"I think this is a very important piece of science," said Douglas J. McCauley of the University of California, Santa Barbara. That's particularly high praise coming from Dr. McCauley, who has been a scathing critic of Dr. Costanza's attempt to put price tags on ecosystem services.
"This paper reads to me like an annual financial report for Planet Earth," Dr. McCauley said. "We learn whether the dollar value of Earth's major assets have gone up or down."
The group last calculated this value back in 1997 and it rose sharply over the past 17 years, even as those natural habitats are disappearing. This line from the article stunned me:
Dr. Costanza and his colleagues estimate that the world's reefs shrank from 240,000 square miles in 1997 to 108,000 in 2011.
Coral reefs shrank by more than half over the past 17 years...I had no idea the reef situation was that bad. Jesus.
This NRA seeks empirical economic research projects, historical analog research, concepts for
encouraging further economic activity in space, and unique stimulatory activities that promote
novel private/commercial uses of space, new private/commercial space opportunities, and
emerging private/commercial capabilities in suborbital, orbital or deep space environments that
enable discoveries, development and applications from these environments.
Specific topics of interest include:
Historical Economic Studies in the following areas:
Economic history of NASA programs;
Long term historical impact of the space program;
Economic and business histories of American private sector space enterprises (including companies, societies, and projects);
Economic histories of historical analog activities for space exploration (including detailed investigations into the financing of historical expeditions, settlements, and transportation infrastructure projects).
Current and Near-Term Trends, Analyses and Concepts for accelerating American space development, in the following areas:
Utilizing market mechanisms, private sector partnerships, and expanding markets to serve non-traditional commercial entities;
Promoting broader uses of space for public and/or economic benefit, including job creation and/or workforce development, and maintaining American leadership in the global space marketplace;
Encouraging engagement on space activities from citizen makers, crowd-funders, citizen explorers, and participation of innovators from non-traditional sectors that can have a transformative effect on future private/commercial space developments;
Identifying and evaluating economic applications of space systems design to earth-scale economic analysis, including integrated modeling of globalized economic systems and earth systems science;
Examining competitive stresses, potentials for public benefit, and issues affecting NASA or the nation in the commercial space arena;
Monitoring, investigating and reporting on opportunities enabled by the rapidly growing national and international entrepreneurial space communities;
Assessing the adequacy of economic assessment and evaluation tools and methods for space architectures;
Conducting case studies of space development projects that can be used to inform NASA on the opportunities and impediments to economic development in space.
Economics, Systems Analysis, and Projections, in orbital and deep space development; lunar development, asteroid development, and Mars development.
I saw the trailer for the new Planet of the Apes movie last night and it looks amazing, but that's not what I came to talk about. A recent paper shows that chimps do better in some strategy games than humans.
Chimps play the cat and mouse game very well. First, the chimps converge on the Nash Equilibrium strategies. In one set of games the Nash equilibrium strategies had randomization frequencies of .5, .75 and .8 and the chimps played .5, .73 and .79. Second, when payoffs change the chimps adapt their strategies very quickly simply by observation of outcomes.
Camerer et al. also tested humans in similar games and they found that humans often deviate from NE play and they adjust their strategies more slowly when payoffs change, i.e. they learn more slowly! The only thing that Camerer didn't do was to play humans against chimps in the same game. That would have been awesome!
But that's nothing compared to this video of a chimp remembering the placement of nine numbers on a screen after seeing them for less than a quarter of a second:
It cannot be said that Netflix does not know what the Internet likes: to advertise for the soon arriving season of Orange Is the New Black, the site has recast the Arrested Development credits with the inmates of Litchfield. It's funny to think that this time last year Netflix's big story was the (disappointing or not that bad, depending on who you talk to) fourth season of Arrested Development, and the Orange Is the New Black phenomenon was just waiting in the wings.
So while you wait in anticipation of the second season of Orange, and wonder whether a fifth season of AD will ever happen, enjoy a Ron Howard voiceover: "Now the story of a wealthy girl who lost everything..."
Written with academic proposals in mind, but good advice for drafting anything meant to persuade. “After you write anything, go back and replace all qualitative statements with quantitative ones. Knowing and showing the numbers is basically the only thing that separates a Scientist from a Guy Selling Vitamins At The Mall. Both callings have their place, but government agencies are better oriented towards funding the former”
…the feminist prescription doesn’t supply what men slipping down into the darkness of misogyny most immediately need: not lectures on how they need to respect women as sexual beings, but reasons, despite their lack of sexual experience, to first respect themselves as men.
