The Obedience Experiments at 50
“This year is the 50th anniversary of the start of Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking experiments on obedience to destructive orders — the most famous, controversial and, arguably, most important psychological research of our times. To commemorate this milestone, in this article I present the key elements comprising the legacy of those experiments.
Milgram was a 28-year-old junior faculty member at Yale University when he began his program of research on obedience, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which lasted from August 7, 1961 through May 27, 1962.
As we know, in his obedience experiments Milgram made the startling discovery that a majority of his subjects — average and, presumably, normal community residents — were willing to give a series of what they believed were increasingly painful and, perhaps, harmful electric shocks to a vehemently protesting victim simply because they were commanded to do so by an authority (although no shock was actually given). They did this despite the fact that the experimenter had no coercive powers to enforce his commands and the person they were shocking was an innocent victim who did nothing to merit such punishment. Although Milgram conducted over 20 variations of his basic procedure, his central finding obtained in several standard, or baseline, conditions was that about two-thirds of the subjects fully obeyed the experimenter, progressing step-by-step up to the maximum shock of 450 volts.
First and foremost, the obedience experiments taught us that we have a powerful propensity to obey authority. Did we need Milgram to tell us this? Of course, not. What he did teach us is just how strong this tendency is — so strong, in fact, that it can make us act in ways contrary to our moral principles.
Milgram’s findings provided a powerful affirmation of one of the main guiding principles of contemporary social psychology: That often it is not the kind of person we are that determines how we act, but rather the kind of situation we find ourselves in. To perceive behavior as flowing from within — from our character or personality — is to paint an incomplete picture of the determinants of our behavior. Milgram showed that external pressures coming from a legitimate authority can make us behave in ways we would not even consider when acting on our own.”
Continue reading at APS (Thanks Annette)
Monkey Mind Control
Scientists believe they are a step closer to enabling paralyzed people to walk and use artificial arms after an experiment in which monkeys moved and sensed objects using only their minds.
The monkeys were able to operate a virtual arm to search for objects through brain activity that was picked up by implants — a so-called brain-machine interface.
In a leap forward from previous studies, the primates were also able to experience the sense of touch — a crucial element of any solution for paralyzed people because it enables them to judge the strength used to grasp and control objects.
“This was one of the most difficult steps and the fact that we achieved it opens the door to the dream of a person being able to walk again,” Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist who took part in the study carried out by a team at Duke University in North Carolina.
The results suggest it would be possible to create a kind of robotic “exoskeleton” that people could use to feel and sense objects, he said.
“The success we’ve had with primates makes us believe that humans could perform the same tasks much more easily in the future,” Nicolelis said.
The study was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
You can continue reading this article here
Source: Reuters
Face Substitution
“This is a technical demo for face substitution technique. The application works in real time and it’s developed using the opensource framework for creative coding openFrameworks: openFrameworks.cc
The face tracking library returns a mesh that matches the contour of the eyes, nose, mouth and other facial features. That way the mesh obtained from a photo is matched to the face in the video.
Via Vimeo link 1 and Vimeo link 2 (Thanks Wendy)
Unusual Art: Leaf Carvings
“A new art form emerging out of China. Creating these leaf carvings is no easy process, taking the delicate precision from a skilled artisan. With a knife, the leaf is slowly scraped of its outer layers, eventually revealing a near transparent surface. Special care is given to keep the veins intact to preserve the stability of the leaf.
Artists prefer using the leaves of the Chinar tree, native to India, Pakistan, and China. Resembling maple leaves, the distribution of veins in the Chinar leaves are the best suited for sculpting–and they are considered ‘lucky’ in Chinese tradition.
The process of producing a single leaf carving is said to take months of careful work. When the artwork is finished, the leaves are then preserved and framed–ensuring that they will last for decades.”
(Thanks Claire)
Two-headed Cat ‘Frankenlouie’ Turns 12
“A two-headed cat in Worcester, Mass., has twice the reasons for celebrating his recent birthday: It got him in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The double-domed feline is named “Frankenlouie,” and according to its owner, who only wants to be known as Marty, he turned 12 on Sept. 8, according to the Worcester Telegram.
In doing so, he earned a place in the record books for being the longest-lived Janus cat (the term for cats with two heads, which comes from the name of a two-faced Roman god).
“He is the most astounding two-headed animal of all,” according to Todd Ray of the Venice Beach Freakshow, who has some by estimates, the largest collection of bizarre animals in the world — including 22 living two-headed animals and a five-legged dog.
Still, he says Frankenlouie is in a class by his two-headed self.
“We might never see another one in our lifetime,” Ray told HuffPost Weird News. “I have seen many two-headed animals die within a week. To see one alive for weeks is incredible, but to have one alive for years is truly amazing.”"
Read more at Huffington Post (Thanks Annette)
Mind-reading car could drive you round the bend
“One of the world’s largest motor manufacturers is working with scientists based in Switzerland to design a car that can read its driver’s mind and predict his or her next move.
The collaboration, between Nissan and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), is intended to balance the necessities of road safety with demands for personal transport.
Scientists at the EPFL have already developed brain-machine interface (BMI) systems that allow wheelchair users to manoeuvre their chairs by thought transference. Their next step will be finding a way to incorporate that technology into the way motorists interact with their cars.
If the endeavour proves successful, the vehicles of the future may be able to prepare themselves for a left or right turn – choosing the correct speed and positioning – by gauging that their drivers are thinking about making such a turn.
However, although BMI technology is well established, the levels of human concentration needed to make it work are extremely high, so the research team is working on systems that will use statistical analysis to predict a driver’s next move and to “evaluate a driver’s cognitive state relevant to the driving environment”.
By measuring brain activity, monitoring patterns of eye movement and scanning the environment around the car, the team thinks the car will be able to predict what a driver is planning to do and help him or her complete the manoeuvre safely.”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks Laurence)
Virtual monkeys write Shakespeare
“A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on virtual typewriters.
A running total of how well they are doing shows that the re-creation is 99.990% complete.
The first single work to be completed was the poem A Lover’s Complaint.
Set up by US programmer Jesse Anderson the project co-ordinates the virtual monkeys sitting on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing system via a home PC.
Mr Anderson said he started the project as a way to get to know the Hadoop programming tool better and to put Amazon’s web services to the test.
It is also a practical test of the thought experiment that wonders whether an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters would be able to produce Shakespeare’s works by accident.
Mr Anderson’s virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. These coded apes regularly pump out random sequences of text.
Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard.
To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet.
Mr Anderson’s monkeys are generating random nine-character strings to try to produce all these strings and thereby find those that appear in Shakespeare’s works.
Mr Anderson kicked off the project on 21 August using Amazon’s cloud computers. Each day of virtual monkey keyboard mashing processing cost $19.20 (£12.40).”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks Tammy)
Mind-Reading Tech Reconstructs Videos From Brain Images
“A year and a half ago, we published a great feature on the current state of the quest to read the human mind. It included some then in-progress work from Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at U.C. Berkeley, in which Gallant was attempting to reconstruct a video by reading the brain scans of someone who watched that video–essentially pulling experiences directly from someone’s brain. Now, Gallant and his team have published a paper on the subject in the journal Current Biology.
This is the first taste we’ve gotten of what the study actually produces. Here’s a video of the reconstruction in action:
The reconstruction (on the right, obviously) was, according to Gallant, “obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately.”"
Read more at Pop Sci (Thanks Dan)
A ‘self’ portrait of an artist with memory loss
“She finished the books and wanted more. Before her mother could fetch some, Lonni Sue started making grids with words hidden in them. Thousands of puzzles poured out of her. Wearing thin the pages of a paperback dictionary, she created elaborate word lists, then puzzles from the lists and then images from the puzzles. A grid of words for things that hang in the closet took the shape of a coat hanger. Words related to trousers formed a pair of pants. Her vocabulary seemed to open a new door for her creativity.
Enter Barbara Landau. She had gone to high school with Lonni Sue in the Princeton, N.J., area. (“She was brilliant,” Landau remembers.) Today, Landau is an expert on cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. She had followed Lonni Sue’s career as an artist for years and now, with Hopkins colleague Michael McCloskey, she explored Lonni Sue’s amnesia intensively. It was Landau who brought Lonni Sue’s art to the Walters.
Scientists often work with people who have lost the use of part of the brain to learn how the normal brain works.
After working with Lonni Sue, Landau concludes: “If we think that art and creativity have to be rooted in what we know about ourselves or what we remember about ourselves, that clearly is not the case.”
Lonni Sue has been full of surprises. She can remember how to fly an airplane — “It’s like dancing in the sky,” she said in an interview — but she can’t remember the death of her father.
She can’t recognize art she treasured before her illness — “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh, for example. Yet she can instantly recognize her own past work.
She can’t remember that she was married for 10 years, but she can remember how to play Bach suites on her viola. But if, as she’s putting her instrument away, her mother thanks her for playing, she’s likely to look astonished and say, “Oh, did I play?”
She cannot produce the kind of finished art she once drew, but her work shows flashes of her old skill as well as her characteristic whimsy and puns.
“When you draw a drawing, you can draw people in,” she says.”
The Washington Post (Thanks Annette)
Turn orange peel into plastic? It’s not as crazy as it sounds
“British scientists are pioneering a novel way of recycling that turns orange peel into plastic.
The technique relies on high-powered microwaves that can degrade the tough cellulose molecules of plant matter so that they release volatile gases that can be collected and distilled into a liquid product.
These valuable biodegradable chemicals can then be used in water purifiers, cleaning agents and plastics. Researchers behind the process say it is 90 per cent efficient and works not just on orange peel but almost any plant-based waste such as straw or coffee grounds.
James Clark, professor of green chemistry at the University of York, said he is building a small demonstrator facility to show the novel recycling scheme can be scaled up in order to suit industrial applications.
“It will be able to cope with tens of kilograms an hour. We believe it is the right scale to prove to people that this is a viable technology,” Professor Clark said.
“You dice the peel and put it into a microwave field. You then focus the microwaves as you would with a domestic microwave oven but at higher power,” he said.
“The microwaves activate the cellulose and that triggers the release of chemicals or further chemical reactions inside the orange peel,” he told the British Science Festival at Bradford University.
Volatile chemicals are released in the process, including d-limonene, which is responsible for the distinctive smell of citrus fruit and is used in cosmetics, the cleaning industry and as a biological insecticide.
“As you produce the volatiles you strip them off continuously. It’s a continuous process. You feed the peel into a microwave zone and have a pipe that takes off the volatile fractions as they are produced,” he said
“The unique feature of our microwave is that we work at deliberately low temperatures. We never go above 200C. You can take the limonene off or you can turn limonene into other chemicals,” he said. “It works really well with waste paper. It can take a big range of bio-waste material.”"
Read more at The Independent
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