Smoking is Good For You!

Um, not really.

But nicotine does enhance our ability to think, perform and take tests. Thanks to new research, scientists now know it increases our memory function, too.

Up to now, results about nicotine’s effects on boosting human performance were mixed. Dr. Stephen Heishman, a scientist with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (part of the National Institutes of Health) said that in the past, researchers kept doing studies on the effects of nicotine and human performance without taking into account the drug’s harsh withdrawal effects. Instead, they’d ask subjects to go eight or 12 hours without smoking before testing their brain functions. He says it wasn’t surprising that as soon as nicotine was administered in those cases, performance improved.

“Without knowing what their baseline level of performance is, you can’t really say whether that increase is a true increase or whether you’re just bringing that person back to their baseline,” Heishman told Discovery News. “Those early studies didn’t provide the pre-deprivation performance, [as in], what’s their performance when they’re normally smoking?”

So Heishman and his colleagues studied all the literature they could find on nicotine and performance published between 1994 and 2008. In all, they reviewed and coded 41 studies and looked at how nicotine affected everything from fine motor skills to short term memory. Their results were published online in the journal Psychopharmacology.

What they found surprised them. Not only does the drug help with fine motor skills and alertness, it improves short term memory for tasks like remembering a list of items.

“We knew that the effect on attention was well known, but I was somewhat surprised about the effects on memory,” Heishman said. “Smokers say that one of the reasons that they smoke is to help them concentrate, focus on tasks and do their work, and obviously a lot of our daily work involves memory. So on the other hand, I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising.”

Having a better understanding of nicotine’s effects, including withdrawal effects, can lead to more effective quitting tactics, Heishman said. If we know that nicotine is the reason why we feel more alert when we smoke, for example, developing medicines that mimic nicotine’s role can make quitting seem like less of an impossible task.

via news.discovery.com

Penn State Football Pumps Up the Volume

Few stadia in American collegiate athletics can be more intimidating for opposing players than Penn State University’s Beaver Stadium (capacity: 107,282) in the town of State College (population: 39,419). And now the bowl’s legendary crowd noise will soon be even more pronounced, not for any kind of fake, pumped-in sound effects but rather the acoustical science behind relocating one of the student sections.

Penn State student Andrew Barnard, who’s working toward a PhD in the university’s Graduate Program in Acoustics, led a study that used a dozen acoustic meters to analyze sound pressure levels during three home games, including one last September against Big Ten conference-foe Iowa. Data from that game is shown here, with decibel levels rising as Penn State scores:

It’s part of an effort that started quietly enough back in 2007, but Barnard and his team eventually found that not only did starting quarterbacks contend with some-110 decibels of crowd noise, but that parts of Beaver Stadium’s architecture produced a weird, amplification effect, something more akin to a symphony concert hall than a standard sporting arena.

Barnard presented his findings last month in Baltimore at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Now, when the stadium is reseated in the fall of 2011, PSU plans to relocate 20,000 student seats into one of the end zones to best take advantage of their home-field quirk. The result, Barnard and Penn State officials hope, will be louder noise during opposing drives, more penalties, and a decrease in how far the opposing quarterback’s voice travels by as much as six inches.

And in a sport like football – often determined by the slightest of margins – a few inches can make all the difference.

via wired.com

Twelve elephants left at Bangkok’s city hall in protest of Thailand’s destroyed tourist industry

According to several Thai news channels and The Nation newspaper, 12 elephants were dumped at Bangkok’s city hall by the owner of the Mae Tha Man Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai today.

With the tourism industry destroyed in Thailand, due to the ongoing anti-government political protests, violence, 27 deaths and the Thai government’s inability to solve the problem, elephant camps in northern Thailand are suffering. Few tourists are going to the camps as few are in Thailand, yet every elephant camp in Thailand relies on tourists to survive.

According to recent statistics, tourists arriving in Thailand over the last month has fallen by more than 60% and who can really blame them?

Sure, it’s fun to spend time at an elephant camp in Chiang Mai (I’ve done it many times) but few tourists want to take the chance of being stuck, injured or killed if the ongoing political violence worsens. The government is at a stalemate with a proposed ‘road map’ solution with red shirt anti-government protesters now being stymied by the yellow shirts (PAD). With neither side willing to compromise, the stalemate continues. But, many western governments now are wondering how long will the stalemate continue before it disintegrates into civil war? With that question hanging in the air, it takes a brave tourist indeed to come on a trip to Thailand.

As for the elephants, with hardly any tourists going to the Mae Tha Man Elephant Camp, the owner cannot afford to feed them. So, she decided to leave 12 of her 65 elephants at Bangkok City Hall to get some charity from the government and, of course, to make her point. Thailand’s tourist industry is irreparably damaged and it will likely be years before it recovers.

