Happy Arbitary Calendar Reset Day

I'm a real scrooge when it comes to New Years. I find it completely underwhelming.

Just to annoy everyone, I make a point of going to bed extra early on NYE to make sure that I'm definitely asleep at midnight. That'll show em!

And no, I don't do new years resolutions either. If something is important enough to be made into a resolution, then its important enough to start doing the moment you think of it. Why wait for new years?

Interestingly, the Cancer Council here in Australia has recently come out and said that New Years is one of the worst dates to choose to try to quit smoking. With all the parties and drinking and stress of this time of year, the temptation to smoke is likely to be at its greatest.

Ok, that's enough from me for this year... I'll get back to wetting these here blankets (grumble grumble). See you in '08.

Mac Software recommendation: OmniFocus, the ultimate to-do list

We nerds love systems -- systems of all kinds, protocols of all sorts. We're always on the lookout for ways of living more like robots. And so for nerds, clever little systems designed to help you get organised are always a really appealing way to overcome the clutter and chaos of life. This is even more true when the system can involve some kind of gadget or software. Nerds, you may have noticed, love gadgets and software.

But sometimes we nerds forget that, ultimately, we aren't robots. And so we get too ambitious and try to implement systems that are too nerdy. I've fallen into this trap many a time. A couple of years ago I built my self a Super Duper Intelligent Techno ToDo List using FileMaker. At its core was a super intelligent algorythm that would prioritise all my to-dos based on the importance of the project they were a part of, the domain that they contributed to (e.g., career, social life, health, etc.) and how soon they were due. The hope was that it would run my life for me, showing me the most important things to do at any given time. The system took me ages to set it up, and it was all very clever (if I do say so myself), but I only ended up using it for a couple of weeks because, ultimately, it just wasn't human friendly.

And then i discovered Getting Things Done (GTD). GTD is a little nerd cult based on a book by David Allen called, funnily enough, Getting Things Done. It is a set of 'action management' principals that are complement the human mind, not replace it. The basis of the system, as I understand it, stems from the notion that we typically have ideas about things that need to be done at times when we have no way of doing them, and that trying to remember to do these things is both inefficient and stressful. So GTD encourages us to abolish the practice of taking 'mental notes' in favour of either a paper and/or digital system. And under GTD such a system should include a few core features:

a) ubiquitous capture - one must be able to capture todo items quickly and easily, at any time (the moment they come to mind) and keep them safe.

b) context based lists - todo items must be grouped together on the basis of the context that they can be done in, or the resources they require, NOT, as we instinctively tend to do, on the basis of what project they are a part of.

c) trust - you need to be able to give yourself the iron clad garuntee that once a todo is in the system, it will DEFINETLY be seen when it needs to be seen, and so, one has to develop the discipline of regularly processing one's inbox and context lists.

Those, in my opinion, are the core essentials. You can learn more via the wikipedia article. It's nothing revolutionary. In fact, David Allen describes GTD as "just advanced common sense".

A GTD system can take many forms. For example, you could implement it using index cards, a notebook, or text files. But if you are a Mac user, I would recommend this new piece of software from OmniGroup: OmniFocus.

A free beta version of OmniFocus has just be released, although i've been an alpha tester since early this year. I think that it is the most elegant GTD software available. It's become an indispensable part of my life now; I couldn't live without it.

Best features (IMHO):


The quick entry window.When working in any other application a single (assignable) keystroke brings up a 'quick entry' window. You bang out a quick note, hit enter, and voila, it's in your digital inbox.

Smart start- and due-date parsing.As well as entering dates via a mini calendar window, OmniFocus will also recognise dates written in almost any format (e.g., 01/01/08, January 1, Jan 1, tomorrow, tom, 3 days, 3d, next week, January, 2 months, March 2008, etc.)

SmartMatch. You can assign tasks to a context or project list by typing its full title, or, simply by typing any aspect of it; OmniFocus will match it to the most similar context. For example, typing "wo" might match to the context "Work", or typing "market" might match to "Supermarket".

Sorting, Filtering, and Grouping. You can sort, filter, and group tasks by all kinds of different task characteristics, and easily change between these views.

What OmniFocus doesn't do, however, is run your life for you. And for this reason, Omni Focus can be dangerous in the wrong hands. So it's best suited for people who are familiar with GTD. It's also probably best suited to people who spend most of their time around their Mac.

If you're interested in OmniFocus, check out the 15min intro video (available here), and download the beta.

Also note that there is a 50% discount available if you pre-order before Jan 8. You can get a futher discount on top of that if you own a copy of OmniOutliner Pro (another Omni product).

Nicafaith CQ

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, made some comments recently about which elements of the Christmas story are important to believe in and which one's aren't. (I heard about this via Lee's post over on the 'Thinking Outside The Cage' blog.)

The Archbishop says he doesn't believe that a star literally guided three wise men to Bethlehem. This, apparently, is not an essential miracle to believe in. Furthermore, according to The Age, Dr Williams said that "while he believed in it himself, new Christians need not leap over the "hurdle" of belief in the virgin birth before they could join the church".

Interesting.

