Britain’s Most Popular Lie: ‘Sorry, I Had No Mobile Phone Signal’
“Britain’s most popular lie has been disclosed, with one in four people admitting using ‘sorry I had no signal’ when returning a missed mobile phone call, a survey found.
Researchers found the average Briton tells on average four lies every day or almost 1500 every year.
Almost one in six men admitted they were most likely to lie to their wife or girlfriend, on average at least twice a day.
The most popular lie was saying you had no mobile phone signal, with one in four people admitting regularly using the little white lie. It usually came after they hit the ‘ignore’ button when their mobile rang.
One in three Britons have lied about their weight, a quarter fibbed about the amount of debt they are in and 30 per cent have bent the truth about the amount of exercise they do.
Kissing or spending the night with another person emerged as the worst lie to tell while one in five males admitted to lying to their girlfriend to go to the pub or watch sport.
Almost a quarter of blokes have told their partner they look good in an outfit, despite thinking the opposite.”
Read more at The Telegraph
Milgram’s Personal Archive Reveals How He Created The ‘Strongest Obedience Situation’
“Stanley Milgram’s 1960s obedience to authority experiments, in which a majority of participants applied an apparently fatal electric shock to an innocent ‘learner’, are probably the most famous in psychology, and their findings still appall and intrigue to this day. Now, in a hunt for fresh clues as to why ordinary people were so ready to harm another, Nestar Russell, at Victoria University of Wellington, has reviewed Milgram’s personal notes and project applications, which are housed at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library.
Milgram trained under Solomon Asch, author of the famous conformity experiments, and the obedience project was originally conceived as an extension of Asch’s work. Milgram was going to see how the behaviour of a group of cooperating participants (actually confederates working for the researcher) influenced the naive participants’ willingness to harm another. A condition in which single participants followed the experimenter’s orders on their own was planned as a mere control condition.
It was during Milgram’s extensive pilot work that he discovered the remarkable willingness for participants to obey instructions, without the need for group coercion, thus changing the direction of his project. The focus shifted to lone participants and Milgram began a process of trial and error pilot work to identify the perfect conditions for inducing obedience – what he described as ‘the strongest obedience situation’.”
Read more at BPS Research Digest
What are mirror neurons?
“”When you’re smilin’, the whole world smiles with you,” sang Louis Armstrong. He could have been referring to what some consider one of the greatest recent discoveries of neuroscience: mirror neurons.
Discovered in macaques in the 1990s, these cells were spotted when researchers made recordings from microelectrodes placed in the animals’ brains as they performed various tasks. While many neurons fired when the animal performed an action, a subset also fired when the animals saw the researcher perform the same action, with different groups of mirror neurons for different actions.
Neuroscientists have speculated that in people, mirror neurons could represent the neural basis of empathy. They could also contribute to imitation and learning, and perhaps even language acquisition.
It has been hard to find out if people have mirror neurons, but MRI scans have shown that certain areas of the brain – dubbed mirror systems – “light up” when we perform and watch the same action. Numerous studies have shown that people with more activity in their mirror systems seem to be better at understanding other people’s emotions. Conversely, less activity in mirror systems has been linked to autism and also with psychopathy – different conditions that are both noted for low levels of empathy. Nina Bien’s team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands recently identified inhibition mechanisms that hint at how we can mentally imitate an action without actually performing it (Cerebral Cortex, vol 19, p 2338).
Nevertheless, some researchers question whether mirror systems can take sole responsibility for empathy. “Understanding someone else’s actions and empathy are huge cognitive achievements,” says Cecilia Heyes, a psychologist at the University of Oxford. “So to suggest that there’s one discrete neural system responsible for it doesn’t make sense.”
However, Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, claims to have seen individual brain cells behaving like mirror neurons in people. He made his observations when someone with epilepsy was undergoing exploratory brain surgery to investigate the cause of their seizures. The results are due to be published this month in Current Biology.”
Read more at New Scientist
Terrifying Sea Beast Hauled Out Of Ocean Depths
“A submarine exploring the ocean’s depths recently returned with an unexpected visitor: a crablike critter called Bathynomus giganteus (commonly known as giant ispod) that has left many readers startled and horrified.
This giant isopod (a crustacean related to shrimps and crabs) represents one of about nine species of large isopods in the genus Bathynomus. They are thought to be abundant in cold, deep waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In a posting to social bookmarking site Reddit, a deep-sea technician detailed finding the Bathynomus giganteus, asking the site’s readers to help identify what exactly the bizarre-looking creature was.
