One of the mysteries of human behavior is why we sometimes act with completely selfless altruism. When asked to play totally anonymous games in which we can cheat without anyone else ever finding out, very often we don’t.

Instead, we play the game fairly, which results in a cost to ourselves (compared with what we could’ve had) and a benefit to the stranger. That’s a mystery because evolution says that organisms which don’t act to maximize benefit to themselves - whatever the cost to others - should die out.

Several explanations have been put forward, but one of the most intriguing stems from the fact that we live in social networks. In a network like this, we depend critically on the kindness of others.

A new study has looked at how altruistic behavior can be transmitted between players in the kinds of anonymous games that social psychologists are so fond of.

What they found was that the amount individuals contributed in one round was affected by how generous their partners were in previous rounds. If they played with generous people in round 1, then they would be more generous to the new partners they had in round 2. In fact, they showed that this effect was propagated through new partners.

Unselfish acts propagated out to 3 degrees of separation. When you remember that only 6 degrees of separation stand between you and every other person on the planet, you can understand how powerful and important this effect is.

{ Epiphenom | Continue reading }

Most people with an interest in evolution understand why selfish genes do not mean selfish individuals. It’s clear that selfish genes will benefit from co-operation (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, also known as reciprocity), and kin selection (as the biologist JBS Haldane famously put it, “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins”).

What most people may not know (I certainly didn’t before reading West’s article) is that these, in fact, are the sole genetic basis for altruism. But if that’s the case, how do you get from here to the apparently completely selfless altruism sometimes seen in humans?

Reciprocity doesn’t need to be direct to be effective. If, by sharing with you I help to set up a virtuous circle, that will likely result in some benefit to me down the line. This has been seen in practice, with virtuous deeds propagating out to at least three degrees of separation.

{ Epiphenom | Continue reading }

photo { Noah Kalina }

Magnetism remains the most developed way to store digital information. The giga and terabytes of computer hard drives as well as the magnetic stripes that still are used for credit cards or hotel room keys, all function with the help of magnetic fields. There, the direction of the magnetic fields, up or down, expresses the digital 0s and 1s that make up the computer bits and bytes.

As the amount of data we store on hard drives continues to increase, it is of course desirable that read and write speeds follow that trend. (…)

In a paper published in advance on the Nature website this week, Ilie Radu, Theo Rasing from Radboud University in Nijmegen and others have investigated the details of the optical switching proceeds for a particular class of magnets, antiferromagnets.

{ All that matters | Continue reading }

photo { James Bond’s Rolex activates a “Hyper intensified magnetic field” “powerful enough to even deflect the path of a bullet at long range in Live and Let Die, 1971 }

Language, according to Benveniste, is the only semiotic system capable of interpreting another semiotic system. How, then, does language manage when it has to interpret music? Alas, it seems, very badly. If one looks at the normal practice of music criticism (or, which is often the same thing, of conversations “on” music), it can readily be seen that a work (or its performance) is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective. Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective.

The adjective is inevitable: this music is this, this execution is that. No doubt the moment we turn an art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates; in the case of music, however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile and trivial form, that of the epithet. Naturally, this epithet, to which we are constantly led by weakness or fascination (little parlour game: talk about a piece of music without using a single adjective), has an economic function: the predicate is always the bulwark with which the subject’s imaginary protects itself from the loss which threatens it. The man who provides himself or is provided with an adjective is now hurt, now pleased, but always constituted.

{ Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, | Continue reading }

Microsoft’s recent takedown of the world’s largest spam engine offered tantalizing new clues to the identity and earnings of the Rustock botmasters. The data shows that Rustock’s curators made millions by pimping rogue Internet pharmacies, but also highlights the challenges that investigators still face in tracking down those responsible for building and profiting from this complex crime machine.

Earlier this month, Microsoft crippled Rustock by convincing a court to let it seize dozens of Rustock control servers that were scattered among several U.S.-based hosting providers. Shortly after that takedown, I began following the money trail to learn who ultimately paid the botnet controllers’ hosts for their services.

According to interviews with investigators involved in the Rustock takedown, approximately one-third of the control servers were rented from U.S. hosting providers by one entity: A small business in Eastern Europe that specializes in reselling hosting services to shadowy individuals who frequent underground hacker forums.