In marketing his very relaxed and moderate brand of religion, Dr Williams might hope that religion might capture a greater market share. It's a 'lite' version of faith, now 99% miracle free; a Diet Faith for those people who would like to take up religion but have previously found some elements hard to swallow.

I wonder, though, if moderate, diluted religion ends up playing quiet a different role? I wonder if it might serve as the religious equivalent of a nicotine patch; an intermediate step, not into religion (as Williams might hope), but out of it. Are Williams, and other moderates, creating a form of belief for those who are finding religiosity less and less compatible with the rest of their lives, but can't (for one reason or another) bare to go 'cold turkey'? And might this ultimately lose them more of the flock?

How much, I wonder, do either side of the believe divide know about how religious ideas play out in the minds of people in the long-term, and which are ultimately the best at capturing hearts and minds?

The things you find when doing literature searches: study on the correlation between shoe size and penis length

I was simply poking around the internet for articles relevant to my PhD, and just a few wrong clicks landed me in the British Journal of Urology.

Those urologists sure do seem to have a lot of fun. If ever there was a scientific journal that could replace the in flight magazine on aeroplanes, the BJU would be it.

One article that caught my eye was titled "Can shoe size predict penile length?". I just had to find out the answer, because, let's face it, we've all wondered.

The abstract sums it up:

Objective

To establish if the ‘myth’ about whether the size of a man’s penis can be estimated from his shoe size has any basis, infact.

Subjects and methods

Two urologists measured the stretched penile length of 104 men in a prospective study and related this to their shoe size.

Results

The median stretched penile length for the sampled population was 13cm and the median UK shoe size was 9 (European 43). There was no statistically significant correlation between shoe size and stretched penile length.

Conclusion

The supposed association of penile length and shoe size has no scientific basis.

Myth busted!

(this blog post is so going to attract the wrong kind of google ads)

References

Shae, J. & Christopher, N., (2002). Can shoe size predict penile length? British Journal of Urology International, 90, 586-587

A tribute to the Pale Blue Dot

Kid Nation

I find this new TV show, Kid Nation, absolutely riveting!

It's not hard to imagine the TV executives pitching this one:

"OK Johnny, I got somethin you're gonna love, the next big the thing! It's dynamite I tells ya!...think Survivor meets ....Lord of the Flies!

Ya like?! No Johnny, it's got nothin to do with the Hobbits...Lord of the Flies! It's with kids! Kids, see!...no, no, no, not elves! it's with kids!"

Star Wars Holiday Special - Happy Life Day

I just discovered this via the MacBreak Weekly podcast. In 1978, when Star Wars was at its most popular, there was a Star Wars 'Holiday Special' that went to air only once.

Oh, how it captures the holiday spirit!



And you thought the Phantom Menace was painful!

Nectarine Appreciation Day

Is it just me, or is the nectarine the most amazing fruit? I just can't get over how great nectarines are!

Social Functions of the Santa Conspiracy

As December 25th approaches I've been thinking about Christmas and the traditions that accompany it. What would an alien anthropologist make of our behaviour this time of year?

From an outside perspective, I imagine that the great Santa Claus deception would seem to be one of the more bizzare traditions. Out of love, we adults go to the effort to give children gifts at Christmas, but then instead of taking the credit we go to great lengths to trick children into thinking that the gifts come courtesy of an overweight elderly Eskimo with superhuman couriering abilities. It's a deception as weird as it is implausible, but yet we find it entirely charming. And if I had kids would I partake in the conspiracy?....ummm.....yes, of course! But why? Why do we do it?!

The Pagan, Christian, and Coca-Cola origins of the Santa myth are well known. But that's not what i'm interested in. What I want to know is what function the Santa conspiracy plays? What do we adults hope to achieve by partaking in the hoax? What's the pay-off?

Let's put on our nerdy over-analytical thinking caps, shall we? Here's a few preliminary hypotheses:

1. The Gift of a Fantastical Story

Perhaps we perpetuate the Santa myth because we think it is a story that children will enjoy. It's a story with a friendly hero, flying animals, and a seemingly impossible quest. So perhaps the Santa myth is like any story that we might tell to children for their enjoyment, but this story just happens to involve the annual provision of goodies to children worldwide.

Now, sure, kids enjoy fantastical stories whether it be Harry Potter, the Chronicals of Narnia, or a make-believe scenario of their own imagining. But they can enjoy stories in this way without believing that the story is literally true. Why then do we go to such great lengths to convince the kiddies that Santa a literal reality? There's got to be more to it.

2. The Gift of a Comforting Belief

What aspects of the Santa myth might a child find comforting if they believed in the literal truth of it? Perhaps the Santa hoax is intended to create a sense for the child that they are loved and cared for, not only by their parents and family, but also by the whole world; Santa, maybe, represents a grand-parent of an ultra-extended family that includes all children everywhere. Or perhaps the Santa hoax is merely supposed to instill optimistic expectations about life more generally. The child might be expected to think something along the lines "an overweight elderly Eskimo went to enormous effort to break into my houuse to give me presents, thus, the world must full of such kindness and altruism more generally."

