Manipulating Memory

Psychologists are finding more and more evidence that our memories can be very easily manipulated. From Neuronarrative:

In the first study, researchers wanted to know if they could convince people that they’d committed an act they never did. To accomplish this, they created a computerized multiple choice gambling task for participants to complete, which entailed increasing the winnings from a sum of money as much as possible by answering questions. The money was withdrawn from an online bank based on cues given to participants by the computer program: when they answered questions correctly, they were told to withdraw money from the bank; when they answered incorrectly, they were instructed to deposit money back into the bank. Subjects were videotaped while they completed the task.

Afterwards, participants were asked to sit and discuss the task with a researcher. During the discussion, the researcher said he’d identified “a problem” during the task, and then accused the participant of stealing money from the bank. Some of the participants were told that video evidence showed them taking the money (but they weren’t actually shown the video), while others were shown video “proving” that they took the money. What the participants didn’t know, of course, is that the video had been edited to make it appear as if they did something they had not. Participants were then asked to sign a confession stating that they did in fact take money from the bank when they should have deposited it back.

Participants were given two chances to sign the confession, and by the end of the day all of them did. 87% signed on the first request, and the remaining 13% signed on the second. Interestingly, even participants merely told that the video showed them taking the money eventually complied with the confession.

Break out the Red Uniforms

From New Scientist:

The powerful influence of colour on sporting success was first discovered a few years ago, when evolutionary anthropologists Russell Hill and Robert Barton of Durham University, UK, were looking for some way to test the idea that colours influence human behaviour. The 2004 Athens Olympics were coming up, and it dawned on them that in some Olympic combat sports - boxing, taekwondo, Graeco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling - competitors are randomly assigned a red or blue kit. "We realised that this was a ready-made experiment to study the effects of colour on match outcome," Barton says.

When they analysed the results they found that shirt colour appeared to influence the result, with nearly 55 per cent of bouts being won by the competitor in red. In closely fought bouts it was 62 per cent (Nature, vol 435, p 293). "It should have been roughly 50 per cent red, 50 per cent blue, and this was a statistically significant deviation," Barton says. "Skill and strength may be the main factors - if you're rubbish, a red shirt won't stop you from losing, but when fights were relatively symmetrical, colour tipped the balance."

Barton says that the differences may be accounted for, to some extent, by a referee's unconscious preference for red - which he argues is an inherited preference - as seen in the taekwondo experiment. He also believes colour affects the combatants' mood and behaviour. "There is now good experimental evidence that red stimuli are perceived as dominant and that they cause negative effects on performance in those viewing them," Barton says. "It is plausible that wearing red also makes individuals feel more confident, although this hasn't yet been tested."

First Day of School

Ben starts first grade.

The Voter as Constitutional Monarch

In this sense, in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.

--Slavoj Žižek, Berlusconi in Tehran

Kristof on Health Reform

Great column:

The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.

So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.

If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes — all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.

Farnsworth House

This is the famous Farnsworth House, designed by Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1951. At the time it was very controversial, and House Beautiful called it a communist attempt to supplant traditional American values. Now it's a National Historic Landmark (which is actually difficult to achieve, unlike getting listed on the National Register of Historic Places), and I suppose this represents progress of a sort.

My objections to it are 1) it's ugly, and 2) it's completely unlivable. The original owner was a sort of half-mad ascetic who enjoyed the rigor of living in a glass cube. When British magnate Peter Palumbo bought it, mostly as a place to show off his sculpture collection, he made major changes (including curtains) but still found it impossibly uncomfortable to stay in this masterpiece for more than a day or two. And this is the thing that drives me crazy about architects. A house is a place to live, not a sculpture or a statement about artistic values. So as far as I am concerned, a house that nobody wants to live in is a failure, no matter how cool it looks.

And, as we have recently discovered, the house isn't sited very well.

The National Trust is trying to raise money for some kind of flood control, but I have a better idea: let it float away.

The Golden Mean of Drinking

A new, large study of people in Britain and Sweden shows that heavy drinkers and teetotalers both have higher rates of depression and anxiety than people who drink moderately.

The happiest people, in contrast, were those who averaged about two glasses of alcohol per week.

Looking for reasons why non-drinkers are more depressed, they offer two: some people don't drink because they are in poor health, and people who don't drink report having fewer friends and going out less.

"We see that this group is less socially well-adjusted than other groups”, Stordal says. “Generally when people are with friends, it is more acceptable in Western societies to drink than not to drink. While the questionnaire recorded non-drinkers’ subjective perception of the situation, a number of other studies also confirm that teetotalers experience some level of social exclusion. ”

District 9

I saw District 9 last night, and I liked it. I think much of the praise heaped on it comes from the kind of film buffs who hunger for something different, because while it isn't wonderful it certainly is unusual. The very original plot concerns aliens who come to earth and get shoved into a refugee camp, treated like we generally treat unwanted refugees. It has the most unlikely hero I've seen in years, and some quite acceptable bad guys. I would give it a B+.