And also:
…our society has lost sight of a basic human truth: A culture that too tightly binds sex and self-respect is likely, in the long run, to end up with less and less of both.
We measure the distributional preferences of a large, diverse sample of Americans by embedding modified dictator games that vary the relative price of redistribution in the American Life Panel. Subjects' choices are generally consistent with maximizing a (social) utility function. We decompose distributional preferences into two distinct components - fair-mindedness (tradeoffs between oneself and others) and equality-efficiency tradeoffs - by estimating constant elasticity of substitution utility functions at the individual level. Approximately equal numbers of Americans have equality-focused and efficiency-focused distributional preferences. After controlling for individual characteristics, our experimental measures of equality-efficiency tradeoffs predict the political decisions of our subjects.
We compare behavior in experiments measuring distributional preferences during the "Great Recession" to behavior in identical experiments conducted during the preceding economic boom. Subjects are drawn from a diverse pool of students whose socioeconomic composition is largely held constant by the university, mitigating concerns about differential selection across macroeconomic conditions. Subjects exposed to the recession are more selfish and more willing to sacrifice equality to enhance efficiency. Reproducing recessionary conditions inside the laboratory by confronting subjects with losses has the same impact on distributional preferences, bolstering the interpretation that economic circumstances, rather than other factors, are driving our results.
Across the pond, in Germany, companies are doing some incredible things with 3D printing. They're using it to make food. Actual food, like the kind that tastes good.
One of the more successful projects is Biozoon's Smoothfood, which was developed to print food for senior citizens in retirement and assisted living communities. Those communities have a major need for food that their residents do not need to chew. But rather than feeding them baby food for adults, Smoothfood creates melt-in-your-mouth food (literally) from fresh ingredients using a 3D printer. The food looks like food, tastes like food, but has the consistency of puree that prevents residents from choking.
The main questions on our mind: how does it work and how does it taste? Munchies spoke with Sandra Forstner, a project manager at Biozoon, about the 3D food. According to Forstner, it's actually quite delicious. They use cauliflower, peas, chicken, pork, potatoes and pasta to make their foods. It's bound together with a top secret, safe for consumption product (not agar.)
The food puree is injected into the printer as "ink", and out comes the final product. The printer is controlled by software that determines the shape and you can set the shape to match the food: carrot puree is printed in the shape of diced carrots, but with the texture of roasted carrots.
As for the taste, Forstner says it "tastes like normal food. It is made from fresh ingredients, so the taste doesn't change. One of our goals is not to change the flavor; the texturizing system doesn’t change it." Pretty nifty.
On the costs and benefits of staying thin. “There are a number of euphemisms for female thinness that do not require a man to make the impolite admission of his exclusive attraction to women with very little body fat. Though ‘active’ and ‘full of energy’ make respectable showings, they are a distance second and third from ‘a woman who takes care of herself’. When he says ‘herself’, he means, ‘her body’”
The New Yorker and First We Feast each has an account of a talk given by NYU professor George Solt, who presented some of his research on the history of ramen.
World War II all but destroyed ramen's first wave of popularity. Thanks to food shortages and famine, the government placed tight regulations on food supplies, and earning a profit via restaurants or pushcarts was strictly prohibited until 1949. Some wheat flour made it onto the black market, though, and many of the country's unemployed turned to hawking ramen. Which means, Solt points out, that selling future all-nighter fuel could and did land people in jail.
Can infrastructure investment win "hearts and minds"? We analyze a famous case in the early stages of dictatorship - the building of the motorway network in Nazi Germany. The Autobahn was one of the most important projects of the Hitler government. It was intended to reduce unemployment, and was widely used for propaganda purposes. We examine its role in increasing support for the NS regime by analyzing new data on motorway construction and the 1934 plebiscite, which gave Hitler greater powers as head of state. Our results suggest that road building was highly effective, reducing opposition to the nascent Nazi regime.
Suppose that an autonomous car is faced with a terrible decision to crash into one of two objects. It could swerve to the left and hit a Volvo sport utility vehicle (SUV), or it could swerve to the right and hit a Mini Cooper. If you were programming the car to minimize harm to others–a sensible goal–which way would you instruct it go in this scenario?
As a matter of physics, you should choose a collision with a heavier vehicle that can better absorb the impact of a crash, which means programming the car to crash into the Volvo. Further, it makes sense to choose a collision with a vehicle that’s known for passenger safety, which again means crashing into the Volvo. ...
