so basic, yet so mysterious....,

wikipedia | The James–Lange theory refers to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange. The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of a specific emotion.^[1] Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system.

The theory has been criticised and modified over the course of time, as one of several competing theories. In 2002 a research paper on the autonomous nervous system stated that the theory has been "hard to disprove".^[2]

on BD's mind yesterday: "why IQ-75'z are bigger"

thescientist | Women rate images of men more highly the larger their penises are, according to a study published yesterday (April 8) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Penis size had about the same influence as height in determining how females rated the attractiveness of males. Body shape was also influential in determining hotness—men with broad shoulders and narrow hips faired best.

Researchers had 105 heterosexual female Australian women rate life-size computer-generated images of men of various heights, builds, and penis sizes. They found that, at rather short lengths, adding inches to penis size was hugely helpful, but the benefit per added inch began to diminish when penises reached around 3 inches long when flaccid. The researchers, from three Australian universities, predicted that there would be a size at which penises became too big but said that they had not studied big enough penises to reach that point. The longest penises they tested were around 5 inches long. Also, having a big penis boosted tall men’s ratings more than it boosted short men’s ratings.

The scientists said that women’s apparent interest in penis size could explain why human males have penises that are larger in proportion to body size than the penises of other animals. Since penises would have been readily visible for much of human evolution, ancestral women could have selected for large penises through sizing up partners before copulating.

The preference could have several explanations, the authors speculated. A previous study showed that larger penises were associated with more orgasms in female sex partners. A predilection for large penises could also be a social or cultural phenomenon. Alan Dixson, a primatologist at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, told Nature that in order to understand the cultural component, the researchers should study how women from various areas and cultures value penis size.

need a treasure trail too...,

dailymail | For years women have been convinced that porn star style waxing and vajazzles are the quickest way to impress their other halves in bed, with nearly two thirds saying that their look down below is calculated to please their man.

But it appears that it's time to wave goodbye to painful waxing for good, after a new survey found that men actually prefer a natural look.

According to the poll, which canvassed 1,000 men, the most popular look is is 'trimmed and tidy' – a far cry from the Hollywood, which involves having all hair removed.

Nearly half (43 per cent) of those who took part in the survey, which was commissioned by waxing brand, Nads, said they preferred their women to look as natural as possible but with a 'Bermuda triangle' - trimmed hair and waxed edges leaving no bikini hair overspill.

17 per cent plumped for the Brazilian, a landing strip of pubic hair, while 15 per cent liked the heart shaped 'Heart Breaker'.

Just 12 per cent chose the full Hollywood, with most men saying they preferred their women to have some hair 'down there'.

The style that men hated the most was the 'G Wax' – a closely trimmed small square of hair that most felt looked a bit silly and a bit of a turn off.

Among the men who took part in the poll was Sidcup father of two, Mark Tailworth, who said: 'I’d hate my wife not to have some hair, I much prefer her to be well trimmed than sporting some ridiculous, unsexy design.'

mordor, steady $$ for Bechtel, employment for the unproductive, and hell on earth for you...,

zerohedge | Engineers around the world have done a great job developing nuclear technologies to serve mankind’s many endeavors: medical devices, power generators, naval propulsion systems, or the most formidable weapons ever built, so formidable that they could largely wipe out mankind and its many endeavors.

However, engineers haven’t figured out yet what to do with the highly radioactive and toxic materials nuclear technologies leave behind. They leak through corroded containers, contaminate soil, water, and air, and after decades, we try to deal with them somehow, but mainly we’re shuffling that problem to the next generation. The enormous sums coming due over time were never included in the original costs. We’re not even talking about an accident, like Fukushima, whose costs will likely reach $1 trillion, but about maintenance and cleanup.

For example, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, the largest, most daunting environmental cleanup project in the US. More than 11,000 people work on it. Nine relatively small reactors on that property produced plutonium, starting in 1943 through the Cold War. In 1987, the last reactor was shut down. What remains are various structures, such as the evocatively named “Plutonium Finishing Plant” (aerial photo: red “X” marks denote sections to be demolished) or the “Plutonium Vault Complex” that stored plutonium for nuclear weapons (photo of corridor).

Buried underground are 177 tanks containing 56 million gallons of highly radioactive and toxic waste. The 31 oldest tanks, made of a single layer of now rust-perforated carbon steel, have been leaking highly radioactive and toxic sludge into the ground for decades.

