Category: Science

Psychopaths cannot process clues of context very easily:

The key deficit in psychopaths, he [Newman] says, is an inability to process contextual cues, which makes them oblivious to the implications of their actions, both for themselves and for their potential victims…

Newman has published several studies showing this inability to consider peripheral information.  In 2004, Newman reported in the journal Neuropsychology one study in which subjects were presented with mislabeled images, such as a drawing of a pig with the word "dog" superimposed on it.  Newman’s researchers timed how long it took them to name what they saw.  They found that people in the control group — non-psychopaths — were confused by the mislabeled images, while the psychopaths answered swiftly and barely noticed the discrepancy.

"Although it is somewhat counterintuitive that superior selective attention be associated with psychopathology, it is consistent with the importance of incidental contextual and associative cues for regulating behavior," Newman wrote.

The main point of the article, with which I agree, is that we should feel sorry for psychopaths.  Here are Robert Hare’s results on psychopaths.  Here is a summary of some neurological evidence.

Addendum: Speaking of neurology, here is Will Wilkinson on whether neuroeconomics implies paternalism.

The utterly charming Seth Roberts, best-selling author and paragon of scientific  self-experimentation, visited GMU last week.

Seth told us how to be happy.  "See other people’s faces in the morning."  Faces on TV work as well as real faces.  Conversational distance is ideal.  In his view, seeing faces at night makes people unhappy.

The best way to sleep better is to stand all day.  Also you should stop eating breakfast.  Seth claims we are programmed to wake about three hours before our usual breakfast time.  (Oddly this started happening to me about two weeks before his visit.)

Most college professors have too few skills to be useful teachers and we should reward diverse kinds of achievement.  Given the importance of division of labor in modern economies, there should be many ways get an "A."  Students should receive more individualized attention.

Here is Alex’s earlier post on Seth, and here.  Here is Seth’s blog.

On the bottom of Seth’s home page is some fascinating Powerpoint on economics: "In the beginning, hobbies.  Diversify expertise: procrastination."

Here are three things statistics textbooks don’t tell you.

Seth is a true American original and his work deserves the attention of every thinking person.

HP has a new camera that can take off ten pounds.  As far as I can tell all it does is shrink the entire picture but the effect is still pretty impressive even though I prefer the less scrawny one.

Of course you can get the same effect in person using this method.

Hat tip to Boing Boing Blog.

Here is a nice flash animation explaining the meaning of the zeroth to tenth dimension.   

According to a recent paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology the rich are more efficient sleepers.  Not that they sleep fewer hours, in fact they sleep more than the poor, but their sleep latency, the time spent lying in bed trying to get to sleep is lower than for the poor.

Graphic from University of Chicago Magazine.

Me?  I have money but I sleep like a pauper.

Hat tip to Robin Hanson.

Women in almost every culture speak in deeper voices than Japanese women.  American women’s voices are lower than Japanese women’s, Swedish women’s are lower than American’s, and Dutch women’s are lower than Swedish women’s.  Vocal difference is one way of expressing social difference, so that in Dutch society, which doesn’t differentiate much between its image of the ideal male and the ideal female, there are few differences between male and female voice.  The Dutch also find medium and low pitch more attractive than high pitch.

That is from the new and interesting The Human Voice: How this Extraordinary Instrument Reveals Essential Clues About Who We Are, by Anne Karpf.  Here is an interesting dissertation abstract on voice pitch, some of which relates to economic ideas on signaling.

Anti-dork spin: Maybe guys likely to have autistic kids tend not to become dads as early as other guys.

That is from Slate.  Here is Steve Levitt on the same.  Here is The Washington Post and the effect appears very large indeed.

Addendum: Using bacteria to fight autism.  And here is a satirical (?) treatment of the causes of autism.

Who shows up for experiments?

Peer nominations of pathological personality traits were collected on
1442 freshmen participating in a study regarding personality and 283
students who initially provided consent to participate but failed to
show up for the assessment.  Ten peer-based personality disorder scales
and eight IIP-64 scales were entered into two separate multiple
logistic regression procedures to predict the probability of
nonparticipation.  There was a significantly higher probability of
participation if peers nominated someone as having more histrionic,
obsessive–compulsive, self-sacrificing, and intrusive/needy
characteristics.  Students were significantly less likely to participate
if peers nominated them as being higher on narcissism or
non-assertiveness.  Results suggest it may be more difficult to obtain
sufficient numbers of people high in narcissistic traits than
individuals with other personality traits.  Researchers may need to
employ novel strategies to recruit individuals with narcissistic traits
for experimental studies.

