Weekly Science Headlines

[minuspace]

Right up until he decided that Orgone was (1) detectable and (2) the answer to literally everything wrong with humans and society, he had some good ideas.

Listen, Little Man! is genius, and The Mass Psychology of Facism is a pretty good read.

Like any nacent psychological research and practice, it's clumsy and doesn't work that well with modern neuroscience, but as a model and a metaphor, it has a few positive pragmatic uses.

Been de-teching Orgone most definitively since I re-gifted my generators and accumulators

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Your blood can smell food?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130407183542.htm

In a discovery suggesting that odors may have a far more important role in life than previously believed, scientists have found that heart, blood, lung and other cells in the body have the same receptors for sensing odors that exist in the nose. It opens the door to questions about whether the heart, for instance, "smells" that fresh-brewed cup of coffee or cinnamon bun, according to the research leader, who spoke in New Orleans on April 7 at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

[Junkenstein]

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/05/inflated-praise

Mainly so I remember about this tomorrow, seems like something here.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/05/inflated-praise

Mainly so I remember about this tomorrow, seems like something here.

This is not actually particularly new news. I mean, this particular study is new, but there have been a number of previous studies (probably all cited by this one) that show that empty praise is harmful to morale and performance.

[minuspace]

Killlllll iiitttttttt.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140102142012.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fhealth_medicine+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Health+%26+Medicine+News%29

"regular users of cannabis show signs of memory loss and a lack of motivation that make quite hard their social insertion."

Relatedly, plastic wrapper results harder to fit back on pack of smokes once previously removed 

[Junkenstein]

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/05/inflated-praise

Mainly so I remember about this tomorrow, seems like something here.

This is not actually particularly new news. I mean, this particular study is new, but there have been a number of previous studies (probably all cited by this one) that show that empty praise is harmful to morale and performance.

Appreciated, I hadn't seen the others before so I assumed this was new.

This does seem new though, with somewhat inevitable conclusions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24821383

It has become a depressingly universal truth in education that children from poorer backgrounds tend on average to do less well than their richer counterparts.

But what would happen if you took those poorer families and gave them money, real hard cash? If you make a poor family richer, will their children's chances of success rise accordingly?

Or is it much more complex?

Are children being held back not by lack of money, but by poverty's fellow travellers, such as bad housing, ill health, unemployment, chaotic parenting or family breakdown? Or are poor children getting stuck in a downward spiral of poorly educated parents and bad schools?

A US economist, Prof Greg Duncan, has won a million Swiss franc (£680,000) research prize to find out, in an annual award by the Zurich-based Jacobs Foundation, a charity that supports research into improving childhood.

Prof Duncan, an expert on the impact of poverty in childhood, wants to take a randomised group of a thousand low-income single mothers with a newborn child and give them $4,000 (£2,890) each for the first three years of the children's lives.

Another control group of mothers will get a much smaller amount.

Prof Duncan, from the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, is going to to measure what happens next.

Brain development
The experiment will be a big, expensive, long-term venture, with the prize money supporting the pilot stage. But Prof Duncan wants this to answer some big questions about what happens if you reduce hardship in the earliest years.

Greg Duncan
Prof Greg Duncan wants to measure how raising income changes life chances
Can raising income deliver a measurable change in family life and children's progress? Will neuroscientists find a difference in cognitive development between those who receive the $4,000 and those who don't?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/05/inflated-praise

Mainly so I remember about this tomorrow, seems like something here.

This is not actually particularly new news. I mean, this particular study is new, but there have been a number of previous studies (probably all cited by this one) that show that empty praise is harmful to morale and performance.

Appreciated, I hadn't seen the others before so I assumed this was new.

This does seem new though, with somewhat inevitable conclusions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24821383

It has become a depressingly universal truth in education that children from poorer backgrounds tend on average to do less well than their richer counterparts.

But what would happen if you took those poorer families and gave them money, real hard cash? If you make a poor family richer, will their children's chances of success rise accordingly?

Or is it much more complex?

Are children being held back not by lack of money, but by poverty's fellow travellers, such as bad housing, ill health, unemployment, chaotic parenting or family breakdown? Or are poor children getting stuck in a downward spiral of poorly educated parents and bad schools?

A US economist, Prof Greg Duncan, has won a million Swiss franc (£680,000) research prize to find out, in an annual award by the Zurich-based Jacobs Foundation, a charity that supports research into improving childhood.

Prof Duncan, an expert on the impact of poverty in childhood, wants to take a randomised group of a thousand low-income single mothers with a newborn child and give them $4,000 (£2,890) each for the first three years of the children's lives.

Another control group of mothers will get a much smaller amount.

Prof Duncan, from the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, is going to to measure what happens next.