Hence the “Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant,” a radiochemical processing facility. In its annual report to Congress, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which has jurisdiction over the “defense nuclear facilities” of the Department of Energy (DOE), describes the task at Hanford:

After these wastes are retrieved from the tanks, the plant will chemically separate the waste into two streams of differing radioactive hazard and solidify them into glass in stainless steel canisters. The low-radioactivity glass will be disposed of onsite, while the high-level waste glass will be shipped offsite for permanent disposal once a repository is available.

Turns out, almost none of it, according to the report, can be done safely or at all. And that “repository?” It doesn’t exist. Despite decades of trying, the US has not been able to come up with one.

mordor is spontaneously burping large quantities of radioactive hydrogen...,

krem | KING 5 News has learned there’s been a series of unexpected hydrogen gas releases from a tank holding radioactive waste at Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Confidential sources say it began on March 16 and lasted for several days, much longer than usual, and they worry a single spark could have set off an explosive release of radioactivity.  

This comes two days after a report by a government panel expressing concerns about the release of flammable gasses at Hanford and the government's inability to respond to them.

Our confidential sources and government representatives are giving dramatically different versions of what has happened. Both agre a million-gallon tank holding nuclear waste at Hanford had a build-up of hydrogen gas.

Our confidential sources say it was of a magnitude larger than anything teams there have seen in at least two years and "burped" days longer than normal.

  

Workers who toil above the buried Hanford tank farms constantly monitor the tanks for gas build-ups and will conduct controlled releases to reduce pressure. We're told this was a spontaenous release, not controlled.

Hydrogen gas is constantly being produced in some tanks by the extremely high temperatures of nuclear waste. They are like dozens of underground crock pots just simmering away. Sometimes, they can boil over.

prohibition scuttles promising medical science...,

guardian | Drugs derived from magic mushrooms could help treat people with severe depression. Scientists believe the chemical psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, can turn down parts of the brain that are overactive in severely depressive patients. The drug appears to stop patients dwelling on themselves and their own perceived inadequacies.

However, a bid by British scientists to carry out trials of psilocybin on patients in order to assess its full medical potential has been blocked by red tape relating to Britain's strict drugs laws. Professor David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, will tell a conference today that because magic mushrooms are rated as a class-A drug, their active chemical ingredient cannot be manufactured unless a special licence is granted.

"We haven't started the study because finding companies that could manufacture the drug and who are prepared to go through the regulatory hoops to get the licence is proving very difficult," said Nutt. "The whole field is so bedevilled by primitive old-fashioned attitudes. Even if you have a good idea, you may never get it into the clinic, it seems."

Research by Nutt has found that psilocybin switches off part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. It was known that this area is overactive in individuals suffering from depression. In his tests on healthy individuals, it was found that psilocybin had a profound effect on making these volunteers feel happier weeks after they had taken the drug, said Nutt – who was sacked as the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in 2009 after repeatedly clashing with government ministers about the dangers and classification of illicit drugs.

Nutt's team also discovered that another section of the brain known as the default mode network was also influenced by psilocybin. "People with depression have overactive default mode networks and so ruminate on themselves, on their inadequacies, on their badness, that they are worthless, that they have failed – to an extent that is sometimes delusional. Again psilo-cybin appears to block that activity and stops this obsessive rumination."

To determine if psilocybin could be used as a treatment to help patients, Nutt and his team were given £550,000 by the Medical Research Council to begin a three-year project to test the drug on people with depression. Patients who had failed to respond to two previous treatments would be selected. The aim was to test 30 with the drug and 30 with a placebo.

However, the group has found its path blocked by bureaucracy. So difficult has the government and the EU made it for companies to manufacture the active ingredients of Class A drugs that price tags of around £100,000 were given by chemical companies.

"We only need a relatively small amount of the drug, an order worth only a few hundred pounds," said Nutt, who is set to describe his work with psilocybin at the UK Festival of Neuroscience conference in London today. "If we have to pay £100,000 we simply cannot afford to carry out the rest of the study. We have not given up but it is proving very difficult," he said.