As someone who has told tourists over and over again to “Come to Thailand” with the present government impasse and the likelihood, now the PAD is involved, the situation will get worse, I too have to agree with the more than 40 government’s that have issued travel warnings to Thailand and told their citizens not to come. It’s a shame. Thailand is a beautiful country and the people are lovely. But when it comes to having a vacation versus risking your life, right now, it’s just not worth it.

Meanwhile, anyone want an elephant?

via examiner.com

Aldous Huxley on Dictatorship in America (Interviewed by Mike Wallace, 1958)

via youtube.com

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, talks with Mike Wallace in an interview in 1958 about the major threats to American freedom. The villains were not the elected representatives, rather, it was a different set of characters: overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.

In Horror Flicks, The Cell Phone Always Dies First

There’s a reboot of Nightmare on Elm Street in theaters, and the new Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), is going to have to contend with something Robert Englund never had to face in the original: cell phones.

If teens in peril can just pull out their phones to call for help, the scary movie just isn’t as scary. The result is a new horror movie truism: Cell phones only work until Freddy or Jason show up.

This necessitates the disabling of cell phones. There are four basic limitations in the horror film provider package:

There’s no signal. This method is employed in the upcoming film The Human Centipede and in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes.

Limited cell phone battery life. It’s even shorter than the life of a teenager in a horror film, especially when you’ve got chatty friends like the characters in The Roost.

“Whoops! I dropped my phone in the toilet, pool, sink … “ Or you could be like Aaron Yoo in Disturbia and drop your phone in the killer’s car.

Plan terminated by the killer … by destroying your phone or politely knocking it into the sink, as Michael Pitt does before terrorizing Naomi Watts in Funny Games.

These have all become genre cliches in the time between the debuts of the two Freddy Kruegers. Maybe horror movies need to check out the service plan over at the end of the world-armageddon-apocalypse genre. After all, cell phone service was quite robust at the end of the world in the movie 2012. India is about to be obliterated, and a guy on top of a mountain peak (about to be wiped out by a tidal wave) calls his friend to say goodbye. If we can just find out who his provider is, maybe we can save those kids on Elm Street from the next Freddy Krueger.

via npr.org

Linux vs. Genome in Network Challenge

A comparison of the networks formed by genetic code and the Linux operating system has given insight into the fundamental differences between biological and computational programming.

The shapes are very dissimilar, reflecting the evolutionary parameters of each process. Biology is driven by random mutations and natural selection. Software is an act of intelligent design.

“One of the biggest problems of biological data is that you have no intuitions about it. It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook symbols. One way to get intuition is to map its structure onto something we know about,” said study co-author and Yale University informaticist Marc Gerstein. “Linux is evolving and changing. But unlike evolution in biology, we know exactly what’s going on.”

Several years ago, he refined a technique for turning gene-network “hairballs” — densely tangled depictions of gene interaction — into hierarchical maps. At the top of each map are what Gerstein calls master regulators, which steer the activity of many other genes. At the bottom are workhorses, which pump out protein code. In between are the middle managers, which do a bit of both.

Since then, Gerstein has compared the structure of gene networks between species, and contrasted biological networks with corporate and governmental structures. He hopes the contrasts will illuminate how network structure shapes genomic function.

In the latest study, published April 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he compared the genome of E. coli, a widely studied microbe, to Linux, the popular open source operating system. Though Gerstein hoped for insight into biological networks, the study also suggests strategies for social and technological engineers.

“If we don’t have designers fine-tuning things, and we have to deal with random changes, then what do we need to do in the control structure to make it robust?” said Gerstein.

E. coli’s network proved to have a pyramid-like shape, with a few master regulators, more middle managers, and many workhorses. In stark contrast, the Linux kernel call graph — the network of interactions between different pieces of program code — looks almost like an inverted pyramid. A great many top-level programs call on a few common subroutines.

Gene network structures start to resemble the Linux call graph as species become more complex, according to Sergei Maslov, a Brookhaven National Laboratory systems biologist not involved in the study. However, their pyramids never become as top-heavy as Linux. There seems to be a natural limit to this progression. The new study suggests why.

“If you update a low-level function, then you need to update all the functions that use it. That’s doable if you’re an engineer. You just go through all the code. But it’s impossible in biology,” Maslov said.

Indeed, when Gerstein’s team tracked the evolution of Linux kernel code since its original 1991 version, they found that its basic components had undergone extensive alteration. Biologically analagous are so-called evolutionarily conserved genes, which are used in a great many functions, but these have hardly changed at all. When a mutation is added, evolution can’t quickly update the rest of the genetic code.

