Andrew Webber

 Our skyline is changing these are 15 story buildings going up at our railway stations.Three new buildings all units, when we moved here 28 years ago you could not build over 3 stories how things have changed.
 Cranes everywhere

 
 I met my friend Barbarba, and we went over to the twins place so she could see them before they left for their new  country, two weeks to go or maybe three.

 This was knitted meat in a shop window not sure if it was a butchers, yarn shop or a cafe but it was a very different display for a front window.

 We did some shopping and played in the park for a while then headed for home.
 This morning I woke had breakfast came back to make my bed but it was unavailable because there was a Leeroy in it.
 I painted my toilet and put new floor covering down.
It feel cleaner anyway.
And cleaned out the pantry, threw out old stuff, my daughter gave me a box of food she will not be able to use.

The post Privacy sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

By Christian Jarrett

The US psychologist Walter Mischel famously tested children’s ability – aged four to six – to delay immediate gratification with his “Marshmallow Experiment”. It’s become a classic, not least because the children who were better at resisting one marshmallow now, for the promise of two if they waited, went on to enjoy more success in adult life. Mischel also showed that children with stronger willpower used better distraction strategies, such as looking away or covering their eyes. Now a group of Polish psychologists have extended this line of inquiry to toddlers.

The findings, published in Infant Behaviour and Development, show that individual differences in self-control are already apparent at the tender age of 18 months. The study also reveals how self-control develops through the second year of life, and it shows the kind of toddler behaviours that were correlated with stronger willpower.

Marta Bialecka-Pikul and her colleagues at Jagiellonian University recruited hundreds of toddlers and their parents. At 18 months, each toddler sat on his or her parent’s lap at a desk upon which was a corn puff treat – a hit with toddlers in Poland – under a transparent cup. The female experimenter got up and asked the toddler to wait for the treat until she returned to the room, which she did after 60 seconds. The parent was not allowed to intervene. The researchers videoed what happened while they were gone. At 24 months, the procedure was repeated, but the toddlers had to wait 90 seconds, and now the treat was tailored to their latest tastes, such as a jelly baby or chocolate.

One hundred and thirty toddlers took part at both time points. At 18 months, 23 per cent of them successfully waited 60 seconds. At 24 months, 55 per cent of them successfully waited 90 seconds (it seems some toddlers are capable of greater willpower than adults).

There was clear evidence of a developmental trajectory: most of the successful delayers at 24 months had failed to wait at the first test, suggesting they had acquired greater self-control over time. Going backwards was rare: only eight per cent of those who successfully resisted at 18 months failed to do so at 24 months.

Coding the videos of the toddlers’ behaviour while they waited revealed 20 different types of behaviour, including: looking at, touching, playing with, and talking about the treat, as well as looking around, fidgeting, being noisy and touching themselves or their parent. Bialecka-Pikul and her team said these behaviours could be grouped into four main categories: attentional and movement based; communication; focusing on or acting on the treat in some way; and non-specific, such as fidgeting and making noises.

The “attention and movement” category of behaviours was most strongly correlated with successfully waiting for the treat, at both 18 months and 24 months. “Glancing, looking around, or at other objects, or touching their own bodies turned out to be the set of behaviours that most helped children to succeed while waiting,” the researchers said, adding that it “explained 61 to 70 per cent of the variance in the time of delay [i.e. how long the toddlers were able to wait]”.

At 24 months compared with 18 months, the children showed less focus on the treat, while they increased in the other kinds of behaviour. Also, the biggest difference between those toddlers who gained the ability to delay gratification between 18 months and 24 months and those who didn’t was that the newly successful delayers started showing more attention and movement related behaviours than they had earlier.

“It can be supposed that the increase in the ability to delay gratification was due to overcoming temptation by using an active strategy mainly based on the first signs of effortful attention,” the researchers said. “This result confirms the importance of such a set of behaviours for effectively delaying gratification”. Perhaps worth reminding yourself of these strategies the next time you reach for the cookie jar.

—Waiting for a treat. Studying behaviors related to self-regulation in 18- and 24-month-olds

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

It's time for an RSS revival. Long before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram weaponized the newsfeed, we had a technology that let us aggregate the news without annoying, creepy algorithms.

For more of a throwback feel, you might try The Old Reader, which strips down the RSS reader experience while still emphasizing a social component.

Disclaimer: I have not connection to The Old Reader other than being a user. I noticed it now has a Premium plan, but the first 100 feeds are free.

