cortex | December 14, 2006A few days ago, I lamented the rise of conspicuous consumption, and wondered whether all our luxuries were actually making us depressed. My logic was simple: we adapt to what we have - it stops making us happy - but we are constantly being barraged with all sorts of new needs, like HDTV's, and blu-ray DVD's, and copper saute pans. Many of these expecations are bound to be unfulfilled, and that disappoints our dopamine neurons, which doesn't feel good.
Well, here's further evidence that Americans are stuck on the hedonic treadmill. Every year, we take more and more things for granted. Our…
cortex | December 14, 2006As everybody knows by now, having a circumcised penis cuts a man's risk of contacting AIDS from heterosexual sex by half. Those ancient Israelites were some astute scientists:
Uncircumcised men are thought to be more susceptible because the underside of the foreskin is rich in Langerhans cells, sentinel cells of the immune system, which attach easily to the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. The foreskin also often suffers small tears during intercourse.
So here's my question: was this just blind luck on the part of Abraham and his offspring? Does cutting off the foreskin have…
cortex | December 14, 2006Apparently, the Japanese believe that blood type is destiny. It's their version of the zodiac:
In Japan, using blood type to predict a person's character is as common as going to McDonald's and ordering a teriyaki burger. The association is akin to the equally unscientific use of astrological signs by Americans to predict behavior, only more popular. It is widely believed that more than 90 percent of Japanese know their blood type.
Japanese popular culture has been saturated by blood typology for decades. Dating services use it to make matches. Employers use it to evaluate job applicants.…
cortex | December 14, 2006Well, no meritocracy is perfect. The economists Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv analyzed the faculty in the top 35 U.S. economics departments. Their conclusions were startling, especially if your last name begins with the letter Z:
Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for…
cortex | December 13, 2006If I was a smart man, I'd go out and invest in the stock of some robot companies. Bill Gates (yes, that one) is convinced that the 21st century will be the age of the robot:
Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies... But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when--or even if--this industry will achieve critical mass…
cortex | December 13, 2006What are the psychological effects of "doing time"? Do harsher prison conditions create harder criminals? These are the questions that the economists M. Keith Chen and Jesse Schapiro were determined to answer. Their conclusions are sobering:
Some two million Americans are currently incarcerated, with roughly six hundred thousand to be released this year. Despite this, little is known about the effects of confinement conditions on the post-release lives of inmates. In this paper we estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the…
cortex | December 12, 2006Evangelicals are getting worried: all their pastors are turning gay. Who's to blame? Well, some might argue that genes play a role, and that homosexuality is really a biological behavior. But that would be utterly foolish. It turns out that the real problem is soy. According to Jim Rutz, tofu turns you gay:
There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture. The ironic part is, it's a "health food," one of our most popular.
The dangerous food I'm speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing, and they're all over the place.…
cortex | December 12, 2006The fight is getting pretty entertaining. While I've got my problems with Gladwell, I think his main argument in this skuffle is exactly right:
As I thought should have been obvious, I don't think that the observation, or analysis, or discussion of racial differences is racist. The black-white achievement gap is real. The issue is what inferences are drawn from those observations of difference. There is enough uncertainty over what is meant by race, and enough uncertainty over what is meant by intelligence, and enough uncertainty over our ability to measure what we think is intelligence, and…
cortex | December 12, 2006This article on turtles contains more bewildering facts than just about anything else I've read recently. Consider this:
The liver, lungs and kidneys of a centenarian turtle are virtually indistinguishable from those of its teenage counterpart, a Ponce de Leonic quality that has inspired investigators to begin examining the turtle genome for novel longevity genes.
Or this:
Turtles have the power to almost stop the ticking of their personal clock. "Their heart isn't necessarily stimulated by nerves, and it doesn't need to beat constantly," said Dr. George Zug, curator of herpetology at the…
cortex | December 12, 2006John Strassburger, the president of Ursinus College, a small liberal arts institution here in the eastern Pennsylvania countryside, vividly remembers the day that the chairman of the board of trustees told him the college was losing applicants because of its tuition.
It was too low.
So early in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen.