The owners or operators of these targeted vehicles would bear this burden through no fault of their own, other than that they care about safety or need an SUV to transport a large family. Does that sound fair? ...
Again, imagine that an autonomous car is facing an imminent crash. It could select one of two targets to swerve into: either a motorcyclist who is wearing a helmet, or a motorcyclist who is not. What’s the right way to program the car?
In the name of crash-optimization, you should program the car to crash into whatever can best survive the collision. In the last scenario, that meant smashing into the Volvo SUV. Here, it means striking the motorcyclist who’s wearing a helmet. A good algorithm would account for the much-higher statistical odds that the biker without a helmet would die, and surely killing someone is one of the worst things auto manufacturers desperately want to avoid.
But we can quickly see the injustice of this choice, as reasonable as it may be from a crash-optimization standpoint. By deliberately crashing into that motorcyclist, we are in effect penalizing him or her for being responsible, for wearing a helmet. Meanwhile, we are giving the other motorcyclist a free pass, even though that person is much less responsible for not wearing a helmet, which is illegal in most U.S. states. ...
An elegant solution to these vexing dilemmas is to simply not make a deliberate choice. We could design an autonomous car to make certain decisions through a random-number generator. ...
Yet, the random-number engine may be inadequate for at least a few reasons. ...
...while human drivers may be forgiven for making a poor split-second reaction–for instance, crashing into a Pinto that’s prone to explode, instead of a more stable object–robot cars won’t enjoy that freedom. Programmers have all the time in the world to get it right. It’s the difference between premeditated murder and involuntary manslaughter.
The politician is planning to run for office once more, and wanted stories about his prior behavior in office (which we can assume was not to the taste of his voters) removed from search. The pedophile has asked links to websites about his conviction to be removed, meaning it would be harder for neighbors and potential landlords to check into his criminal history before inviting the man to a location potentially surrounded by children. A doctor has also asked Google to remove negative reviews about him written by former patients.
Obviously, this is causing a major issue both for the average Google user and the company itself. The details of the hearing require Google to remove links from their search results, not remove actual content from the web, but this is a massive task on its own. Google already receives a huge volume of requests for removals, and that will only grow as these requests are now considered legally legitimate. Search engines will have to set up massive vetting offices, dealing with the thousands of requests they receive. There will also be a delay in processing requests, as there are so many. This means that arguably illegitimate requests — like a disliked service provider asking to remove unfavorable reviews — will delay legitimate requests, like users looking to remove illegally gathered photographs or videos of themselves leaked online.
EU Commissioner Viviane Reding called the ruling "a clear victory for the protection of personal data of Europeans" but perhaps she will not feel so strongly when she finds out pedophiles and miscreants are using the law to their advantage.
Pretty good, apparently. “Consumer reports awarded the Model S 99 stars out of a possible 100. I am awarding my Model S one hundred stars, two black holes, five supernovae and an ever-expanding singularity of engorged Luck Dragons”
Over 65 per cent of women are believed to have done it at least once in their lives. Magazines, TV shows and self-help books all talk about it. It features in one of the most memorable movie scenes ever. What am I talking about? Faking orgasm, of course.
I’ve done it. I wonder if you have too?
Let’s distract ourselves from this potentially awkward moment with a study by Cooper and colleagues, who have created the Faking Orgasm Scale.
When I saw this paper I bristled at the thought of yet another tool to over-diagnose our sexual lives. Really, does it matter if we fake? Doesn’t this surveillance reduce trust and put more pressure on people?
But I liked their discussion of what orgasm might be, why pressure to ‘achieve’ ‘mind-blowing orgasms’ exists in Western culture, and who perpetuates it. (Clue: it’s not just the media, medicalisation of women’s sexual problems by the pharmaceutical industry also doesn’t help).
In a two-stage study respondents (all heterosexual women college students majoring in psychology) were asked when, why and how they faked orgasm. The researchers then narrowed this into four categories:
Altruistic Deceit (e.g. faked orgasm to make a partner happy or prevent them feeling guilty) Fear and Insecurity (e.g. faked orgasm because they felt ashamed they couldn’t experience orgasm) Elevated Arousal (e.g. faked an orgasm to get more turned on or increase the intensity of the experience) Sexual Adjournment (e.g. to end a sexual encounter because of tiredness, a lack of enjoyment etc)
We tend to view faking orgasm as manipulative, whereas this research suggested that it could well play a positive role in increasing arousal. I could see an additional measure of distress being useful here to identify whether the faking was something done pleasurably to enhance sex, or an indication of other sexual or relationships problems where perhaps education or therapy might be of benefit.