Asked if human software engineers have outpaced natural evolution, Gerstein said the opposite was true. The computer model may be so extreme that it can’t be scaled to biological levels of complexity. “You can easily see why software systems might be fragile, and biological systems robust. Biological networks are built to adapt to random changes. They’re lessons on how to construct something that can change and evolve,” said Gerstein.

For now, the researchers have no plans to compare genomes to the most widely-used operating system of all, Windows.

“That’s forbidden,” said study co-author and Stony Brook University biophysicist Koon-Kiu Yan. “Windows is not open source.”

via wired.com

Lie-Detection Brain Scan Could Be Used in Court for First Time

A Brooklyn attorney hopes to break new ground this week when he offers a brain scan as evidence that a key witness in a civil trial is telling the truth, Wired.com has learned.

If the fMRI scan is admitted, it would be a legal first in the United States and could have major consequences for the future of neuroscience in court.

The lawyer, David Levin, wants to use that evidence to break a he-said/she-said stalemate in an employer-retaliation case. He’s representing Cynette Wilson, a woman who claims that after she complained to temp agency CoreStaff Services about sexual harassment at a job site, she no longer received good assignments. Another worker at CoreStaff claims he heard her supervisor say that she should not be placed on jobs because of her complaint. The supervisor denies that he said anything of the sort.

So, Levin had the coworker undergo an fMRI brain scan by the company Cephos, which claims to provide “independent, scientific validation that someone is telling the truth.”

Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects (.pdf) with accuracy ranging from 76 percent to over 90 percent. But some scientists and lawyers like New York University neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps doubts those results can be applied outside the lab.

“The data in their studies don’t appear to be reliable enough to use in a court of law,” Phelps said. “There is just no reason to think that this is going to be a good measure of whether someone is telling the truth.

General fMRI data from research has been used in sentencing, but an individual’s brain scan has yet to be entered as evidence in a civil or criminal trial to help the jury determine whether someone was telling the truth. Individual fMRI evidence was offered in at least one other case by a San Diego attorney defending a father accused of sexual abuse, but the evidence was eventually withdrawn and did not make it into the record.

But this case could be different, said Ed Cheng, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School who may serve as a consultant to the plaintiff.

“It’s not like the sex abuse stuff that was going on in San Diego. You can imagine that the case was in many ways a whole lot more complicated. There’s a good reason to believe that the research studies don’t port to the sex abuse case. But they port much better here,” Cheng said. “This is a witness who arguably doesn’t have much at stake. It’s not a criminal case.”

But Phelps strenuously disagrees. She calls attention to the fact that the brain scan was done four years after the witness allegedly heard the CoreStaff manager’s remarks about the plaintiff.

But even in the best of circumstances, Phelps argues that fMRI evidence should not be allowed in court, even if there are at least two companies peddling the service to the legal profession.

“I always come down hard on these companies that are selling it,” she said. “But these companies are going ahead and making claims already, based on some data that’s not so great, that they can do things that they can’t really do.”

Cheng does not see the fMRI evidence in the same light. Humans, he pointed out, are terrible lie detectors and yet our legal system is based on allowing them to make those determinations. If slightly better than chance is the baseline, any improvement on that could be a reason to allow the evidence into court.

“The validation studies may have some problems,” he said. “But if we can help the jury make this decision even a little bit better, it’s hard to defend keeping this stuff out.”

The latest attempt to use fMRI lie-detection evidence is sure to spark a contentious debate in court over whether the brain scans meet the standard for scientific evidence in New York, which is known as the Frye standard. To clear the bar, the evidence must be “generally accepted as reliable in the relevant scientific community.”

If Phelps is considered to be in the relevant scientific community — and she is — slipping past Frye may be difficult. On the other hand, fMRI has become a well-accepted and oft-used tool for brain researchers over the last decade.

And of course, whether the evidence gets in won’t just affect Cynette Wilson’s case. Due to legal precedence, if fMRI brain scans are allowed in once, they’ll be more likely to be used in more trials down the line.

“Once you have precedent, it’s much harder to keep it out,” Phelps said. “They’ve yet to get it admitted as evidence. So every time it comes up, it’s very important that it doesn’t get in.”

Beginning May 5 in the court room in Brooklyn, we’ll see another skirmish in what’s likely to be a long war over how fMRI machines should be deployed in pursuit of justice.

