, that the economy or the stock market is captured by our latest model. (…)

Statistical models are all based on the notion of randomness, but no one can really understand randomness. Many people use the word random without realizing that random means what it says — randomness cannot be predicted or controlled. A model of randomness is no longer true randomness.

Because they are logically consistent, mathematical models screen out ambiguity. Ambiguity is real, but business and financial models have little to no room for it.


{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

It’s hard to imagine Apple’s App store — 50 million users, 400,000 apps, 10 billion downloads — being threatened with extinction. (…) But we know that empires crumble: what’s interesting is how.

Right now pundits are focused on the threat of Android. (…) Android’s not the issue, however.

The real threat are web apps. The kind that will download to your device the moment you open then, allowing you offline access, whether they’re news, games, email or some other utility. If you don’t believe they’ll work — and eliminate dependencies on plugins outside of open web standards, like flash — go download a free copy of Angry Birds for Google Chrome and try disconnecting from your local network. (…)

Or try opening Nytimes.com/chrome in Firefox, any webkit-based browser or, of course, Google Chrome, and you’ll see what the future holds.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Apple has entered the final stages of negotiations with the major record labels and music publishers for a service that will allow people to upload and store their music on the Web and listen to it on smartphones, tablets or computers — so-called cloud-based music.

Amazon and Google introduced similar services weeks earlier. Apple’s service, though, is expected to be easier to use, and to find a ready market in the 200 million people who have iTunes accounts. (…)

“I don’t think it is something they will have to give away for free, at least initially,” said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray. Mr. Munster said the service could be bundled with MobileMe.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Laurent La Torpille }

related { Offlining is a growing response to what is now widely recognised as a first-world social problem: we’re all addicted to the net. | And: Is Netflix Reducing Illicit File Sharing? }

Powerful people smile less, interrupt others, and speak in a louder voice. When people do not respect the basic rules of social behavior, they lead others to believe that they have power, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science. (…) Acting rudely also leads people to see power.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Individuals who took coffee from another person’s can (Study 1), violated rules of bookkeeping (Study 2), dropped cigarette ashes on the floor (Study 3), or put their feet on the table (Study 4) were perceived as more powerful than individuals who did not show such behaviors.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

{ Zdob si Zdub of Moldova perform So Lucky during the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest }

A thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature ; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.

{ Spinoza, The Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 | Continue reading }

photo { Louis Porter }

{ via Clayton Cubitt }

In his talk, Gregory Longmore of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, outlined some of the complex signaling pathways responsible for metastasis. Somehow, cancer cells break off from a primary tumor, break through the layer of cells that separates them from the bloodstream, and then spread to new sites.

Of the facts and figures Longmore cited, two struck me especially. Ninety percent of cancer patients are killed by metastases, not primary tumors. Ninety-nine percent of cancer cells that make their way into the bloodstream die. “Metastasis is incredibly inefficient,” he said.

{ Charles Day/Physics Today | Continue reading | More: Oncogenes }

Charles Darwin suffered from a persistent, debilitating illness for most of his adult life with a wide range of bizarre symptoms. Attacks of nausea and vomiting were his most distressing complaint but he also experienced headaches, abdominal pains, ‘lumbago’, palpitations and chest pain, numbness and tingling in the fingers, sweating, heat and cold sensitivity, flushing and swelling of his face and extremities, eczema, recurrent boils, attacks of acute anxiety, a sensation of dying and hysterical crying.

Apart from these major symptoms Darwin also occasionally vomited blood, he developed dental decay and skin pigmentation. (…) Darwin also had mild dyslexia. (…) With the dyslexia there is a frequent association of amusica – tone deafness, and Darwin was tone deaf.

{ Butterflies and wheels | Continue reading }

photo { Sanna Kannisto }

A link between late-night eating and weight gain has been debated for years. But though many dieters suspect a connection, it has not been borne out in studies.

Most of the research on the matter has been carried out in animals, and with mixed results. A 2005 study of primates at Oregon Health & Science University found that late-night meals did not lead to extra weight gain; whether consumed at 10 a.m. or 10 p.m., a calorie was just a calorie.

But a study on adult men and women, published in April in the journal Obesity, has added support to the claim that eating late does have a greater effect on the waistline. (…)

Eating at night may in fact lead to more weight gain, though it’s not clear why.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Researchers have found that while cell phone use appears to increase the level of testosterone circulating in the body, it may also lead to low sperm quality and a decrease in fertility. (…)

More in-depth research is needed to determine the exact ways in which EMW affects male fertility.

{ Queen’s University | Continue reading }

Friday, August 12, 1988. On the sidewalk outside 57 Great Jones Street, the usual sad lineup of crack addicts slept in the burning sun. (…) In the months before his death, Basquiat claimed he was doing up to a hundred bags of heroin a day.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

images { Odette England }

{ Juliana Santacruz Herrera, Knitted street interventions }

One group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they’ve taught them how to invent and use spoken language. The robots, called LingoDroids, are introduced to each other. In order to share information, they need to communicate. Since they don’t share a common language, they do the next best thing: they make one up. The LingoDroids invent words to describe areas on their maps, speak the word aloud to the other robot, and then find a way to connect the word and the place, the same way a human would point to themselves and speak their name to someone who doesn’t speak their language.”

{ Slashdot | Continue reading }

artwork { Thomas Schütte, United Enemies, 1994-95 | fimo, fabric, wood glass and PVC }

Science knows approximately how, and when, our Earth will end. In about five billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen, which will upset its self-regulating equilibrium; in its death-throes it will swell, and this planet will vaporize. Before that, we can expect, at unpredictable intervals measured in tens of millions of years, bombardment by dangerously large meteors or comets. Any one of these impacts could be catastrophic enough to destroy all life, as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago nearly did. In the nearer future, it is pretty likely that human life will become extinct – the fate of almost all species that have ever lived.

{ Richard Dawkins/Washington Post | Continue reading }

artwork { Dan Holdsworth, Blackout 08, 2010 }

related:

This paper considers what motivates people to improve themselves. Across four studies the authors find that benign envy stimulates better performance. They reveal that admiration feels good but does not lead to a motivation to improve oneself. This has been labelled happy self-surrender, a feeling that the other is so good at something that one can only look with appreciation at how good the other is.

Benign envy (not malicious envy), on the other hand, feels frustrating but it does lead to a motivation to improve.

{ Why Envy Outperforms Admiration | Continue reading }