Category: Science

For a given amount of pressure, it hurts more when a man is making you feel bad:

Participants placed a finger in a clamp which was tightened using a pressure gauge until they reported feeling pain. Both men and women appeared to feel pain more quickly if the person turning the clamp was a man.

Previous studies have shown that men report feeling less pain in front of a female experimenters – but this was put down to their wanting to appear more macho.

David Williams, who carried out the study at the University of Westminster in the UK, says his findings contradict this assumption. Williams suggests that the subjects of his study may be socially conditioned to expect men to be more likely to inflict harm. The effect, “is likely to be a result of what participants subconsciously expect, based on socially acquired gender stereotypes,” he says.

We are susceptible to the power of suggestion in other ways as well:

The study also shows that a person’s surroundings can affect their sensitivity to pain. Objects that might be associated with suffering – such as a chart showing wounds or a poster related to blood donations – were found to make the participants report feeling pain more readily.

Here is the full story, here is the researcher.

The bottom line? No, it is not all in your head. Nonetheless a stoic attitude may help you endure discomfort. Furthermore we seem programmed to think that men are the bad guys. They usually are.

Some people may be aware that a scene they are looking at has changed without being able to identify what that change is. This could be a newly discovered mode of conscious visual perception, according to the psychologist who discovered it. He has dubbed the phenomenon “mindsight”.

Ronald Rensink, based at the University of British Columbia in Canada, showed 40 people a series of photographic images flickering on a computer screen. Each image was shown for around a quarter of a second and followed by a brief blank grey screen. Sometimes the image would remain the same throughout the trial; in other trials, after a time the initial image would be alternated with a subtly different one.

n trials where the researchers manipulated the image, around a third of the people tested reported feeling that the image had changed before they could identify what the change was. In control trials, the same people were confident that no change had occurred. The response to a change in image and control trials was reliably different.

Our visual system can produce a strong gut feeling that something has changed, Rensink says, even if we cannot visualise that change in our minds and cannot say what was altered or where the alteration occurred.

Here is the full story. The bottom line? Maybe somebody really is following you, and subtly changing small items in your environment.

Birds sing to attract mates, so what about humans? Are our jokes, stories, guitar strumming just part of an elaborately programmed mating strategy? We all know how much young girls fall for rock stars. Here are three reviews of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. Click here for a good summary and short critique, here for an outright critique, and here for an account of why Miller’s views are not always so popular. Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the links.

1. On average lightning strikes one hundred times per second.

2. From 1959 to 1994 an average of 363 Americans are struck a year, 90 are killed.

3. The annual odds of being struck are about 576,000 to 1. The annual odds of being killed are about 2.32 million to 1. In other words, one in 87,000 bolts hits someone, one in 345,000 bolts kills someone.

4. Florida is the most dangerous state for lightning. In per capita terms New Mexico is the most dangerous state.

5. Alaska and Hawaii are the least dangerous states, with zero reported lightning deaths.

6. July is the most dangerous month.

7. 3 p.m. is the most dangerous time of day, it is five times more dangerous than 9 a.m.

8. Men account for 84 percent of lightning deaths. Can we be that stupid? Yes.

9. Golfer Lee Trevino has been struck by lightning twice.

These facts are from LIfe: The Odds (And How to Improve them), by Lee Baer.

Here is a color-coded map of where lightning is most likely to strike. Here is an association of lightning survivors. Here is a medical description of what happens to you if you are struck.

Happy golfing!

Economist David Romer says yes. Teams would enjoy higher returns if they would try for the first down more often. Furthermore his work has influenced how professional football is played.

The real question is why this mistake was made in the first place. Could it be the economist’s well-known distinction between the seen and the unseen? If you punt, no one sees the first down you didn’t make. If you don’t punt and fail to make a first down, you feel bad and are easily blamed. For agency-related reasons, we might expect coaches to be more risk-averse than players. The coach wants to hold onto his job, whereas a superstar player captures upside returns to a greater extent. The variance of player salaries, especially if you include endorsements, is typically much higher than the variance of coach salaries. So the coach plays it safe to a greater extent, and of course a punting decision is usually in the hands of the coach.

Addendum: Here is further discussion from Nick Schulz.

I’ve been an economist for so long that I don’t flinch when the paper abstract starts as follows:

“This paper models love-making as a signaling game. In the act of love-making, man and woman send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy. Each has a prior belief about the other’s state of ecstasy. These prior beliefs are associated with the other’s sexual response capacity…”

Or if that is not enough for you: “In this paper, love is formally defined as a mixture of altruism and possessiveness. Love is shown to alter the man and the woman’s payoff functions in a way that increases the equilibrium probability of faking, but more so for the woman than for the man.”

Here is the full paper. I could go on with quotations, but why don’t we look at the empirical results, drawn from an extensive data set and questionnaire:

1. 72 percent of women admit to having faked it in their current or most recent relationship, for men the number is 26 percent.

2. You are more likely to fake an orgasm if you are in love. “It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most,” said Marguerite Duras.

3. Being in love and faking are less positively correlated for men than for women. Perhaps men want to look like studs, regardless of the seriousness of the relationship.

4. Women mind less if their partners fake orgasm. (Might some be positively relieved to have it over?)

5. Faking is correlated with age, but in complicated ways. It depends on whether you love your partner, whether you are a man or woman, and how old you are.

6. The more education you have, the more likely you are to fake orgasm. I found this to be the most interesting result.

The author, Hugo Mialon, is on the job market right now and he has a forthcoming co-authored AER piece, plus a revise-and-resubmit at the Rand Journal. His dissertation is “Five Essays on the Economics of Law and Language.”

OK, the orgasm stuff is not his most marketable side, but Hugo seems to be a guy with both ideas and good technical skills. Hire this man. If we had a slot at GMU I would be pushing for him, even though he probably fakes his orgasms.

