Quote of the day

From Ben's awesome post:

"In every human being there is only so large a supply of love. It's like the limbs of a starfish, to some extent: if you chew off a chunk, it will grow back. But if you chew off too much, the starfish dies.
Having learned that, all I can advise is an impossible stance for all of you: utter openness and reasonable caution. Don't close yourself off, but jeezus, be careful of monsters with teeth."

700-year-old Brain Found Preserved!

Hope THIS will answer few of our questions albeit being an infant's brain.

"It is only the left-hemisphere that survived and not the entire brain, which had also shrunk to about 80% of it's original weight due to the (natural) mummification process. Although it was first discovered in 1998 and preserved all this time in a formalin solution, it was found in the skull of a 13th Century infant that was exhumed at an archaeological dig in north-west France. The body of the 18-month-old child was wrapped in leather and kept in a wooden coffin with a pillow underneath the head.

The presence of acidic clay soil and fresh briny water around the burial site is believed to have contributed towards the excellent preservation of the brain. To a certain degree, even the innate cellular structure had been preserved, so much so that intact neurons and dendrites - branched fibres that extend from the cell body of a neuron - had survived for observation in the 21st Century. It was also possible to identify grey and white matter. Apart from the external burial conditions, the toughness of the neuronal myelin sheath and collagen fibres are said to be the reasons for why the brain tissue had been nicely preserved."

Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization

David Eagleman post on Stewart Brand's six steps to avert our demise.

1. "Try not to cough on one another." More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars. Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas. People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague. Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks. All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce.

2. "Don't lose things." As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, "knowledge is hard won but easily lost." Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell. Inoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it. These days Michelangelo's David has been safely digitized in detail. Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via PubMed,JSTOR, and Google Books. "Distribute, don't reinvent."

3. "Tell each other faster." Don't let natural disasters cascade. The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have. Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by Ushahidi.com, which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time.

4. "Mitigate tyranny." The USSR's collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions. Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering. We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China.

5. "Get more brains involved in solving problems." Undertapping human capital endangers the future. Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible. Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as PatientsLikeMe, Foldit (protein folding), and Cstart(moon exploration). Perhaps the next step is "society sourcing."

6. "Try not to run out of energy." When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. Email saves trees and trucking. Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left. We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online.

Quote of the Day

"The long chains of reasonings, simple and easy, by which geometricians are wont to achieve their most complex proofs, had led me to suppose that all things, the knowledge of which man may achieve, are strung together in the same way, and that there is nothing so distant as ultimately to be beyond our mental grasp, or so hidden that we cannot uncover it, provided only we avoid accepting falsehoods as true, and always preserve in our thoughts the discipline essential for the deduction of one truth from another." - Rene Descartes (thanks)

Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

Wray Herbert again has an answer

This guy is really good!! His "psycho-analyzing" process again hits the bull eye with respect to some of my shortcomings and reasons behind them. The premise of my satiation with novelty is from studying, living, working all over the map and longing to keep my butt in one place. The good part is adapting to any new environment comes seamless but there is always this sense of melancholy because of losing friends, immature nostalgia et al.

"It all starts with basic sense of self. Oishi studied a large sample of American college students, some of whom had moved around a lot before college and others of whom had pretty much stayed put. When he asked these students to describe themselves—their most important attributes—the itinerants were much more likely to mention personal traits, while less mobile students were more apt to mention important group affiliations. In fact, the mobile students didn’t belong to many groups; they weren’t joiners. And this tendency weakened their overall sense of community identity.

Mobility appears to affect the nature of friendship as well, in a variety of ways. In one study, for example, college freshmen who had moved around a lot reported having more friends—as measured by their Facebook friendships—and they also added more new friends after arriving on campus. But it’s not just the size of the social networks, Oishi has found. Mobile Americans are more likely to form “duty free” relationships, without the deep sense of social obligation that characterizes traditional friendships. Duty-free friendships are based on more on shared interests and similarities of personality, rather than group membership.

So who’s happier, those who ramble or those who stay close to home? One would guess that more mobile people might be happier, since that’s why many people move—to find a new life, perhaps a better job or a safer community. But the results are more mixed than that. As Oishi describes in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, adults who move often for work feel they have more interesting lives and are more satisfied with their marriages and family life. But itinerant adults also report more frequent health issues, like stomach aches and shortness of breath, than do less mobile adults. It’s possible that when people pull up stakes for a better life, they overestimate the novelty and opportunity of moving, and underestimate the social disruption and its consequences.