{ Brian Krebs | Continue reading }

The nature of complexity is different in the economic realm from that in physical systems because it can stem from people gaming, from changing the rules and assumptions of the system. Ironically, “game theory” is not suited to addressing this source of complexity. But military theory is. (…)

Game theory began with the insights of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their book, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. They defined a game as an interaction between agents governed by a set of rules that specified possible moves for each participant and the set of outcomes for each possible set of moves. The theory of games rests on defined rules and outcomes. It also assumes rationality. “Rational” means “logical.” (…)

The military theorist John Boyd used this phrase to convey the essential point that warfare is not a game. Or if you want to think of it as a game, it is a game that is ill-defined, with rules that are, put gently, subject to interpretation. Thus, he said, for any strategy, “if it works, it is obsolete. Yesterday’s rules won’t work today”. This point was also made by the great German Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke: “In war as in art there exist no general rules; in neither can talent be replaced by precept.” That is, plans – and models – don’t work because the enemy does not cooperate with the assumptions on which they are based. In fact the enemy tries to discover and actively undermine any assumptions of his opponent.

{ Rick Bookstaber | Continue reading }

The art of the before-and-after photograph

In the first decade of the 20th century, Madame C.J. Walker — an African-American entrepreneur who made a fortune selling hair care products — demonstrated the dramatic results her wares could deliver via advertisements that used before-and-after photos of Madame Walker herself.

In Madame Walker’s “before” photo, her hair is short and kinky. In two “after” shots, it’s long, silky, and luxurious. In this regard, the sequence helped establish the parameters of the before-and-after format in the realm of advertising. The technique wasn’t just for showing incremental change. It was for showing fantastic, life-altering transformations, metamorphoses so amazing they’d be downright unbelievable were they not being depicted in a medium as ostensibly incapable of deceit as photography.

{ The Smartest | Continue reading }

{ Jean-Pierre Léaud in François Truffaut’s Domicile Conjugal, 1970 }

If photography is to be discussed on a serious level, it must be described in relation to death. It’s true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more. Even if the person in the picture is still alive, it’s a moment of this subject’s existence that was photographed, and this moment is gone. This is an enormous trauma for humanity, a trauma endlessly renewed. Each reading of a photo and there are billions worldwide in a day, each perception and reading of a photo is implicitly, in a repressed manner, a contract with what has ceased to exist, a contract with death.

{ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida }

photo { John Gutmann }

Why is aspirin toxic to cats?

One animal’s cure can be another animal’s poison. Take aspirin – it’s one of the most popular drugs on the market and we readily use it as a painkiller. But cats are extremely sensitive to aspirin, and even a single extra-strength pill can trigger a fatal overdose. Vets will sometimes prescribe aspirin to cats but only under very controlled doses.

The problem is that cats can’t break down the drug effectively. They take a long time to clear it from their bodies, so it’s easy for them to build up harmful concentrations. This defect is unusual – humans clearly don’t suffer from it, and neither do dogs. All cats, however, seem to share the same problem, from house tabbies to African lions.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

The term big cat – which is not a biological classification – is used informally to distinguish the larger felid species from smaller ones. One definition of “big cat” includes the four members of the genus Panthera: the tiger, lion, jaguar, and leopard. Members of this genus are the only cats able to roar. A more expansive definition of “big cat” also includes the cheetah, snow leopard, clouded leopard, and cougar.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery.

Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.

Critics of DCD contend that some patients may still be alive five or even 10 minutes after cardiac arrest because, theoretically, their hearts could be restarted, and some of their brain function might still remain. In such cases, critics assert, the patients were clearly not dead because their condition was reversible. Advocates of DCD counter that do-not-resuscitate orders from a patient or family render the argument about irreversibility moot.

In any case, there would be little debate about DCD if organs in a body remained viable for transplantation 20 or 30 minutes after heart and lung failure. But they become damaged quickly, so surgeons have to act fast — ideally, within about 10 minutes of cardiac arrest.

According to the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which was drafted about 30 years ago and has since been adopted, in some form, by all of the states, you can be declared dead in one of two ways: Your brain can irreversibly cease functioning, or your heart and lungs can irreversibly stop working. “Irreversibly,” in this context, has fueled the controversy. Does it mean the heart is unable to spontaneously start by itself? Or does it mean that even resuscitation efforts fail to restart the heart? (…)

More than 100,000 potential organ recipients idle on the waiting list maintained by the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the U.S. transplant system. An average of 18 people on the list die each day because of a shortage of donor organs.

{ Stanford Medicine | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Frank, London, 1952 }

{ Todd Fisher }

For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When the brain needed to time some event, a gate opened and the pulses moved into some kind of counting device.

One reason this clock model was so compelling: Psychologists could use it to explain how our perception of time changes. Think about how your feeling of time slows down as you see a car crash on the road ahead, how it speeds up when you’re wheeling around a dance floor in love. Psychologists argued that these experiences tweaked the pulse generator, speeding up the flow of pulses or slowing it down.

