Due to a combination of various factors including illness, an unexpected holiday and an abnormally slow Internet connection, I have been remiss in writing new posts this week. Here are a few links to some interesting items to tide you over:
China’s State Administration of Radio, Film & Television has effectively banned all plots involving time travel from films. The stated reasons are that such stories treat history frivolously and disrespectfully and time-travel itself is unrealistic bad science. The suspected real reason is that China does not want people to compare the society that they have now with living conditions in the past. I’d also hazard that China feels uncomfortable about exploring “what if” historical scenarios. Additional fun fact: the Hearts of Iron games are also banned in China because it depicts places like Tibet, Shaanxi, Yunan etc. as independent states.
Iphone and ipad users should be careful. Apparently Apple has been secretly tracking the movement of users of the devices. The devices seem to automatically log its geographic position together with a timestamp at irregular intervals and save the data to an internal file without asking permission from owners or telling them that it is doing so. As many Internet pundits have noted, if you’ve been having an affair or lying to your employer about where you have been, a look at the file will reveal all your secrets.
In the latest of many pages on the sins of the Catholic church, an investigative reporter has written a new book alleging that thousands of Vatican-based priests have illicit sexual relationships. The book tells stories of priests having families complete with children in secret, of paid sex with escorts and of gay priests partying in nightclubs in Rome. It also cites research alleging that up to a quarter of Catholic priests in the US are involved in heterosexual relationships with women. My take: it’s not the sex that is offensive, it is the hypocrisy that rankles.
Finally, I recently learned that Ted Chiang has a short story available for reading online. Exhalation was apparently made available for free when it was nominated for the Hugo Award for 2009. It won incidentally. It’s a fantastic story that successfully paints a picture of strange society of alien within just a few succinct paragraphs. Ted Chiang is probably my favorite writer of short science-fiction right now ever since Greg Egan’s quality dropped in the 2000s. My favorite story of his however is still Story of Your Life which examines free will from the perspective that language determines thought.
Three articles for this month. The first is a new form of psychiatry that may come to eventually replace the traditional psychoanalysis. The second is really a business school paper than a science article, but I found it interesting nonetheless. The last one is an amusing insight into the paradox of why whales even exist.
The first one is from The Economist and covers is new form of psychiatric treatment now called Cognitive-bias modification (CBM). The article explains that the conventional form of treatment now recognized is psychoanalysis which everyone associates with lying down on a couch and talking out your problems to a sympathetic therapist. Psychoanalysis seems to be a reasonably effective remedy for a variety of common ailments but takes too long and is therefore too expensive. CBM on the other hand seems to work after just a few 15-minute sessions and you even need a therapist for it. A specialized computer program simply takes the place of the therapist.
That seems to be what the disaster is being officially called. Some of my own thoughts on the events, divided into a few categories:
Civil Order / Looting
Many commentators, particularly in Asia, have noted how civilized the Japanese have acted and how little looting there is. Most people cite it as evidence of their superior educational system and the way their culture frowns upon individualism. But that’s a shallow and general observation that doesn’t satisfy. What would be interesting are concrete examples of how the Japanese are taught differently and how their system is set up that delivers these results.
Four articles this month and only two of them are the human nature stuff that I usually like to link to. One is an invention that I’d honestly wondered myself if it would work. The last one is not really a scientific article. Instead, it’s one person’s attempt to create art using technology and to illustrate a fundamental biological process at the same time. We’ll go with the human nature stuff first.
The first one comes from PsyDir and covers a question that many people are no doubt curious about: is there any link between genetics and religious fundamentalism? The paper in question took data from a national survey in the US to look for data about variations in religiosity between identical twins and non-identical twins. The paper also tried to sort out influences caused by the family environment that would be shared by siblings and the environment outside of the family.
A bit of a slow start for the year in terms of science news so I’ll have to make do with some softer research articles. All three of the articles are about human psychology. First a short one about how chess grandmasters use their brains. Next, one about how men and women respond to stress differently when under the effects of caffeine and finally an odd look at how having a name that with starts with a letter at the end of the alphabet influences human behavior.
The first article is from New Scientist which talks about how Merim Bilalic at the University of Tübingen in Germany used an MRI machine to look at the brains of various chess players while they were looking at images of geometrical shapes or identifying whether certain situations in chess amounted to a check. Half of these were just novices and the other half were all internationally acknowledged grandmasters.
Three articles for the last month of 2010. Two of them are arguably about psychology. The other one is about a weird way of getting rid of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. We’ll start with that one first.
Bacterial infections that are increasingly resistant to currently available antibiotics is becoming a prevalent problem, especially in many hospitals where the bugs are able to attack patients already weakened by disease. This article from The Seattle Times looks at a way to treat one of these superbugs, known as C-diff, which can cause severe diarrhea in patients. Affected patients can use an expensive course of antibiotics to kill the bug but this also kills all of the other benign bacteria in the patient’s gut and after that C-diff can still come back.
Three articles this month, one on an amazing new implant that allows the blind to see, albeit in low resolution, one on a way of treating auto-immune disorders that I’d long suspected would work, and one about which sorts of people think the most like an economist. Let’s start with the eye implant first.
Using technology to let the blind see again has long been one of the staples of science-fiction, perhaps one best exemplified by the character of Geordi LaForge of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember being amazed a few years back when scientists successfully gave a very crude form of sight to some blind people by essentially using feeding the input of cameras to nerve receptors on their chests. But as far as I know, this is the first example of an actual artificial eye implant.