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cortex | June 12, 2008At first glance, it's hard to think of a more frivolous form of culture than the daily soap opera. It's pure and delicious escapism. And yet, at least in Brazil, soap operas have powerfully influenced family planning, according to a new study:
What are the effects of television, and of role models portrayed in TV programs, on individual behavior? We focus on fertility choices in Brazil, a country where soap operas (novelas) portray families that are much smaller than in reality. We exploit differences in the timing of entry into different markets of Rede Globo, the network that has an…
cortex | June 12, 2008Bookslut has a really interesting interview with Jeff Warren, author of The Head Trip:
Q: It turns out sleep is more interesting than we usually expect -- and that it even has a history! What are some key misconceptions about sleep?
A: I would like to spiel about dreaming for a moment if you don't mind. The writer Rodger Kamenetz tipped me off to a great Borges quote. Borges once wrote: "Lately I've been rereading psychology books, and I have felt singularly defrauded. All of them discuss the mechanisms of dreams or the subjects of dreams, but they do not mention, as I had hoped, that which…
loom | June 12, 2008It is a little weird to think of engineered bacteria living in your mouth or your gut, fighting cavities or Crohn's disease. I'll admit I feel a twinge just thinking about it. But is that because I have some intuition of the risks of ingesting such creatures? I doubt it. I think it's just focusing my attention on the prospect of some living thing living inside me. But we're already packed with thousands of species, and we regularly get infected (or maybe I should just say colonized) with new microbes. We even purposefully take in bacteria for our well-being when we proudly spoon yogurt into…
jdennehy | June 12, 2008Back in the 1970s, a scientist named Ananda Chakrabarty received the first patent for a genetically modified lifeform, an oil eating "Superbug" from the bacterial strain Pseudomonas putida. The feat was doubly hailed as a major step in bioremediation and a travesty of nature. In the long run, Chakrabarty's Superbug was a failure. It was unable to survive in the wild, unable to compete with native bacteria, and unable to move towards food sources.
The moral of the story is that it is very difficult to tinker with nature and produce an organism that can survive outside the rarefied confines of…
cortex | June 12, 2008Over at Marginal Revolution, a commenter asks Tyler a great question:
I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else. Any advice would help.
Tyler's answer is instructive:
I hope you have an expensive gold wedding band but otherwise start off by keeping your mouth shut. Find someone who will take care of you for a few days or weeks and then…
petnoyer | June 12, 2008
The Bush administration has outlined plans for a "blue legacy" that would use Presidential authority to establish new national monuments, along the lines of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. This is something Deep-Sea News reported on two years ago as a case of "sanctuary envy" not to be outdone, but due to new developments, the story has caught the attention of National Public Radio and The Intersection. Five new national marine monuments are being proposed (see map above, and story at NPR). The question I have is this: why would we establish these huge new monuments in the…
gregladen | June 11, 2008Carnival of the Godless #93
Carnival of Liberals #66: Anything Goes Edition
The 175th Carnival of Education: Game Show Edition
Homeschooling Carnival, June 10
ddobbs | June 11, 2008
Unusual penetrating brain injuries
from NeurophilosophyThe e'er enchanging Neurophilosopher has a radiologically rich roundup of penetrating injuries to the head. Paintbrushes, nails, Don't try this at home.
cmcclain | June 11, 2008People are freaking out about the recent outbreak of shark attacks. This recent massive increase in shark attacks has media outlets claiming that a shark is "seeking human targets", "sharks are hunting humans", and maybe even developing a taste for human fish. O' my god grab the children and run for the hills!