Spain, 1937

The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

--W.H. Auden

Edward M. Kennedy RIP

What always impressed me most about Ted Kennedy was his endurance. He just kept on going, working through scandal and tragedy, in the majority and in the minority, through triumph and failure. He worked on health care reform from his first year in office until his death, always pushing the same principles. He wasn't brilliant or virtuous, but he spent a lifetime working hard for what he believed in, and that counts for a lot.

Matt Yglesias puts it this way, analyzing Kennedy's most famous speech:

Its closing line is, I think, crucially important: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

I’m never able to express myself nearly that well, but what I take Kennedy to be doing here is trying to offer an alternative to the boom-bust mentality that often overtakes American progressives. There’s a tendency to get extremely wound up with optimism about the imminent dawn of sudden and radical change for the better, and then intensely bitter, cynical, and depressed when that fails to materialize. The reality, however, is that change is hard. That’s not an excuse for the people who stand in its way, it’s the reality. But if you respond to the difficulty of making things better by giving up or getting frustrated, then it only gets harder.

Building a better country and a world is work—hard work—and it’s work that goes on. And on. And on.

Wandering in Circles

It seems that if people can see the sun or the moon, or any reference point, they can walk in straight lines. But in the dark or in the woods on a sunless day, they really do walk in circles.

Summer is Over

The season's first soccer practice; that's Ben in the orange. Actually it should have been the second, but Robert blew his off.

Abolished Loneliness?

From Christopher Hitchens' Atlantic review of Elizabeth Edwards' new book:

She has herself, meanwhile, become a best-selling model for many readers, and not, I am sure, only for female ones. She is a person with many friends and many internal and moral and intellectual resources, yet she confesses in the most disarming—and helpful—manner how much the Internet came to her aid, first when her son was killed and second when she discovered that a term had been set on her own life. The importance of this medium in bringing about a great unspoken social reform—the abolition of loneliness—has not to my knowledge been better evoked.

Has the internet abolished loneliness?

Getting Richer

This table, drawn from Census Data, shows some of the concrete benefits that our ever increasing wealth has brought us over the past century.

The Inspector General's Report on CIA Torture

From Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent:

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

The more we know, the more the claims made by Cheney and others about the importance and usefulness of "enhanced interrogation" dissolve into the fog of political war.

Turning Science into Therapies

How long does it take for a "scientific breakthrough" to lead to an accepted medical therapy? According to a study published last year in Science, about 24 years on average, with a span of 14 to 44 years. And very few "breakthroughs" announced with fanfare ever do lead to any real medicine:

Despite a major interest in translational research (1-3), development of new, effective medical interventions is difficult. Of 101 very promising claims of new discoveries with clear clinical potential that were made in major basic science journals between 1979 and 1983, only five resulted in interventions with licensed clinical use by 2003 and only one had extensive clinical use (4). Drug discovery faces major challenges (5-8). Moreover, for several interventions supported by high-profile clinical studies, subsequent evidence from larger and/or better studies contradicts their effectiveness or shows smaller benefits (9).

This is from one of my skeptical heroes, John Ioannidis, author of the brilliant "Why Most Published Research Findings are False."

Measles Returns to New Zealand

In a bit of disturbing news, the number of measles cases in New Zealand this year is more than 7 times last year's total. The likely reason: the vaccination rate for children is only 83%. Measles has also reappeared in the UK, where the vaccination rate has fallen below 90%.

What Happens to Plastic in the Ocean

There have long been rumors about enormous dumps of plastic in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, where all the world's plastic bags and styrofoam cups get whirled together by currents into islands of debris. Alas, expeditions launched to find these floating trash dumps were generally disappointing, leading to all sorts of strange theories about plastic sinking to the bottom or getting pulverized into tiny pieces.

Turns out that most of the plastic that goes into the Ocean dissolves. Warm salt water can turn most plastics back into hydrocarbon molecules in a matter of months. While this discovery frees us from the nightmare of the seas getting covered by continent-sized mats of plastic trash, it also means that plastic washing into the sea is just like piplines disgorging chemical waste.

And while I'm on the subject, it's worth pointing out that most of the plastic in the ocean doesn't come from cruise ships or nefarious waste dumpers, it washes in from the land. Litter = chemical pollution of the oceans.

Money and Happiness

Statistically speaking, money buys a little happiness, but not very much. Every study that compares income and happiness finds that while poverty can make you miserable, once you rise above poverty more money makes you only a very little bit more satisfied with your life. Now why should that be? It seems that the real problem with money is how we spend it:

A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it’s just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.