Brain development
The experiment will be a big, expensive, long-term venture, with the prize money supporting the pilot stage. But Prof Duncan wants this to answer some big questions about what happens if you reduce hardship in the earliest years.

Greg Duncan
Prof Greg Duncan wants to measure how raising income changes life chances
Can raising income deliver a measurable change in family life and children's progress? Will neuroscientists find a difference in cognitive development between those who receive the $4,000 and those who don't?

Every research study in psychology and sociology is building on others that point in the same direction, so in a sense nothing is totally "new", because none of it exists in a vacuum. What it does do is explores and finds concrete data in an area that all the other data points toward having a certain outcome, and then that data is used to help guide the next study, and so on and so forth.

I am curious about how meaningfully this researcher believes that $4000 for three years will change the family situation, especially during the first three years, when the mother is effectively trapped in a situation that prevents her from using it to do something with long-term benefits such as attend school. It almost, ALMOST, smells like an experiment designed to "prove" that giving poor people money won't change anything.

[minuspace]

At least those 10$ a day seem like they will make more of a negligible difference in the US than in Switzerland, because the latter has an even more inflated cost of living.

[P3nT4gR4m]

cure for leukemia - more cancers to follow...

[Junkenstein]

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/05/inflated-praise

Mainly so I remember about this tomorrow, seems like something here.

This is not actually particularly new news. I mean, this particular study is new, but there have been a number of previous studies (probably all cited by this one) that show that empty praise is harmful to morale and performance.

Appreciated, I hadn't seen the others before so I assumed this was new.

This does seem new though, with somewhat inevitable conclusions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24821383

It has become a depressingly universal truth in education that children from poorer backgrounds tend on average to do less well than their richer counterparts.

But what would happen if you took those poorer families and gave them money, real hard cash? If you make a poor family richer, will their children's chances of success rise accordingly?

Or is it much more complex?

Are children being held back not by lack of money, but by poverty's fellow travellers, such as bad housing, ill health, unemployment, chaotic parenting or family breakdown? Or are poor children getting stuck in a downward spiral of poorly educated parents and bad schools?

A US economist, Prof Greg Duncan, has won a million Swiss franc (£680,000) research prize to find out, in an annual award by the Zurich-based Jacobs Foundation, a charity that supports research into improving childhood.

Prof Duncan, an expert on the impact of poverty in childhood, wants to take a randomised group of a thousand low-income single mothers with a newborn child and give them $4,000 (£2,890) each for the first three years of the children's lives.

Another control group of mothers will get a much smaller amount.

Prof Duncan, from the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, is going to to measure what happens next.

Brain development
The experiment will be a big, expensive, long-term venture, with the prize money supporting the pilot stage. But Prof Duncan wants this to answer some big questions about what happens if you reduce hardship in the earliest years.

Greg Duncan
Prof Greg Duncan wants to measure how raising income changes life chances
Can raising income deliver a measurable change in family life and children's progress? Will neuroscientists find a difference in cognitive development between those who receive the $4,000 and those who don't?

Every research study in psychology and sociology is building on others that point in the same direction, so in a sense nothing is totally "new", because none of it exists in a vacuum. What it does do is explores and finds concrete data in an area that all the other data points toward having a certain outcome, and then that data is used to help guide the next study, and so on and so forth.

I am curious about how meaningfully this researcher believes that $4000 for three years will change the family situation, especially during the first three years, when the mother is effectively trapped in a situation that prevents her from using it to do something with long-term benefits such as attend school. It almost, ALMOST, smells like an experiment designed to "prove" that giving poor people money won't change anything.

I thought I replied to this yesterday, laptop must have swallowed it.

The bold, I must admit that was my first reaction to the thing. Set up poor people for failure justifying increasingly punitive measures kind of thing, but there does appear to be no actual restrictions on what the cash is spent on, with exactly what it's spent on being a key part of the findings.

As I understand it, this does not mean you have to spend ANY of the cash on the child if you were so inclined and could use it for rent/education/savings/crack as you see fit. I do think that this is going to highlight some blindingly obvious but it might just give an indication of how things can change for a disadvantaged family with a relatively low level of funds. I'd hope it'd do more good for the seriously disadvantaged. $4K if you're homeless for instance, could be enough to get you a basis to get back into society. Or it could be gone in a day. It's a total unknown without knowing more about an individuals circumstances.

Either way, It'll be interesting to look at the results and see what conclusions get drawn.

[Left]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25592214

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3444.html

Apparently, a high-fiber diet might help with asthma, and conversely, eating junk food might make asthma worse.

...Must buy more brown rice...I like breathing.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I thought I replied to this yesterday, laptop must have swallowed it.

The bold, I must admit that was my first reaction to the thing. Set up poor people for failure justifying increasingly punitive measures kind of thing, but there does appear to be no actual restrictions on what the cash is spent on, with exactly what it's spent on being a key part of the findings.