"Depression is now the largest cause of disability in Europe. There are many effective treatments but only about a third of individuals respond fully. At least 10% fail to respond to three different treatments. We badly need more types of treatment but we cannot pursue these because the government is denying scientists access to powerful tools that could help people in need. The regulations that govern researchers access to Class A drugs are totally inappropriate and harmful."

views from the borders of mental illness...,

guardian | When the psychologist Peter Chadwick explained that he was trying to research psychosis he was given short shrift by one of his patients. "You're trying to climb rain, Peter, or sweep sun off the pavement." The desire to build a science of disabling mental states can sometimes seem like wishful thinking, especially to those who have experienced the turmoil of an unquiet mind.

It is therefore no accident that critics of psychiatry have always had a particular dislike for the use of diagnosis. There are those on the outer fringes who still argue that classifying anything as a "mental illness" is fundamentally flawed, but most of the debate centres on the possibility of distinguishing different forms of psychological disability. One of the key issues is whether different diagnoses such as schizophrenia, bipolar or depression represent distinct disorders that have specific causes or whether these are just convenient and perhaps improvised ways of dividing up human distress for the purposes of treatment.

This is a hot and newly contentious topic. The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the book that lists psychiatric diagnoses, is due out in May. The latest revision has emerged after a decade of unfriendly debates over what should be included and where the boundaries should lie.

The most medical approach sees each diagnosis as a separate disease with specific causes. For example, the National Institute of Mental Health, a US government research agency, describes schizophrenia as "a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder", something akin to a distinct condition linked to specific genetic risks and brain changes. But diagnoses are not usually derived from scientific discovery but are based on descriptions of experiences and behaviours, which are then tested for their coherence in scientific studies. For those who see mental illness as something best understood at the level of the brain and genetics, the discovery of specific biological differences associated with a particular diagnosis is considered to be good evidence for its validity.

An alternative approach is to see the definition of schizophrenia as a makeshift way of classifying mental distress that clinicians happen to agree on. From this point of view, rather than schizophrenia being a scientific discovery, it's a tradition – varying in its usefulness depending on your point of view. This difference of opinion turns out to be remarkably politicised: the medical model traditionally favours diagnosis, medication and biomedical science, while the social model is linked to the championing of individual experience, psychotherapy and social interventions.

But a growing body of evidence suggests that this divide is both unhelpful and misleading because some of the best evidence that diagnoses do not represent distinct disorders comes not from social criticism but from medical genetics. Observers may note that this is a deliciously uncomfortable situation for both parties. The hardline biological psychiatrists have had diagnoses undermined by exactly the techniques they use to support them and the social constructionists may have to accept that the best evidence for their "humane" conclusions are biological studies which they reject as supposedly "alienating".

autistic brains organized differently (neandertals)

bbcnews | People with autism use their brains differently from other people, which may explain why some have extraordinary abilities to remember and draw objects in detail, according to new research.

University of Montreal scientists say in autistic people, the brain areas that deal with visual information are highly developed.

Other brain areas are less active.

The National Autistic Society says the findings significantly increase understanding of the condition.

The research, published in the journal Human Brain Mapping, pulls together 15 years of data on the way the autistic brain works.

Better at visual tasks

It suggests that the brains of autistic people are organised differently from those of other people; the area at the back of the brain, which processes visual information, is more highly developed.

That leaves less brain capacity in areas which deal with decision-making and planning.

That may be why people with autism can be better than others at carrying out some types of visual tasks.

For example, some are able to draw highly accurate and detailed images from memory.

However, they can find it difficult to interpret things like facial expressions.

The condition varies in severity, with some people functioning well, but others completely unable to take part in normal society.

The researchers believe their findings may lead towards new ways of helping people to live with the condition.

"For example, this may show a means to help people to literacy in a much more natural way than the usual methods of helping autistic people," said Dr Laurent Mottron from the University of Montreal.