But the fact is that the biology of the brain just doesn’t work like the clocks we’re familiar with. Neurons can do a good job of producing a steady series of pulses. They don’t have what it takes to count pulses accurately for seconds or minutes or more. The mistakes we make in telling time also raise doubts about the clock models. If our brains really did work that way, we ought to do a better job of estimating long periods of time than short ones. Any individual pulse from the hypothetical clock would be a little bit slow or fast. Over a short time, the brain would accumulate just a few pulses, and so the error could be significant. The many pulses that pile up over long stretches of time should cancel their errors out. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. As we estimate longer stretches of time, the range of errors gets bigger as well.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

{ Ezra Stoller | Top: Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, New York, NY, 1958 | Bottom: General Motors Technical Center, Eero Saarinen, Warren, MI, 1950 | Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC | more }

related { At about 3.45pm, witnesses recalled, Barthes paused before crossing the street at 44 rue des Écoles; he looked left and right, but failed to spot an advancing laundry van, which knocked him down. | Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes | Roland Barthes, ‪Camera lucida: reflections on photography, 1981 | Google Books }

The ‘Regrets of the Typical American’ have been analysed in a new study that not only looks at what US citizens regret most, but provides some clues for those wanting to know whether it is better to regret something you haven’t done, or regret something you have. (…)

Women, who tend to value social relationships more than men, have more regrets of love (romance, family) compared to men. Conversely, men were more likely to have work-related (career, education) regrets. Those who lack either higher education or a romantic relationship hold the most regrets in precisely these areas.

The study also found that regrets about things you haven’t done were equally as common as regrets about things you have, no matter how old the person.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading + Chart }

strip { Milo Manara }

unrelated { Envy is a stronger motivator than admiration, according to a new study }

A venomous Egyptian cobra went missing from New York’s Bronx Zoo, prompting the closure of the zoo’s reptile house until further notice. (…)

The Egyptian cobra is most commonly found in North Africa. Its venom is so deadly that it can kill a full-grown elephant in three hours — or a person in about 15 minutes, according to wildlife experts. The venom destroys nerve tissue and causes paralysis and death due to respiratory failure.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

Because electronic information seems invisible, we underestimate the resources it takes to keep it all alive. The data centers dotting the globe, colloquially known as “server farms,” are major power users with considerable carbon footprints. Such huge clusters of servers not only require power to run but must also be cooled. In the United States, it’s estimated that server farms, which house Internet, business and telecommunications systems and store the bulk of our data, consume close to 3 percent of our national power supply. Worldwide, they use more power annually than Sweden. (…)

We can try hitting delete more often.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Michael Rubenstein }

The most familiar domain, though arguably not the most important to the Earth’s overall biosphere, is the eukaryotes. These are the animals, the plants, the fungi and also a host of single-celled creatures, all of which have complex cell nuclei divided into linear chromosomes.

Then there are the bacteria—familiar as agents of disease, but actually ecologically crucial. Some feed on dead organic matter. Some oxidise minerals. And some photosynthesise, providing a significant fraction (around a quarter) of the world’s oxygen. Bacteria, rather than having complex nuclei, carry their genes on simple rings of DNA which float around inside their cells.

The third great domain of life, the archaea, look, under a microscope, like bacteria. For that reason, their distinctiveness was recognised only in the 1970s. Their biochemistry, however, is very different from that of bacteria (they are, for example, the only organisms that give off methane as a waste product), and their separate history seems to stretch back billions of years.

But is that it? Or are there other biological domains hiding in the shadows—missed, like the archaea were for so long, because biologists have been using the wrong tools to look? A paper published in the Public Library of Science suggests there might indeed be at least one other, previously hidden, domain of life.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

How well do you know your friends? (…)

There are lots of ways to know someone’s personality. You can say “she’s an extrovert” or “she’s usually happy.” You may also know how he or she reacts to different situations and other people’s behavior. “It’s a more detailed way of understanding personality,” says Charity A. Friesen, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, who co-wrote a new paper with Lara K. Kammrath.

“You might know the person is extroverted when they’re out with their friends but more introverted when they’re in a new situation.” When a person is faced with one of a list of situations, then how does he or she behave? Friesen identifies this as an “if-then profile.” (…)

Some people knew their friends’ triggers well; others had almost no idea what set their friends off. And that made a difference to the friendship. People who had more knowledge of their friend’s if-then profile of triggers had better relationships. They had less conflict with the friend and less frustration with the relationship.

{ APS | Continue reading }