Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "They took their video camera to a maternity ward to examine the preferences of babies that were only one day old. The infants saw either the friendly face of a live female student or a mobile that matched the color, size and shape of the student's face and included a scrambled mix of her facial features. To avoid any bias, the experimenters were unaware of each baby's sex during testing. When they watched the tapes, they found that the girls spent more time looking at the student, whereas the boys spent more time looking at the mechanical object. This difference in social interest was evident on day one of life--implying again that we come out of the womb with some cognitive sex differences built in."

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the 'masculine' toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys."

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "Such anatomical diversity may be caused in large part by the activity of the sex hormones that bathe the fetal brain. These steroids help to direct the organization and wiring of the brain during development and influence the structure and neuronal density of various regions. Interestingly, the brain areas that Goldstein found to differ between men and women are ones that in animals contain the highest number of sex hormone receptors during development. This correlation between brain region size in adults and sex steroid action in utero suggests that at least some sex differences in cognitive function do not result from cultural influences or the hormonal changes associated with puberty--they are there from birth."

Language Log: Trees spring eternal

Language Log: Trees spring eternal: "'things are trees' idea over many millenia of hominid inquiry into nature. A believer in evolutionary psychology might even suppose that our brains have learned to think that things are trees, genetically as well as memetically."

Untitled Document

Untitled Document: "The world - David Hume writes - is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died' ('Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', V. 1779"

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview: "The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world simpler than our own. In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic."

Linguistics 001 -- Communication: a Biological Perspective

Linguistics 001 -- Communication: a Biological Perspective: "In a word, the answer is ritual. Indeed, ritual is still a central component of symbolic 'education' in modern human societies, though we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. The problem for symbol discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs. In order to bring the logic of token-token relationships to the fore, a high degree of redundancy is important. This was demonstrated in the experiments with the chimpanzees Sherman and Austin. It was found that getting them to repeat by rote a large number of errorless trials in combining lexigrams enabled them to make the transition from explicit and concrete sign-object associations to implicit sign-sign associations. Repetition of the same set of actions with the same set of objects over and over again in a ritual performance is often used for a similar purpose in modern human societies. Repetition can render the individual details for some performance automatic and minimally conscious, while at the same time the emotional intensity induced by group participation can help focus attention on other aspects of the objects and actions involved. In a ritual frenzy, one can be induced to see everyday activities and objects in a very different light."

Feminist Ethics

Feminist Ethics: "Kohlberg claimed that moral development is a six-stage process. Stage One is the punishment and obedience orientation. To avoid the 'stick' of punishment and/or to receive the 'carrot' of a reward, children do as they are told. Stage Two is 'the instrumental relativist orientation.' Based on a limited principle of reciprocity — You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours — children meet others' needs only if others meet their needs. Stage Three is the 'good boy-nice girl' orientation. Adolescents conform to prevailing norms to secure others' approval and love. Stage Four is the law and order orientation. Adolescents begin to do their duty, show respect for authority, and maintain the given social order to secure others' admiration and respect for them as honorable, law abiding citizens. Stage Five is the social-contract legalistic orientation. Adults adopt an essentially utilitarian moral point of view according to which individuals are permitted to do as they please, provided they refrain from harming other people in the process. Stage Six is the universal ethical principle orientation. Adults adopt an essentially Kantian moral perspective that seeks to transcend and judge all conventional moralities. Adults are no longer ruled by self-interest, the opinion of others, or the fear of legal punishment, but by self-legislated and self-imposed universal principles such as those of justice, reciprocity, and respect for the dignity of human persons (Kohlberg in Mischel, ed., Cognitive Development and Epistemology, 1971)."

Economist.com | America's intelligence reforms

Economist.com | America's intelligence reforms

Economist.com | Synaesthesia

Economist.com | Synaesthesia: "In ES's case, that happens too. Individual tones have their own colours: C is red, F-sharp is violet. But her perception of intervals as flavours, reported in this week's Nature by Gian Beeli and his colleagues at the University of Zurich, is a phenomenon recorded only once before."

Mangiare Bene - Rules for cooking Pasta

Mangiare Bene - Rules for cooking Pasta: "The quantity of salt to water should be 1/2 tablespoon per litre"

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books: "terror of boredom"

Economist.com | Animal behaviour

Economist.com | Animal behaviour

The New York Times > Technology > For Local Searchers, Amazon Adds Photos to Yellow Pages

The New York Times > Technology > For Local Searchers, Amazon Adds Photos to Yellow Pages:

"To achieve this, A9 sent out a sport utility vehicle equipped with a digital video camera. In Manhattan, for example, a driver spent more than a week cruising down streets, capturing images and cataloging the location of each business using a global positioning system receiver."

current issue

current issue:

'Pink tea,' originally meaning a highly fashionable (and exclusive) tea party, is an American invention dating back to the late 19th century. The use of 'pink' to mean 'fashionable' or 'exclusive' harks back to the very old sense of 'pink' meaning 'the peak or finest example' of something, a use dating back to the 16th century, probably ultimately derived from the pinkish complexion of a Caucasian person in good health ('in the pink'). By the 17th century, 'pink' was being used both as a noun meaning 'one of the elite' and an adjective meaning 'exquisite' or 'exclusive.'

Entrez PubMed

Entrez PubMed: "Temporal lobe abnormalities in semantic processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging."

Note, find thisarticle.

The democracy that hates you...

"The democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator that loves you."

From The Case for Democracy Natan Sharansky (p95).

My Sharansky - Bush's favorite book doesn't always endorse his policies. By Chris Suellentrop:

Reason: Stigmatizing Fathers: Dads lose both ways in adoption cases

Reason: Stigmatizing Fathers: Dads lose both ways in adoption cases: "In the end, our society sends men quite a mixed message. If your partner gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby, you're liable for 18 years of child support, whether or not you want to be a father. If she doesn't want to be a mother, she can give your child to strangers and there isn't much you can do. Then we complain that men don't take parenthood seriously enough."

Chinks in the alliance

The New York Times > Washington > Backers of Gay Marriage Ban Use Social Security as Cudgel:

"WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - A coalition of major conservative Christian groups is threatening to withhold support for President Bush's plans to remake Social Security unless Mr. Bush vigorously champions a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage."

The New York Times > Science > Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically

The New York Times > Science > Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically:

For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius.

Who is this guy! I love him. I've been pointing that out too - being born a male, that's no guarantee of success. We may see more males at the very top of success than females but we need to take into account all those males who fail utterly, those in jail, those with mental illnesses, those who die in war or crime. That is, there is selection bias in saying men have advantages over women. Only those who survived have it better than women.

One comparison is to polygamy (legally having more than one wife). Is it good for males or bad? The initial response is: sure, it's good for males because they can have a harem (salacious laughter). But look at it more closely. It's not the case that a polygamous society would instantaneously have more girls be born. No, there would still be a 1:1, male:female ratio (more accurately, it's 105:100 ratio in the US, at birth; and it declines every second after that). If some man has three wives that means there are two men out there unable to find a wife. On average it would be the same as a strictly monogamous society. But that's on average. It may still be better to be born a female in such a society. Why? Because it's safer. There's more insurance for a woman. She can always find a mate, even if she has to share him with other women. That's not the case with men. They have a higher chance of having multiple mates but also a higher chance of having no mates at all. In this society, males and females may average the same number of mates, but males have a larger Bell curve (compare high risk investment options).


(It should be pointed out that a society such as the US, where there are no legal penalties for having a mistress, is partially polygamous. A status-rich man can have as many women as he can provide status for.)