Category: Science
Hallucinators are more likely to heed high status voices
Here is the abstract:
This study examined three factors hypothesised which influence compliance to harm-others command hallucinations. The factors investigated were the perceived power of the commanding voice, participants' perceived social rank in relation to the commanding voice and to the others. Thirty-two male participants were recruited from forensic services. Participants were identified as belonging to one of the two groups: compliers or resisters. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were administered to participants. Beliefs, that the commanding voice was more powerful than the self and of a higher social rank than the self, were associated with compliance. There were no significant differences between the two groups on perceptions of social rank in relation to others. The significant findings of this study can be understood in terms of the relationship an individual has with the commanding voice and which are congruent with cognitive models of hallucinations.
For the pointer credit is due to BPS Psychological Digest. They also offer up this bit on how Republicans look more powerful or at least are perceived as such.
The Importance of Marketing
From Ben Smith. Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.
Early globalization
The Greenlander belonged to a Paleo-Eskimo culture called the Saqqaq by archaeologists. On the basis of his genome, the Saqqaq man’s closest living relatives are the Chukchis, people who live at the easternmost tip of Siberia. His ancestors split apart from Chukchis some 5,500 years ago, according to genetic calculations, implying the Saqqaq people’s ancestors must have traveled across the northern edges of North America until they reached Greenland.
Here is the full article. Call me crazy, but I've long been a (partial) fan of John Bailey's Sailing to Paradise: The Discovery of the Americas by 7000 B.C.
The culture that is Japan, snow removal edition
Robot Snowplow from Japan Eats Up Snow, Poops Out Bricks.
It has a camera and GPS. Here is a further report from Japan (remarkable detail at that link):
One protective measure against snow and ice for railroads and roadways is the "slush removal system" that hydraulically transfers collected snow that has been removed from the railroad tracks or roadways and deposits it in a river. Also, there is the "sprinkler snow melting system" that melts snow by sprinkling water on the road surface.
Here is a longer study of geothermal snow melting systems. Here is a discussion of numerous other Japanese snow treatment and disposal technologies. Here is a report from Tsuruta:
In town several additional unique ways of dealing with this snow exist. A concrete-contained stream runs under downtown sidewalks, covered by hinged, lightweight metal grates. People who have access to this “river” can shovel their snow into the running water, sending it floating to the nearby Sea of Japan. Around the nicer homes in town (luckily, including mine) pipes spray a constant stream of hot water onto snow, quickly melting it.
Still, the snow can gather, breaking the delicate branches of Japan’s carefully tended trees and plants. The solution: wooden cages and bamboo teepees, odd-looking sights.
The abundance of snow in Japan spawned a bewildering variety of shovels with distinct shapes and purposes. Most are plastic. There are wide shovels for moving large quantities of snow; there are smaller shovels for weaker shovelers; there are shovels with handles and shovels without; there are shovel-sleds designed to allow the user to push a large load of snow a long distance; there are also metal shovels for breaking up hard-packed snow.
The shovels come in a selection of neon colors: green, yellow, purple, orange, and blue – some marketer’s feeble attempt to make snow-shoveling fun. Shovels cost from five to thirty dollars. Most people own at least two different types, selected by need.
I like this from Japan (ultimately) too — Bohemian Rhapsody!
Department of !
Yesterday I read this:
While physicists struggle to get quantum computers to function at cryogenic temperatures, other researchers are saying that humble algae and bacteria may have been performing quantum calculations at life-friendly temperatures for billions of years.
The evidence comes from a study of how energy travels across the light-harvesting molecules involved in photosynthesis. The work has culminated this week in the extraordinary announcement that these molecules in a marine alga may exploit quantum processes at room temperature to transfer energy without loss. Physicists had previously ruled out quantum processes, arguing that they could not persist for long enough at such temperatures to achieve anything useful.
Roger Penrose is now on related points looking more credible.
*Cosmos*
The author is John North and the subtitle is An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology. Excerpt:
Other alternatives to Einstein's general theory of relativity were the theories of gravitation developed by G.D. Birkhoff, A.N. Whitehead, and J.L. Synge. All of them had cosmological implications. They were symptomatic of a period of great intellectual vitality. They were no doubt partly motivated by a desire to create something comparable with what Einstein had produced. Some ideas of a very different kind were then being put forth by Hermann Weyl, Eddington, and Dirac — the first two in 1930, and Dirac in 1937-38. They seemed to many to be suggesting that cosmological observation was superfluous, and that all could be deducted from the constants of physics. Eddington, for instance, thought that all the dimensionless constants (pure numbers) obtained by suitably multiplying and dividing powers of the constants of physics — the mass of a proton, the charge on an electron, and so forth — turn out to be close to unity, or of the order of 10 raised to the power 79. This vast number he thought might characterize the number of particles in the universe.