A 2008 article in The Psychologist also considered orgasm
Wait! I’m sure you’ve already spotted these participants might be a bit WEIRD [Western, Educated, industrious, Rich, Democratic], so how useful is this study? The authors are up front about their research being limited by the use of a volunteer student sample, and because of this I think the Faking Orgasm Scale may be better described as a tool in development rather than an established measure.
For that to happen the scale would need further research using bi and lesbian women, Trans women, women in long term relationships, and those who are not US psychology majors. It could also broaden into sexual experiences that are not just penis in vagina intercourse or oral sex (the two activities respondents were required to have both tried and faked orgasm during).
The researchers note 'faking orgasm… seems to have been overlooked almost entirely as a male sexual practice' – something that future research could certainly benefit from, not least because existing qualitative work indicates faking orgasm is not unique to women and may be equally prevalent in men.
I can see therapists, researchers and healthcare providers welcoming a tool that might encourage us to open up about our sexual experiences. I could also see some practitioners taking issue with a quantified measure of complex behaviour and notions of authenticity and sexual behaviour. Me? I’d welcome anything that might allow us to talk more openly about orgasm so as to resist or reinvent the representations of perfectable sex we’re currently encouraged to aspire to.
- Further reading from The Psychologist – Orgasm. _________________________________
Cooper EB, Fenigstein A, & Fauber RL (2014). The faking orgasm scale for women: psychometric properties. Archives of sexual behavior, 43 (3), 423-35 PMID: 24346866
Post written for the BPS Research Digest by guest host Petra Boynton, Senior Lecturer in International Primary Care Research, University College London and the Telegraph's Agony Aunt.
Bay Area tech guys invent food substitute called Soylent: 35 blended nutrients to keep your body fully fuelled for $50 a month so you can treat traditional food as an occasional recreation. Intended market: “Cubicle workers craving efficiency”. Soylent has the consistency of sludge, the mouth-feel of pancake mix, and just enough flavouring to mask the raw vitamins. Usage note: “In the first week you fart pretty bad”
From the editors of The American Scholar, the ten best sentences. Presumably in all of literature? Here's one of them, from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone -- they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
Inside Google’s innovation lab, Google X. Not to be confused with Google Research: Research is “mostly bits”; X is “mostly atoms”. X is “tasked with making actual objects that interact with the physical world”. Main products so far: driverless cars, Google Glass, high-altitude Wi-Fi balloons, and glucose-monitoring contact lenses. “Failure is not precisely the goal at Google X. But in many respects it is the means”
In fact, the more Yelp reviewers mention dessert, the more they like the restaurant. Reviewers who don’t mention a dessert give the restaurants an average review score of 3.6 (out of 5). But reviewers who mention a dessert in their review give a higher average review score, 3.9 out of 5. And when people do talk about dessert, the more times they mention dessert in the review, the higher the rating they give to the restaurant.
This positivity of reviews, filled with metaphors of sex and dessert, turns out to be astonishingly strong.
Americans usually describe desserts as soft or dripping wet…US commercials emphasize tender, gooey, rich, creamy food, and associate softness and dripping sweetness with sensual hedonism and pleasure.
This association between soft, sticky things and pleasure isn’t a necessary connection. For example, Strauss found that Korean food commercials emphasize hard, textually stimulating food, using words like wulthung pwulthung hata (solid and bumpy), coalis hata (stinging, stimulating), thok ssota (stinging), and elelhata (spicy to the extent one’s nerves are numbed).
How can you resist a book with sentences such as these?
The pasta and the almond pastry traditions merged in Sicily, resulting in foods with characteristics of both.
Say we have a statistically significant interaction in non-experimental data between two continuous predictors, X and Z and it is unclear which variable is primarily a cause and which variable is primarily a moderator. One person might find it more plausible to think of X as a cause and Z as a moderator and another person may think the reverse more plausible. My question then is whether there is are any set of rules or heuristics you could recommend to help adjudicate between alternate perspectives on such an interaction term.
My reply:
I think in this setting, it would make sense to think about different interventions, some of which affect X, others of which affect Z, others of which affect both, and go from there. Rather than trying to isolate a single causal path, consider different cases of forward casual inference. My guess is that the different stories regarding moderators etc. could motivate different thought experiments (and, ultimately, different observational studies) regarding different potential interventions.