By the way, I’ve never showed up for any experiments.  I would think the procedure also discriminates against the anti-social, a trait which may be to some extent correlated with narcissism.

The link is from BPS Digest, which also informs us that people born in late winter are smarter; I can only imagine how smart tall, left-handed people, born in late winter [alas, I am not tall], must be…

In a nutshell, mentors:

The most common response to the question ‘What inspired you to take up science?’ – given by respondents including Dr Colin Berry, Peter Cochrane, Jorge Mayer, Simon Singh and Christopher Llewellyn Smith – is that they were inspired by teachers or mentors. Typical of such reponses are Alom Shaha‘s description of ‘gifted teachers, whose enthusiasm for their subjects was relentless and infectious’, and Michael Wilson‘s account of ‘inspirational and rigorous teachers in high school, who engendered an insatiable intellectual hunger for factual knowledge, and who encouraged observation and deductive thinking’.

Survey respondents often point to one or two particular individuals who made a lasting impact. Josef Penninger, for instance, was inspired by ‘a great mentor and teacher’, and argues that ‘most of us became what we became because of one dominating person, who moved us into a certain direction’. Frances Downey, James Enstrom, Pat Norris, John Zarnecki and Anton Zeilinger describe inspirational mathematics and physics teachers, Thomas Addiscott and Eliot Forster discuss inspirational chemistry teachers, and Kenneth Freeman had ‘a very capable and very overworked teacher’ who taught him mathematics, physics and chemistry. Meanwhile, Professor Sir Colin Berry, Keith Davies and William Ledger found inspiration in their biology teachers.

Here is much more, via www.politicaltheory.info.  Here is the answer of Sophie Petit-Zeman: falling in love with the teacher.

“How tall your parents are compared to the average height explains
80 to 90 percent of how tall you are compared to the average person,”
Dr. Vaupel said. But “only 3 percent of how long you live compared to
the average person can be explained by how long your parents lived.”

“You
really learn very little about your own life span from your parents’
life spans,” Dr. Vaupel said. “That’s what the evidence shows. Even
twins, identical twins, die at different times.” On average, he said,
more than 10 years apart.

Here is the full story, which is interesting throughout.  But of course the day is young, and I haven’t seen Bryan, Robin [Hanson], and Alex yet…

Some of the Irish claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine. 

As a young child I read this was impossible, but frankly I’ve long been convinced of the contrary.  The universe itself seemed like a counterexample.  It goes and goes and goes and goes.  Lots of stuff happens.  Stars explode, galaxies crash, planets get downgraded, etc.  Where does a vacuum get its energy from anyway?  And isn’t the "cosmological constant" a big free push?

Now perhaps our universe is not truly "perpetual."  Or perhaps it involves "no net expenditure of energy."  I’ve heard it called "a free lunch," through some kind of quantum effect and subsequent inflation. 

But still, the universe, as a perpetual motion machine, seems to me like a good enough version of what people have been looking for.  (Imagine your venture capital pitch: "Well, it’s not as Big or as Important as The Universe, but it does operate according to the same physical laws…")  The universe was produced by some process, and perhaps a smaller and more local version of the idea is possible.  Or does it come only in one size?  Well…I’d better stop before I make any more scientific blunders…

I can’t get over the idea there is a free lunch floating around out there.  Perhaps I read too much Julian Simon in my formative years.

Addendum: Here are the seven warning signs of bogus science.

New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep in the first year postpartum.

…In one study, mother rats were given the opportunity to press a bar and get a squirt of cocaine or press a bar and get a rat pup to suck their nipples…Those oxytocin squirts in the brain outscored a snort of cocaine every time.

Both are from the new and noteworthy The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine.  Here is a very brief (and somewhat skewed in the direction of politically correct) summary.  Here is more.  Here is a Deborah Tannen review.

There are way way way too many books on gender differences.  Most of them just string together the usual well-known templates, but I read every page of this one with interest.  The best parts focus on the role of hormones.

Not everyone will appreciate the punchy style — "There’s a new reality brewing in Sylvia’s brain, and it’s a take-no-prisoners view" — but everyone who wants to marry or have kids should read this book.