Letters Remain

  • Raising Bill Gates

    While the article lacks in certain places, this brief look at Bill Gates Sr. and his relationship with his son is an interesting read with a few amusing anecdotes about the mostly elusive Gates family.

    [Bill Gates Sr.] and Mary brought their son to a therapist. “I’m at war with my parents over who is in control,” Bill Gates recalls telling the counselor. Reporting back, the counselor told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him. […]

    They enrolled their son in a school that they thought would give him more freedom. That was the private Lakeside School, now known as the place where Bill Gates discovered computers.

    Mr. Gates says he began to realize, “Hey, I don’t have to prove my position relative to my parents. I just have to figure out what I’m doing relative to the world.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Using Spammers to Solve AI Problems

    With spammers having already written software to match humans at solving some CAPTCHAs, many are predicting the end of the CAPTCHA. Not so, says Luis von Ahn (developer of the reCAPTCHA system) in a New Scientist article that asks why not set the spammers further AI tasks that they can solve inadvertently.

    Software that can solve any text-based CAPTCHA will be as much a milestone for artificial intelligence as it will be a problem for online security. […]

    “If [the spammers] are really able to write a programme to read distorted text, great – they have solved an AI problem,” says von Ahn. The criminal underworld has created a kind of X prize for OCR.

    That bonus for artificial intelligence will come at no more than a short-term cost for security groups. They can simply switch for an alternative CAPTCHA system – based on images, for example – presenting the eager spamming community with a new AI problem to crack.

    via Richard Holden

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Indefinite Memories

    There are many substances in the brain thought to be responsible for maintaining long-term memories. Now, research is showing that by blocking one of these substances, the enzyme PKMζ (PMKzeta), we could ‘erase’ certain memories. The hope is that the opposite could work, too:

    The drug [ZIP] blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information [PKMζ]. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems.

    However, should we really be trying to erase memories (traumatic experiences, an addiction, etc.)? Another group of researchers say no, and instead are looking at how a certain neurotransmitter receptor (mGluR5) may allow us to override or ‘unlearn’ memories, possibly helping with conditions such as PTSD, phobias, and anxiety.

    We don’t need to annihilate bad memories to get over them. A normal brain is able to take in new information that overrides or “unlearns” traumatic experiences. […]

    “It’s more appropriate to remember [a traumatic] event, […] you just don’t want it to affect your daily life.”

    On the other end of the spectrum, a study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review in 2002 looks at how researchers successfully created false childhood memories using doctored photographs (pdf).

    In prior research on how adults can be led to report false childhood memories, subjects have typically been exposed to personalized and detailed narratives describing false events. Instead, we exposed 20 subjects to a false childhood event via a fake photograph and imagery instructions. Over three interviews, subjects thought about a photograph showing them on a hot air balloon ride and tried to recall the event by using guided-imagery exercises. Fifty percent of the subjects created complete or partial false memories. The results bear on ways in which false memories can be created and also have practical implications for those involved in clinical and legal settings.

    via @jakeybro, @rightthought and @mocost

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Emotional Cartography

    By getting volunteers to walk around cities with biofeedback machines and GPS devices, Christian Nold has created a series of ’emotion maps’ of cities around the world, including San Francisco, (East) Paris and Greenwich, London.

    Participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s […] emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.

    Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self, a book created about the project, is a collection of essays from “artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists” and is available as a free, CC-licensed PDF.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Forever’s Not So Long

    Forever’s Not So Long is a touching short film (13 mins.) chronicling how two people decide to see out the end of their lives.

    via Link Banana

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Predicting Our Future Reactions

    Written by, among others, Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness), an article in Science looks at how bad we are at judging our reactions to various future events (closed access article).

    In two experiments, participants more accurately predicted their affective reactions to a future event when they knew how a neighbor in their social network had reacted to it than when they knew about the event itself. Women made more accurate predictions about how much they would enjoy a date with a man when they knew how much another woman in their social network enjoyed dating the man than when they read the man’s personal profile and saw his photograph. Men and women made more accurate predictions about how they would feel after being evaluated by a peer when they knew how another person in their social network had felt after being evaluated than when they previewed the evaluation itself. Although surrogation trumped simulation, both participants and independent judges had precisely the opposite intuition. By a wide margin, they believed that simulation was more likely than surrogation to produce accurate affective forecasts.

