science

Tracking children who might commit a crime later

education, law, politics, science, security, tech in changing society / /

From Mark Townsend and Anushka Asthana’s “Put young children on DNA list, urge police” (The Guardian: 16 March 2008):

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

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10,000 hours to reach expertise

art, education, science / /

From Malcolm Gladwell’s “A gift or hard graft?” (The Guardian: 15 November 2008):

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

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Correcting wrong info reinforces false beliefs

education, history, politics, science / /

From Jonathan M. Gitlin’s “Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does” (Ars Technica: 24 September 2008):

We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that’s not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that’s actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief.

This sort of misinformation isn’t hypothetical; in 2003 a study found that viewers of Fox News were significantly more misinformed about the Iraq war, with far greater percentages of viewers erroneously believing that Iraq possessed WMDs or that there was a credible link between the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein than those who got their news from other outlets like NPR and PBS. This has led to the rise of websites like FactCheck and SourceWatch.

Saying that correcting misinformation does little more than reinforce a false belief is a pretty controversial proposal, but the claim is based on a number of studies that examine the effect of political or ideological bias on fact correction. In the studies, volunteers were shown news items or political adverts that contained misinformation, followed by a correction. For example, a study by John Bullock of Yale showed volunteers a political ad created by NARAL that linked Justice John Roberts to a violent anti-abortion group, followed by news that the ad had been withdrawn. Interestingly, Democratic participants had a worse opinion of Roberts after being shown the ad, even after they were told it was false.

Over half (56 percent) of Democratic subjects disapproved of Roberts before the misinformation. That rose to 80 percent afterward, but even after correcting the misinformation, 72 percent of Democratic subjects still had a negative opinion. Republican volunteers, on the other hand, only showed a small increase in disapproval after watching the misinformation (11 percent vs 14 percent).

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Interesting psychological disorders

science, weird / /

From Lauren Davis’ “Delusion or Alien Invasion? Disorders That Make Life Seem Like Scifi” (io9: 27 September 2008):

Capgras Delusion: You believe a loved one has been replaced with an exact duplicate.

…

Reduplicative Paramnesia: You believe that a place or location has been moved to another site, or has been duplicated and exists in two places simultaneously.

…

Alien Hand Syndrome:Your hand seems to have a will of its own.

…

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: You perceive objects as much larger or smaller than they actually are.

…

Fregoli Syndrome: You believe that multiple people in your life are actually a single person in disguise.

…

Jumping Frenchman of Maine Disorder: You obey any order shouted at you in a commanding voice.

…

Delusional Parasitosis: You believe that you are infested with parasites.

…

Cotard Delusion: You believe you have died and that your body is rotting and/or your soul is gone.

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To solve a problem, you first have to figure out the problem

commonplace book, science, true stories / /

From Russell L. Ackoff & Daniel Greenberg’s Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track (2008):

A classic story illustrates very well the potential cost of placing a problem in a disciplinary box. It involves a multistoried office building in New York. Occupants began complaining about the poor elevator service provided in the building. Waiting times for elevators at peak hours, they said, were excessively long. Several of the tenants threatened to break their leases and move out of the building because of this…

Management authorized a study to determine what would be the best solution. The study revealed that because of the age of the building no engineering solution could be justified economically. The engineers said that management would just have to live with the problem permanently.

The desperate manager called a meeting of his staff, which included a young recently hired graduate in personnel psychology…The young man had not focused on elevator performance but on the fact that people complained about waiting only a few minutes. Why, he asked himself, were they complaining about waiting for only a very short time? He concluded that the complaints were a consequence of boredom. Therefore, he took the problem to be one of giving those waiting something to occupy their time pleasantly. He suggested installing mirrors in the elevator boarding areas so that those waiting could look at each other or themselves without appearing to do so. The manager took up his suggestion. The installation of mirrors was made quickly and at a relatively low cost. The complaints about waiting stopped.

Today, mirrors in elevator lobbies and even on elevators in tall buildings are commonplace.

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Energy-efficient washing machines

science / /

From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Is a Dishwasher a Green Machine?” (Slate: 22 April 2008):

To really green up your automatic dishwashing, you should always use the air-drying function, avoid the profligate “rinse hold” setting, wash only full loads, and install the machine far away from your refrigerator.

…

Just promise that you’ll scrape your dishes instead of pre-rinsing, use the shortest wash cycles possible, and buy phosphate-free detergents – or, if you’re handy with a blender, make your own.