Thanks to Newmark’s Door for the initial pointer to the paper.

I have heard of or experienced the following ideas for improving the running of meetings:

1. Make everyone stand up until the meeting is over.

2. Make everyone talk on the phone, even if you are in adjacent offices.

3. Give everyone a chess clock to limit the number of minutes they are allowed to speak for (this is a variant of an idea from Robin Hanson. Read here for some commentary.

4. Lock the door when the meeting starts on time and do not allow latecomers to enter.

Or how about this idea, channeled through Randall Parker:

Aided by tiny sensors and transmitters called a PAL (Personal Assistance Link) your machine (with your permission) will become an anthroscope – an investigator of your up-to-the-moment vital signs, says Sandia project manager Peter Merkle. It will monitor your perspiration and heartbeat, read your facial expressions and head motions, analyze your voice tones, and correlate these to keep you informed with a running account of how you are feeling – something you may be ignoring – instead of waiting passively for your factual questions. It also will transmit this information to others in your group so that everyone can work together more effectively.

So perhaps a bunch of buzzers go off when somebody says something confusing. Or the boss knows when no one is paying attention.

I’m all for voluntary experimentation, but let’s not forget what many meetings are about. Meetings are not always about the efficient exchange of information, or discovering a new idea. Meetings can be about displays of power, signaling that a coalition is in place, wearing down an opponent, staging “theater” to make someone feel better, giving key players the feeling of being insiders, transmitting information about status, or simply marking time until something better happens. It’s one thing to hate meetings. But before you can improve them, make sure you know what meetings are all about.

A genetically engineered plant that detects landmines in soil by changing colour could prevent thousands of deaths and injuries by signalling where explosives are concealed.

The plant, a modified version of thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), is sensitive to nitrogen dioxide gas, which is released by underground landmines. The leaves of the plant change from green to red after three to five weeks of growth in the presence of this gas. “They are easy to spot,” says Carsten Meier of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who served as scientific adviser to Aresa, the Danish company that developed the plant.

Here is the full story. Note that the technology is not yet fully proven.

On a separate note, it appears that simply putting a tea strainer (mesh cylinder) in your neck could stop a large number of strokes.

They are bolder and more confident, but have poorer memories, here is the story.

And humans?

Studies are needed to see if test-tube humans are similarly affected, he says…In the Western world, around 1% of children are conceived through assisted reproductive technologies. In one common method known as in vitro fertilization, eggs are fertilized in a test tube, cultured for a short while and then returned to the womb. Over a million ‘test-tube’ babies have been born worldwide. But little is known about the long-term effects of culturing embryos. The world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born just 26 years ago. There have been few systematic attempts so far to assess the long-term health and behaviour of these children.

Food for thought, perhaps we are engaging in social experimentation here without knowing it.

Maybe so, according to Futurepundit. Here are some options (not all of this represents Futurepundit’s words, some is from his links):

Proposed options for reducing carbon dioxide pollution currently include underground burying of liquefied carbon dioxide; disposal in the sea; fertilising its absorption by marine algae; reflecting the sun’s rays in the atmosphere; and stabilizing sea-level rise. These and other macro-engineering ideas will be evaluated against a strict set of criteria, including effectiveness, environmental impacts, cost, public acceptability, and reversibility. All of these options go beyond the conventional approaches of improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon intensity by using more renewable energy sources, and may be needed in addition to these conventional approaches.

And further out on the limb:

… the scientists backed more way-out systems for reflecting the sun’s rays back into space. Plan A would float thousands of bubble-making machines across the world’s oceans to send huge amounts of salt spray into the atmosphere. The trillions of tiny droplets would make the clouds bigger, whiter, and more reflective — enough, in theory, to shut down several decades worth of global warming.

Plan B would flood the stratosphere with billions of tiny metal-coated balloons, “optical chaff” to backscatter the sun’s rays. Most sophisticated of all, Plan C would assemble giant mirrors in orbit, ready to be positioned at will by a global climate controller.

The BBC reports on 4 major categories of conceivable climate engineering approaches.

* “sequestering” (storing) carbon dioxide, for example in the oceans, by removing it from the air for storage, or by improved ways of locking it up in forests
* “insolation management” – modifying the albedo (reflectivity) of clouds and other surfaces to affect the amount of the Sun’s energy reaching the Earth
* climate design, for example by long-term management of carbon for photosynthesis, or by glaciation control
* impacts reduction, which includes stabilising ocean currents by river deviation, and providing large-scale migration corridors for wildlife.

Here is another article on the topic. I’ll never be competent to assess these proposals, but they could be among the most important scientific innovations we come up with. Global warming may well be real and the result of human activity, follow Chris Mooney. For better or worse I’ll predict the world won’t much cut its CO2 omissions in the near future, so we need to look toward other solutions.

A penny dropped from the Empire State Building would not kill someone standing below, most likely. The observation deck is 1050 feet high, and the penny would reach a maximum velocity of 57 miles an hour after falling 500 feet. That’s enough to hurt pretty bad, but only a very very lucky (unlucky) shot would kill you. Most importantly of all, there is an updraft. Tossed coins generally land on the setback roof of floor 80.

The calculations come from the February issue of Popular Science, the article itself is not available on-line.

Addendum: Cecil offers some more detailed observations. Here is another supporting account, albeit with different details, in engineering language.

Here is an update on the quest for a Theory of Everything. It is written by Lee Smolin, of inflation theory fame, and recommended to me by Robin Hanson. In pdf format it is over sixty pages long but makes for fascinating albeit difficult reading. Smolin defends “loop gravity” theories over string theory. He claims that within ten years we may have real experimental evidence to resolve the dispute.