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Calvin and Hobbes - 29 October 2011

2011-10-29T05:31:09Z

Calvin and Hobbes - 25 October 2011

2011-10-25T05:51:11Z

How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect

2011-10-18T18:48:19Z

Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life.

But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my cherished childhood tales – the time my older brother put hot peppers in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my young tongue – actually happened to my little sister. I’d stolen her trauma.

The reason we’re such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.

The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner.

This time, though, the subjects were given a “lifeline”: they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing group. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the lifeline was actually composed of false answers to the very questions that the subjects had previously answered correctly and confidently. Remarkably, this false feedback altered the responses of the participants, leading nearly 70 percent to conform to the group and give an incorrect answer. They had revised their stories in light of the social pressure.

The question, of course, is whether their memory of the film had actually undergone a change. (Previous studies have demonstrated that people will knowingly give a false answer just to conform to the group. We’re such wimps.) To find out, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab one last time to take the memory test, telling them that the answers they had previously been given were not those of their fellow film watchers, but randomly generated by a computer. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, but more than 40 percent remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted by the earlier session. They had come to believe their own bullshit.

Here’s where the fMRI data proved useful. By comparing the differences in brain activity between the persistent false memories and the temporary errors of “social compliance” the scientists were able to detect the neural causes of the misremembering. The main trigger seemed to be a strong co-activation between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus is known to play a role in long-term memory formation, while the amygdala is an emotional center in the brain. According to the scientists, the co-activation of these areas can sometimes result in the replacement of an accurate memory with a false one, provided the false memory has a social component. This suggests that feedback of others has the ability to strongly shape our remembered experience. We are all performers, twisting our stories for strangers.

The scientists briefly speculate on why this effect might exist, given that it leads to such warped recollections of the past:

Altering memory in response to group influence may produce untoward effects. For example, social influence such as false propaganda can deleteriously affect individuals’ memory in political campaigns and commercial advertising and impede justice by influencing eyewitness testimony. However, memory conformity may also serve an adaptive purpose, because social learning is often more efficient and accurate than individual learning. For this reason, humans may be predisposed to trust the judgment of the group, even when it stands in opposition to their own original beliefs.

This research helps explain why a shared narrative can often lead to totally unreliable individual memories. We are so eager to conform to the collective, to fit our little lives into the arc of history, that we end up misleading ourselves. Consider an investigation of flashbulb memories from September 11, 2001. A few days after the tragic attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps began interviewing people about their personal experiences. In the years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these personal stories. They’ve shown, for instance, that subjects have dramatically changed their recollection of how they first learned about the attacks. After one year, 37 percent of the details in their original story had changed. By 2004, that number was approaching 50 percent. The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of details from that day are now inventions. Our 9/11 tales are almost certainly better – more entertaining, more dramatic, more reflective of that awful day – but those improvements have come at the expense of the truth. Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.

Image: wolfgangfoto/Flickr

Why add a Barometer to the Galaxy Nexus? Dan Morrill gives us some Insight

2011-10-20T16:45:48Z

One of the features that was added to the Galaxy Nexus was a barometer. I saw it listed during the event and didn’t pay much mind to it. I figured it was for internal weather predicting and elevation readings. After all, a Barometer is just an indicator of air pressure changes. Various Barometer readings can lead to predictions of thunder storms, hurricanes and tornado’s. They are pretty cool little things to have around.

One of our most informative Google Engineers, Dan Morrill, was kind enough to give a bit of an explanation via Google+. The Barometer was added to the Galaxy Nexus to improve GPS location, because “locking onto a GPS involves numerically solving a 4-dimensional set of linear equations – 3 dimensions in space, and time.”

Are you lost? Don’t worry you aren’t the only one. Mr. Morrill went a little further and put it in English for the rest of us. Assisted GPS (aGPS) is one of the most popular and common types of GPS in devices. It gives a rough, city-level estimate of your location. Adding a barometer to the device helps speed things up. IT gives a “reasonable first-cut estimate for altitude” based on atmospheric pressure. Determining altitude quickly eliminates one of the three spacial dimensions of GPS location.

Morrill says it could be used for weather prediction but that the Galaxy Nexus barometer isn’t even close to “weather grade”. Oh, and the Motorola XOOM has a barometer in it too, so it is not a new technology.

If you want to check out the entire written word of Morrill, feel free to head over to his Google+ account.

Source: AndroidPolice

GMusic Is a Native Google Music Player for the iPhone

2011-10-19T13:00:00Z

iOS: GMusic is a new native iOS app that streams music from your Google Music account right to your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. It can even download songs for offline playback, something that the previously mentioned webapp provided by Google is unable to do. More »

The Science Of Irrationality

2011-10-18T15:26:41Z

My latest WSJ Head Case column is on Daniel Kahneman’s new book, which is quite wonderful. Even if you think you know prospect theory, it’s insightful to read a review of the work by the master:

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: “A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs 10 cents. This answer is both incredibly obvious and utterly wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and $1.05 for the bat.) What’s most impressive is that education doesn’t really help; more than 50% of students at Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology routinely give the incorrect answer.