"The natural tendency is to think that autism is a form of disorganisation. Here, what we see is that it is a reorganisation of the brain," he said.

characteristics of nde memories as compared to real and imagined events memories

plosone | Since the dawn of time, Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) have intrigued and, nowadays, are still not fully explained. Since reports of NDEs are proposed to be imagined events, and since memories of imagined events have, on average, fewer phenomenological characteristics than real events memories, we here compared phenomenological characteristics of NDEs reports with memories of imagined and real events. We included three groups of coma survivors (8 patients with NDE as defined by the Greyson NDE scale, 6 patients without NDE but with memories of their coma, 7 patients without memories of their coma) and a group of 18 age-matched healthy volunteers. Five types of memories were assessed using Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ – Johnson et al., 1988): target memories (NDE for NDE memory group, coma memory for coma memory group, and first childhood memory for no memory and control groups), old and recent real event memories and old and recent imagined event memories. Since NDEs are known to have high emotional content, participants were requested to choose the most emotionally salient memories for both real and imagined recent and old event memories. Results showed that, in NDE memories group, NDE memories have more characteristics than memories of imagined and real events.

human breath analysis and individual metabolic phenotypes

plosone | The metabolic phenotype varies widely due to external factors such as diet and gut microbiome composition, among others. Despite these temporal fluctuations, urine metabolite profiling studies have suggested that there are highly individual phenotypes that persist over extended periods of time. This hypothesis was tested by analyzing the exhaled breath of a group of subjects during nine days by mass spectrometry. Consistent with previous metabolomic studies based on urine, we conclude that individual signatures of breath composition exist. The confirmation of the existence of stable and specific breathprints may contribute to strengthen the inclusion of breath as a biofluid of choice in metabolomic studies. In addition, the fact that the method is rapid and totally non-invasive, yet individualized profiles can be tracked, makes it an appealing approach.

cancer pandemic: reaping the seeds of nuclear testing

globalresearch | The warnings about fallout from nuclear tests six decades ago often noted that cancers from the radiation would probably not begin appearing in large numbers for many years. But that time is now – and medical experts are wondering whether the surge in some cancers is a result.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission doused the entire United States with thyroid cancer-causing iodine-131 — and 300 other radioisotopes — by exploding atomic and hydrogen bombs above ground. To protect the dirty, secretive, militarized bomb-building industry, the government chose to warn the photographic film industry about the radioactive fallout patterns, but not the general public.

In 1951, the Eastman Kodak Company had threatened a federal lawsuit over the nuclear fallout that was fogging its bulk film shipments. Film was not packed in bubble wrap then, but in corn stalks that were sometimes being fallout-contaminated.

Image: During nuclear bomb drills in the 1950s, school children were ordered to hide under their desks.

By agreeing to warn Kodak, etc., the AEC and the bomb program avoided the public uproar — and the bomb testing program’s possible cancellation — that a lawsuit would have precipitated. The settlement kept the deadliness of the fallout hidden from farmers and the public, even though the government well knew that fallout endangered all the people it was supposed to be defending.

This staggering revelation was heralded on Sept. 30, 1997, in the New York Times headline, “U.S. Warned Film Plants, Not Public, About Nuclear Fallout.” The article began, “[W]hile the Government reassured the public that there was no health threat from atmospheric nuclear tests…” The fallout’s radioactive iodine-131delivered thyroid doses to virtually all 160 million people in the U.S. at the time.

According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland, which discovered the cover-up, children were especially affected and received higher doses because they generally consumed more milk than adults and since their thyroids are smaller and growing more rapidly. The “milk pathway” moves radioiodine from grass, to cows, to milk with extreme efficiency — a fact known to the government as early as 1951.

Ingested iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid gland where it can cause cancer. Average doses to children averaged between 6 and 14 rad, with some as high as 112 rad. Prior to 1997, the government claimed that thyroid doses to children were 15 to 70 times less.

Arkansas Nuclear One Reactor and ExxonMobil Pipeline Both Suffer Major Accidents

The Arkansas Nuclear One nuclear reactor – operated by Entergy – suffered an accident yesterday which killed one and injured 8 workers.

The plant vented steam to cool the reactor.  Air detection teams have been deployed to the area, and local residents are worried.  See this, this and this.

The operator of the reactor is “trying to understand scope of damage”, and there may be structural problems at one of the units, after a 500 ton device fell on water lines and electrical equipment.  Reactors are still using emergency generators.

Only 40 miles from the nuclear plant, Arkansas was hit with a major oil spill.

NBC News is reporting that an ExxonMobil pipeline rupture near Little Rock Friday evening has resulted in a “major oil spill,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency.  And see this.

Why are nuclear and fossil fuel disasters happening at the same time?  Because the accidents are caused by the exact same thing:  greed.

fukushima fallout sickens u.s. babies...,

msn | It's already well known how devastating the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown was for Japan -- dramatic spikes in radiation-related illnesses, an increase in likely cancer deaths over the next several years, and pollution which may never truly be cleaned up.

