“Deception has been studied as an almost exclusively individual-level phenomenon,” said Tripp Driskell. “You have a hard-nosed detective on one side of a desk and a suspect on the other. But there are many situations today, especially in security settings, in which the opportunity exists to question two or more suspects. The bottom line is that there are many occasions in which people conspire to lie or to deceive. In fact, many terrorist acts are carried out jointly by multiple participants or conspirators, and initial encounters with these suspects are likely to be in a group setting. We believe that the key to distinguishing truthful dyads from deceptive dyads is the concept of transactive memory. Two people describe an event differently if they had actually performed that event together versus if they did not but are fabricating a story about an event that did not take place. When we are questioned about the event, we recall it also in a joint manner - you recall some information and I recall some information. This is not as evident when two people recall a story that is fabricated or that did not take place.” [Human Factors and Ergonomics Society]
Who is more or less likely to break up? Couples who met in church or primary or secondary school are less likely to break up. Couples who met online are also less likely to breakup. Couples who meet through friends are more likely to break up. [DatingWise]
In some cases, the electronic information being gathered is used for illegal purposes, such as electronic identity theft. In other cases, the information is gathered for lawful purposes but is extremely annoying to users, such as when targeted and aggressive marketing tactics are used. Users are growing uncomfortable with the amount of information marketers possess today about them and many feel it is an invasion of their privacy even if the marketing is currently considered to be lawful. Moreover, even legitimate and lawful enterprises that collect confidential information about a user runs the risk of having an intruder penetrate their databases and acquiring the information for subsequent unlawful purposes. […] Assignee: Apple Inc. (Cupertino, CA) […] Techniques to pollute electronic profiling are provided. A cloned identity is created for a principal. Areas of interest are assigned to the cloned identity, where a number of the areas of interest are divergent from true interests of the principal. One or more actions are automatically processed in response to the assigned areas of interest. The actions appear to network eavesdroppers to be associated with the principal and not with the cloned identity. [United States Patent]
The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever Becomes Even Tougher
Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language in which the words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are ‘da’ and ‘ja’, in some order. You do not know which word means which. […] His modification is to remove any knowledge about the Gods' language other than that they all speak the same language and use the same words for yes and no, rather than synonyms. [The arXiv Blog]
Drug tests spot banned substances based on their specific chemical structures, but a new breed of narcotics is designed to evade such tests. Now researchers have developed a method that can screen for multiple designer drugs at once, without knowing their structures. The test may help law enforcement crack down on the substances. “Herbal incense” products sold in gas stations and on the internet are typically spiked with synthetic cannabinoids, a class of designer drugs, says Megan Grabenauer of RTI International. When smoked, these compounds produce a high just as their chemical forebear, tetrahydrocannabinol, better known as THC, does. The Drug Enforcement Agency has banned some synthetic cannabinoids, such as JWH-018. But the scientific literature contains recipes for hundreds of synthetic cannabinoids with different, yet related chemical structures. Every time a new test catches one, designer-drug makers can just move on to the next. [American Chemical Society]
Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts “the worst drug” he has seen in his 20 years there. “With LSD, you might see pink elephants, but with this drug, you see demons, aliens, extreme paranoia, heart attacks, and superhuman strength like Superman,” Ryan has said. “If you had a reaction, it was a bad reaction.” […] DEA officials believe that the base compounds are manufactured primarily in China and India and then imported into the U.S., where traffickers cut and mix the drug in a variety of ways — just one of the reasons why even the first hit of salts can produce unpredictable results. [Spin]
What retail consultants call a Henry: High Earner Not Rich Yet. [Bloomberg]
New York made giant strides toward solving its crime problem without major changes in its racial and ethnic profile; it did so without lowering poverty and unemployment more than other cities; and it did so without either winning its war on drugs or participating in the mass incarceration that has taken place throughout the rest of the nation. [OUP]
What causes some photos, videos, and Twitter posts to spread across the internet like wildfire while others fall by the wayside? The answer may have little to do with the quality of the information. What goes viral may be completely arbitrary, according to a controversial new study of online social networks. [New Scientist]
Google+ is functioning exactly as intended. [Silicon News]
If liars betray their true emotions in early, rapid, automatic facial expressions, as some experts have claimed, it would make sense that people who are particularly adept at recognising and processing emotions (one of the hall-marks of emotional intelligence) would therefore have an advantage at spotting deception. […] The participants performed no better than chance at identifying which clips featured a liar - consistent with past research showing the difficulty of accurate lie detection. However, there was a further paradoxical finding: participants who scored highly on the “emotionality” component of emotional intelligence (pertaining to emotional expression, perception and empathy) were significantly less accurate than average at judging which of the anxious relatives was being genuine. [BPS]
An experiment that Sigmund Freud could never have imagined 100 years ago may help lend scientific support for one of his key theories, and help connect it with current neuroscience. […] new data supporting a causal link between the psychoanalytic concept known as unconscious conflict, and the conscious symptoms experienced by people with anxiety disorders such as phobias. [EurekAlert]
Could mirror universes or parallel worlds account for dark matter — the ‘missing’ matter in the Universe? In what seems to be mixing of science and science fiction, a new paper by a team of theoretical physicists hypothesizes the existence of mirror particles as a possible candidate for dark matter. An anomaly observed in the behavior of ordinary particles that appear to oscillate in and out of existence could be from a “hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles,” says a press release from Springer. “Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other.” [Universe Today]
We regret the duplication of material. [The New Yorker] Related: Jonah Lehrer just landed a job at the New Yorker and plagiarized the shit out of himself. And: What’s the latest?