Cephos declined to comment on the open case.

via wired.com

Fraunhofer’s 3D posters make your fish-based advertising really pop

The pinnacle of 3D-based content? Glasses-free, of course, and Fraunhofer has reached that level for static images — and it plans to use it for advertising, of course. The company is talking up its new 3D posters that rely on 250,000 lenses embedded in a grooved sheet, each lens with a 2mm diameter. The effect is said to be similar to those simple “3D” lenticular postcards and cereal boxes we’ve all seen, but Fraunhofer promises that improved accuracy used in manufacturing here will make the resulting images far clearer, enabling the effect to be clearly seen on these five meter posters even from across the street. That’s good, because when was the last time you walked up to a billboard to get a closer look?

via engadget.com

OpenCourseWare: Opportunities for the EdTech Entrepreneur

The Instructional Technology Council recently released a report on the trends in distance education and online learning at community colleges. Among its findings: Enrollment in distance education courses increased by over 20%, while overall community college enrollment increased by less than 2%. Clearly online learning offers many opportunities to students, teachers and academic institutions. But what are the opportunities for entrepreneurs?

The Case for OpenCourseWare

Of course, entrepreneurs can benefit themselves from taking online classes. As Bill Gates said in a recent speech at M.I.T., he’s a “super happy user” of the university’s OpenCourseWare program, which offers free online courses, noting that he “retook physics” along with over a dozen of the other online offerings. Gates praised OpenCourseWare for offering a blend of the best of video technology, professional instruction and testing, and argued that accreditation too should be separated from place-based learning. Gates stated that “What’s been done so far has had very modest funding. This is an area we need more resources, more bright minds, and certainly one that I want to see how the foundation could make a contribution to this.”

Gates noted that work needs to be done in order to make teaching and learning online easier and that OpenCourseWare is currently highly fragmented.

Innovation and OCWSearch

Pierre Far found this fragmentation when he was looking online for a statistics course. As he browsed course catalogs and reviewed the course descriptions he found online, Far discovered that he often had to download the entire course packages and sift through the lectures before ascertaining whether or not a class contained the materials he was interested in learning.

Far created OCWSearch.com, a search engine that indexes not just course offerings, but course content. Launched two weeks ago, OCWSearch.com contains OpenCourseWare offerings from M.I.T., Stanford and Open University, and Far hopes to add the University of Massachusetts within the next day or so.

Far describes the OCWSearch engine as a “labor of love” at this stage. While Far’s work is a personal project, he worries that without any way to make money from tools like the one he’s devised, innovation in the field may be limited. Far also wonders how entrepreneurs and others who seek to add value to OCW content will fit into this system.

In an interview with Timothy Vollmer of Creative Commons, Karen Fasimpaur, creator of the Kids Open Dictionary, and co-founder of K12 Open Ed, argues that there can be sustainable business models around building open-education resources. She says, “Having worked in both commercial textbook and software publishing myself, I understand the business challenges and believe that there are exciting new business models around OER. In particular, income can be generated around customization services, professional development, and premium add-ons.”

Currently, the OpenCourseWare movement is funded in large part by large foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations. As more and more students turn to online learning, Far and other are hoping that OpenCourseWare can be both sustainable and innovative and provide opportunities for ed-tech entrepreneurs.

via readwriteweb.com

Native Tongue Twisters

Some tourists in Thailand seem to have trouble remembering how to speak their own language

All around my Los Angeles neighbourhood are hand-written signs tacked onto lofty palm trees: “ACCENT ELIMINATION”. The two words are followed by a local telephone number, which to my surprise doesn’t begin with 555. Accent Elimination _ how intriguing.

A long, long time ago I was here in Southern California as an AFS foreign exchange student. This was pre-Crocodile Dundee, and Americans had next to no knowledge of Australia … but they did love my accent. These days Aussies are a dime a dozen in America; you can find them trawling the cheap beer in Ralph’s supermarkets, or staggering out of seedy Sunset Boulevard bars singing Khe Sanh at the top of their atonal voices.

In fact, here in LA nobody has an American accent. Every little Fatburger or El Polo Loco in every strip mall across LA is a cacophony of voices from Asia, Europe, the Middle East and, most predominantly, Mexico, to the point where LA must surely stand for Latin America. “Accent Elimination” promises to knock that accent out of you, and in no time you’ll begin to sound like those prescription-happy people on every American TV ad. Oh joy! Hand me my cellphone now!

“It’s a service for new Americans who can be a little difficult to understand,” my host brother Marc explained when I finally gathered the courage to ask. “What about in Thailand? Do you have a problem with accents?”

How interesting you should ask, Marc.

Something bizarre is going on in Thailand. As a native English speaker spends more and more time in the Kingdom, his English starts to mutate into something far removed from what he uses back home.