    Robin Hanson gives his typically learned opinion on the paper:

    People often wonder what it will be like for them to be old, or married, or with a successful career, etc.  They usually conclude they just can’t know, and must wait and see.  Yet all around them are other folks who are old, married, etc. – why not just accept those experiences as a good predictions of such futures?

    This research shows that we should do exactly that, as we’re not as different as we would like to think.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Financial Consequences of Winning the Lottery

    For individuals and families facing financial ruin one would assume that a lottery win would be a perfect, if lucky, way out of hardship. Contrary to this, however, an analysis of a small, unique set of people—Floridian lottery winners linked to bankruptcy records—finds that lottery winners are more likely to claim bankruptcy than others who were in a similar financial state previous to their win (pdf).

    A fundamental question faced by policymakers is how best to help individuals who are in financial trouble. This paper examines the consequences of the most basic approach: giving people large cash transfers. To determine whether this prevents or merely postpones bankruptcy, we exploit a unique dataset of Florida Lottery winners linked to bankruptcy records. Results show that although recipients of $50,000 to $150,000 are 50 percent less likely to file for bankruptcy in the two years after winning relative to small winners, they are equally more likely to file three to five years afterward. Furthermore, bankruptcy filings indicate that even though the median winner of a large cash prize could have paid off all of his unsecured debt or increased equity in new or existing assets, she chose not to do either. Consequently, although we cannot be sure other recipients of financial assistance would react in the same way lottery players did, our results do suggest that some skepticism regarding the long-term effect of cash transfers may be warranted.

    via The Undercover Economist

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Psychology of Money

    New Scientist provides a comprehensive summary of studies looking at the psychology of money. There are some fascinating findings here, including a study showing that “simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others [and] just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain”.

    Our relationship with money has many facets. Some people seem addicted to accumulating it, while others can’t help maxing out their credit cards and find it impossible to save for a rainy day. As we come to understand more about money’s effect on us, it is emerging that some people’s brains can react to it as they would to a drug, while to others it is like a friend. Some studies even suggest that the desire for money gets cross-wired with our appetite for food. And, of course, because having a pile of money means that you can buy more things, it is virtually synonymous with status – so much so that losing it can lead to depression and even suicide. In these cash-strapped times, perhaps an insight into the psychology of money can improve the way we deal with it.

    *The original article has, since posting this, gone behind a paywall. Simoleon Sense has some extensive excerpts.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The History of Puns

    For The New York Times, Joseph Tartakovsky provides a short, surprisingly groanless, history of the pun.

    The inglorious pun! Dryden called it the “lowest and most groveling kind of wit.” To Ambrose Bierce it was a “form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.” Universal experience confirms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan. […]

    Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies.

    I’ll say nothing more on the subject lest I pun and lose you all as readers.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Crowd Behaviour

    By studying the footage from an unidentified UK city’s CCTV cameras, psychologist Mark Levine is finding that a number of theories about crowd psychology previously taken as gospel may be incorrect, including the bystander effect (sometimes referred to as the Kitty Genovese effect) and the idea that crowds are inclined to be unruly and violent.

    Dr Levine persuaded the authorities in one British city to allow him to look at their CCTV footage of alcohol-fuelled conflict in public places. […] He analysed 42 clips of incidents that operators in a control room had judged had the potential to turn violent, though only 30 of them actually did so. He recorded gestures he labelled either “escalating”, such as pointing and prodding, or “de-escalating”, such as conciliatory open-handedness. […]

    Judging the fight to begin with the aggressor’s first pointing gesture towards his target, the researchers found that the first intervention usually involved a bystander trying to calm the protagonist down. Next, another would advise the target not to respond. If a third intervention reinforced crowd solidarity, sending the same peaceful message, then a violent outcome became unlikely. But if it did not—if the third bystander vocally took sides, say—then violence was much more likely.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan