The chemical revolution effects

http://www.thehalsreport.com/2011/01/is-something-wrong-with-the-sexual-development-of-human-males/

Women are very obedient!

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram's subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a puppy who was given real electric shocks. They found that 20 out of the 26 participants complied to the end. The six that had refused to comply were all male (54% of males were obedient); all 13 of the women obeyed to the end, although many were highly disturbed and some openly wept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Desk entropy

The internet in numbers

Take a look and you will surely be surprised with some of the data:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/22/internet-2009-in-numbers/

Very useful for online marketing people for calculating required numbers.

Cognitive miser

In today's excerpt - the human brain is a "cognitive miser"- it can employ several approaches to solving a given problem, but almost always chooses the one that requires the least computational power:

"We tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate. Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution.

Problem: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes

B) No

C) Cannot be determined

"More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning - reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities. Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like 'cannot be determined' available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence.

"Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick.

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

"Many people give the first response that comes to mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems."

Keith E. Stanovich, "Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss," Scientific American, November/December 2009, pp. 35-36.

10 good bad things

http://www.livescience.com/health/top_10_badthings_good-1.html

Exception or a norm?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1222108/Black-woman-said-raped-tortured-white-gang-claims-lied.html

Another such story in a week I have read.... I was just reading about this topic here and there and I came across a reliable research which states that approximately 10% cases of rape are just made up. What better weapon can one get than just acting like a victim for sometime and getting the guy(s) one of the harshest of punishments around.

Disgusting truth...

People's priority indicator

Well, I was at it again. I went to google and typed "how to" and back came the response.

Two months ago, "how to write a resume", was the first in the list as mentioned here previously.

http://ajitjagan.blogspot.com/2009/07/understanding-economys-priorities.html

I guess people are back to wanting to make babies again.

Now that I am searching this pretty regularly, I am thinking of a fancy name I can give to this indicator. I can then report the monthly state of affairs and can observe the lastest trends in people's priorities. It may give some clue as to what people are upto these days.

Thinking it cross sectionally, maybe it can work as a crude indicator to predict the number of children born in the next year or so.

Having some hopes that one day, this will be refered to something like the long skirt theory, the leading lipstick indicator.

@readers: please suggest an appropriate/wacky name with/without including my name in the indicator :)

p.s: The search is for google.co.in..... You may get different results if you are in another domain/country.

A good hedge

Crazy as it sounds, alcohol may one day be given to people with brain injuries to help them recover.

The idea has arisen from a study of 38,000 people with head injuries, which found that those with alcohol in their blood were more likely to survive. For every 100 people who died when stone-cold sober, only 88 died with ethanol – the kind of alcohol in drinks – in their veins.

"The finding raises the intriguing possibility that administering ethanol to patients with brain injuries may improve outcome," conclude the investigators.

Lead researcher Ali Salim of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said he hoped a trial could be mounted, but more information is needed first. "We need a better understanding of the exact mechanism, the appropriate dose and specific timing of treatment before we can embark on clinical trials," he told New Scientist.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17820-bash-your-head-you-need-a-stiff-drink.html

Understanding economy's priorities

Well, here is one crude method to understand the people's priorties in various times(e.g. now in recession and a couple of years before).

Story: Today, I opened google search with auto fill option on and typed in "how to " and found something that really caught my eye. Right at the top was "how to write a resume".

The prelude: 2 years ago, I went to google search with auto fill option on and typed "how to" and found "how to get pregnant" as the number one option.

Well, things have changed and today "how to get pregnant" is at 9th position.

Shows peoples' priorities, I guess!

Interesting study

A randomized trial of the effect of estrogen and testosterone on economic behavior concludes "There was no significant effect of estrogen or testosterone on any of the studied behaviors." http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/04/03/0812757106.short?rss=1