Delayed Knowledge

Reading this article about naps and dreams being able to boost learning would be ever so helpful in my teens when day dreaming came very easy as did napping for hours on summer afternoons where the only respite from the heat was somnolence. That was also when I had mastered the fine art of zoning out during the most boring classes with my eyes wide open while sitting at the desk closest to the teacher. It was more typical for the malcontents, troublemakers and such to cluster as far away from her as possible.

This I realized was poor strategy. If you wanted to sleep right through a class, you had locate yourself in the general vicinity of the most irreproachable kids. The enterprising neighbor who sat at the desk next to mine, put her time to good use by snacking out of the lunch boxes of the kids who actually paid attention to the teacher and took copious notes that the rest of us would soon borrow. Like me she no use for what was been taught and had been astute about choosing her desk. It paid rich dividends. At the end of forty minutes I would have no idea what had been taught or what if anything I was expected to have learned. My thoughts might have been one of many interesting places all highly unrelated to education and self-improvement.

I did suffer from occasional pangs of guilt for not having learned anything at school and having no desire to remedy the situation at home. Had I know then what I know now, I may have felt better about falling asleep on my text book the night before the test knowing fully well that I had squandered my last opportunity to familiarize myself with the material.

To remember something in particular -- say, the lines of a play or formulas for an exam -- it might help to study right before dozing, whether that means studying late at night or napping directly after a cram session, Stickgold said.

And if you can get yourself to dream about the material, you are at a particular advantage. Unfortunately, "dream content is notoriously hard to control," Stickgold said. The non-conscious brain "has its own rules," and focuses on whatever it deems most important, he added.

Empathy Enhancement

Against my better judgment, I emailed T several weeks after our "date" asking him a simple question "What made you fall off the face of the earth ?" More than anything, this was curiosity about human nature. It was all too apparent to me that he and I would not work out for the long haul.Even so, no one wants to believe that they have no judgment of character and in inter-personal relationships are completely unable to read what the other party is signaling. It hurts our self-esteem. T wrote back and this is what he had to say for himself :

No, you have not misunderstood things. I was wrong to break off contact with you, and I should have handled it better. Soon after our date (which was wonderful) I realized that because of distance and other things we would not have a long term relationship. I also knew that if we dated even a couple of times, I would not be able to restrain my desire for you. I thought it would be wrong to start dating, then maybe get too involved, then break up with you. I apologize that I just cut off communications, but I thought it would be best.

If this Livescience article is to be believed, men like T could benefit greatly from a shot of empathy enhancing nasal spray. They would be able to handle things better and be more pro-active than reactive when it came to relationships.In this situation, T might have been over-reacting about hurting my feelings when in fact, I was not liable to be hurt at all. Had I not asked, I would have never known. It would have been one of those unresolved relationship questions that make it to agony aunt columns and prompt books such as He Is Not That Into You. Truth is apparently stranger than fiction.

Art of Bragging

Found this article on how to brag via Marginal Revolution. The insights are interesting but not necessarily path-breaking. Being blatantly boastful is painfully obvious both to the person who is participating in the conversation and to on-lookers. It definitely makes them unpopular. Subtlety definitely helps but even that becomes evident after a while when there is a pattern to leading questions and remarks that open the opportunity to brag. Bragging just a little on occasion clearly has its uses :

'In situations ranging from a first date to a job interview, people commonly face the dilemma of how to make their listeners aware of their success without being perceived as braggers,' Tal-Or said. 'The present research provides a possible solution to this dilemma.'

There is also the issue of the person chosing not to be boastful being at a distinct disadvantage because they have to stand out in a crowd where everyone else is not making any effort to be humble. This is a lot like being the only at a party in jeans when every one is dressed to the nines. You stand out for being different but not necessarily in the most favorable light.

Symboitic Perspective

Reading this line in a Seed Magazine article "Human beings are not really individuals; they’re communities of organisms” makes we want to believe that this is entirely true. It would explain all of the irrational, out-of-character or plain idiotic things I have done and will in all likelihood continue to do in my life. A flotilla of organisms sending out conflicting chemical impulses all the time can only be the cause of trouble:

The difference between our interaction with harmful and helpful bacteria, she says, is not so much like separate languages as it is a change in tone: “It’s the difference between an argument and a civil conversation.” We are in constant communication with our microbes, and the messages are broadcast throughout the human body.