A new study suggests what many worldwide have feared -- that the devastation from the traveling radiation has in fact sickened infants in other countries, including babies born shortly after the incident in Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California.

The study, conducted by scientists with the Radiation and Public Health Project, found that babies born shortly after the incident were 28 percent more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism than were children born in those states during the same period one year earlier. In the rest of the U.S., which received less radioactive fallout, the risks actually decreased slightly compared with the year before.

The explosions produced the radioisotope iodine-131, which floated east over the Pacific Ocean and landed through precipitation on West Coast states as well as other Pacific countries. The levels of that isotope were measured in levels hundreds of times greater than supposedly safe levels. Radioactive iodine accumulates in human thyroid glands, and,  in babies and fetuses, the radiation can stunt the growth and development of both the body and the brain. That condition is congenital hypothyroidism (which, luckily, is treatable when and if detected early).

Fukushima fallout appeared to affect all areas of the U.S., and was especially large in some, mostly in the western part of the nation, the study said. Even worse, other conditions affecting babies born in that time frame may have been caused or worsened by Fukushima, the researchers said.

what is the alternative to the war on the poor?

guardian | Most of the world's people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I've reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government's full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.

"With a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness." This government, whose mismanagement of the economy has forced so many into the arms of the state, blames the sick, the unemployed, the underpaid for a crisis caused by the feral elite – and punishes them accordingly. Most of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced today, are disabled. Thousands will be driven from their homes, and many more pushed towards destitution. Relief for the poor from council tax will be clipped; legal aid for civil cases cut off. Yet at the end of this week those making more than £150,000 a year will have their income tax cut.

Two days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real terms. A week after that, thousands of families who live in towns and boroughs where property prices are high will be forced out of their homes by the total benefits cap. What we are witnessing is raw economic warfare by the rich against the poor.

So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? Part of the reason is that the minority controls the story. As John Harris explained in the Guardian, large numbers (including many who depend on it) have been persuaded that most recipients of social security are feckless, profligate fraudsters. Despite everything that has happened over the last two years, Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the other media barons still seem to be running the country. Their relentless propaganda, using exceptional and shocking cases to characterise an entire social class, remains highly effective. Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever been.

But I've come to believe that there's also something deeper at work: that most of the world's people live with the legacy of slavery. Even in a nominal democracy like the United Kingdom, most people were more or less in bondage until little more than a century ago: on near-starvation wages, fired at will, threatened with extreme punishment if they dissented, forbidden to vote. They lived in great and justified fear of authority, and the fear has persisted, passed down across the five or six generations that separate us and reinforced now by renewed insecurity, snowballing inequality, partisan policing.

Any movement that seeks to challenge the power of the elite needs to ask itself what it takes to shake people out of this state. And the answer seems inescapable – hope. Those who govern on behalf of billionaires are threatened only when confronted by the power of a transformative idea.

some of the "Top" about to get outed?

guardian | Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife.

The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade, with a former chief economist at McKinsey estimating that wealthy individuals may have as much as $32tn (£21tn) stashed in overseas havens.

In France, Jean-Jacques Augier, President François Hollande's campaign co-treasurer and close friend, has been forced to publicly identify his Chinese business partner. It emerges as Hollande is mired in financial scandal because his former budget minister concealed a Swiss bank account for 20 years and repeatedly lied about it.

In Mongolia, the country's former finance minister and deputy speaker of its parliament says he may have to resign from politics as a result of this investigation.

But the two can now be named for the first time because of their use of companies in offshore havens, particularly in the British Virgin Islands, where owners' identities normally remain secret.

The names have been unearthed in a novel project by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists [ICIJ], in collaboration with the Guardian and other international media, who are jointly publishing their research results this week.

The naming project may be extremely damaging for confidence among the world's wealthiest people, no longer certain that the size of their fortunes remains hidden from governments and from their neighbours.

online video instruction makes another quantum leap

The online version of 2.002 offers video lectures searchable by keyword, and organized as a tree of basic concepts that branch into related subtopics.

mit | Jasmine Chan’s course schedule this semester would suggest that the MIT sophomore is more than a little overbooked.

Chan, a mechanical engineering major, is taking two classes that meet at exactly the same time. Despite this apparent scheduling snafu, she hasn’t missed a single lecture in either course — and her approach to juggling the conflicting courses may represent the future of ambitious academic scheduling.