Photo and video credits from the top: Nashville progression photo by Richard Sparkman. HDR photo with Moon detail by Dennis Sprinkle (this one blew my mind a little). Rock climber by Ted Hesser (the story behind the photo). Progression photo by Jasman Lion Mander. Photo from the Alaska Airlines flight by Tanya Harrison. Video of the eclipse shadow moving across the Earth from the NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. Neon cowboy photo by Rick Armstrong. ISS transit photo and video by Joel Kowsky. Partial eclipse video by NASA’s SDO spacecraft. Partial eclipse video by the ESA’s Proba-2 satellite. Video of the eclipse shadow moving across the US by the NOAA’s GOES-16 weather satellite. Time lapse video from The Salt Lake Tribune. Amazing 4K close-up video by JunHo Oh, ByoungJun Jeong, and YoungSam Choi…check out those prominences!

More eclipse photos on Petapixel (and here), BBC, Bored Panda, The Verge, and the NY Times.

Update: I added the time lapse video from The Salt Lake Tribune. (via the kid should see this)

Update: Added the 4K close-up video.

Tags: 2017 solar eclipse   astronomy   photography   science   time lapse   video

Dominos Australia and Final Fantasy have teamed up for the Domino’s Final Fantasy XIV Pizza And Gaming Bundle. When you order one of the selected Domino Pizza bundles, you’ll get a Final Fantasy XIV Complete Edition Download which is valued at $79.95

The deal will set you back $49.95 and you’ll get the below:

3 Traditional Pizzas
1 Garlic Bread
1 1.25L Drink
PLUS FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Complete Edition Download (choose from PS4 or PC! Includes: A Realm Reborn + Heavensward + NEW Stormblood
Dominos has also themed a bunch of Pizzas in Final Fantasy names:

Moogles Meatlovers
Heavensward Hawaiian
Curious Cactuar
Chocobow Cow
Stormblood Supreme

 The twins went to The big yellow bus (it's really a truck) for a play and socialise.

 Clemmy is in the centre of it all in her red tights.
 I've finished my jigsaw all done I have two empty spaces and two bits over only trouble is they don't fit in the holes so I've made a mistake somewhere but just can't see it, I will pass it on to the Yank who lives around the corner he likes jigsaws.

the sky is wonky too, there are a few bits missing.

For the NY Times, Claire Cain Miller asked a panel of experts (including neuroscientists and psychologists) how to raise feminist sons. From the introduction:

We’re now more likely to tell our daughters they can be anything they want to be — an astronaut and a mother, a tomboy and a girlie girl. But we don’t do the same for our sons.

Even as we’ve given girls more choices for the roles they play, boys’ worlds are still confined, social scientists say. They’re discouraged from having interests that are considered feminine. They’re told to be tough at all costs, or else to tamp down their so-called boy energy.

If we want to create an equitable society, one in which everyone can thrive, we need to also give boys more choices. As Gloria Steinem says, “I’m glad we’ve begun to raise our daughters more like our sons, but it will never work until we raise our sons more like our daughters.”

One piece of advice is to encourage friendships with girls:

Research at Arizona State University found that by the end of preschool, children start segregating by sex, and this reinforces gender stereotypes. But children who are encouraged to play with friends of the opposite sex learn better problem-solving and communication.

“The more obvious it is that gender is being used to categorize groups or activities, the more likely it is that gender stereotypes and bias are reinforced,” said Richard Fabes, director of the university’s Sanford School, which studies gender and education.

Organize coed birthday parties and sports teams for young children, so children don’t come to believe it’s acceptable to exclude a group on the basis of sex, said Christia Brown, a developmental psychologist at the University of Kentucky. Try not to differentiate in language, either: One study found that when preschool teachers said “boys and girls” instead of “children,” the students held more stereotypical beliefs about men’s and women’s roles and spent less time playing with one another.

I’ve seen this segregation happen in school with both my kids and it drives me bananas.

Tags: Claire Cain Miller   feminism   how to   lists   parenting

Back in the 70s and 80s, before photorealistic computer graphics became commonplace, elaborate background sets in movies were hand-painted. Sploid’s Jesus Diaz took at look at the background art featured in the original Star Wars trilogy and the artists who painted them.

Matte paintings are fake sets that-most of the times-used to be made with plexiglass and oil paint. The artists used oversized panels to create the necessary detail that the camera needed to fool the audiences when the film was projected over the large surface of the theater screen. The paintings were combined with live action filmed to match the perspective of the painting. If done well, the public would totally buy into the shot.

Robert Bechtle has nothing on these guys. Bonus painting: the warehouse scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

They had to use a painting because the filmmakers were unaware of Ikea at the time.