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this for more than five decades. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents, Mr. Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on mental short cuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. The short cuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether.

Although Mr. Kahneman is now widely recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, his research was dismissed for years. Mr. Kahneman recounts how one eminent American philosopher, after hearing about the work, quickly turned away, saying, “I am not interested in the psychology of stupidity.”

But the philosopher missed the point. The biases and blind-spots identified by Messrs. Kahneman and Tversky aren’t symptoms of stupidity. They’re an essential part of our humanity, the inescapable byproducts of a brain that evolution engineered over millions of years.

In Mr. Kahneman’s important new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” his first work for a popular audience, he outlines the implications of this new model of cognition. What are the most important mental errors that we all make? And can they be overcome?

Consider the overconfidence bias, which drives many of our mistakes in decision-making. The best demonstration of the bias comes from the world of investing. Although many fund managers charge high fees to oversee stock portfolios, they routinely fail a basic test of skill: persistent achievement. As Mr. Kahneman notes, the year-to-year correlation between the performance of the vast majority of funds is barely above zero, which suggests that most successful managers are banking on luck, not talent.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. The stock market is a case study in randomness, a system so complex that it’s impossible to predict. Nevertheless, professional investors routinely believe that they can see what others can’t. The end result is that they make far too many trades, with costly consequences.

And it’s not just investors who suffer from this mental flaw. The typical entrepreneur believes that he or she has a 60% chance of success, though less than 35% of small businesses survive more than five years. Meanwhile, CEOs who hold more company stock—taken here as a sign of self-confidence—also tend to make more irresponsible decisions, overpaying for acquisitions and engaging in misguided mergers.

Even consumers are hurt by this bias. A recent survey of American homeowners found that they expected, on average, to spend about $18,500 on remodelling their kitchens. The actual average cost? Nearly $39,000.

We like to see ourselves as a Promethean species, uniquely endowed with the gift of reason. But Mr. Kahneman’s simple experiments reveal a very different mind, stuffed full of habits that, in most situations, lead us astray. Though overconfidence may encourage us to take necessary risks—Mr. Kahneman calls it the “engine of capitalism”—it’s generally a dangerous (and expensive) illusion.

What’s even more upsetting is that these habits are virtually impossible to fix. As Mr. Kahneman himself admits, “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.”

Even when we know why we stumble, we still find a way to fall.

Dilbert - 19 October 2011

2011-10-19T10:21:51Z

Shared by John Russell
You don't want to be in a meeting with me at 12:15. I start saying things I don't even remember later.

Calvin and Hobbes - 19 October 2011

2011-10-19T05:58:27Z

Dilbert - 18 October 2011

2011-10-19T01:30:49Z

Shared by John Russell
Nope, the iMole was patented already.

Find Your Way in a City GPS-Free by Paying Attention to the Ubiquitous Cues

2011-10-11T20:00:00Z

Your phone's GPS capabilities mean you can pinpoint yourself on a map with the tap of your finger, but should your battery die or your phone go on the fritz, would you be able to navigate compass-free? The Natural Navigator Tristan Gooley offers six clever ways to never get lost in a city again. More »

The True Cost of Commuting

2011-10-12T20:00:00Z

Your daily commute costs a lot more than what you pay each trip to the gas station. Personal finance blogger Mr. Money Mustache details the true cost of commuting, walking through how to calculate the time and financial burden of a "not too bad" commute, breaking down some of the most common misconceptions about what you sign on for with your daily drive to the office. More »

Should I Switch to iCloud From Google?

2011-10-17T19:00:00Z

Among the big enhancements to iOS 5 is Apple's new iCloud suite, which keeps your mail, contacts, calendars, documents, and other data stored in the cloud and synced to all your Apple devices. Most people currently use Google services for these features, so we played with iCloud for a few days and looked at how they stacked up against one another. Here's what we found. More »

Serving at the Pleasure of the King

2011-10-15T10:58:47Z

I enjoy my iPhone tremendously; I think it's the most important product Apple has ever created and one they were born to make. As a consumer who has waited far too long for the phone industry to get the swift kick in the ass it so richly deserved, I'm entirely on Apple's side here.

But as a software developer, I am deeply ambivalent about an Apple dominated future. Apple isn't shy about cultivating the experience around their new iOS products and the App Store. There are unusually strict, often mysterious rules around what software developers can and cannot do -- at least if they want entry into the App Store. And once you're in, the rules can and will change at any time. Apple has cracked down several times already:

The developers involved are contractually prevented from even discussing specifically what happened to them by the terms of the app store. Those frustrating, inconsistent, opaque App Store experiences led developers to coin parodies such as Apple's Three Laws of Developers.

