These documents need publishing: “The UK government has been quick to deny that we practice, or tolerate the practice of torture. So it is perhaps not suprising that they are determined that you should not see the following documents…” (Blairwatch)
Daily Archives: 30 Dec 05
I’m feeling silly
Christmas fun with 250 lbs. of Silly Putty in-house at Google.
‘Ear bud’ headphones can cause hearing loss, experts warn
“We’re seeing the kind of hearing loss in younger people that’s typically found in aging adults…” (Star Tribune )
What We Believe But Cannot Prove
I have already long since blinked to this collection of essays from modern thinkers convened by John Brockman at The Edge website. It serves as an antidote to blind dogma in that the essays thoughtfully dissect the ways in which belief is different than certainty and the implications of sustaining it under conditions of uncertainty. Thank you, John Brockman, for that. Now it is a book.
Distorted Tunes Test
Ever wondered if you are tone-deaf? The Distorted Tunes Test can help you ascertain, by seeing if you can distinguish tunes that are played off-key from those rendered correctly. (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders)
Murdercide
Unravelling the Myths of the Suicide Bomber, according to inveterate skeptic Michael Shermer:
“Police have an expression for people who put themselves into circumstances that force officers to shoot them: “suicide by cop.” Following this lingo, suicide bombers commit “suicide by murder,” so I propose we call such acts “murdercide”: the killing of a human or humans with malice aforethought by means of self-murder.
The reason we need semantic precision is that suicide has drawn the attention of scientists, who understand it to be the product of two conditions quite unrelated to murdercide: ineffectiveness and disconnectedness. According to Florida State University psychologist Thomas Joiner, in his remarkably revealing scientific treatise Why People Die by Suicide (Harvard University Press, 2006): “People desire death when two fundamental needs are frustrated to the point of extinction; namely, the need to belong with or connect to others, and the need to feel effective with or to influence others.”” (Scientific American )
Language affects ‘half of vision’
“University of California researchers tested the hypothesis that language plays a role in perception by carrying out a series of colour tests.
They found that people were able to identify colours faster in their right visual field than in their left.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study said it was because the right field is processed in the brain area responsible for language.” (BBC)
This is construed as an empirical test of the controversial and, in its strongest form, discredited Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that the structure and lexicon of a peroson’s native language shapes the perception and understanding of the world. It is more reasonable that linguistic underpinnings make certain concepts or percepts more or less easily grasped. And divergent worldviews and models occur far more readily from influences other than linguistic differences, between people reared with nominally the same native tongue.
It strikes me that this research has some bearing on the ‘fringy’ psychological technic called neurolinguistic programming (Wikipedia ) proposed in the ’70’s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, which attempts to match communication to the perceptual style, cerebral dominance characteristics, etc. of listeners for maximum receptivity. Although it was heavily colored by New Age pap about ‘unlimited potential’ and the like and billed as a set of strategies for ‘therapeutic magic’. Eventually deprecated as a serious psychotherapeutic tool, it has continued to intrigue (and draw customers) in fields like business management, sales, coaching and seduction (!). NLP claims have been roundly criticized for being unsupported by empirical evidence, yet apart from the pop-science trappings and the reductionist popularization, I have always suspected that Bandler and Grinder had touched on more than a grain of truth.
Funny, what the Wikipedia article does not touch upon is the debt that NLP owed to ‘Ericksonian hypnosis,’ a far more psychologically credible but obscure set of therapeutic techniques developed by psychologist Milton Erickson (1901-80). He operationalized the belief, which I share, that the psychotherapy session is a sort of entry into a joint trance state. Usually, the therapist is not aware of that aspect of the psychotherapy encounter, but Erickson said it could be recognized and explicitly, although subliminally, used in therapeutically powerful ways.
Happy Birthday, Paul Bowles (1910-1999)
“… we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
Celebratory gun firing
Good idea or not? “I must live in a relatively shielded environment because I thought firing guns up the air to celebrate something wasn’t really a common practice outside of, say, Baghdad or Beirut. Turns out I was wrong. There is apparently a long standing tradition among some regarding what the police call “celebratory firing.”
How dangerous is the practice of celebratory firing?” (Notes from the Technology Underground via boing boing)
the 2005 ‘Dubious Data’ Awards
“America’s so-called methamphetamine epidemic was the worst example of media stressing shock over substance in 2005 science journalism, according to the annual “Dubious Data Awards,” issued by the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University.
STATS is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to improving public understanding of science and statistics . Each December STATS issues a list of scientific studies that were mishandled by the media during the preceding year. This year’s “Dubious Data Awards” detailing the worst examples of shoddy science reporting go to… [more]”
New Scientist’s top 10 news stories of 2005
“These stories were the ones you clicked on the most – a stimulating mix of mystery, brain work, climate change, weaponry and sex.
1. 13 things that do not make sense
2. Pentagon reveals rejected chemical weapons
3. 11 steps to a better brain
4. US military sets laser PHASRs to stun
5. Details of US microwave-weapon tests revealed
6. Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age
7. Antarctic ice sheet is an ‘awakened giant’
8. Bionic suit offers wearers super-strength
9. Out-of-this-world sex could jeopardise missions
10. Centrifugal weapon could deliver stealth firepower“
Top Ten Myths about Iraq in 2005
Juan Cole: “Iraq has unfortunately become a football in the rough and ready, two-party American political arena, generating large numbers of sound bites and so much spin you could clothe all of China in the resulting threads.