The post reads, ‘I work for a Sub-sea Survey Company, recently this beast came up attached to one of our ROVs. It measures a wee bit over 2.5 feet head to tail, and we expect it latched onto the ROV at roughly 8,500 feet depth.
‘Unfortunately, the e-mail that these pictures were attached to came from a contractor, and the ship he was operating from (and therefore location) is unknown, so I can’t tell you what part of the Earth this beast was living.’
The pictures reveal Bathynomus giganteus to be a giant isopod, a large crustacean that dwells in deep Atlantic and Pacific waters. This particular creature is a deep-sea scavenger that feeds on dead whales, fish and squid.”
Read more at National Geographic
Edinburgh
Oh Em Gee. What a wonderful two nights. After being warned that Edinburgh audiences would be tough (apparently due to a weariness and over-seasoned-ness following so many fine fringe performers), we had the most overwhelmingly enthusiastic response of any venue. The 3008-strong sold out Playhouse let rip both nights when I walked out and didn’t stop until after their fantastically appreciative and immediate leaping-to-feet-twice response at the end. Many thanks, we were all on a real high because of you lot.
I spent most of the time with the glorious parapsychology duo Richard Wiseman and Caroline Watt, discussing ghosties and exploring the city. And what a stunner it is. A personal highlight was visiting the Camera Obscura up by the castle: well well worth a visit and the finest I’ve seen.
Our hotel was a bit of a downer: Edinburgh lets the side royally down on the normally glorious MalMaison front. ‘Poor Diddums’, I hear you protest. ‘Was the poor telly-welly star not looked after by the hotelsy-welsy? Did he not get the right champagney-wagney in his roomikins?’
Well, it IS a poor sister of the other MalMaisons (no aircon, the wifi is broken and no-one seems arsed to fix it), but no matter there. All that matters is friendliness. We had come from the Roslin in Southend, which is very modest in comparison to the purple sumptuousness of a MalMaison, but was so extraordinarily welcoming throughout. This is such a treat, and trumps such meaningless peripherals as fancy decor. The MalMaison chain is always so friendly too: Liverpool, for example and not surprisingly, boasts probably the most friendly of the chain. In Edinburgh, aside from the few local bar and restaurant staff, the attitude was uniformly sterile. First night after-show conversation at reception:
(me): Hello, can we have a bite from the night menu in the bar?
(reception guy, East-European accent): No, only in your rooms.
(me): Ah, do you have some room where we can eat together? We stay in a lot of MalMaisons and they always pop us in a side-room when they can’t serve in the bar.
(him): No.
Pause
(me): Do you have a little meeting room? Normally we’d sit in a meeting room if there wasn’t anywhere else, just to have a bite.
(him): We have a meeting room but no, we won’t do this.
(me): Brilliant, thank you.
And so on. Rather like our similar experience in Buxton, it’s a real shame how all the poshness and carpeted walls and silly tall chairs in the world mean nothing when some member of staff can’t just be nice. I remember fondly the Wolverhampton Novotel last year: a fairly grim hotel by the normal standards, but made wonderful by the most friendly and helpful staff. Thank you, any of the lovely men and ladies who have made our hotel stays so pleasant.
The big plus of staying at the MalMaison, though, was discovering Fishers at Leith, the Edinburgh fish restaurant and all-round institution, which was right next to the hotel. You simply must get your fine, shapely arses down there if you’re unfamiliar. Or familiar. My dear sweet non-existent Supreme Being. Oh. Oh oh oh. Fish soup? Think you’ve had fish soup? Get OUT.
Get to Fishers, have soup, the seabass, have any of it; go see Luke or Eddie and tell them I sent you. And the friendliest bunch! So delightful, in fact, that we invited them to the show and I ended up drinking a fine Barolo back at Eddie’s girlfriend’s friend Fiona’s flat after the show with their gang… a long story. Much fun.
We have arisen too early after a late night to drive to Bradford. The snow on these A-roads is fantastic. But we’re tired. If we don’t make it, it’s because Coops fell asleep at the wheel.
Fingers crossed.
Boost Creativity: 7 Unusual Psychological Techniques
“Everyone is creative: we can all innovate given time, freedom, autonomy, experience to draw on, perhaps a role model to emulate and the motivation to get on with it.
But there are times when even the most creative person gets bored, starts going round in circles, or hits a cul-de-sac. So here are 7 unusual creativity boosters that research has shown will increase creativity:
1. Psychological distance
People often recommend physical separation from creative impasses by taking a break, but psychological distance can be just as useful.
Participants in one study who were primed to think about the source of a task as distant, solved twice as many insight problems as those primed with proximity to the task (Jia et al., 2009).”