A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It is absolutely clear who is in charge when you submit an application to the App Store. Apple developers serve at the pleasure of the king.

In Apple's defense, this is done in the name of protecting the consumers from malicious, slimy, or defective applications. Sort of like Nintendo's Seal of Approval, I guess.

The court of the king is a lucrative place to be, but equally dangerous. While upgrading my iPhone to iOS 5 – an excellent upgrade, by the way – I was surprised to discover the following blurb in the feature notes:

Safari Reader displays web articles sans ads or clutter so you can read without distractions. Reading List lets you save interesting articles to peruse later [like the popular Instapaper application], while iCloud keeps your list updated across all your devices.

Apple has since changed the page, but at the time I read it, there was a direct linked reference to Instapaper, the popular "save this webpage to read later" application which Reading List is a clone of. I distinctly remember this mention, because I was shocked that they would be so open and overt about replacing a beloved third-party application. Perhaps it made Apple uncomfortable too; maybe that's why they pulled the Instapaper text and link.

If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums. But in the Mac world, if the king deems it necessary, then so it must be.

When iOS 5 and Lion ship, Apple will show a much larger percentage of iOS-device owners that saving web pages to read later is a useful workflow and can dramatically improve the way they read.
If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve their needs better. And they’ll quickly find Instapaper in the App Store.

I've met Marco Arment, the developer of Instapaper, and I like Marco. He's even been a guest on the Stack Exchange podcast. This is a nice, optimistic interpretation, but the reality is a little scarier. I'm struggling to understand why anyone would buy Instapaper when they can click a button in Safari and have that web page delivered to any of their Macs or iOS devices for later reading via iCloud.

Ah, but wait – what about offline support? Yes, that's something only Instapaper can deliver! Or can it?

A common scenario: an Instapaper customer is stocking up an iPad for a long flight. She syncs a bunch of movies and podcasts, downloads some magazines, and buys a few new games, leaving very little free space. Right before boarding, she remembers to download the newest issue of The Economist. This causes free space to fall below the threshold that triggers the [new iOS 5 space] cleaner, which — in the background, unbeknownst to her — deletes everything that was saved in Instapaper. Later in the flight, with no internet connectivity, she goes to launch Instapaper and finds it completely empty.

That's the problem with kings, you see. Their rule is absolute law, but they can be capricious, erratic, and impulsive. If you're lucky enough to live under the rule of a fair and generous king, then you'll do well. But historically speaking, monarchies have proven to be … unreliable.

I tend to agree with Marco that this is, in the big scheme of things, a minor technical problem. A private application cache not subject to iCloud syncing and space limitations would fix it. But it speaks volumes that Marco – a dedicated subject of the king – apparently had no idea this change was coming until it was on top of him. It's negatively impacting his Instapaper business and his customers. It's also concerning that this issue wasn't resolved or at least raised as a serious concern during the lengthy iOS 5 beta. Perhaps Apple's legendary secrecy is to blame. I honestly don't know.

As a consumer, I like that Apple is perfectly willing to throw its software developers under a bus to protect me (or, more cynically, Apple itself). But as a software developer, I'm not sure I can cope with that and I am unlikely to ever develop anything for an iOS device as a result. If you choose to deliver software in the Apple ecosystem, this is simply the tradeoff you've chosen to make. Apple developers serve at the pleasure of the king.

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Mix Tea Leaves in a Litter Box to Cut the Stench

2011-10-18T01:42:58Z

Shared by John Russell
Funny, it also makes it taste like coffee.

If you live with a cat, it might seem like there is no way you can combat the horrid smell coming from the litter box, but DIY blogger Adam Verwymeren suggests using dried tea leaves in the box. More »

X11

2011-10-15T02:54:31Z

Shared by John Russell
Its been a while. Things are good.

The Corliss Resolution

2011-10-10T00:00:00Z

Putting Emails In Folders Is a Waste of Time, Says IBM Study

2011-10-10T20:40:12Z

Shared by John Russell
I've been saying this for years. I completely agree. I just don't like having stuff in my inbox. I search the deleted items folder. I live on the edge.

An anonymous reader writes "There are two types of office workers in the world — those who file their emails in folders, and those who use search. Well, it looks like the searchers are smarter. A 354-user study by IBM research found that users who just searched their inbox found emails slightly faster than users who had filed them by folder. Add the time spent filing and the searchers easily come out on top. Apparently the filers are using their inbox as a to-do list rather than wanting to categorize information to find it more easily."

Rapid PCR Could Bring Quick Diagnoses

2011-10-10T12:26:06Z

Shared by John Russell
This is mostly for Paul. Billion fold amplification of a sample in 3 minutes!!! Woah.

A technique for doing PCR amplification of DNA samples could make it possible to do genome analysis in minutes of infectious agents. Cynthia Graber reports.

Bizarro - 9 October 2011

2011-10-09T05:13:17Z

Bizarro - 8 October 2011

2011-10-08T05:42:16Z