To that end, I lack the will power to resist chocolate and need to devise complicated ways of hiding the box of macadamia cookies that a friend gifts me. It's got to be those harmful bacteria I am carrying in my gut - bacteria with whom it is impossible to have "a civil conversation" with. It would be instructive to understand what's inside one's microbiome :

Much like a genetic profile, a person’s microbiome can be seen as a sort of natural identification tag. As David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, puts it, “It’s a biometric — a signature of who you are and your life experience.”

Intellect And Consumption

Reading a comment on this article about rejection reducing IQ levels, made me wish that the commentator had written a comprehensive essay on the themes touched upon in the comments. Despite the political slant in the observations, it makes for very interesting reading. Specially loved the concluding remark :

And if , by some magic, an average American's IQ can be raised by, say, 10-25 points - this economy will simply collapse because much of it is based on artificially manufactured needs and wants supported by massive marketing and advertising budgets of corporations.

A few weeks ago, I happened to have a couple of hours to occupy after dropping J off at a birthday party. There was some grocery shopping to be done but it would not take as long as I my wait time was. So, I wandered into a newly opened home decor store in the area to browse around and see if I could find a replacement for my down at the heel frying pan. The parking lot was full, the store was swarming with holiday shoppers and business appeared to be brisk. I looked at some of the price tags and wondered how any of it made sense in the current economic climate.

All around me homes have For Sale signs, the job market continues to be tough - former co-workers desperate to find employment after being laid off are working at half of what they used to make, liquidations sales have become so commonplace that they no longer provoke any surprise. That a pricey home decor store is able to thrive in such difficult times is a puzzle to say the least.

Likewise, the nicer restaurants in the neighborhood are are busy as ever judging from their parking lots at least - maybe the regular patrons are relatively untouched by the recession. In all there is little evidence that the pattern of consumption is driven by real life circumstances or even tempered by it. Maybe upping everyone's IQ by 20-25 points as this commentator suggests would cause that alignment to happen.

Status

Read this interesting article on the psychology of social status. Both observations and conclusions seem to make sense but the author does not clarify whether status (high or low) is as it is perceived by the individual or as they are appear to be in the eyes of the world.

Status is inherently relative. A high in a one social milieu could end up ranking low in another. Would that then increase their propensity for negative low-status behavior ? Also if status is achieved or conferred for reasons other than material success what might an interaction between two high status individuals look like if their status is based on account of very different things. Who decides the relative status of these two individuals ?

Apparently, low-status behavior can be remedied : Finally, in an experiment with both high- and low-SES college students, Henry demonstrated that boosting people’s sense of self-worth diminished aggressive tendencies amongst low-status individuals.

The boosting of self-worth seems to be an integral part of elementary school curriculum but bullies are a still a problem. Maybe if self-worth boosting was limited to the target population it may have helped. With everyone undergoing a status elevation, the difference between high and low does not disappear - instead you now have to deal with the problem of everyone feeling special and entitled.

Loneliness Virus

Read this story on Live Science about loneliness being like a virus that spreads and found myself wondering if I have seen any evidence of this in my surroundings. Folks that I know who do not care to socialize much (or at all) are friends with like minded people. They would cringe at the thought of hanging out those who are unlike them.

The part that did not register with me right away was the contagious aspect of loneliness. Say Person A is lonely and naturally gravitates toward Person B who is also a loner. The pair becomes lonelier together as they feed off of each other's sense of isolation. What are the chances of Person A (or B) reaching out to Person C who is highly social and outgoing and transferring the loneliness virus to them. Suddenly Person C turns introverted and withdraws social contact.

That scenario does not make as much sense at first. The phenomenon is explained thusly :

Over time, lonely individuals become lonelier and transmit such feelings to others before severing ties. "People with few friends are more likely to become lonelier over time, which then makes it less likely that they will attract or try to form new social ties," they write. Such friendless individuals ended up on the outskirts of their social networks.