I've been trying to think back to my own childhood memories of Christmas, but it's all a bit sketchy. I know I was definetly excited about getting presents, but how much was that enhanced by the delusion that Santa would be bringing them? I just can't remember. It's all a bit hazy.

3. Training Children in Blind Faith

Maybe Santa serves a training ground for children to develop the ability to believe in something implausible (or at least in something that at times may be hard to believe). The parent might hope, on some level, that developing this ability might facilitate better faith in religious/spiritual concepts (note that Santa in many ways resembles the Christian God concept; perhaps Santa is God with training wheels). Alternatively, a parent might hope that, having exercised their 'faith muscle' in childhood, the child might be better able to "believe in themselves" later in life, even when the chips are down.

4. Behavioural Control via Supernatural Surveillance.

Santa "knows when you are sleeping" and "knows when you're awake" and "knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake". Yes, Santa has supernatural powers of observation, and therefore can punish bad behaviour even if it goes undetected by the child's parents. So if the child isn't 'good' all of the time then they won't get any presents. Thus, by partaking in the Santa conspiracy the parent may hope to gain some control of the child's unsupervised behaviour.

Thankfully, my parents deleted this aspect of the Santa myth from my childhood. It was made clear that Santa is an unconditional gift giver. No sack of coal for me, but then, I was a habitually well behaved child....mostly.

5. Anonymised provision.

Parents may want to provide a child with gifts, but don't want the child to know that the gift came from them. But why wouldn't they want to take the credit? A couple of possibilities seem likely. First, in times of financial hardship parents might wish to keep a child from knowing that it cost them money to provide the gift. They might not want the child's enjoyment of the gift to be tainted by any worry about what it cost the parents. Second, parents might wish to avoid creating the impression that the child could have want they want at any time of the year. If Christmas gifts were attributable directly to parents children might wonder why they couldn't of had that new Barbie in July when they first asked for it.

In some ways this seems quite a shame. I think parents should take credit for the effort and thought that goes into the gifts. The tradition in my immediate family was (and still is, LOL) that 'Santa' delivers various odds and ends into my Christmas pillow case (stockings are too small), but that my main Christmas gift comes directly from my parents. And i'm really glad that Mum and Dad chose to do it that way. It allowed my main gift to serve as a demonstration that my parents understood the kinds of things that I liked and supported those interests and hobbies. It served as a really nice validation of my personality. And surely it's more important that it's your parents validating your personality than the big red Eskimo.

6. Santa is a classically conditioned stimulus

Just as Pavlov's dogs associated the ring of a bell with the provision of food, we associate Santa with the warm fuzzy excitement of Christmas, simply because the two stimuli have been paired together so often. However, we mistakenly assume that it is the Santa myth that partially creates those feelings and so we see it as an indispensible part of our children's Christmas experience.

6. Santa is a selfish-meme

Another possibility is that perhaps Santa is a selfish-meme, a self-replicating idea that survives because it's good at surviving. Could the tail be wagging the dog?

In summary, then, it seems that there are a number of functions that the Santa conspiracy might play. So parents, parents-to-be, and all of you who grew up believing in Santa, tell me what you think? Do any of these hypotheses fit your experience in any way? Can you think of any other functions that Santa might play in family life?

(I started writing this blog entry at 10am and it's nearly 2.15pm. Time to stop analysing away everyone's Christmas and do something productive. Hope I didn't unweave anyone's rainbows.)

A FaceBook App Based on the Big 5 Personality Dimensions

As we all know, the vast majority of FaceBook applications are annoyingly silly and a complete waste of time. And, as we all know, the vast majority of popular online personality tests are also annoyingly silly and a complete waste of time.

What a huge surprise it was, then, to find this really good FaceBook personality test application: My Personality

The great thing about this test is that it actually measures the Big 5 personality dimensions, one of more scientifically validated frameworks for characterising individual differences. The important thing to understand about the Big 5 traits is that they were identified using a statistical procedure called factor analysis. Essentially, a very large sample of people were given a very long list of adjectives and were asked to rate someone they knew on these adjectives. These ratings were then analysed to identify clumps of adjectives that vary together. For example, people who are rated as being very 'happy', might, on average, tend to be rated as being very 'cheerful'. Thus both of these adjectives could be seen as tapping an underlying 'happy' factor. Factor analysis examines the relationships between all possible combinations of adjectives seeking to extract the underlying factors.

Using this procedure, five major clumps (factors) were identified and given a label based on what the items in each clump seemed to have in common. They are:

- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism

The mnemonic is OCEAN.

These dimensions are continuous and independant of each other. Different people will have different 'amounts' of each one and the mix accounts for a reasonable amount of your stable core personality. And these dimensions weren't plucked out of the air, they arise from the trends in the way people actually differ (or at least the way people describe the way that people differ).

No, these dimensions don't predict everything you'll ever do, no they don't account for all of the differences between people, and yes, there is some personality change over the life span. But the Big 5 do seem to account for a good deal of stable individual differences; these factors come up again and again in personality research. Research, of course, continues into refining this model and understanding the underlying causes of these dimensions. And as with everything, the Big 5 has its detractors.