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After a stroke, he can write, but can’t read

on writing, science, weird / /

From Oliver Sacks’ “The Case of Anna H.” (The New Yorker: 7 October 2002: 64):

I recently received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist, who told me that he had a somewhat similar problem following a stroke: “The area affected,” he relates, “was my ability to read. I can write, but I can’t read what I’ve just written … So, I can write, but I can’t rewrite …”

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Language shapes thought

science / /

From Celeste Biever’s “Language may shape human thought” (New Scientist: 19 August 2004):

Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.

Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study. 

…

For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.

The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four or five taps.

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What in our brains invest memories with emotion?

science / /

From Steven Pinker’s “What the F***?” (The New Republic: 9 Octobert 2007):

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

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Graveyard shifts and torpedo coffins

commonplace book, history, science, security / /

From Atul Gawande’s “Final Cut: Medical arrogance and the decline of the autopsy” (The New Yorker: 19 March 2001):

… in the nineteenth century … [some doctors] waited until burial and then robbed the graves, either personally or through accomplices, an activity that continued into the twentieth century. To deter such autopsies, some families would post nighttime guards at the grave site – hence the term “graveyard shift.” Others placed heavey stones on the coffins. In 1878, one company in Columbus, Ohio, even sold “torpedo cofins,” equipped with pipe bombs designed to blow up if they were tampered with.

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Incompetent & they don’t know it

commonplace book, science / /

From Erica Goode’s “Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find: They’re blind to own failings, others’ skills” (The New York Times: 18 January 2000):

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well. …

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,” the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market — and repeatedly lose out — and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy. …

Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were — a phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect.”

When high-scoring subjects were asked to “grade” the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

“Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,” the researchers concluded.

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Imagining a future of warring balloons

art, history, language & literature, science, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Tom Reiss’s “Imagining the Worst: How a literary genre anticipated the modern world” (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 108):

… the first mini-boom in invasion fiction began in the seventeen-eighties, when the French developed the hot-air balloon. Soon, French poems and plays were depicting hot-air-propelled flying armies destined for England, and an American poem from 1784 warned, “At sea let the British their neighbors defy– / The French shall have frigates to traverse the sky. … If the English should venture to sea with their fleet, / A host of balloons in a trice they shall meet.” A German story published in 1810, and set in the twenty-first century, describes human populations living in deep underground shelters, with shops and churches, while balloon warfare between Europeans and invading Asian armies rages in the skies above.

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Warning signs of an incipient serial killer

commonplace book, law, science / /

From Wikipedia’s “MacDonald triad” (26 July 2006):

The MacDonald triad are three major personality traits in children that are said to be warning signs for the tendency to become a serial killer. They were first described by J. M. MacDonald in his article “The Threat to Kill” in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

  • Firestarting, invariably just for the thrill of destroying things.
  • Cruelty to animals. Many children can be cruel to animals, such as pulling the legs off of spiders, but future serial killers often kill larger animals, like dogs and cats, and frequently for their solitary enjoyment rather than to impress peers.
  • Bedwetting beyond the age when children normally grow out of such behaviour.

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The Cold War as game theory

history, politics, science / /

From Charles Platt’s “The Profits of Fear” (August 2005):

Game theory began with the logical proposition that in a strategic two-player game, either player may try to obtain an advantage by bluffing. If the stakes are low, perhaps you can take a chance on trusting your opponent when he makes a seemingly fair and decent offer; but when the penalty for being deceived can be nuclear annihilation, taking a chance is out of the question. You work on the principle that the person you are dealing with may be utterly ruthless, unethical, and untrustworthy, no matter how peaceful his intentions may seem. You also have to assume that he may be smart enough to use game theory just like you; and therefore, he will assume that _you_ are ruthless, unethical, and untrustworthy, no matter how peaceful _your_ intentions may seem. In this way a supposedly rational system of assessment leads to a highly emotional outcome in which trust becomes impossible and strategy is based entirely on fear. This is precisely what happened during the decades of the Cold War.

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To combat phishing, change browser design philosophy

business, law, science, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Federico Biancuzzi’s “Phishing with Rachna Dhamija” (SecurityFocus: 19 June 2006):

We discovered that existing security cues are ineffective, for three reasons:

1. The indicators are ignored (23% of participants in our study did not look at the address bar, status bar, or any SSL indicators).

2. The indicators are misunderstood. For example, one regular Firefox user told me that he thought the yellow background in the address bar was an aesthetic design choice of the website designer (he didn’t realize that it was a security signal presented by the browser). Other users thought the SSL lock icon indicated whether a website could set cookies.