Now, that is quite fascinating to consider. In inverse of this scenario would be a lonely person coming into contact with an very friendly individual and being infected by the social virus. They may remain on the fringes of this new person's vibrant social network, but the energy emanating from this large, dynamic and friendly organism could be enough to ease the loneliness a little. Wonder if the antidote to loneliness would be then to latch on to the networks of those who are not quite as lonely and hope the salutary effects transmit over.

Feeling Space

The "feelSpace belt" mentioned this Wired article can be a wonderful training tool for people like me who have severe direction retardation. Like the subject of the experiment, I might start seeing the map of hallways and cubicle farms in office buildings in my dreams, know to tell south and east apart while awake - skills I have never possessed. Apparently, the brain gets re-mapped and can sense direction even without the belt. The author asks :

Can our senses be modified ? Expanded ? Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic fields or hear ultrasound ? The answers to these questions, according to researchers at a handful of labs around the world, appear to be yes.

If the results of these mashed-up or augmented senses are anything like the feelSpace belt, it would definitely have a great deal of value to some.

Flying Geese

There is a lake near our home and we often see geese flying in formation over the woods across from the balcony. Every once in a while, J has pondered why they fly the way they do. Each time, I have said I don't know why but we can look it up. Inevitably, the business of the day gets in the way and the birds are forgotten once they are out of sight.

In the absence of a good scientific explanation, J has used her imagination to fill the gap - the leader bird knows the way and so they have the central position in the pattern. If everyone lines up behind the leader then they can't see the path they are supposed to take very well - the V helps by giving everyone a clear line of sight. That is J's theory but she is not fully satisfied with it. I finally found the time to look it up like I have always promised to.

She got some of it right apparently - there is indeed a leader and communication between the birds is enabled by the V formation. As a parent, I am always trying to find the correct answers to her questions - often over zealously I may add. It is as if I would be doing her the greatest disservice by not doing so - shirking my responsibilty as a parent. While I need not know the answer, I feel I am required to make every effort to find one out. Yet, when I let things slide, J was able to piece parts of the puzzle together even if it was not complete or correct. Perhaps I should let more of the questions answer themselves without any help from me.

Testing For Flaws

The first time I encountered a Personalysis type test was in high school. We had a career counselor come in to advise on career options that were best aligned to our intellectual abilities (measured by an IQ test) and our personality. The IQ test was one thing but the other battery designed to reveal the real me really got my goat. The woman who administered the test had this smug look about her that suggested that she'd tease out every last secret from our souls because she was a psychologist and had the tools to be able to do so. When you are in your teens and believe that you have it all figured out, for an adult to come across with that kind of attitude is a open invitation to fight.

So I answered the test that was supposed to reveal the "real" person behind my facade as misleadingly as I could. For every honest answer, there were ten others that were not. In hopes of making things more confusing for her, I did my best to randomize the pattern of my inaccurate responses. After the test was done, when I compared notes with my compadres, I was delighted to find that almost everyone else had taken the test the way I had. We gloated over our cleverness and our ability to game the very system designed to "help" us.

When the results came out, we were surprised that the findings were not as far off the mark as we would have wanted them to be. It was a mirror (even if considerably grimy) held up to our true selves. I briefly wondered what might have been revealed if I had taken the test the way it was meant to be - if the findings could have actually been helpful.

This article about an online test that would predict an individual's probability of suffering depression piqued my interest. Looking at the questions reminded me of what I had found annoying about that personality test from years ago. There is very little imagination is what is asked and how it is asked. Anyone can tell the difference between a "good" and "bad" answer. No one wants to viewed or be identified negatively - acceptance of problem is half the battle won.

There would be no need for a test if people were so willing to come out and ask for help when they needed it. A good test in my mind should be designed with a lot more finesse. The questions should offer no clues whatsoever into their intent and similarly the answers should not be recognized as good or bad. A test is worthless when the subject of the test is so readily able to manipulate it.

Freedom From Clock

Many of us have seen women past a certain age make poor (even irrational) choices in as far as selecting a partner to have a child with. The ticking biological clock reaches a crescendo in their lives and they figure it was now or never as far as motherhood. Once that wish is fulfilled and their sanity restored, they are left wondering about who they have partnered for life with and why.

To have a limited set of resources be fully depleted in less than four decades of a her life is possibly the single biggest inequality that a woman has to contend with as she goes through relationships. The men are not similarly constrained and in as such enjoy far higher degrees of freedom. If this study reported in the Washington Post turns out to be for real, that may change that forever.