The next night you have off, quietly pop down to any pub in Soi Cowboy, Nana or Patpong. Find yourself a bar stool, thoroughly disinfect it with anti-fungal spray, sit down upon it and order an orange juice. Now, listen in to your neighbours. As any professor of linguistics will tell you, the deterioration happens in four distinct phases:

PHASE ONE: THE DEMISE OF “S”.

For some inexplicable reason, many western visitors who fraternise with the locals believe that the more they speak like an idiot, the better they will be understood. Thus, within days they are dropping the conjugated S at the end of verbs whose subject is third-person singular.

“Your mother, she say she’s sick?” I heard an Australian in dire need of a course of Jenny Craig frozen dinners ask his new friend Noi. From my eavesdropping position Noi had just informed him, surprise surprise, that her mother has fallen ill. “She go to hospital?” the Aussie asked.

say  … go … what happened on the Qantas flight over here that made you decide these were preferable to says and goes? In a similar way, this linguistic disease starts spreading to the present continuous tense, eradicating it entirely. “I go to ATM,” he tells Noi. “Then we eat rice. OK?” “OK!” Noi nods, with a smile, not because she understands the sentence structure, but because she heard the magic word: ATM.

PHASE TWO: BYE BYE VERB TO BE

This, I suspect, is a communicable disease  the western tourist picks up from the likes of Noi.

“You very beautiful!” he say _ I beg your pardon _ says. “I very happy with you.” The man is effectively speaking like a newspaper headline, dropping the is am are faster than he drops thousand-baht bills into Noi’s sweaty palms. He’s not doing anybody any favours talking like this, especially poor Noi, who should be learning that the verb “to be” is fundamental to any good English sentence. In no time she herself will begin speaking like this, with sentences like “He my brother!” when a man, strangely with the same nose and mouth as Noi’s three-year-old son, suddenly appears from upcountry needing a motorbike.

3. PREPOSTEROUS PRONOUNS

The first person I ever heard speaking like this was a western woman … and an Australian to boot. It was down on Koh Samui as she ordered a drink from a bewildered Thai waiter.

“Me like water,” she was saying from her buckling deckchair. “Me want water in bottle. Me no like Coke or Pepsi.”

Has this woman seen one too many Tarzan movies? Where does she get off thinking “me” instead of “I” as the subject is good? Some tourists even do it the other way around.

“You come to I tonight at 11pm. Lek come here. Lek wait for I here, okay?” I heard a Dutchman tell his Thai bargirlfriend (named Lek) on the Pattaya walking street. Poor Lek; she’s going to hit her teens thinking it’s perfectly acceptable to switch “I” and “me” around as frequently as she switches Eurotrash boyfriends.

The final stage is almost fatal, simply because I want to murder the idiots who enter it. By this stage, their accent and English construction is more fraught with holes than a Sukhumvit condominium complex. It’s the stage I call:

PHASE FOUR: THE SAME-SAME SYNDROME

Thais love to take English words and give them new meanings far removed from what may appear in your old MacMillan or Oxford dictionary. A “freshy” is a freshman, for example, and if your clothes “fit”, then they are too small for you. I know, quirky and cute, but completely understandable in the adventure of learning a new language.

It does not, however, give native English speakers carte blanche to do it.

“I no butterfly!” I heard a British septuagenarian defending his character to  the blank-faced-but-gorgeous girl in a temple-fair bikini sitting on his lap. “I no like you say that.” She’s no doubt just accused him of philandering, not because she believes it, but what else is she gonna talk about between now and asking for a TV? But that is beside the point _ where in England does one call a philanderer a “butterfly”?

“Mekhong whiskey same-same methylated spirits,” I overheard an Australian telling his Thai bargirl one night in Patpong. The girl raised her eyebrows and laughed, lifting her glass and clinking it with his, pretending “methylated spirits” was a word she indeed knew from her four years’ schooling upcountry.

“Butterfly” … “same-same” … no verb to be … no present continuous tense … “like” suddenly an intransitive verb.  These are the symptoms of a strange linguistic disease that engulfs many a western tourist to Thailand.

What is it that makes us think speaking like an idiot somehow makes us easier to understand, let alone be of any help to a Thai already grappling with the maddening complexities of the English language? And yet we do it, and often.

It’s a slap in the face to the Thais. Somebody wrestling with a second language doesn’t mean they are stupid. The last thing they need is condescending pidgin English comin’ right at ‘em. So no, Marc, we don’t need Accent Eliminators in Thailand … although mandatory intelligence tests along with visas on arrival may not go astray.

via bangkokpost.com