It's also important to note that there's nothing good or bad about where a person lies on these dimensions. Some of the labels (e.g., openness and agreeableness) might seem to suggest that the more than the better. I mean, who'd want to be disagreeable. But there's advantages and disadvantages to all personality traits. It's horses for courses.

Anyway, so the My Personality FaceBook app taps these dimensions using items from the International Personality Item Pool. You start with 10 items, but you can do a full 100 if you decide (and I recommend that you do do the full 100 to increase the reliability). You can then post your results to your facebook profile, compare yourself with friends, and search for a 'personality twin' amongst other users. You can also invite friends to give their ratings of your personality to see how their perspective differs from your own. (Be careful, however, of mischevous people who might seek to screw with your results. You know who you are!)

The test is just for fun, and most people won't take it seriously, but I quite like the idea of making this kind of info available to my friends. I'd like to think that, just maybe, it might help them deal with me better. Or that someone out there looking for an conscientious-introvert to converse with might stumble on my profile.

My Personality is a good example of what a facebook app should be, an innovative interpersonal lubricant, a tool for connecting with people over the internet in a meaningful way...more than just a never ending flood of notifications that one has just been bitten by a virtual zombie, scorched by a virtual dragon, or been gifted a picture of a kitten eating a cupcake.

You can find My Personality here.

I hate TomKat!

I'm feeling tired and murderous this morning. All last night there was something making this horrible noise outside my window. It kept me awake all night. It was loud and repeated at irregular intervals.

Here's what it sounded like.

Dad said it was probably TomKat, which just makes me more anrgy, because you'd think they could find better ways to spend their time.

Any tips for getting rid of them? I hear TomKat doesn't like psychiatrists, but i was hoping for a cheaper solution.

Interesting Psych Video: Interview with Paul Ekman on the Science of Faces

For me, the most interesting thing about science is the journey of discovery. I love hearing about how things were discovered more than just what was discovered. I think that knowing a bit about the personal journey of the scientist really ads to the understanding of the discovery in many ways.

That's what I really like about this interview with Paul Ekman. Paul Ekman pioneered the science of facial expressions. His work is really fascinating, and I've been meaning to find out more about it for a while. In this video he talks about his career and how he came to do research on the face.


(56mins)

Ekman and Co. have a CD-ROM out that trains people to recognise facial expressions better (particularly micro-expressions). I ordered it a few months back to have a play with. It is pretty cool. The software flashes images of parts of faces at you and you have to quickly identify the emotion (e.g., happy eyes, disgusted eyes, angry eyes). It didn't take long to master. Sadly, I don't really feel like I've gained any psychological superpowers from it. Although, i'm now always sure to crinkle my eyes when faking a smile.

Ekman also has a photographic exhibition on at the moment I believe.

Show and Tell: 3D Glasses

I went to see Beowulf 3D at the movies on Friday; these are the magical 3D glasses.

I was a little dissapointed that they didn't have the classic red and blue cellophane ones. At least everyone recognises those ones as being 3D glasses. But with this new polaroid type, when you forget to take off them off after the movie, people just think you're weird.

At Chadstone they charge extra for 3D movies. A whole extra $5 for just one extra dimension. A bit steep!

Mike Huckabee on Bees

"It is aeronautically impossible for the bumblebee to fly. However, the bumblebee, being unaware of these scientific facts, goes ahead and flies anyway."

- Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas and republican presidential candidate for 2008

Things Psychologists or Students of Psychology Hear All the Time

"Oh, you do psychology! So you can read my mind!"

"Oh, you do psychology! I better watch what I say..."

"Oh, you do psychology! You should meet my friend/father/mother/sister/brother/uncle/aunty. He/she is nuts."

"Oh, you do psychiatry!"

The Joy of Auto-Deletion

One of the best things I ever did was setting my computer up to delete my files by default. Now, that might sound crazy to you, anathema to the very notion of good computing. But, let me tell you brothers and sisters, it saved my digital soul!

You see, fundamentally, I'm a messy and impatient person when it comes to my digital lifestyle. I can't be bothered labeling all of my files carefully. I can't be bothered maintaining a taxonomically perfect filing system. I download or create hundreds of files every day, and the 10seconds it would take to file each of them would add up to too much.

So, inevitably, the clutter on my hard drive would mount. My desktop was drowning in a million icons (far worse than the picture above, actually), and the state of my other folders wasn't much better. I just couldn't bring myself to knuckle down and tidy it all up and DELETE ALL OF THE CRAP, because I knew that once I started it would take days to achieve complete cleanliness. Yes, I was lost. Dark days, dark days.

But then it hit me! The whole system was back to front. Generally, computers keep every file by default, and the user has to actively choose what to delete. Now, that would be efficient if the things worth keeping outnumbered the junk. But that's not how it is any more. Not for me at least. 90% of the files that I create on my hard drive are useless within a few days. Precious files are quite rare. Thus it would be more efficient for my files to be deleted by default, and persist only if I went out of my way to designate them worthy. Clearly, I needed to set up auto-deletion.