Here are what I think are the top ten myths about Iraq, that one sees in print or on television in the United States.” (Informed Comment )
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
“It’s navel gazing time again, that stretch of the year when many of us turn our attention inward and think about how we can improve the way we live our lives. But as we embark on this annual ritual of introspection, we would do well to ask ourselves a simple question: Does it really do any good?” (New York Times )
Top Online Journalism Stories of 2005
“Here is CyberJournalist.net’s annual list of the top online journalism stories of the year, based on the most popular entries on CyberJournalist.net in 2005.
The number one story might seem surprising, in a year in which Hurricane Katrina struck and the aftermath of the Asian tsunami was felt. But CyberJournalist.net’s readers have spoken.&rdquo
Psychotherapy, On the Road to…Where?
“As psychotherapy struggles to define itself for an age of podcasts and terror alerts, it will need ideas, thinkers, leaders. Yet the luminaries here, many of whom rose to prominence three decades ago, were making their way off the stage. And it was not clear who, or what, would take their place.&rdquo (New York Times )
What is science? First, magnetise your wine…
The ‘Bad Science’ column at The Guardian does the obvious. “We take a claim, and we pull it apart to extract a clear scientific hypothesis, like “homeopathy makes people better faster than placebo” or “the Chemsol lab correctly identifies MRSA”; then we examine the experimental evidence for that hypothesis…” Not shockingly, it finds there is no evidence for claims that magnetizing your wine “‘ages’ it in only 45 minutes!”
Wealth From Worship?
Is going to church more than its own reward? “Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims that regular religious participation leads to better education, higher income and a lower chance of divorce. His results (based on data covering non-Hispanic white Americans of several Christian denominations, other faiths and none) imply that doubling church attendance raises someone’s income by almost 10%.”(The Economist )
The researcher, one of the first to investigate quantitatively the relationship between religion and income, claims he has addressed the obvious fallacy of disentangling causation from correlation; I am not convinced. His argument relies on sociological data on the ethnic mix of neighborhoods and congregations and hinges on excluding “ethnic density” (ghettoization, in other words), since the ghetto has a negative impact on your income, to measure the supposedly independent effect of the density of “co-religionists”. defined as “the proportion of the population that shares your religion but not your race.” He finds that living near different ethnic groups of the same religion correlates with higher income and — here’s where his argument doesn’t hold water — that the result cannot be mediated through any other civic activity than the influence it has on churchgoing. But the finagling he has done means precisely that churchgoing is not the independent variable he makes it out to be. Living closer to ethnically diverse co-religionists correlates with socioeconomic differences for a host of reasons apart from frequency of attending church.
How the read/write web was lost
“Tim Berners-Lee (TBL), in his first blog post, reminds us of a very important bit of web history. He writes: ‘The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web…’ TBL might also have noted that the Enquire program that he wrote in 1980 (10 years before the WWW) supported an edit mode.
The idea of a read/write web had been motivating the work of many hypertext developers like TBL long before the web was born. But, the last 10 years experience with the largely ‘read-only’ web has caused many people to forget that the original idea was to create a writeable, creative space — not just a network of things to be read. Fortunately, the growth of blogging is finally causing the renaissance of the read/write web. What we don’t understand, I think, is how the original idea of the read/write web could have been ‘lost'” — Bob Wyman (As I May Think…)
The Hidden State Steps Forward
Jonathan Schell writes in The Nation: “Bush’s choice marks a watershed in the evolution of his Administration. Previously when it was caught engaging in disgraceful, illegal or merely mistaken or incompetent behavior, he would simply deny it. ‘We have found the weapons of mass destruction!’ ‘We do not torture!’ However, further developments in the torture matter revealed a shift. Even as he denied the existence of torture, he and his officials began to defend his right to order it. His Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, refused at his confirmation hearings to state that the torture called waterboarding, in which someone is brought to the edge of drowning, was prohibited. Then when Senator John McCain sponsored a bill prohibiting cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, Bush threatened to veto the legislation to which it was attached. It was only in the face of majority votes in both houses against such treatment that he retreated from his claim.
But in the wiretapping matter, he has so far exhibited no such vacillation. Secret law-breaking has been supplanted by brazen law-breaking. The difference is critical. If abuses of power are kept secret, there is still the possibility that, when exposed, they will be stopped. But if they are exposed and still permitted to continue, then every remedy has failed, and the abuse is permanently ratified. In this case, what will be ratified is a presidency that has risen above the law.“
(Emphasis added — FmH)
Related:
Checks and No Balances
Sydney Schanberg writes in the Village Voice: “Some Bush supporters have attacked the Times for running the piece. On the other hand, some journalists have attacked theTimes for holding it for a year. From where I stand (I’m a Times alumnus), the paper should get credit for digging it out and publishing it. But whatever one’s journalistic point of view, the Times’ decision-making is not the central story here. The president’s secret directive is.”
BAGnewsNotes
Getting between the point and the view: “a progressive blog dedicated to the discussion and analysis of news images.” [via Just Between Strangers]