So I would not try to “adjudicate” between different stories; rather, I’d recognize that they could all be appropriate, just corresponding to different interventions. Also, all the above would hold even if there are only main effects, no interactions needed. And, for that matter, statistical significance would not be needed either for you to look at these questions.
For her Uncomfortable Project, Katerina Kamprani redesigned useful objects; they're still technically functional but are a pain in the ass to use. Like this key:
Errol Morris has directed a new series of Taco Bell commercials where a bunch of ordinary men named Ronald McDonald review Taco Bell's new breakfast menu. Here's one of the spots:
A hospital in Pennsylvania will soon begin clinical trials to put gunshot or other accident victims into a state of suspended animation while their organs are repaired. By all measures the people suspended will be dead for hours but with luck many will be brought back to life.
The first step is to flush cold saline through the heart and up to the brain – the areas most vulnerable to low oxygen. To do this, the lower region of their heart must be clamped and a catheter placed into the aorta – the largest artery in the body – to carry the saline. The clamp is later removed so the saline can be artificially pumped around the whole body. It takes about 15 minutes for the patient’s temperature to drop to 10 °C. At this point they will have no blood in their body, no breathing, and no brain activity. They will be clinically dead.
In this state, almost no metabolic reactions happen in the body, so cells can survive without oxygen. Instead, they may be producing energy through what’s called anaerobic glycolysis. At normal body temperatures this can sustain cells for about 2 minutes. At low temperatures, however, glycolysis rates are so low that cells can survive for hours. The patient will be disconnected from all machinery and taken to an operating room where surgeons have up to 2 hours to fix the injury. The saline is then replaced with blood. If the heart does not restart by itself, as it did in the pig trial, the patient is resuscitated. The new blood will heat the body slowly, which should help prevent any reperfusion injuries.
The technique will be tested on 10 people, and the outcome compared with another 10 who met the criteria but who weren’t treated this way because the team wasn’t on hand. The technique will be refined then tested on another 10, says Tisherman, until there are enough results to analyse.
No one knows how long people can be maintained in suspended animation before revival is impossible. We know from accidents where people drown in icy lakes that suspended animation can work for at least half an hour and experiments on pigs suggest no cognitive defects from revived animals suspended for up to an hour, mice have been suspended for up to six hours and roundworms for up to 24 hours. If the initial trials are successful, further experiments will likely discover ways to lengthen the period of suspended animation in humans and perhaps suggest improvements to current cryonic techniques.
"Delight" may be an intangible concept, but it's a useful term to describe Pixar's relationship with its audience, and one that any company can strive for even if they don't make heartwarming cartoons.
It seems counterintuitive that simple pleasure would be a core principle of something as elaborate as a Pixar production, but Suzanne Slatcher says she has translated this idea directly to her new career.
"Food is a bit like cartoons," says Slatcher. "It's not some high-minded thing that people will make themselves like because they think they ought to. The food has to work on that very simple level of just someone is watching TV and they're shoving it in their mouths."
The idea that "everybody deserves quality" is a fundamental Pixar concept that Slatcher applies equally to snack foods.
"Pixar makes amazing, beautiful, hilarious, deep, wise films for kids, and adults can watch them and everybody watches them 25 times if they've got kids, and it's still funny. It's really, really great quality, where most things made for kids are made very cheaply. A lot of time and money is spent making the most accessible thing possible, and that's such an inspiration and so not what you learn at art school," Slatcher says. "The Good Bean could choose to be the darlings of the foodie world, using obscure, exotic spices, trying to be clever, but we'd rather make affordable, accessible food."
When I first met Donald Rumsfeld in his offices in Washington, D.C., one of the things I said to him was that if we could provide an answer to the American public about why we went to war in Iraq, we would be rendering an important service. He agreed. Unfortunately, after having spent 33 hours over the course of a year interviewing Mr. Rumsfeld, I fear I know less about the origins of the Iraq war than when I started. A question presents itself: How could that be? How could I know less rather than more? Was he hiding something? Or was there really little more than met the eye?
The Unknown Known has been referred to as a sequel of sorts to The Fog of War, but from this it seems more like its opposite. Morris got some substantive and honest answers to important questions from McNamara, whereas it sounds like he got bupkiss from Rumsfeld.
facebook
reddit
REUTERS/Steve Marcus 
