The first of the series for 2014. It’s a light start for the year:

•  First, we have this New York Times article covering a study that looks into how technology might be changing how people interact with each other. This one works by filming public spaces in New York and comparing them to similar footage filmed forty to fifty years ago. The researchers carefully identified persons in the footage that were observed to be using mobile phones and similar devices and tried to draw comparisons between then and now. It turned out that publicly visible usage of such technology was lower than they expected and that mostly by loners. They also found that more people are meeting and loitering in public spaces and speculate that technology may be a reason for the boost.
• Next, this Atlantic article talks about how even sleep has a placebo effect. In the study, scientists informed participants that REM sleep is more restful and getting more REM sleep is correlated with better performance on learning tests. They hooked up the participants with sensors and told them that this would measure the amount of REM sleep they had gotten the previous night. This was however a lie as the scientists had no way of knowing that fact. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that participants who were told that they had gotten more REM sleep did perform better on cognitive tests compared to those who were told that they had gotten less REM sleep than average.
• Finally, here’s a direct link to a paper that seems spurious but actually makes perfect sense. The idea is to search for time travellers from the future by searching for prescient content on the Internet. This includes content about events that preceded the date of the event and search engine queries about events before the events could possibly have been known about. Not surprisingly, the search revealed no evidence of any time travellers on the Internet.