Tags: art   Indiana Jones   movies   Star Wars

Sales Wick is a pilot for SWISS and while working an overnight flight from Zurich to Sao Paulo, he filmed the first segment of the flight from basically the dashboard of the plane and made a timelapse video out of it. At that altitude, without a lot of light and atmospheric interference, the Milky Way is super vivid.

Just as the bright city lights are vanishing behind us, the Milky Way starts to become clearly visible up ahead. Its now us, pacing at almost the speed of sound along the invisible highway and the pitch-black night sky above this surreal landscape. Ahead of us are another eight hours flight time, but we already stopped counting the shooting stars. And we got already to a few hundred.

I watched this twice already, once to specifically pay attention to all the passing airplanes. The sky is surprisingly busy, even at that hour. (via @ozans)

Update: Several people asked if this was fake or digitally composited (the Milky Way and ground footage shot separately then edited together). I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it. The answer lies in the camera Wick used to shoot this, the Sony a7S. It’s really good in low-light conditions, better than many more expensive professional cameras even. As the last bit of this Vox video explains, the camera is so good in low light that the BBC used it to capture some night scenes for Planet Earth II. Here’s a screen-capped comparison at 6400 ISO from that video:

And the full scene at 32000 ISO:

That’s pretty amazing, right? Wick himself says on his site:

I had to take many attempts and a lot of trying to figure it out. Basically the challenge is to keep shutter speed as fast as possible in order to get razor sharp images. While you can use the 500 or 600 rule on ground this doesn’t work out the same way while being up in the sky. Well of course basically it does if you dont fly perpendicular to the movement of the night sky but even if its really smooth there are usually some light movements of the aircraft. So depending on the focal length of your lense you can get exposure times between 15” to 1”. Thats why you will need a camera that can handle high iso. Thats where the A7s comes into play and of course a ver fast lense. The rest is a good mounting and some luck. Last but not least you need to keep the flight deck as dark as possible to get the least reflections…and the rest is magic ;)

Tags: flying   photography   Sales Wick   time lapse   video

On being a fat medical student, at the start of our metabolism module.

A searchable database of all the registered dog names in New York City.

Entomologists call it the windshield phenomenon. "If you talk to people, they have a gut feeling. They remember how insects used to smash on your windscreen," says Wolfgang Wägele, director of the Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity in Bonn, Germany. Today, drivers spend less time scraping and scrubbing. "I'm a very data-driven person," says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Oregon. "But it is a visceral reaction when you realize you don't see that mess anymore."

Where have all the insects gone?

“i tried to share the memo you sent but you got mad at me when i screenshotted it”

By Christian Jarrett

To see a man’s face light up as he strokes a dog, to hear a child’s laughter as her hamster tickles her skin, it just seems obvious that animals are good for our state of mind. Let’s hope so because not only do millions of us own pets, but also animals are being used therapeutically in an increasing number of contexts, from residential care homes to airports, prisons, hospitals, schools and universities. Unfortunately, as detailed by psychologist Molly Crossman in her new review in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, the research literature has simply not kept pace with the widespread embrace of animal contact as a form of therapy in itself, or as a therapy adjunct. In short, we don’t know whether animal contact is psychologically beneficial, and if it is, we have no idea how.

After several decades of animal-human interaction research, Crossman explains that the evidence is mixed: some studies have found benefits, others have not. And the research has tended to be of poor quality. In relation to animal-based therapy or animal-assisted therapy, for example, those studies showing benefits have usually only looked over short-term outcomes; they’ve not compared the generalisability of effects from one animal to another; and they’ve typically had no control condition, so there’s no way of knowing if the apparent positive outcomes are simply due to the passage of time, or to any kind of sociable or pleasurable activity.

Another issue is that, for obvious reasons, animal-based therapy always requires the presence of a human handler, but existing studies have always failed to account for the effect of this person. This means it’s possible that any benefits are solely or partly down to the friendliness and company of the handler, as opposed to the animal.

Similarly most research on the benefits of pet ownership (as opposed to animal therapy) has been observational, rather than involving any experimental allocation of pets to some participants, with other participants placed in a no-pet control condition. Again, this makes it difficult to source any apparent benefits to animal companionship per se. “There is not yet sufficient evidence to conclude that companion animal ownership conveys benefits for human health,” Crossman writes.

Even if we assume that the apparent psychological benefits of animals are real, Crossman also explains that there has been virtually no research into the mechanisms. She identifies several possibilities, all of which need testing, including: the simple pleasure of the interaction; the passing of positive emotions from animal to human; feeling that the animal is providing unconditional love; and the benefits of tactile contact. There is also likely to be a large placebo effect.