So that's just what I did. I found a piece of Mac software called Hazel that seemed perfect for this job. Hazel is an application that runs in the background, watching any folder or folders that you ask it to. You can then assign actions for Hazel to perform on that folder. For example, Hazel can automatically move mp3 files to a 'music' folder, set the label on any new files to green, or delete files that have not been touched in the past month. You define the rules.

Using Hazel, I implemented a very simple auto-deletion system. I created a folder on my desktop called "temp", and I set Hazel to delete any "temp" file that has "not been added in the past 30 days". I then made "temp" my default save location for everything. Every download, every text file, every screenshot now goes to "temp" by default. And if I haven't filed it elsewhere in 30 days...poof...it's gone. In other words, my Mac presumes files to be junk (which they usually are) unless I specify otherwise.



This system seems much more human friendly to me. In someways, it resembles the way our brain does file storage. By default, information that we are exposed to is forgotten half a minute after exposure (mostly). If we need to remember something in any detail we have to put in effort and think about that information, or even right it down. And thank goodness for that. If we remembered every detail about our day (every word of every conversation, every license plate number, every frozen orange), we'd go crazy pretty quickly. And for the brain, that system works brilliantly. Because we don't expect our memory to store absolutely everything in detail, we know we have to put in effort when there's important information that needs to be remembered.

I find that my auto-deletion system has a similar effect. If I start an important document, I know that I have to put in the effort to file it away in a permanent folder. If I don't, it will be gone in a month. It's very motivating. And I haven't lost one important file yet. Most importantly, however, my hard drive is cleaner than it's ever been, without me hardly ever having to clean it up. I'm saved!

(Ethan over at Kinkless.com has detailed instructions for setting up a more complex Hazel based filing system, complete with some really cool demo videos)

Online Christmas Card Printing and Mail Out

Help me out. I'm looking for a website that will let me create and customise Christmas cards, then will print them out for me and send them off. Has anyone heard of such a thing?

I'm not a big Christmas card person, but I might be if I could use something nerdy like that.

Is it a good idea to 'sponsor' children in the third world?

Ja'mie (from the ABC comedy series We Can Be Hereos) and her 'Global Vision' promotional poster.

A conversation with some people from my French class had me recently contemplating signing up to one of those sponsor-a-child-in-a-developing-country programs. Quite a few of the people in my class said have sponsored a child and said they found it very rewarding.

However, in doing some research, I stumbled on a very interesting article that has made me think twice.

ONE MILLION 'foster parents' in the West are now sponsoring children in the Third World - each giving around $20 a month - in what has become an extraordinary international exchange.

This is a very 'personal' form of giving - and from the outset the needs of the individual donor are taken into account. Advertisements for Save the Children in the US offer the prospective parent a long series of multiple choices. You check one box to choose the sex of your child and then another for their location or race. After this, as with most of the organisations, you get a child 'on approval' - with a photograph and a case history. If you accept, the process starts; you send your monthly aid and get letters from the child of your choice.

The appeal of all this is almost irresistible, and it is hardly surprising that this is one of the fastest-growing sources of money for voluntary agencies. The organisations concerned - like Foster Parents Plan and World Vision - are expanding rapidly. And even the relatively new British agency, Action Aid, now has 60,000 children on its books.

There can be no doubt about the good intentions of most of the donors. They wish to help identifiable individuals and hope to learn more about the places where their money is being used. It is a more attractive proposition than working through a conventional aid agency, which might fund a thousand projects from a central fund and appears much more impersonal.

Offering sponsorship is certainly an easier way to raise money. But is it a good way to spend it? (Continued...)

The article goes on to argue that, compared to other modes of charitable donation, child sponsorship has several hidden disadvantages for those you're trying to help:

- It's an inefficient use of your money (much of your donation is spent on taking photos of the child, monitoring the family's progress, translating the child's letters, etc).

- It causes divisions, setting the child apart from other children in the family, village, and school that don't also have a sponsor.

- Makes the child and his/her family acutely aware of their poverty relative to the sponsor's lavish first world life style.

- Maintains the child and his/her family's consciousness of aid and dependence.

Hmmmm. I had never considered these things before. It's not the kind of thing that is readily apparent to prospective donors. Of course, the article is from 1982, so maybe things have changed since then. But I haven't been able to find much info to the contrary.

Anyway, I feel obligated now to find something else to donate the equivalent amount to. Something that gets me 'bang for my buck'. But how do you calculate 'bang'? How do you work out which charity squeezes the most goodness out of each of your charity dollars?

The logical fallacy in Paul Davies' article 'Taking Science on Faith'

The blogosphere is abuzz over the recent article in the NY Times by physicist Paul Davies. In the article Davies has a go at repackaging the old fallacy that science requires blind faith in the orderliness of nature.

Taking Science on Faith
By PAUL DAVIES

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified. (continued here...)

But hang on, science doesn't presume orderliness, it just looks for it. Scientists examine various phenomena looking for reliable relationships between things -- rules that reality seems to hold to most of the time -- and sometimes they find them and sometimes they don't.

"Ah, but you wouldn't look for these reliable relationships and orderliness unless you believed (i.e., had faith) it was there" Davies might say.

Um, no! One looks for something because one entertains the possibility that it might be there.