3. The security indicators are trivial to spoof. Many users can’t distinguish between an actual SSL indicator in the browser frame and a spoofed image of that indicator that appears in the content of a webpage. For example, if you display a popup window with no address bar, and then add an image of an address bar at the top with the correct URL and SSL indicators and an image of the status bar at the bottom with all the right indicators, most users will think it is legitimate. This attack fooled more than 80% of participants. …

Currently, I’m working on other techniques to prevent phishing in conjunction with security skins. For example, in a security usability class I taught this semester at Harvard, we conducted a usability study that shows that simply showing a user’s history information (for example, “you’ve been to this website many times” or “you’ve never submitted this form before”) can significantly increase a user’s ability to detect a spoofed website and reduce their vulnerability to phishing attacks. Another area I’ve been investigating are techniques to help users recover from errors and to identify when errors are real, or when they are simulated. Many attacks rely on users not being able to make this distinction.

You presented the project called Dynamic Security Skins (DSS) nearly one year ago. Do you think the main idea behind it is still valid after your tests?

Rachna Dhamija: I think that our usability study shows how easy it is to spoof security indicators, and how hard it is for users to distinguish legitimate security indicators from those that have been spoofed. Dynamic Security Skins is a proposal that starts from the assumption that any static security indicator can easily be copied by attacker. Instead, we propose that users create their own customized security indicators that are hard for an attacker to predict. Our usability study also shows that indicators placed in the periphery or outside of the user’s focus of attention (such as the SSL lock icon in the status bar) may be ignored entirely by some users. DSS places the security indicator (a secret image) at the point of password entry, so the user can not ignore it.

DSS adds a trusted window in the browser dedicated to username and password entry. The user chooses a photographic image (or is assigned a random image), which is overlaid across the window and text entry boxes. If the window displays the user’s personal image, it is safe for the user to enter his password. …

With security skins, we were trying to solve not user authentication, but the reverse problem – server authentication. I was looking for a way to convey to a user that his client and the server had successfully negotiated a protocol, that they have mutually authenticated each other and agreed on the same key. One way to do this would be to display a message like “Server X is authenticated”, or to display a binary indicator, like a closed or open lock. The problem is that any static indicator can be easily copied by an attacker. Instead, we allow the server and the user’s browser to each generate an abstract image. If the authentication is successful, the two images will match. This image can change with each authentication. If it is captured, it can’t be replayed by an attacker and it won’t reveal anything useful about the user’s password. …

Instead of blaming specific development techniques, I think we need to change our design philosophy. We should assume that every interface we develop will be spoofed. The only thing an attacker can’t simulate is an interface he can’t predict. This is the principle that DSS relies on. We should make it easy for users to personalize their interfaces. Look at how popular screensavers, ringtones, and application skins are – users clearly enjoy the ability to personalize their interfaces. We can take advantage of this fact to build spoof resistant interfaces.

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The birth of Geology & gradualism as a paradigm shift from catastrophism

history, religion, science, technology / /

From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change : Terraforming Earth” (Amazon Shorts: 31 July 2005):

This view, by the way, was in keeping with a larger and older paradigm called gradualism, the result of a dramatic and controversial paradigm shift of its own from the nineteenth century, one that is still a contested part of our culture wars, having to do with the birth of geology as a field, and its discovery of the immense age of the Earth. Before that, Earth’s history tended to be explained in a kind of Biblical paradigm, in which the Earth was understood to be several thousand years old, because of genealogies in the Bible, so that landscape features tended to be explained by events like Noah’s flood. This kind of “catastrophism” paradigm was what led Josiah Whitney to maintain that Yosemite Valley must have been formed by a cataclysmic earthquake, for instance; there simply hadn’t been time for water and ice to have carved something as hard as granite. It was John Muir who made the gradualist argument for glacial action over millions of years; and the eventual acceptance of his explanation was part of the general shift to gradualist explanations for Earth’s landforms, which also meant there was another time for evolution to have taken place. Gradualism also led by extension to thinking that the various climate regimes of the past had also come about fairly gradually.

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Paradigm shifts explained

history, science, tech in changing society / /

From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change : Terraforming Earth” (Amazon Shorts: 31 July 2005):

… paradigm shifts are exciting moments in science’s ongoing project of self-improvement, making itself more accurately mapped to reality as it is discovered and teased out; this process of continual recalibration and improvement is one of the most admirable parts of science, which among other things is a most powerful and utopian set of mental habits; an attitude toward reality that I have no hesitation in labeling a kind of worship or devotion. And in this ongoing communal act of devotion, paradigm shifts are very good at revealing how science is conducted, in part because each one represents a little (or big) crisis of understanding.