Finding out how and why animal contact is psychological beneficial and for whom would help to maximise the positive impact of using animals for therapeutic reasons. Crossman points out that the idea of there being positive emotional contagion from animal to human also reminds us that it’s important to consider the effect of animal therapy on animals, and not to sacrifice their welfare in the process of helping people.

Some may wonder whether it matters that there is such a dearth of quality research in this field. As Crossman says, many people just feel they “know” that animal contact is beneficial and “they’re often sceptical of the need for empirical evidence.” But the wider psychotherapy literature teaches us that there are dangers in assuming interventions are always going to be helpful – animal therapy or ownership might not work for everyone, and in some cases it could even be detrimental. For instance, the responsibility of a pet might backfire for someone who is struggling to cope with stress.

“Researchers and practitioners have called for methodological improvements and advancements [in human-animal interaction research] for nearly half a century, but those calls remain largely unanswered,” Crossman writes. “At this point, the clearest conclusion in the field is that we cannot yet draw clear conclusions.”

—Effects of Interactions With Animals On Human Psychological Distress

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

The post The Viewpoint Diversity Experience appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

AMEN

(area maceration via emancipated neutrons)

The post Gender Reversal Teaches Uncomfortable Lessons appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The longer the race, the stronger we become. From the article: "A growing pattern of race results suggests that the longer and more arduous the event, the better the chances women have of beating men."

The post Today’s American men are weaker than their dads appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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Matt Haughey comes not to bury Flickr, but to praise it.

Flickr represents one of the very best of things in the history of the internet. It was the first popular way to share photos in a social way instead of photos lingering in private accounts online and in the real world in shoeboxes under beds. It brought millions together and helped kick off first the digital SLR revolution, then it was eclipsed by the mobile photography revolution. Flickr—despite being a big corporate entity—embraced open licensing and took on the ambitious goal of being a mirror and gallery for oodles of museums around the globe.

Those values that drove Flickr during its influential peak can be seen in its Explore page, which still knocks your socks off. Matt calls it “an entire year’s worth of epic shots from National Geographic, generated each day, automatically by algorithms.”

Lots of wondrous shots from places I’ve never heard of. Lots of “how’d they even get that shot?!” photos of animals… Instagram has an explore tab but it’s popular music and tv stars and their dogs or it’s brand advertising-driven shots cooked up to sell something. There’s something so completely boring about Instagram’s explore page that makes me ignore it and go back to my friend feeds, whereas Flickr is the opposite: my friend feed is largely silent, but the best of the best page is truly awe-inspiring and at least one photo each day is going to take my breath away.

It is bizarre to think now that Flickr was only active for about a year before it was acquired by Yahoo. For those of us who were on the site then, that year felt like everything.

Jason’s first post that mentions Flickr is from March 2004. He wonders whether Flickr could be used as a universal login (much like Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts are today). Annotation quickly followed. Then calendar view. RSS feed splicing. Organizr. A public API. The interestingness algorithm. Prints. It was step-by-step, bit-by-bit, but every new feature was a milestone. It excited people, and got them thinking and working on what was next.

Jason even has a remarkable post from August 2004 where he imagines an entire web-based operating system linking different services together:

To put this another way, a distributed data storage system would take the place of a local storage system. And not just data storage, but data processing/filtering/formatting. Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr’s authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner “listen” for new content from all those sources, transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.

Think of it like Unix…small pieces loosely joined.

That last part didn’t come true; the pieces didn’t join so much as fuse together into something new. The companies listed either took over the world, faded into relative obscurity, or stopped existing (at least for a little while). And then there’s Flickr — which didn’t do any of those things, but changed how we use the web forever.

I usually say that platforms stop being vital, even if they continue to have lots of users, when the platforms stop getting better. It’s a tricky thing: sometimes a ham-handed “improvement” can actually ruin a lot of what made a platform special. Flickr was extraordinarily vital, for years. It still has so much to offer. Sometimes there’s something reassuring about a tool that’s still much the same.

Photo by Tom Hall, via Flickr. Used under a CC-BY license.

Tags: best of the web   Flickr   Matt Haughey   photography   web 2.0

The post Solve for the equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Japanese snack food manufacturers Calbee Inc. and Koike-Ya Inc. are halting sales of 49 potato chip products due to potato shortages. This is the result of poor crops in Hokkaido, a key potato-producing region, where a series of typhoons hit the island in 2016 for the first time on record. Calbee has said that imported potatoes from the United States are of insufficient quality and cannot cover the deficit.