Read more at Psyblog
Life-drawing robot could teach us about art
From afar this image could be a photograph of Stephen Hawking. Zoom closer and you can see it’s a pretty good sketch, the kind a street artist might rustle up for tourists. Yet this is not the work of any human hand but of a robot.
The Aikon robot was created by Frédéric Fol Leymarie and Patrick Tresset, computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London. It attempts to recreate the thought process that Tresset, a former draughtsman, unconsciously moves through when drawing someone’s face. First, Tresset identifies the face’s orientation and looks for shaded regions, subconsciously working out how to recreate those regions with his hand. The way his wrist flexes and the pressure he applies to his pen lend the sketch his own particular style. The team has devised an algorithm that allows the robot to approximate these steps once its camera has detected a face.
Aikon completes its sketches in one go, but Leymarie says that feedback mechanisms will be built into future models to allow the robot to modify a sketch as it draws, as a human would.
Research in visual perception is moving fast and should help make Aikon more sophisticated. A team at Yeshiva University in New York have found that a person’s eyes move in a much more precise manner when drawing an object than when simply looking at it. Meanwhile, differences in the cognitive processes used by artists and non-artists are being investigated at Camberwell College of Arts in London using functional MRI brain scans. “[Our] focus of attention is very important when we draw,” says Tresset. “We hope to incorporate recent research results into the robot in the next two years.”
The team hopes that by tweaking their software they will gradually reveal the fundamental components of creativity. But can creativity be programmed? And is the work of a machine really art?
“Art is as much about the concept and the observer as it is about technique,” says Leymarie. “A difficult question remains: can a machine recognise art?” One of the team’s long-term goals is to have Aikon develop its own critical sense and decide whether to keep or erase its own pen strokes.
Read more at Culture Lab
‘Sorcerer’ faces imminent death in Saudi Arabia
“The lawyer for a Lebanese man sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia for witchcraft has appealed for international help to save him. Ali Sabat was the host of a popular Lebanese TV show in which he predicted the future and gave advice. He was arrested by religious police on sorcery charges while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in 2008. His lawyer, May el-Khansa, says she has been told Mr Sabat is due to be executed this week. Ms Khansa has contacted the Lebanese president and prime minister to appeal on his behalf.
There has been no official confirmation from Saudi Arabia, but executions there are often carried out with little warning. Mr Sabat did make a confession, but Ms Khansa says he only did so because he had been told he could go back to Lebanon if he did. Human rights groups have accused the Saudis of “sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police”.
An Egyptian working as a pharmacist in Saudi Arabia was executed in 2007 after having been found guilty of using sorcery to try to separate a married couple. There is no legal definition of witchcraft in Saudi Arabia, but horoscopes and fortune telling are condemned as un-Islamic. Nevertheless, there is still a big thirst for such services in the country where widespread superstition survives under the surface of strict religious orthodoxy.”
Read more at BBC News
Find an update on this article at The Telegraph
You can have your say here (Thanks Jon Baxter)
Science Writer Simon Singh Wins Libel Appeal
“When the science writer Simon Singh sat down to write an opinion piece on chiropractors two years ago, he could have had little inkling of the nightmare that lay ahead.
Yesterday, after a court of appeal ruling hailed as a ‘resounding victory’ for Singh, he has been spared having to stand up in court and prove that the comments that sparked a libel suit from the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) were factually correct – an experience that the three appeal judges compared to ‘an Orwellian ministry of truth’.
The landmark ruling will allow the writer, whose battle has become a catalyst for demands for libel law reform, to rely on a ‘fair comment’ defence of his statements about chiropractors. It will also strengthen the position of others – from science writers and medical professionals to bloggers – who face libel suits, as the judges made clear the court was not the place to settle scientific controversies.
Singh was accused of libel by the BCA over an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008. In the article, he had criticised the BCA for claiming its members could use spinal manipulation to treat children with colic, ear infections, asthma, sleeping and feeding conditions and prolonged crying. He described the treatments as ‘bogus’ and based on insufficient evidence and criticised the BCA for ‘happily promoting’ them. The BCA denies these criticisms.”
Read more at The Guardian
Probe Sees PacMan In The Moon
“The Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn has caught an interesting new view of the tiny moon Mimas.
The probe measured temperature differences across the object’s surface and produced a map that looks just like the 1980s Pac-Man video games icon.
Scientists are unsure why Mimas should display such variations but say it is probably related to the diversity of textures in the surface materials.
Some textures may retain heat better than others, they explain.
Mimas is about 400km (250 miles) across. It has a distinctive scar called Herschel Crater which has led many to draw comparisons with the ‘Death Star’ from the Star Wars movies.”
Read more at The BBC