Maybe it was just a matter of time before sharks went on the hunt as a matter of retribution. So how many shark attacks have there been in Mexico in the last month? 3
Sharks have attacked three surfers in less than a month, two fatally, near the southwestern resort of Ixtapa-…
cortex | June 11, 2008I wandered into the ICP a few weeks ago, wandering amid Midtown with an hour to spare. I ended up transfixed by an exhibit called Bill Wood's Business:
The Bill Wood Photo Company supplied local snap shooters and amateur photographers with cameras, flash bulbs, accessories, and quality photo finishing. In addition, the business provided commercial photographic services: using large format cameras, and shooting mostly black-and-white film, Wood offered studio portraits and professional photographs, taken on location. The variety of subjects and situations he captured provide an in-depth…
cortex | June 11, 2008In the latest Atlantic, John Staddon, a professor of psychology at Duke, has an article on the dangers of road signs and speed limits:
The American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite…
cortex | June 11, 2008A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on various explanations for home field advantage. One of the more interesting tidbits I learned was this:
Professional teams, however, seem to be better adjusted to life on the road. (The chartered planes and fancy hotels probably help.) A 1986 analysis of nearly 3,500 Premier League English professional soccer games found that the distance traveled had no effect on home-field advantage. A study in 1992 of professional baseball and hockey teams concluded that "travel factors" accounted for less than 1.5 percent of the variance in the home advantage. A…
clock | June 10, 200860 new articles just got published in PLoS ONE a few minutes ago. Here are some of the greatest hits (IMHO):
Enhanced Temporal but Not Attentional Processing in Expert Tennis Players:
In tennis, as in many disciplines of sport, fine spatio-temporal resolution is required to reach optimal performance. While many studies on tennis have focused on anticipatory skills or decision making, fewer have investigated the underlying visual perception abilities. In this study, we used a battery of seven visual tests that allowed us to assess which kind of visual information processing is performed…
grrlscientist | June 10, 2008Between the extreme weather in NYC these past few days and my forced SSRI withdrawal, I am suffering a bit of a crisis today, so I am trying to prove to myself that I am not alone in my misery by poking through those blogs that link to mine. As a result, I discovered this gem; R.E.S.E.A.R.C.H.E.R.S. This is a new blog written by two postdocs from the opposite sides of the pond, so you, dear readers, will have the rare opportunity to start reading a blog from the very beginning. Here's what Dr. A writes;
Dr J and I used to work on the same floor in the institute where I did my Ph.D. and where…
jessica.sachs | June 10, 2008Yikes. Carl, how am I ever going to get that "parahuman" image out of my head!
I get your point. This image evokes the abhorrent reaction that early critics had against the idea of tinkering with any life, even "mere" E. coli.
Most people start to squirm when the transgenics concerns animals, especially when it produces visible "mutations." Today, I suppose that most people are comfortable with the idea of transgenic E. coli churning out useful chemicals inside sealed vats. We harvest and purify the chemicals. No harm done. Right?
So let's take the safety question one step further. In…
cortex | June 10, 2008David Brooks' column today is filled with some depressing financial facts:
Between 1989 and 2001, credit-card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. By last year, it was up to $937 billion, the report said.
State governments aggressively hawk their lottery products, which some people call a tax on stupidity. Twenty percent of Americans are frequent players, spending about $60 billion a year. The spending is starkly regressive. A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income.
Fifty-six percent of…
petnoyer | June 10, 2008You would think that deep-sea squid could hide from human pollution like dichlorodiphenyl- trichloroethane (DDT) and tributyltin (TBT), but these and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are accumulating in our cephalopod brethren, according to a new study about to be released in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin by Michael Vecchione of NOAA Fisheries' National Systematics Laboratory and colleagues Michael Unger, Ellen Harvey and George Vadas at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science of The College of William and Mary.
Science Daily reports
"The cephalopod species we analyzed span…
petnoyer | June 10, 2008Deep-sea corals bring people together. Geologists, ecologists, taxonomists, managers and climatologists all get a kick out of our heartless, brainless, colonial friends. So, we get together once every two years to kick back and share stories at the International Deep-Sea Coral Symposium. The first was in Halifax, Canada; the second in Erlangen, Germany, the third in Ft. Lauderdale, USA, and the fourth is in... oh yeah... Wellington, New Zealand, December 1-5, 2008. Abstracts are now being accepted. The website is here.
Themes include:
1. Systematics and Biogeography (genetics, taxonomy,…
cortex | June 9, 2008An eloquent elegy to age, written by Steven Johnson on his fortieth birthday:
One of the things that's always stuck with me from my Mind Wide Open research is that human beings vary predictably in their perception of time as they age. Time literally seems to go faster the older you get--not just in the span of decades, but also in the span of minutes. Put someone in a room without a clock or watch and ask them to guess when an hour has passed, and on average, the older person will perceive the hour zipping by faster than the younger person.
The older I get, the more I think that one of the…
cortex | June 9, 2008Given the weather on the Eastern seaboard - it's one of those hot, sultry days where you wait for a thunderstorm to purge the humidity from the air - I decided to do a quick literature search for the effects of heat on cognition. But as so often happens when I play with vague search terms on Google scholar, I ended up getting entranced by completely unrelated papers. Like this one by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh:
In one experiment, Williams had an undergraduate assistant meet each volunteer at the door and bring him or her up to the lab. In the elevator, the assistant asked the volunteer…