The stomach aches and other ailments may be the tip of the iceberg. When Oishi analyzed a decade of data from 7000 adults, he found that those who moved frequently in childhood were more likely to have died during the course of the study. Perhaps unsurprisingly, introverts suffered more from the negative consequences of mobility, including increased mortality. In short, the American pattern of residential mobility may have a dark side that has yet to be fully revealed."

How do morals change? Paul Bloom Refutes Jonathan Haidt

Paul Bloom opinion has the age old philosophers error (thanks):

"Indeed, many psychologists think that the reasoned arguments we make about why we have certain beliefs are mostly post-hoc justifications for gut reactions. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, although we like to think of ourselves as judges, reasoning through cases according to deeply held principles, in reality we are more like lawyers, making arguments for positions that have already been established. This implies we have little conscious control over our sense of right and wrong.

I predict that this theory of morality will be proved wrong in its wholesale rejection of reason. Emotional responses alone cannot explain one of the most interesting aspects of human nature: that morals evolve. The extent of the average person's sympathies has grown substantially and continues to do so. Contemporary readers of Nature, for example, have different beliefs about the rights of women, racial minorities and homosexuals compared with readers in the late 1800s, and different intuitions about the morality of practices such as slavery, child labour and the abuse of animals for public entertainment. Rational deliberation and debate have played a large part in this development."

Paul Bloom and Jonathan Haidt both are right but also wrong. Haidt research is based on our daily emotions which rule over our reason. Bloom is taking about on a much grander scale, evolution of morality per se and tactically avoids the emotional battle we go through every second. The trick is the honing reason slowly during its everyday battle with emotions and in the process, transposing reason as part of our emotions. Hence, we see the change in morality of our civilization in every generation. On a grander scale, we are enchanted to see how far our morality has changed but the truth is speed of transposition still remains stagnant. 

Dawn of Nudge Era in Washington DC

With Cass Sunstien camping in the White House even if some nudges of skeptical others like this one are awesome!!

"Today, DHS announced that it is changing the default setting for its payroll statements from paper to electronic. This means employees will receive their regular payroll data electronically instead of getting stacks of paper earnings statements by mail.  By making e-statements the default option, while giving employees the option to opt out in favor of the paper statement, we hope to increase the percentage of federal employees who use this approach while saving the taxpayers’ money."

If you have dog, mention that on our resume!!

Just kidding but it sounds Gladwellian, right? Indeed it is. This is inferred from his Hiring and Mismatch Problem

"The mismatch problem shows itself all over the sports world. Although the study below was released in 2008, Gladwell has long illustrated the point that sports combines (events professional sports leagues hold for scouts to evaluate potential draftees based on a battery of 'tests') don't work. Gladwell's results echo what Michael Lewis talks about in Moneyball: Combines are a poor predictor of determining ultimate success. Mismatch problems transcend the sports world.

Teachers are another example. While we tend to evaluate teachers based on high test scores, number of degrees and other credentials, that makes little difference in how well people actually teach.

Some companies, like Google, are trying to attack this problem. Google tried to find correlations between 'great' existing employees. When they find correlations, say like most people who score 9/10 on performance reviews, own a dog, they try to work that into their hiring. By constantly evaluating the actual results of their hiring, rethinking how they hire, and removing questions and evaluations that show no bearing on actual performance they are taking steps to try to eliminate the mismatch problem. Google also knows hiring lacks certainty; they are just trying to continuously improve and refine the process. Interestingly, very few workforces are so evidence-based."

After all Gertrude Stein's quote "I am I because my little dog knows me" is an universal truth.

Self-competence in women

An interesting post based on Do involved dads erode moms’ self-competence?  published in the journal Personal Relationships.

"From the paper:

Mothers’ self-competence was independent of how many hours they spent with their baby or how fervently their husbands praised their parenting. Rather, it was their husbands’ childcare performance that was associated with their self-competence. In particular, the more time their husbands spent engaged in skillful caregiving, the lower the self-competence of mothers sank.

Why is this so? Again from the paper:

... recent social changes may have convinced many Americans that women should enter the workplace and their husbands should share the caregiving. Yet, the ideal that parenting is primarily the wife’s responsibility has survived."

May be this applies not only to parenting but also to any chores stereotyped  based on gender. Having said that self-competence in men definitely deteriorates when their is disparity between the earnings.

Irony is the thought of doing good is great but act of doing good is worse. No wonder white lies thrive in many relationships.