She-Hulk has been a member of the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Heroes for Hire, the Defenders, Fantastic Force, and S.H.I.E.L.D. A highly skilled lawyer, she has served as legal counsel to various superheroes on numerous occasions. She is the cousin of Bruce Banner, better known as the Incredible Hulk. [Wikipedia]
We know that love lives in the brain, not in the heart. But where in the brain is it – and is it in the same place as sexual desire? A recent international study is the first to draw an exact map of these intimately linked feelings. "No one has ever put these two together to see the patterns of activation," says Jim Pfaus, professor of psychology at Concordia University. "We didn't know what to expect – the two could have ended up being completely separate. It turns out that love and desire activate specific but related areas in the brain." [EurekAlert]
Startup has technology to read fingerprints through the air from 6 meters away.
Adidas cancels release of sneaker designed by Jeremy Scott.
Sea-level rise accelerates faster on US east coast.
Scientists Discover That Mars is Full of Water.
Applied Cognitive Psychology recently published a study on [...] walking while texting (WwT). […] The researchers looked at how walking while texting alters an individual’s own walking behavior. The researchers found that, on average, people who engaged in WwT where much more cautious than walkers who weren’t texting. Despite this excess in caution, “texters” did not avoid obstacles with more ease than “non-texters.” The scientists concluded that being overly cautious while texting does not decrease the chances of being involved in an accident. […] In 2010, The Pew Research Center reported that 17% of adult Americans admit to having bumped into objects while texting. [Salamander Hours]
Persistence is learned from fathers, study shows.
Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, in their different ways, both homed in on the same idea: the existence of competence without comprehension. [The Atlantic]
Female sex offenders receive lighter sentences for the same crimes than males.
We form impressions of strangers incredibly quickly: What your choice of shoe says about you.
New research suggests that overall happiness in life is more related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you, not to the status that comes from how much money you have stashed in your bank account.
Semen helps sperm stick to the bitch’s uterus.
Remember the Famous Invisible Gorilla Experiment? The Same Thing Can Happen With Sound.
The idea is to apply Darwinian-like selection to music.
Google tells operators of YouTube-MP3.org that by converting YouTube music videos into MP3 files, they violate the site's terms of service and risk "legal consequences." Also: Clip.dj. Clipped along with YouTube-MP3.
Google detects 9500 malicious sites per day.
Outside of Search, Google’s products— Android, Google Docs— are s**t.
Could Morality Have a Source? [PDF]
Hot enough to cook an egg on a sidewalk?
In a 2011 study, psychologists found that individuals who had seen a spoiler paragraph prior to reading a short story rated the story as more, not less, pleasurable. And that held true even of stories where the plot, the “trick” so to speak, was seemingly the center of the experience, such as one of Roald Dahl’s signature ironic twist tales or an Agatha Christie mystery. Why? When we know the plot, the twist, the surprise, we become more able to focus on everything else: language, character, the intricacies of rhythm and technique. We may even pay closer attention than we otherwise would, trying to wrestle with elements that we hadn’t even noticed the first time around. So, too, with magic.
The Long History of the Espresso Machine.
Does the U.S. Really Have More Oil than Saudi Arabia?