Scientists have produced strong new evidence challenging one of the most fundamental assumptions in biology: that female mammals, including women, are born with all the eggs they will ever have.

Motherhood without an expiration date will give women the biological parity with men which they have never had before and this should enable then to achieve true equality in their partnerships.

Mapping The Sins

It's hard to tell from these maps exactly what is going on in terms of the seven deadly sins in your neck of the woods in America (assuming that you agree with the operational definitions and the method of measuring each) but it is an interesting study all the same. Apparently, where I live there is a bit of lust and pride going on but everything else is just about average.

I guess that must be a good thing. It would be interesting to see what if any correlation existed between sins the big issues facing folks these days - unemployment, foreclosures, out of control health care costs and the like . A material disincentive to sin may work as a much better deterrent than simple censure or even punishment.

Traffic Snafus

Those who have to endure long commutes are often familiar with traffic jams. Given their levels of stress when they find themseleves stuck in one, they would not likely be pondering the physics of traffic jams. They might find little consolation in learning that in scientific terms "A traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars" or that if they could drive like ants they may have respite from traffic.

The triggers for traffic snarls can apparently range from plain old rubbernecking to ghost sightings. The physics of gridlocks is a much written about topic - in this old Atlantic article, the author suggests that the surest remedy would require some 1984-esque measures.

Preventing flow breakdowns in a nonlinear, chaotic world could ultimately require realizing an Orwellian idea that has been suggested from time to time: directly controlling the speed and spacing of individual cars along a highway with central computers and sensors that communicate with each car's engine and brake controls.

Over at the Halfbakery idea factory someone has come up with the idea of laying conveyors over highways so the element of chaos and randomness in traffic patterns is eliminated and with it the bane of commuters around the world - the gridlock.

Truth And Hypothesis

A July 2008 Wired cover story titled The End of Science, resonates with my own experience with data and analytics - specially in light of the battles that one has to wage with those who are convinced that there a priori needs to be a statistical model to proceed with analytics. Apparently, analysis means nothing without a hypothesis. I believe with the right tools, the data should speak for itself - the models are not necessary.

This is however a hard case to make for someone (like myself) who is approaching the problem from a common-sense and industry experience standpoint without a string of accreditations and doctorates appended to their name to lend gravitas to their perspective. Folks like us don't earn the respect of the pure math nerds very easily. They tend to view us as slackers who want to bypass the rigors of the scientific method. So we soldier on, hobbled by models and hypothesis that are not even directionally consistent with what the data says about itself.

It was heartening to see this idea echoed by Google's research director Peter Norvig who says of statistical models "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them". The skills and talents of statisticians are much better served in finding the dominant patterns in sets of correlated data. They can help whittle the field from 100s of X's that result in a Y to a handful of the most high-value ones. Forcing a model on data is almost detrimental in that you can spend the bulk of your time disproving the hypothesis and search for one that will stick. What is more, you could miss out on the real story the data has to tell.

Needless Science

Got to love it when shrink and science come together to restate the obvious. This study seems to suggest the higher up you are socio-economically, the less likely you are to engage with your fellow humans. The simple one-word equivalent for the bunch scientific gobbledygook in the article is probably snobbish.

Then there is this other one that has scientific proof that women are attracted to manly men. It does not qualify the term "manly" so one assumes that definitions could be subjective. At any rate, the value of a scientific study to prove such a thing is just as hard to fathom as needing to establish that wealth and arrogance often go together.

Surely, nature has not run of mysteries to be solved that can keep the scientific community gainfully engaged and also do the rest of us some good. Maybe that is asking for too much.

Saying Cheese

The intensity of smile, school yearbooks photos and successful marriages are correlated according to a study. I specially like that yearbook pictures could be a good predictor of a person's marriage.

Overall, the results indicate that people who frown in photos are five times more likely to get a divorce than people who smile.

While the connection is striking, the researchers stress that they can't conclude anything about the cause of the correlation.

Being a single-parent without so much as a father-figure in J's life, I do worry about what perspectives she might form about the institution of marriage. She has no memory of a two-parent household - it has always been the two of us. If I do a half-way competent job of parenting and housekeeping, would J come to think of marriage as optional or nice to have when it is time for her to find a partner ? Yet, failing to do my job is not even an option.

