Why is there something rather than nothing? […] No experiment could support the hypothesis ‘There is nothing’ because any observation obviously implies the existence of an observer. [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] Percentage of scientific paper titles containing “observations” or “data” in the past century Test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable — and after some participants were told that robot had broken down People spend too much time on problems in which the reward difference between the options is low When people choose not to reveal personal information — to be "hiders" — they are judged negatively by others. Observers rate those who reveal even questionable behavior more positively. We feel more authentic when we're with other people and behave as they expect us to The classic argument is that… Read More...

The authors identify customers, termed “Harbingers of failure,” who systematically purchase new products that flop. Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail—the more they buy, the less likely the product will succeed. Firms can identify these customers through past purchases of either new products that failed or existing products that few other customers purchase. The authors discuss how these insights can be readily incorporated into the new product development process. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom that positive customer feedback is always a signal of future success. [Journal of Marketing Research] Military importance of diarrhea: lessons from the Middle East By one estimate, as many as 40 percent of people experience constipation while they’re away from home Man fails to get penis drawing recognized as his signature Airbnb removes New York igloo… Read More...

Court tells millionaire yoga troll Bikram Choudhury that poses can't be copyrighted The practice by some Chinese parents of adopting girls and raising them as future wives for their biological sons A growing body of literature has shown that environmental exposures in the period around conception can affect the sex ratio at birth through selective attrition that favors the survival of female conceptuses. Glucose availability is considered a key indicator of the fetal environment, and its absence as a result of meal skipping may inhibit male survival. We hypothesize that breakfast skipping during pregnancy may lead to a reduction in the fraction of male births. Using time use data from the United States we show that women with commute times of 90 minutes or longer are 20 percentage points more likely to skip breakfast. Using U.S. census data we show… Read More...

Baby Born Pregnant with Her Own Twins Disabling parts of the brain with magnets can weaken faith in God and change attitudes to immigrants, study finds Can people differentiate what they know from what they do not? Several lines of research suggest that people are not always accurate judges of their knowledge and often overestimate how much they know. Research on overconfidence finds that people commonly judge the accuracy of their judgments too favorably and typically overestimate how well they perform everyday tasks relative to other people. Work on the illusion of explanatory depth demonstrates that participants tend to think they have a better understanding of how objects work (e.g., a ballpoint pen) than they can demonstrate when that understanding is put to the test. At times, people even claim knowledge they cannot possibly have, because the object of their… Read More...

Scientists say they’ve found a way to slow ice cream’s melting Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information. By zooming in on high-resolution face photographs, we were able to recover images of unseen bystanders from reflections in the subjects' eyes. To establish whether these bystanders could be identified from the reflection images, we presented them as stimuli in a face matching task (Experiment 1). Accuracy in the face matching task was well above chance (50%), despite the unpromising source of the stimuli. […] In a test of spontaneous recognition (Experiment 2), observers could reliably name a familiar face from an eye reflection image. For crimes in which the victims are photographed (e.g., hostage taking, child sex abuse), reflections in the eyes of… Read More...

Catalogue of entrances to Hell in and around the UK After the near?collapse of the world’s financial system has shown that we economists really do not know how the world works, I am much too embarrassed to teach economics anymore, which I have done for many years. I will teach Modern Korean Drama instead. Although I have never been to Korea, I have watched Korean drama on a daily basis for over six years now. Therefore I can justly consider myself an expert in that subject. [Uwe E. Reinhardt, Princeton University | PDF] New research shows that, for most of us, the last experience we’ve had can be the defining one when it comes to taking a decision, coming at the expense of other experiences we’ve accumulated further back in time [ScienceBlog] Study finds people -- even teenagers -- unconsciously… Read More...

Films with a female presence earn less at the box office Research shows more sex does not mean more happiness The relation between sexual orientation and penile dimensions in a large sample of men was studied. […] Penile dimensions were assessed using five measures of penile length and circumference from Kinsey’s original protocol. On all five measures, homosexual men reported larger penises than did heterosexual men. Explanations for these differences are discussed, including the possibility that these findings provide additional evidence that variations in prenatal hormonal levels (or other biological mechanisms affecting reproductive structures)affect sexual orientation development. [Archives of Sexual Behavior] Worker fired for disabling GPS app that tracked her 24 hours a day New Zealand-based company is building a very, very angry robot to help companies deal with angry customers Big brands said to want models with at least 10,000… Read More...

US researchers are investigating ways to extract the gold and precious metals from human faeces. It’s hard to read the old-fashioned way, slowly and deliberately. Few of us have the patience, the concentration, or the time. When we do read, we skim, trying to get a quick “take” on the topics of the day, often conveniently served up as prepackaged excerpts by our modern media machine. We flit from one thing to the next, never pausing to think about what we’ve just read, because in our media-saturated, technology-obsessed age we just don’t have time. Worse, our bad reading habits are symptomatic of a deeper malaise. Real learning, real knowledge, and real culture have been supplanted by the shallow, utilitarian instrumentalism of modern life. The evidence is mounting. Humanities departments are losing students to the sciences and other more useful majors,… Read More...