“Just because money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t mean money cannot buy happiness,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. “People just might be using it wrong.”

Dunn and others are beginning to offer an intriguing explanation for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The problem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

What makes people happy isn't stuff, it's connections to other people. I suspect that one reason money doesn't do more for us is that we typically use it to insulate ourselves from other people, for example, by buying houses with such big yards that we never see our neighbors. When poor people move they rent a truck and call in their friends, but rich people hire movers. Helping your friends move is a drag, but this is the kind of thing that builds strong social networks, and friends -- not money, not freedom from carrying mattresses -- are what makes us happy. I am quite certain that broadband internet is one of the most important things my family buys, since we use it mainly to keep in touch with friends.

Another part of the equation shows up in the value of vacations and other adventures. When daily life gets dreary, it is great to have something different to look forward to, or something special to remember. One study I read showed that going to a new restaurant made married couples much happier than going to one they'd been to before. We need variety in our lives, and when we spend money to get it, we may be doing ourselves a lot of good.

The Appendix has a Function?

Another of my cherished ideas about the world is shaken -- now they tell me that the appendix serves a purpose:

The lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.

I wonder how I missed this news when it first came out.

The Wilderness

We're bidding on a job at the Wilderness Battlefield, and it will be a big help for us to know what the sites look like, and since I had never been to this battlefield I thought it would be a good idea to drive down and have a look. It's about 11o miles from my house, Interstate almost the whole way, so I thought I could get there and back in about four hours. Silly me. For reasons I don't understand traffic on I-95 crawled all the way from Washington to Fredericksburg -- this is Saturday! -- and as soon as I got off the Interstate I got stuck in a local traffic jam surrounding the string of strip malls that lines Route 3. At this point I was in the middle of a terrific thunderstorm that kept up furiously all the way to the battlefield. Not wanting to get soaked, I went first to stop in at the Visitors' Center for a chat with the rangers. After the rain abated a bit I went driving around the battlefield. The Battle of the Wilderness was fought in dense thickets of saplings spread across a generally flat landscape, and the soldiers all complained that it was impossible to really see what they were doing or get any sense of what was happening around them.

And so it still is. This is what the Wilderness Battlefield looks like:

I took more pictures, but except for the ones of monuments they all look exactly like this. There is no point from which you can see anything or get any sense of how the battle unfolded. It's just mile after mile of woods. This makes for an unsatisfying experience as a visitor, but on the other hand I suppose it gives one a faint sense of what the place was like for the men who fought there. Just like them, I was wandering in a confusing woodland where all directions looked the same, not knowing who would have been going in which direction or why.

And then home through even worse traffic, not getting back until eight hours after I left. At least I had a good book to listen to along the way.

Science Fiction and Bad Technology

From John Scalzi's list of badly designed stuff in Star Wars:

Lightsabers
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.

Blasters
A tactical nightmare: They're incredibly loud, especially for firing what are essentially light beams. The fire ordnance is so slow it can be dodged, and it comes out as a streak of light that reveals your position to your enemies. Let's not even go near the idea of light beams being slow enough to dodge; that's just something you have let go of, or risk insanity.

Which brings me to the topic of how many science fiction plots turn on finding ways to make the technology not work. Surely by 2300 we will have self-aiming guns that never miss, but Star Wars, Star Trek, and tons of other sci-fi stories still feature guys blazing away with cool looking weapons that turn out to be a lot less effective than an AK-47. Lisa and I are always laughing at the number of different ways the Star Trek: Next Generation writers have found to keep their sensor array from working when they really need it. It's the niobium in the rocks! It's the magnetic storms! But at least the Enterprise has a sensor array, putting its crew at a distinct advantage to the poor slobs of Alien and Aliens, who are reduced to sort of peering around ineffectually whenever they encounter clouds or darkness.

Afghanistan

Outstanding long article by Rory Stewart on the situation in Afghanistan. A sample:

It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

Farming the Sea

Interesting piece at National Geographic about future fish farms. The latest notion is to build big, robot-controlled fish cages that could roam the oceans under their own very minimal power, letting the fish be kept clean by currents and largely fed by whatever comes in through the mesh of the cage. This makes some sense.

I have a question about aquaculture. There are big areas of the ocean where there isn't much life of any kind, especially in the central Pacific. And the reason there isn't much life is that there aren't sufficient minerals in the water, especially iron, for the algae that start the food chain. What I wonder is, why can't find some way to disperse iron and other minerals into the water in these locations, starting our own food chains?

Everybody knows that some parts of the ocean are much more productive than others, again, largely because of the mineral content of the water. Why can't we change that?

I really don't know if this is feasible or not.