My sense is she realizes that I have a lot of responsibilities to juggle, conflicting priorities to balance and lack the helping hand of a partner. Hopefully, she can imagine the kind of mother I might have been if I had the support I am missing. Maybe by doing a somewhat decent job as a mother, I might kindle in her the desire to give more to her children than I have been able to give her. Hopefully, in time she will see that as a natural by-product to a good, happy marriage and want it. At any rate, I am glad J almost always has a big smile on her face in her pictures - yearbook included. I want to believe it is an accurate predictor of her marriage.

Hand Movements

According to this article in Scientific American hand gestures are correlated to our ability to understand and learn new concepts. The comments on the article make for interesting reading as well. In my culture, gesturing has never been a big part of communication. It would generally be viewed as distracting rather than helpful. I have noticed though that when giving discourses holy men and women do use hand gestures - they are few but highly eloquent. Likewise with artists, performers, musicians and dancers - gestures are part of their language.

At the other end of the spectrum, it is common to see socio-economically depressed people given to elaborate gestures involving hand and body to get their point across - and I say this in the context of Indian society. I would imagine some of the negative connotation associated with gesturing too much while talking stems from here. Folks probably don't want to come across as uncultured, uneducated or impoverished. If the findings reported in the article are correct, I wonder what that would mean for those of us who are culturally conditioned to gesture little or not at all.

Tracing Roots

The idea of tracing back one's ancestors to 60,000 years ago is a fascinating one. This is a research in progress at National Geographic. To participate the first step involves purchasing a kit that allows the participant to send back a check swab for DNA analysis. Your anonymity is guaranteed. The success of the project clearly depends on the size and diversity of the database and it seems with a kit priced at $100 + that may be the biggest obstacle on the way to success.

In the exhaustive list of FAQs, I did not find one that asks how this project could be viable if the only way to get data were to be people willing and able to spend $100 to trace their ancestry. I would imagine there is large amounts of existing data - collected at low or no cost to the participant.

Now that it exists, this the monetization opportunity by appealing to the curiosity of the those who don't mind paying as much as they would need to in order to satiate it. This is a lot like paying for a seat on a space-craft though the price tags are orders of magnitude apart. It may not be too long before DIY DNA Analyzers become affordable enough for a lot of people - that combined with public databases could do make the business of ancestry tracing far more egalitarian and in the process more accurate.

Love Potion

Interesting experiment on the science and chemistry of love - in which a man takes an MRI to check if and how he loves his wife. The author who becomes guinea pig for scientists working in the field, asks readers to consider some implications of this research:

If love is simply chemicals, doesn't that change its meaning? And how soon before we create a scientifically valid love potion? (Already under study, by the way.) What about a love vaccine to help us from falling for the wrong person? And if you have to rely on chemical enhancements, do you get an asterisk next to your name in the book of love, like Barry Bonds?

All of that sounds straight out of science fiction though it could not hurt to be inoculated against falling in love with the wrong person - what a lot of time, energy and emotions saved and spared that would be ! According to the article, the odds are already stacked against us by nature - In a cruel twist of bioengineering, the romantic craving actually gets more intense post-dumping.

Trapped By Trash

While explaining why we are where are with garbage in space, columnist Johann Hari writes :

This wall of garbage orbiting us all seems like a symbol of the great dilemmas facing humanity in the twenty-first century. We have become capable of the most stunning technological breakthroughs – but we are sabotaging them by proving ourselves incapable of the most basic forms of self-restraint. At the moment of victory, we regress. The achievements of our frontal lobes are undermined by the backwardness of our adrenal glands.

He is exactly right in that observation. He closes his article with a statement and a question :

Individuals restrain themselves all the time; why can’t we do it collectively?

I don't know if I could agree that individuals restrain themselves all the time. For the most part, people act out of fear of consequences when they are acting alone as individuals. True restraint would require them to act in the same way even when no one was looking, there were no societal norms or law enforcement. It is possible that we are emboldened by numbers when act as a collective and hence don't feel obliged to be restrained in any way. Also, nature is inherently chaotic so perhaps as humans restraint just does not come to us naturally.