For instance, let's say that I was playing a game of hide and seek with the readers of this blog. You all hide, and I begin to search for you. And the first place I choose to look is in a cupboard.

"Why are you looking in the cupboard?" Davies might ask.

"To see if anyone is in there," I reply.

"So you expect someone might be in there. You believe they might be in there. You have faith that they might be in there? You must, otherwise you wouldn't look."

"Well, I think someone might be in there, and I'm putting that hypothesis to the test. I certainly think it is possible that no one will be in there, Paul."

Scientists don't need to believe in an orderly lawful universe, they just look for it and very often find it. But scientists are quite open to the possibility that they won't. That's completely different from religious faith.

More analysis of the Davies article can be found over at Edge.

Longevity with a hard 'g'

The new leader of the Australian Liberal Party, Brendon Nelson, pronounces the word 'longevity' with a hard 'G'; 'G' as in 'gap' rather than 'G' as in 'gee wiz'.

What's with that?!

Software review: Mac OS 10.5 Leopard

The latest edition of the Macintosh operating system -- Leopard -- has been out for a month or so now, and i've been using it for a couple of weeks. My oppinion? It seems pretty good, although certainly not a revolution in computing. It seems to introduce mainly small changes.

Best features (IMHO):

- Screen sharing. VNC style remote control of another Mac on your internal network, or even over the net (although i've not tried that). This feature works beautifully. It has saved me switching my monitor back and forward between my two computers every 5 seconds.

- PDF annotations in Preview. Circle, underline, highlight, and comment on any piece of a pdf file. I wish I had these features while I was doing my honours research this past year.

Over-rated:

- Spaces. Multiple virtual desktops. Nifty, but I can't find any useful way to use it. I can never remember which virtual desktop I was working in. Ended up turning it off.

- Stacks. Pop-up display of folder items from the dock. Looks cool, but I've not found it overly helpful. Maybe I'm just stuck in my ways.

So, I'm glad I upgraded, but Leopard doesn't seem to be anything spectacular. Although, I think we'll see Leopard come into its own when software developers begin to take advantage of the improvements to CoreImage , and the other hidden bits and pieces.

Ghost-busters: debunking of the blue petrol station ghost

There's some footage doing the rounds on YouTube that people are claiming shows a blue ghost haunting a petrol station.

Here's the video as featured on a news bulletin:



What do you reckon? I don't think it looks overly ghostly, but what could it be? It moves like an insect, but are there many blue insects? A fault in the camera's sensors could colour the insect blue, but the blueness seems to follow the insect around. It could be blue plastic, but the movement doesn't seem consistent with something that is being blown around.

Well, if it's too hard to work out in 5 mins, it's gotta be a ghost, right?

Not so fast. Here's a video that gives a brilliant explanation [via skepchick.org]:



I'm really impressed by this second video. It is very well thought out.

Recommended viewing: Angels in America

For Australians with access to digital television, the ABC is showing the Angels in American miniseries again on ABC2, tonight (November 29th) at 9.30pm. If you've never seen it before, I highly recommend it.

Set in 1980s New York, it deals with the political, social, psychological/spiritual impact of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community. The play won a Tony and the miniseries won an Emmy.

In my opinion, it's a modern classic, up there with Death of a Salesman.

(UPDATE: Erk informs me that it can also be seen via Foxtel, as Foxtel re-broadcasts ABC2)

The Answer to Pop Quiz #1

The results are in for our inaugural Pierian Puddle pop quiz.

The question was:

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10. A bat costs $1 more than a ball. So how much does a ball cost?"

The results were mixed. We had one correct answer, one smart-arse answer, and one incredibly wrong answer. However, the answer that we didn't get at all, was the answer that most participants gave in a recent study using this question (Frederick, 2005).

Most people, it seems, give the incorrect answer '10 cents'; indeed, that was my first answer too.

But think about it. If the ball costs $0.10, and the bat "costs $1 more than the ball", then the bat must cost $1.10. Together that equals $1.20, not $1.10. So the right answer is that the ball must cost "5 cents".

It took me ages to work that out. I was so sure that "10 cents" was the answer. Indeed, according to the author of the study, most people get this question wrong because the intuitive answer ("10 cents") comes so easily to mind -- $1.10 splits so easily into $1 and $0.10. Because it seems so easy, most of us fail to carefully vet the logic of our answer.

So to those of you who got the question right, it might suggest that you are quite cognitively reflective -- you rationally think through things and don't succumb to the intuitive answer.

References

Frederick, S. (2005). On the ball: Cognitive reflection and decision-making. Journal of Economic Perspectives.

The right to bare arms?

Word has it that the US Supreme Court is going to take another look at the 2nd ammendment of the US constitution and give an opinion on what 'the right to bear arms' really means. Personally, I'm convinced that the founding fathers made a typo.

Election wrap-up

Oh what a night! Labor has swept into government with a massive 6% swing, and for the first time in Australian history, the incumbent prime minister has lost his seat.

A few observations from election night:


- The Prime Minister elect will mirror the former PM in many ways. Notice that Rudd has already adopted Howard's trademark gold tie.