This is a truly splendid history of science book, especially if you are snowed in for a weekend. It has plenty of material on the early history of astronomy and on the one topic I know something about — the Aztecs — it seems very good to me and very accurate.
Relations
The source article is here.
Temple Grandin’s theories on autism
As you probably know, the Temple Grandin biopic, starring Claire Danes, is showing this Saturday evening. Here is Temple on the movie. Grandin has done a great deal to benefit animals, by designing more humane slaughterhouses, stockyards, and encouraging other innovations. She also has promoted the idea of talented autistics and helped raise that notion to a very high profile. I have enormous respect for what she has done and I would gladly see her win a Nobel Prize if the appropriate category for such a prize existed.
That said, researchers disagree with Grandin's theories on autism in a number of ways and my own reading leads me to side with the researchers on some issues. Many non-autistics defer to Grandin on autism because of her life story, her remarkable achievements, and yes because of her autism. I thought it would be useful to offer a more skeptical view of a few of her claims:
1. Autistic individuals do not in general "think in pictures," though some autistics offer this self-description. Grandin repeatedly refers to herself in this context. I don't read her as claiming this tendency is universal or even the general rule, but the disclaimers aren't as evident as I would like them to be.
2. There is little evidence to support her view that autistics "think like animals." Here is one published critique of her theory: "We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants." You'll find a response by Grandin at that same link. I'm not totally on board with the critique either (how well do we understand savants anyway?), but at the very least Grandin's claim is an unsupported hypothesis.
3. Grandin tends to brusquely classify autistic children into different groups. She will speak of "the nerds who will do just fine" (see the eBook linked to below) as opposed to the "severely autistic," who require that someone take control of their lives and pound a bit of the autism out of them. There's a great deal of diversity among autistics, and autistic outcomes, but I don't see that as the most useful way of expressing those differences. Autism diagnoses are often unstable at young ages, there is not any useful or commonly accepted measure of "autistic severity," her description perpetuates stereotypes, and Grandin herself as a child would have met criteria for "severely autistic" and yet she did fine through parental love and attention, which helped her realize rather than overturn her basic nature. That's not even a complete list of my worries on this point; for more see my Create Your Own Economy.
4. Grandin supports some varieties of intensive behavioral therapy for autistics. Many research papers support those same therapies but those papers do not generally conduct an RCT and furthermore many of the said researchers have a commercial stake in what they are studying and promoting. In my view we don't know "what works" but my (non-RCT-tested) opinion is that giving autistic children a lot of fun things to do — fun by their standards — and a lot of information to study and manipulate, gives the best chance of good outcomes. (In any case "spontaneous improvement" is considerable, so anecdotally many therapies will appear to work when they do not; nor is there a common control for placebos.) Many of the behavioral therapies seem quite oppressive to me and if we don't know they work I am worried that they are being overpromoted. Grandin has in some ways the intellectual temperament of an engineer and I am worried that she has not absorbed the lessons of Hayek's The Counterrevolution of Science.
5. Grandin refers to herself as more interested in tangible results and less interested in emotions. She is entitled to that self-description, but it is worth noting that most individuals in the "autism community" would not consider this a good presentation of their attitude toward emotions.
There is a recent eBook (selling for only $4.00), consisting of a dialogue between myself and Grandin, mostly on autism and talented autistics but not just. For instance we also talk about our favorite TV shows, including a discussion of Lost, and there is a segment on science fiction and the future of humanity. I try to draw her out on autism, cognitive anthromorphizing, and attitudes toward religion, but she is reluctant to offer her opinions on that important topic. I would describe the eBook as a good introduction to her thought on autism and society, while also giving an idea of how someone else (me) might differ from some of her basic attitudes.
What is interdisciplinarity?
Maybe not what you think. Louis Menand writes:
Interdisciplinarity is not something different from disciplinarity. It is the ratification of the logic of disciplinarity. In practice, it actually tends to rigidity disciplinary paradigms. A typical interdisciplinary situation might bring together, in a classroom, a literature professor and an anthropologist. The role of the literature professor is to perform qua literature professor, bringing to bear the specialized methods and knowledge of literary study to the subject at hand; the role of the anthropologist is to do the same with the methods of anthropological inquiry. This methodological constrast is regarded as, in fact, the intellectual and pedagogical takeaway of the collaboration. What happens is the phenomenon of borrowed authority: the literature professor can incorporate into his work the insights of the anthropologist, in the form of "As anthropology has shown us," ignoring the probability that the particular insight being recognized is highly contested within the anthropologist's own discipline.
Because professors are trained to respect the autonomy and expertise of other disciplines, they are rarely in a position to evaluate one another's claims. So there is nothing transgressive about interdisciplinarity on this description. There is nothing even new about it. Disciplinarity has not only been ratified; it has been fetishized. The disciplines are treated as the sum of all possible perspectives.
Here is my previous post on Menand's new book.