Sandy Point

I took today off and Lisa and I took four of our children to Sandy Point State Park, a mostly artificial beach by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It was delightful. It was 92 degrees today, but with enough cloudiness to cloak the burning sun and make the temperature bearable. The beach wasn't nearly as crowded as it is on weekends. My children were in good spirits. The water was a little like dirty bath water, but it was still cool enough to feel soothing, and I felt chilled when I got out.

The waves were just big enough to bob on. This was perfect for Clara, who is still too scared of big waves to go in the ocean, and my sons managed to have plenty of fun without breakers to ride. Boys will be boys:

Women Soldiers

One of the most radical things we have done in the radical modern world is to erase much of the distinction between men's and women's work. Every agricultural society we know about has fairly rigid divisions between the work that men and women do, and these distinctions are fundamental to the identities of both men and women. Our move toward a society in which men and women do pretty much the same kinds of work strikes me as a very big change. Sometimes I read articles about topics like sexual harassment, or how much corporations should do to accomodate working mothers, that seem to imply that this would be very easy if a few nasty people weren't being wicked. But these are big changes, and they have raised and will continue to raise many problems for all of us.

Since this is my general attitude to the problem, I find it very interesting that women in the American military are increasingly doing the same things as men, and facing the same risks, without anyone making much of a fuss over it. The kind of conservatives who go crazy about the minor changes embodied in Obama's health care proposals are mostly silent about women carrying guns and getting killed in combat. Where, I wonder, are the fundamentalists on this one? Aren't female soldiers a bigger violation of Old Testament norms than limits on medical tests?

But the changes go on, and I can't remember the last time I heard an important politician say anything about them. Right now about 1 in 20 of the soldiers in our front-line Iraqi bases is a woman. The attitude of American officers seems to be pretty much my attitude toward the whole problem of breaking down gender barriers, that is, the problems involved are only what would expect from any major organizational change. It probably helps that the female soldiers aren't exactly shrinking violets. From a piece in today's NY Times:

Staff Sgt. Patricia F. Bradford, 27, a psychological operations soldier, said that slights, subtle and not, were common, and some were easier to brush off than others. Women are still viewed derisively at times in the confined, occasionally tense space of an outpost like Warhorse.

“You’re a bitch, a slut or a dyke — or you’re married, but even if you’re married, you’re still probably one of the three,” Sergeant Bradford said.

At the same time, she and other female soldiers cope with the slights, showing a disarming brashness.

“I think being a staff sergeant — and a bitch — helps deflect those things,” she added.

The issues that arise in having women in combat — harassment, bias, hardship, even sexual relations — are, she and others said, a matter of discipline, maturity and professionalism rather than an argument for separating the sexes.

I think the lack of any political opposition to women serving in combat reflects two major changes that have taken place in America. First, the military has become a career path full of specialists, not a trial of manhood for all the males in the population. Second, most Americans have accepted that some women can do almost anything a man can do, and that if women can so something, it is just wrong to keep them from doing it.

coffee alone

Right now I am enjoying a little pleasure I get all too seldom, sitting alone in the dining room in the early morning, drinking coffee, reading the news, and feeling relaxed. Five days a week I am hurrying out the door, and Saturdays and Sundays I usually sleep in to make up for the sleep deficit I accumulate during the week. But today I am off, my body woke me up at 6, and the kids are all abed, so the moment is all mine.

The Ness of Brodgar

Amazing finds at a neolithic village in the Orkneys called the Ness of Brodgar, including a structure with stone foundation walls more than twenty meters long that they are calling a "neolithic cathedral." Quick summary in the London Times here.

All of which raises the question, why were the Orkneys such a good place to live in the Neolithic, when they are such a lousy place to live now?

Below, the Standing Stones of Stenness, which are very close to the new dig site.

Butterflies

The butterflies are finally swarming around my garden, a month later than usual. Besides lots of Tiger Swallowtails like this one, we have Zebra Swallowtails, black and purple swallowtails, Monarchs, and little yellow and white ones.

Invisible Galaxy Distorting Milky Way

This is eerie:

A LARGE satellite galaxy may be lurking, hidden from view, next door to our own.

Sukanya Chakrabarti and Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that the gravity of a nearby galaxy was causing perturbations that have been observed in gas on the fringes of the Milky Way. "We did a large range of simulations where we varied the mass of the perturber and the distance of closest approach," says Chakrabarti. In the best-fitting simulation, the unseen galaxy has about 1 per cent of the Milky Way's mass, or 10 billion times the mass of the sun.

That's a lot. It means the object has roughly the same mass as the Milky Way's brightest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

Right now, says Chakrabarti, the galaxy is roughly 300,000 light years away from us - about twice as far away as the LMC. But the simulations suggest it follows a highly elongated elliptical path, and about 300 million years ago it swept through our own galaxy just 16,000 light years from the galactic centre - closer in than Earth - disturbing the Milky Way's outskirts as it went.