- There's something about being the Member for Bennelong that seems to provoke the two-arm celebratory wave.


Last night was a great night for Labor, but also a great night for 'bone-heads'. If you watched the ABC TV election coverage last night, you might have noticed the record number of people making faces, waving, and holding up giant Rudd heads in the background. The crowd in the tally room were also making a lot of noise, and at one point Kerry O'Brian got quite annoyed. In the future I think the ABC will want to do election coverage from a controlled studio, A) because of the bone-heads, and B) because the rumour is that the Australian Electoral Commission are planning to no-longer make use of an actual tally-room in the future in favour of a virtual tally room.


When the previous Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, won in 1993 he called it a win for the 'true believers'. That was code for a promise to govern from a foundation of Labor ideology. Rudd, however, borrowed Howard's line, and promised to 'govern for all Australians'. So expect to see a very conservative policy - a small target approach. The 'true believers' will have to look to Julia Gillard for traditional Labor values -- she's the 'light on the hill'.

Human Space Invaders

I'm struggling to come up with something shiny and new for today's post, so I thought I'd just go with a classic. The following is probably my favourite YouTube videos of all time.

Pop Quiz #1

Here's a simple maths problem. Have a go. I dare you.

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10. A bat costs $1 more than a ball. So how much does a ball cost?"

Easy, right? Fill in your answer below:
(UPDATE: The bloody form still won't work, so we'll just adopt an honour system, whereby you give your answer in the comments section, without copying off others)


Stay tuned for the results.

Imaginary Friends

Many children have, at some point, had an imaginary friend. 46% according to one study (Pearson, Rouse, Doswell, Ainsworth, Dawson, et al., 2001).

But what I want to know is: do kids ever have imaginary enemies?

References

D Pearson, H Rouse, S Doswell, C Ainsworth, O Dawson, K Simms, L Edwards, J Faulconbridge (2001). Prevalence of imaginary companions in a normal child population Child. Care, Health and Development. 27 (1), 13–22.

An insiders guide to how-to-vote cards

Once upon a time, I used to be a member of a now largely defunct minor Australian political party. And for a couple of elections I was one of those annoying people who stand outside the polling booth handing out how-to-vote cards.

A quick primer on how-to-vote cards:

Australia has preferential voting. When filling out a ballot paper, voters don't merely vote for one candidate, but rank all of the available candidates in order of preference. This means that you can support an unpopular candidate but still influence which of the front-runners will ultimately win. This is because if your first choice can't win, then your second choice counts as a full vote. And if your second choice can't win, then your third choice counts as a full vote, and so on.

That's how it is for the House of Representatives election, anyway. It's more complex for the Senate, although still a preferential system.

With preferential voting, voters are free to distribute preferences however they like. However, the political parties also like to make recommendations. So on election day, each party organises to have people handing out how-to-vote cards outside polling booths around Australia. These how-to-vote cards are a last ditch attempt to impress voters with a nice photo of the candidate, win their vote, and influence their preferences.

Now, the electoral act prohibits any campaigning within the designated polling booth. Therefore, how-to-vote card handerouterors (is that the term?) have to lurk outside the entrance. There's usually half a dozen at each polling location. Waiting, ready to pounce. The poor voters have to run the gauntlet.

In my experience as a handerouteror, there are 4 kinds of voters when it comes to how-to-vote cards:

1) No card McGees - these voters keep their heads down and try to run the gauntlet, refusing all how-to-vote cards.

2) Angry no card McGees - these voters refuse all cards, whilst abusing the how-to-vote-card handerouterers ("You're corrupt bloody mongrels, the lot of yehs. I'm not voting for any of yehs. Grumble grumble...")

3) Proud Partisans - refuse all cards except that of their favourite party. These voters are happy to make their allegiance known.

4) Aquiscents - take a card from all of the parties, not wanting to offend anyone.

5) Recyling Acquiescents - take a card from all of the parties, then return them on the way out, in the interests of recycling.

Why do voters have to put up with this? And aren't how-to-vote cards a huge waste of paper? Why not just change the electoral act to allow parties to poster their recommendations on the wall inside the booth? Why not just have a copy of each card available in each of the little cardboard cubicles?

There's a good answer to that actually. The major parties can afford to pay people to hand out cards at every single booth in Australia. However, the minor parties, not having much money, have to rely on party members and volunteers (like me) to hand out cards, and there's just not enough to go around. Thus, minor parties can only afford to have how-to-vote cards at some booths. The minor parties would much prefer to just post voting recommendations inside the booths. But it's only the major parties that have the power to change the electoral act.

Surprisingly, how-to-vote cards make quite a difference. My minor party did much better at booths where its how-to-vote cards were handed out.

But I wonder what effect the quintessential polling booth sausage sizzle has on election outcomes? Factor that in Antony.

P.S. For any would be handerouterors out there, a tip: the spot closest to the entrance is the best. Yours will be the last card they get, and therefore will likely be on top of the pile.

Patent giveaway #2 - Sleep TV Remote

Here's another free idea for a useful invention:

A TV remote control that detects when you fall asleep and pauses the video/dvd/tv so that you don't miss anything.