Do Animals have Animal Spirits?
It's quite easy to see how a "real business cycle" could occur in the natural world. Imagine a pond teeming with life. One year a parasite infects the lily pads. Without the lily pads the frogs can't catch flies, the flies swarm, but the frogs go hungry and the pike have less to eat. If we measured the gross pond biota (gpb) we could see natural cycles. Indeed, if we measured different pond sectors (the frog sector, the fly sector etc.) we could trace out a whole sequence of events as each sector of the pond responds to the initial shock and to changes in every other sector (ala a vector auto regression).
Can there be a Keynesian business cycle in the pond? i.e. Could animal spirits drive a natural business cycle? It's harder for me to see exactly how this would work. We would need "money" or something similar to generate a rush to liquidity and a decline in investment. We could perhaps get a coordination type business cycle (ala Roger Farmer) with herd behavior. Interestingly, the trend in biology–as I read it at least–has been to think of herd behavior as optimal for the herd but this is not necessarily the case. We know that slime molds self-organize and aggregate during times of stress could this process be set off with no or little exogenous shock? Could a natural system provide a model for business cycle behavior? It would be odd if only people had animal spirits. Biology and economics have much to offer one another.
If he could get one idea peer-reviewed
If I could get one idea peer reviewed, it would probably be ‘What percentage of chewing gum sales are due to someone wanting change?’ All I need now is a couple of referees.
Here is the source blog. What would you pick? If I ask myself this question today, I wish for a serious study on how banning the burkha or veil would affect sexual mores and how it would alter the allocation of resources within the family, referring of course to families where such methods of dress are an issue. If such a paper already exists, please let me know and I'll wish for something else.
How signals work on the dance floor
Here is some new research:
The results showed that women gave the highest attractiveness ratings to men with the highest levels of prenatal testosterone. The men with the lowest testosterone in turn got the lowest attractiveness ratings. "Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance," Lovatt told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "And women understand it — without noticing it."
In women, the link between dancing style and testosterone levels were similar — but the reaction of men was just the opposite. Dancers with high levels of testosterone moved more parts of their body, with their movements being somewhat uncoordinated, while those with lower testosterone made more subtle movements, especially with their hips. The male students found the latter style most appealing…
The men who got the female students hot under the collar danced with large movements which were "complexly coordinated." But it's a fine line between hot and not, however: Those men who made big moves but who were less coordinated came across as dominant alpha males — and were unlikely to win women's hearts. The researchers also found that the size and complexity of the dance moves decreased in parallel with testosterone levels.
The full story is here and the article is interesting throughout. This bit on the researcher caught my eye:
Lovatt knows his subject matter well — he himself was a professional dancer until the age of 26. He performed in musicals in large venues around England and also worked on cruise ships. The thought of an academic career barely entered his head at the time. He wasn't even able to read until he was 23, having left school without any qualifications. When he looked at a page in a book, "all I saw was a big black block."
What is not right in this picture?
How might you improve access to scientific research? Write an editorial calling for greater access…and then put it behind a paywall.
Hat tip goes to Michelle Dawson on Twitter.
Addendum: Registration suffices, you don't need to pay, my apologies!
Is this a big uh-oh for neuroeconomics?
Here's a new abstract:
Reward processing is a central component of learning and decision making. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has contributed essentially to our understanding of reward processing in humans. The strength of reward-related brain responses might prove as a valuable marker for, or correlate of, individual preferences or personality traits. An essential prerequisite for this is a sufficient reliability of individual measures of reward-related brain signals. We therefore determined test-retest reliabilities of BOLD responses to reward prediction, reward receipt and reward prediction errors in the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex in 25 subjects undergoing three different simple reward paradigms (retest interval 7-13 days). Although on a group level the paradigms consistently led to significant activations of the relevant brain areas in two sessions, across subject retest reliabilities were only poor to fair (with intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) of -.15 to .44). ICCs for motor activations were considerably higher (ICC .32 to .73). Our results reveal the methodological difficulties behind across-subject correlations in fMRI research on reward processing. These results demonstrate the need for studies that address methods to optimize the retest reliability of fMRI.
Hat tip goes to the excellent Vaughn Bell. Here are related criticisms. Here is a related paper, possibly gated for you, "Is There a Method for Neuroeconomics?"
The diamond oceans of Uranus and Neptune
Neptune and Uranus may have diamond icebergs floating atop liquid diamond seas closer to home. The surprise finding comes from the first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, Discovery News reports.
Scientists zapped diamond with a laser at pressures 40 million times greater than the Earth's atmosphere at sea level, and then slowly reduced both temperature and pressure. They eventually found that diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, and that chunks of diamond will float in the liquid diamond.
The full story is here, with pictures, and I thank Gregory Rehmke for the pointer. Don't think, however, that a commercial mission to these planets could pay for itself — elasticity of demand!