Ursinus received nearly 200 more applications than the year before. Within four years the size of the freshman…
cortex | December 11, 2006My favorite foods all seem to involve lactose. Whether it's an aged goat cheese from the Loire Valley, or a stinky washed rind cheese, or a scoop of dark chocolate ice cream, I would probably starve if I was lactose intolerant. Now we know how lactose-tolerance evolved. Being able to digest milk is such a beneficial mutation that it appears to have evolved independently three different times:
A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently…
cortex | December 11, 2006The Christmas season is conspicuous consumption time. I recently made my annual trip to the mall, and couldn't help but think that, somehow, the consumption gets more conspicuous every year. The antiqued jeans get more expensive, the televisions get higher definition, and the Starbucks in the food court keeps on inventing newfangled flavors to mix into my coffee. I guess that's the genius of capitalism: it keeps on inventing new things for us to want.
But as I observed this frenzy of consumption - there was a long, long line for the new Elmo doll - I couldn't help but muse on the neural…
cortex | December 9, 2006The scientific process is famously conservative. On the one hand, this is a necessary flaw: empiricism requires reproduction, and it's never fun when our view of reality is jolted by some revolutionary new fact. The reputation of science in large part depends upon not endorsing charlatans.
On the other hand, it often seems as if science is excessively conservative. The peer-review process is an essential element of science, but it also discourages original ideas. If you want to publish a bold new paper on, say, the function of the Golgi bodies, then your paper is sent for review to all the…
cortex | December 8, 2006So I'm reading the newspaper this morning, with NPR on in the background. Next thing I know, a tear is trickling down my cheek.
cortex | December 8, 2006The helter-skelter of urban life even affects birds. I swear my cockatiel is better behaved since I left London; now I know why:
Rapid urbanisation around the world and the subsequent increase in ambient noise has proven problematic for animals which use sound to communicate. For birds in particular, city noises can mask the exchange of vital information and prevent males from attracting mates.
To see how birds reacted to increased noise, Hans Slabbekoorn of Leiden University recorded the songs of great tits in 10 European cities including London, Prague, Paris and Amsterdam. He then compared…
cortex | December 8, 2006When will they learn?
The Environmental Protection Agency has changed the way it sets standards to control dangerous air pollutants like lead, ozone and tiny particles of soot, enhancing the role of the agency's political appointees in scientific assessments and postponing the required review by independent scientific experts.
The change, which largely tracks the suggestions of the American Petroleum Institute but also adopts some recommendations of the agency's independent scientific advisers, was announced yesterday afternoon by the agency's deputy administrator, Marcus Peacock. Mr.…
cortex | December 7, 2006If there was a circle of hell designed especially for me, I'm pretty sure it would closely resemble this:
The strobe lights pulse and the air vibrates to a killer rock beat. Giant screens show mayhem and gross-out pranks: a car wreck, a sucker punch, a flabby (and naked) rear end, sealed with duct tape.
Brad Stine runs onstage in ripped blue jeans, his shirt untucked, his long hair shaggy. He's a stand-up comic by trade, but he's here today as an evangelist, on a mission to build up a new Christian man -- one profanity at a time. "It's the wuss-ification of America that's getting us!"…
cortex | December 7, 2006Over at Pure Pedantry, Kara has a nice post on Goethe and game theory. While we're on the topic of Goethe's prescience, I'd thought I'd mention one of Goethe's most important scientific contributions: his analysis of color. Simply put, Goethe argued that our perception of color is a phenomenon of the brain rather than of physics.
By insisting that color be seen in its psychological context, Goethe was critiquing the science of Isaac Newton, who saw color in terms of discrete wavelengths of light which the eye passively received. Newton believed that color could only be understood by…
cortex | December 7, 2006This won't be news to Rupert Murdoch. Here's Austan Goolsbee in the Times:
New research by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, entitled "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers" (www.nber.org/papers/w12707.pdf) compiles some compelling and altogether unusual data to answer the question.
Dr. Gentzkow and Dr. Shapiro started in the world of the political. They parsed the words of politicians -- all the words -- from the 2005 Congressional Record. They found the 1,000 most partisan phrases uttered in the year. They measured this by…
cortex | December 6, 2006Obama makes bridging our cultural divides look easy. He takes a potential faux-pas - talking about condoms in an evangelical megachurch - and manages to make birth control seem like a faith-based solution. We've been led by a buffoon for so long now, that it's easy to forget what it's like to listen to a genuine leader:
We should never forget that God granted us the power to reason so that we would do His work here on Earth - so that we would use science to cure disease, and heal the sick, and save lives. And one of the miracles to come out of the AIDS pandemic is that scientists have…