The shortage has resulted in hoarding and resale of certain flavours of chips at inflated prices.

Hokkaido accounts for more than 70 per cent of Japan's potato production. According to the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service [pdf]:

Heavy rains in August and September reduced Japan's potato crop by approximately 500,000 metric tons (MT), or 20 percent lower than market year (MY) 2015/16

[...]

[F]our typhoons struck Hokkaido in August 2016 for the first time since record keeping began more than 100 years ago. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) reported that approximately 24,000 ha of land received damaging levels of rain as well as flooding, including those producing fresh potatoes.

Scientists are connecting the strengthening typhoons in the region to ocean surface warming:

Intensification of landfalling typhoons over the northwest Pacific since the late 1970s (abstract only)

Japan's future typhoons: disruptive, deadly and destructive

The bureaucratic voice presents governments and corporations as placid, apologetic, and unmovable. It also makes their victims as active as possible.

If the supposedly objective journalists we rely on to report facts are so hopelessly smitten by the language of violence, what hope do the rest of us have?

After all, the purpose of the bureaucratic voice is less to shape our thoughts or how we see the external world, but to reward incuriosity. The citizen who reads of an "officer-involved shooting" is invited to not think too hard about things and fill in whatever preconceived notions they may already hold about law enforcement, the use of violence, and the prevalence of criminality among racial minorities or those with mental health issues. United [Airlines'] use of language in its email to employees does not itself shape our perception; rather it offers soothing pabulum to those whose minds are already made up, or who are predisposed to support bureaucracy and its use of force. Watching the cell phone videos of the assault has, for most people, the immediate effect of provoking outrage and awakening a desire for justice. The purpose of bureaucratic speech is to dull these responses. It suggests your outrage is not worth it, that it's fine to go back to what you were doing, that it's best to move along and mind your own business.

After all, bureaucracy whispers in your ear, the guy probably had it coming.

Records of when the cherry blossoms appear in Kyoto date back 1200 years. (Let’s boggle at this fact for a sec…) But as this chart of peak-bloom dates shows, since the most recent peak in 1829, the cherry blossoms have been arriving earlier and earlier in the year.

From its most recent peak in 1829, when full bloom could be expected to come on April 18th, the typical full-flowering date has drifted earlier and earlier. Since 1970, it has usually landed on April 7th. The cause is little mystery. In deciding when to show their shoots, cherry trees rely on temperatures in February and March. Yasuyuki Aono and Keiko Kazui, two Japanese scientists, have demonstrated that the full-blossom date for Kyoto’s cherry trees can predict March temperatures to within 0.1°C. A warmer planet makes for warmer Marches.

Temperature and carbon-related charts like this one are clear portraits of the Industrial Revolution, right up there with oil paintings of the time. I also enjoyed the correction at the bottom of the piece:

An earlier version of this chart depicted cherry blossoms with six petals rather than five. This has been amended. Forgive us this botanical sin.

Gotta remember that flower petals are very often numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence.

Tags: Fibonacci sequence   global warming   infoviz   mathematics

The title of this video is “Camera falls from airplane and lands in pig pen—MUST WATCH END!!” and there is literally nothing else I can say to entice you to watch it if you’re not already hooked by that.

Tags: video

The contemporary internet is full to the brim with videos shot from above showing how different foods and crafty things are made. Like this one. Everything is orderly, precise, and moves along at a brisk pace. And then, there’s this:

Cutting tomatoes with a dull knife, folding paper not exactly in half, excruciatingly peeling a hard boiled egg…that sort of thing. Probably not good for folks who have any kind of OCD tendency.

See also this video of the most unsatisfying things in the world. Same general idea but more clever. (via deadspin)

Tags: how to   video

The post Planet earth spider fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Skaters Are Recreating Stunning Yuri On Ice Routines In Real-Life [Kotaku] This isn't a post about people dressed as Yuri on Ice [wiki] characters. It's about people who can skate recreating some of the anime's most famous routines. [Previously.]

• Yuri On Ice Opening Theme/Intro [YouTube]
• Patton Chen Performing Yuri's Eros [YouTube], Complete with Comparison Shots [YouTube]
• Patton Chen Recreating Opening Credits Sequence of Yuri On Ice [YouTube]
• Joel Minas Performing Yuri's Eros, Full Version [YouTube]
• Kenji Miyamoto (a former Japanese champion figure skater and actual choreographer for the show) Performing Some Rountines on Japanese TV [YouTube]