As Thomas Kuhn described the process in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, workers in the various branches of science build over time an interconnected construct of concepts and beliefs that allow them to interpret the data from their experiments, and fit them into a larger picture of the world that makes the best sense of the evidence at hand. What is hoped for is a picture that, if anyone else were to question it, and follow the train of reasoning and all the evidence used to support it, they too would agree with it. This is one of the ways science is interestingly utopian; it attempts to say things that everyone looking at the same evidence would agree to.

So, using this paradigm, always admitted to be a work in progress, scientists then conduct what Kuhn calls “normal science,” elucidating further aspects of reality by using the paradigm to structure their questions and their answers. Sometimes paradigms are useful for centuries; other times, for shorter periods. Then it often happens that scientists in the course of doing “normal science” begin to get evidence from the field that cannot be explained within the paradigm that has been established. At first such “anomalies” are regarded as suspect in themselves, precisely because they don’t fit the paradigm. They’re oddities, and something might be wrong with them as such. Thus they are ignored, or tossed aside, or viewed with suspicion, or in some other way bracketed off. Eventually, if enough of them pile up, and they seem similar in kind, or otherwise solid as observations, attempts might be made to explain them within the old paradigm, by tweaking or re-interpreting the paradigm itself, without actually throwing the paradigm out entirely.

For instance, when it was found that Newtonian laws of gravitation could not account for the speed of Mercury, which was moving a tiny bit faster than it ought to have been, even though Newton’s laws accounted for all the other planets extremely well, at first some astronomers suggested there might be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, too close to the Sun for us to see. They even gave this potential planet a name, Vulcan; but they couldn’t see it, and calculations revealed that this hypothetical Vulcan still would not explain the discrepancy in Mercury’s motion. The discrepancy remained an anomaly, and was real enough and serious enough to cast the whole Newtonian paradigm into doubt among the small group of people who worried about it and wondered what could be causing it.

It was Einstein who then proposed that Mercury moved differently than predicted because spacetime itself curved around masses, and near the huge mass of the Sun the effect was large enough to be noticeable.

Whoah! This was a rather mind-bogglingly profound explanation for a little orbital discrepancy in Mercury; but Einstein also made a new prediction and suggested an experiment; if his explanation were correct, then light too would bend in the gravity well around the sun, and so the light of a star would appear from behind the sun a little bit before the astronomical tables said that it should. The proposed experiment presented some observational difficulties, but a few years later it was accomplished during a total eclipse of the sun, and the light of a certain star appeared before it ought to have by just the degree Einstein had predicted. And so Einstein’s concepts concerning spacetime began to be accepted and elaborated, eventually forming a big part of the paradigm known as the “standard model,” within which new kinds of “normal science” in physics and astronomy could be done. …

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How to exercise your brain

commonplace book, science / /

From Robyn Williams’s “How to Keep Your Brain Young” (The Science Show: 24 September 2005):

Ian Robertson: Seven steps for keeping your brain functioning optimally when you’re older, but not just when you’re older but throughout life are: One, Aerobic fitness – amazing effects on the brain. Mental stimulation, both general mental stimulation and there are also specific memory and other training exercises you can do. The third one is new learning, learning new skills and new facts. The fourth one is reducing stress; severe stress has poor effects on the brain. The fifth one is diet; a diet that’s high in antioxidants and fresh fruit and vegetables and also fish and low in saturated fats has quite extraordinary effects on the brain. The sixth one is social interaction and a rich social environment. This is correlated with enhanced cognitive function. And finally, think young. Thoughts about age, which may not be justified, can actually influence your behaviour, and by influencing your behaviour perhaps to behave in an old way can thereby have deleterious effects on your brain. …

But that’s what education is all about; it’s about trying to train people to think, trying to train them to use their brain capacity. The trouble is we tend to stop being educated when we’re about in the early 20s, and that may be part of the reason why we see more of a drop off of mental capacity as we get older than we need see. If you keep training your brain – it’s a bit like a vintage car: a vintage car can go as fast as a new car but needs more maintenance. Well that’s true of the vintage brain as well when you’re over 60 or over 50 even.

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Patenting is hurting scientific research & progress

business, law, science, technology / /

From American Association for the Advancement of Science’s “The Effects of Patenting in the AAAS Scientific Community” [250 kb PDF] (2006):

Forty percent of respondents who had acquired patented technologies since January 2001 reported difficulties in obtaining those technologies. Industry bioscience respondents reported the most problems, with 76 percent reporting that their research had been affected by such difficulties. In contrast, only 35 percent of academic bioscience respondents reported difficulties that affected their research.

Of the 72 respondents who reported that their work had been affected by the technology acquisition process, 58 percent of those reported that their work was delayed. Fifty percent reported that they had to change their research, and 28 percent reported abandoning their research project as acquisition of the necessary technologies involved overly complex licensing negotiations.

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