Chan is one of 11 students this semester who are participating in i2.002, a new online version of 2.002 (Mechanics and Materials II), a core requirement in mechanical engineering. The online course features videotaped lectures from 2.002, as well as recitations and a discussion forum that are similar to elements of edX, MIT’s OpenCourseWare, and other massive open online course (MOOC) platforms.

What may set i2.002 apart is its ease of searching: Search a key word or concept, and a video will start at exactly the moment in a lecture when that concept is introduced.

“It’s like Googling your class,” says Ken Kamrin, the Class of 1956 Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s a clickable, searchable index of videos … something that might be considered as part of the next generation of textbooks.”

“These are exciting times for online education,” says Pedro Reis, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. “There’s huge momentum at the moment for developing technology, through edX and other MOOC platforms, to deploy to a very large number of students. We’re saying, ‘Let’s take that approach and apply it to benefit our own students.’” Fist tap Dale.

the prisoner's dilemma: trust as a negative survival value...,

cluborlov | A cultural flip is needed to change from impersonal, commercial relationships to personal relationships based on trust, and the first hurdle, for many people, is in understanding what trust actually is, because there is no innate human quality called trustworthiness, possessed by some people, lacking in others. Rather, it is more along the lines of a generalization concerning a given individual’s behavior over time, within a given relationship. Trust is transactional: a person needs a reason to trust you, and you need a reason to trust that person. There is, however, such a quality as trustfulness: this is the property of small children, tame animals and, most unfortunately for them, many regular, salt-of-the-earth, mainstream Americans. It is of negative survival value in the context of financial collapse. It is being exhibited for all to see by some of the people who recently lost money when MF Global stole it to cover some private bets it had made. They licked their wounds, complained bitterly, and then...went looking for another financial company—to be taken advantage of again. Since the head of MF Global wasn’t punished, why wouldn’t another company do the same to them, knowing that it can do so with impunity?

There also seems to be a certain set of traits possessed in abundance by a category of highly effective American financial operators that makes it easy for them to prey on trustful people. It may be the suits they wear, or the English they speak or their general demeanor—let us call it “trustiness,” to go along with the “truthiness” of their financial disclosures. Deep down, trustful people feel privileged to be robbed by such superior specimens. The predator-prey relationship has been honed to the fine point of a pen: told to sign their life away on the dotted line, the besotted, trustful American gulps quietly—and signs.

Clearly, whenever there is an asymmetry between trustfulness and trustworthiness, the trustful party loses. Trust is not the property of one individual but the property of the relationship between individuals, and it must be balanced. There are roughly three types of trust. The first and best kind is trust borne of friendship, sympathy and love. People simply do not want to lose the trust of those they care about, and will do anything they can to make good on their promises. The second type of trust is based on reputation. It is not quite as solid, because someone’s reputation can be ruined without you knowing it. People who realize that their reputation has been ruined tend to stop being trustworthy rather suddenly, because they see that they have nothing left to lose in the trust game. Rather, they try to salvage whatever residual value their formerly trustworthy reputation still holds by taking full advantage of anyone who is still trustful through force of habit, lack of up-to-date information, inattention or sheer inertia. The last category of trust, the worst kind, is coerced: it is a matter of making it too expensive or too unpleasant for someone to break your trust. If you are forced to do business with someone you don’t trust at all, trade hostages for the duration of the transaction or come to some other arrangement that compels good behavior from both sides. Fist tap Dale.

the counterproductivity of targets

aera-l | Relevant to the recent Atlanta cheating scandal, a byproduct of the draconian consequences of failure to meet AdequateYearly Progress targets of the No ChildLeft Behind act , I point to six empirical "laws" related to "The Counterproductivity of Targets," five of which were listed EvalTalk's Bill Fear (2013) in his EvalTalk post "The Performance Paradox...da da da!!". These are epitomized by "Campbell's Law": "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Fear (2013), wrote:

I first heard Frans Leeuw talk about the "Performance Paradox" in relation to evaluation.  Unfortunately I don't think he wrote about it other than a thesis by one of his students.

However, quite by chance I found some of the roots of it today.

It seems that MarilynStrathern was one of the first to articulate this phenomenon in recent times.  I like her quote for it's brevity.

1. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
   - Marilyn Strathern (1997)

2. Goodhart's Law "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." Also: "Once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role."
  - Charles Goodhart (1981). 

3. The Lucas critique "It is naïve to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated historical data."
   - Robert Lucas (1976)

4. "A risk model breaks down when used for regulatory purposes."

    - Jon Danželsson (2002)

5.  Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
   - Donald Campbell (1976)

the child, the tablet, and the developing mind...,

NYTimes | I recently watched my sister perform an act of magic.

We were sitting in a restaurant, trying to have a conversation, but her children, 4-year-old Willow and 7-year-old Luca, would not stop fighting. The arguments — over a fork, or who had more water in a glass — were unrelenting.

Like a magician quieting a group of children by pulling a rabbit out of a hat, my sister reached into her purse and produced two shiny Apple iPads, handing one to each child. Suddenly, the two were quiet. Eerily so. They sat playing games and watching videos, and we continued with our conversation.

After our meal, as we stuffed the iPads back into their magic storage bag, my sister felt slightly guilty.

“I don’t want to give them the iPads at the dinner table, but if it keeps them occupied for an hour so we can eat in peace, and more importantly not disturb other people in the restaurant, I often just hand it over,” she told me. Then she asked: “Do you think it’s bad for them? I do worry that it is setting them up to think it’s O.K. to use electronics at the dinner table in the future.”

I did not have an answer, and although some people might have opinions, no one has a true scientific understanding of what the future might hold for a generation raised on portable screens.

“We really don’t know the full neurological effects of these technologies yet,” said Dr. Gary Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.” “Children, like adults, vary quite a lot, and some are more sensitive than others to an abundance of screen time.”

But Dr. Small says we do know that the brain is highly sensitive to stimuli, like iPads and smartphone screens, and if people spend too much time with one technology, and less time interacting with people like parents at the dinner table, that could hinder the development of certain communications skills.

So will a child who plays with crayons at dinner rather than a coloring application on an iPad be a more socialized person? Fist tap Dale.

inquiry science rocks, or does it?

aps | Although "inquiry teaching" has been a hot topic in science education for many years, it may be useful to reflect on some unresolved issues associated with it. The main point of this essay is that the relative effectiveness of different types of instructional "approaches" is not always investigated with the same rigor that permeates all strong scientific disciplines–clear definitions, well-defined empirical procedures, and data-driven conclusions. The second–and more contentious–point is that for many aspects of science instruction, "discovery learning" is often a less effective way to teach than a direct, didactic, and explicit type of instruction. Some in the physics education community may view this assertion as a foolhardy heresy, while for others it may be a dark secret that they have been reluctant to share with their colleagues. But heresies and secrets are hardly the way to discover and implement maximally effective instructional methods for teaching science.

I am not alone in suggesting that common practices in physics education may have scant empirical support. Several years ago Handelsman, et al.¹ asked: " … why do outstanding scientists who demand rigorous proof for scientific assertions in their research continue to use and, indeed, defend on the basis of their intuition alone, teaching methods that are not the most effective?" (p. 521) The specific lament in Handelsman et al. is the claim that much science education is based on a traditional form of didactic lecturing. However, one could just as well use that very same critique about the lack of "rigorous proof" to challenge the current enthusiasm for "inquiry approaches" to science education.

For example, an influential report from the NAS on inquiry approaches to science education² states that "…studies of inquiry-oriented curriculum programs … demonstrated significant positive effects on various quantitative measures, including cognitive achievement, process skills, and attitudes toward science." This would seem to be clear evidence in support of inquiry-approaches to science instruction, except that the report goes on to note, parenthetically, that "there was essentially no correlation between positive results and expert ratings of the degree of inquiry in the materials (p. 125)." Thus we have an argument for the benefits of a particular pedagogy, but no consensus from experts about the "dose response", i.e., the extent to which different "degrees of inquiry" lead to different types or amounts of learning.

One wonders about the evidential basis for the wide-spread enthusiasm for inquiry science, given the lack of operational definitions of what constitutes an "inquiry-based" lesson–or entire curriculum–and what specific features distinguish it from other types of instruction. There is a particular irony here in that the very field that has developed extraordinarily clear norms and conventions for talking about methods, theories, instrumentation, measurement, underlying mechanisms, etc. often abandons them when engaging in research on science education.