As I understand it, this does not mean you have to spend ANY of the cash on the child if you were so inclined and could use it for rent/education/savings/crack as you see fit. I do think that this is going to highlight some blindingly obvious but it might just give an indication of how things can change for a disadvantaged family with a relatively low level of funds. I'd hope it'd do more good for the seriously disadvantaged. $4K if you're homeless for instance, could be enough to get you a basis to get back into society. Or it could be gone in a day. It's a total unknown without knowing more about an individuals circumstances.

Either way, It'll be interesting to look at the results and see what conclusions get drawn.

Rent, education, and savings all ARE "for the child". Any addition to a struggling family's resources goes into a pool that the child ultimately benefits from, directly or indirectly, provided it doesn't in fact go to feeding a parent's addiction.

A lot of people seem to think that unless a parent takes the exact same dollars that were given to them to help defray childrearing costs and use them to buy cheerios and baby clothes, they aren't "spending it on the child". I have heard, a fair number of times, people complaining because some woman they know "used her child support" to buy a phone or concert tickets or a meal at a restaurant or something "selfish". What does not seem to occur to people is that the mother ALREADY used the money she earned to pay rent so the child has a roof over their head, pay bills so the child has heat and running water, buy groceries so the child already has food, pay auto insurance so she can take the kid to school, and so on and so forth. Most single and divorced mothers have learned not to count on "extra" money, so they put their child's needs first and spend all their money on them, and then only IF child support comes through that month do they consider doing something nice for themselves.

You certainly can't tell me that a parent using money to get an education doesn't benefit the children.

Sorry, I know that's not where you were going with that, just a little side-tangent to address a pet peeve.

Speaking of education, I think a study like this might actually have more meaningful results if it were started when children are six or so - school-age - so that mothers could potentially use it as an opportunity to go back to school.

[Junkenstein]

I'd quite agree that spending cash on education would probably be one of the better possible uses for the funds.

Speaking of education, I think a study like this might actually have more meaningful results if it were started when children are six or so - school-age - so that mothers could potentially use it as an opportunity to go back to school.

I'd guess that many more may take the education route at that point than with a new baby to deal with. It may also be useful to record what the parents stated they wanted to do with the cash and how that relates to what it's actually spent on.

The more I think about this, the more I'm thinking it's going to be used as some kind of punishment device. Consider our societies. If we were able to prove that X dollars helps/hinders a kid for their entire life everyone with an agenda will have a say. Obey and get your $500 worth of baby goods from Babycorp. If your social media history says anything bad about Babycorp then no goods for you. And a libel suit just for fun.

[Junkenstein]

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201401090058

The cover design for an academic journal prompted a wave of criticism on Twitter over what was perceived as discrimination against women.

An illustration of a female robot adorned the cover of the January 2014 issue of the Journal of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence to introduce a basic cover redesign. The robot, dragging a cable connected to her back, looks at the reader with a book in her right hand and a broom in her left.

The design came under heavy fire on social networking site Twitter as soon as it went public.

"It's too horrible. A gynoid robot cleaning with hollow eyes," tweeted Sputniko!, a contemporary artist and an assistant professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

"I thought an academic society journal cover featuring a gynoid robot doing housework represented a lack of sensitivity to the international awareness of gender issues," Sputniko! told The Asahi Shimbun. "A black cleaning robot featured on the cover of a U.S. academic journal would cause an uproar. The same applies here."

It seems that Japan may not be as firmly in the dark ages of gender equality as some would claim. It's at least good to see the conversation is being had.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/72198000/jpg/_72198490_jsai.jpg

Looking at that image, I can't help but consider what the "western" version would have looked like. I'd guess it would still be female, probably with SFX/CGI to look up the the standards of modern films. The broom would probably be some kind of electronic cleaning device but i'd guess the picture to be functionally similar in all key areas. In many ways, I'd figure a "western" version to be worse as it would almost certainly be (hyper)sexualised with nod and snigger to the idea that it's got "multiple functions".

[LMNO]

A lot of people seem to think that unless a parent takes the exact same dollars that were given to them to help defray childrearing costs and use them to buy cheerios and baby clothes, they aren't "spending it on the child". I have heard, a fair number of times, people complaining because some woman they know "used her child support" to buy a phone or concert tickets or a meal at a restaurant or something "selfish". What does not seem to occur to people is that the mother ALREADY used the money she earned to pay rent so the child has a roof over their head, pay bills so the child has heat and running water, buy groceries so the child already has food, pay auto insurance so she can take the kid to school, and so on and so forth. Most single and divorced mothers have learned not to count on "extra" money, so they put their child's needs first and spend all their money on them, and then only IF child support comes through that month do they consider doing something nice for themselves.

This is great.  I'm going to have to remember this the next time someone mutters something about "poor people buying X".