Falling asleep during a narrative can be quite traumatic. You wake up with such a sense of confusion and discontinuity.

It could also be hooked up to the ratings system, to give TV stations a better idea of what is actually getting watched, rather than what is slept through.

P.S. I'm feeling lazy today, so this is actually a repost from the old blog.

Interesting Vocabulary #1 - 'Bacon'

The internet age has given us wonderful new terms like 'google', 'blog', and 'spam'. And there's a new term that's rising in popularity: 'bacon'.

'Bacon' is, in fact, related to 'spam'. It refers to emails that clog up your inbox that aren't quite spam because either a) you've willingly signed up for them but now find them annoying, or b) they're sent to you by people you know (e.g., annoying forwarded jokes, cat pictures, or invitations to add the latest Facebook app to your already overcrowded Facebook profile.)

So there we have it! 'Bacon'! See if you can work it into your conversation this week.

And now might be a good time to point out that you can sign up for daily email copies of this blog by clicking on the subscription link on the top right corner of this blog's main page.

Steven Pinker on the decline of violence

I'm developing a teenage-girl-esq obsession with the cognitive psychologist and popular science writer Steven Pinker (he's so intellectually dreamy!). He's got quite a talent for finding some sense in the mysteries of human behaviour and communicating these insights in a super accessible way.

In the following video (that I was delighted to discover this morning) he gives a really interesting 15 minute talk on human violence. He argues that contrary to popular belief, violence is in decline. He then looks at some of plausible theories of why this might be.


http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/163

I'm particularly intrigued by one of the theories that he briefly addressed: the notion that modern humans enjoy their own lives more (thanks to the comforts of modern living), they value their own lives more, and this leads them to place greater value on the lives of others, making them less violent.

How would you test that? Would you expect to see a correlation between subjective wellbeing and humanitarian attitudes? Or between self-esteem and humanitarian attitudes?

Pet Peeves - Misleading Facebook ID Photos

This might be a bit controversial, but is it just me, or is it really annoying when people use photos of people (or pets) other than themselves as their Facebook ID picture?

I mean, I can understand why people do it. Your Facebook profile picture is quite prominent, so you might like to put up a photo of something really important to you -- your children, a pet, Britney Spears.

But it's really confusing for the rest of us, particularly when you're trying to find someone who you've not seen in a while that has a common name.

What's even more confusing is when there's more than one person in the same picture with no way of telling which person is the owner of the Facebook profile.

Just something I had to get off my chest.

Some classic optical illusions, MTV style.

Chris over at Mixing Memory (a very cool blog, by the way) posted this youtube video featuring some of my favourite optical illusions all wrapped up in one very funky video package.

I'd love to see something like this shown at cinemas before a movie.

Oh, and turn up your speakers for the very chic soundtrack.

Patent giveaway - Credit cards with screens

With rising levels of consumer debt plaguing the nation, here's a free idea for the banks and credit card companies: make credit cards with a digital read-out. A little LCD screen would do the job, or even better, why not incorporate the new eInk technology.

You see, although credit cards are very convenient, they don't provide you with any information about how much you've spent or how much you've got left to spend. (At least with cash, you can feel your wallet lighten with each purchase.) A little screen built into a credit card could make your financial info available at a glance.

It's such a good idea (if i do say so myself) that I'm surprised it hasn't been invented already.

Now, a cynical person might suggest that the banks and credit companies actually prefer us to be unaware of our spending. But that couldn't be the case, could it? My bank is forever telling me how committed it is to providing me with choice, freedom, and financial security. My bank loves me, and only wants the best for me. So I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we see this technology readily available.

UPDATE 15/11/07: In fact it looks like Visa are planning something like this (or at least were) according to a 2004 report from Engadget.com.

Robo Toddler

New Scientist is reporting on a study into how young children interact with robots. The researchers found children will treat a cute little robot as a peer if it interacts with them in a somewhat human like fashion.

The following video shows the kids hugging, patting, and taking care of their robot play mate.



How cute!

But, what about when the kids grow up? What becomes of the robot?

I'd like to think that it will grow up into the Robin Williams character from Bicentennial Man.

Awkward Moment Insurance Tip #1 - Facebook Birthday Alerts

As someone with a talent for getting into awkward and embarrassing situations, I'm always on the look out for tips and tricks for avoiding, escaping, and preventing these occurrences.

Here's a good one I came across the other day: automated 'birthday alerts' using Facebook.

Forgetting someone's birthday can make for quite an awkward situation, particularly when:

1) the person always remembers your birthday,
2) the person usually gives you a thoughtful birthday present on your birthday,
3) everyone else has remembered the person's birthday and you're the only one in the room without a present, or
4) you share the same birthday with the person.

I've had the experience of being on the embarrassing end of a situation where all four of those conditions pertained. It was INCREDIBLY AWKWARD!

So I was very pleased to find this Facebook app (a third party plug-in of sorts) that monitors the birthday information on your Facebook friends' profiles and then emails you a reminder either on the day, or a week or month in advance (you can configure it in the settings panel).

See, Facebook isn't a complete waste of time.

Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes

In Australia, we have a federal election coming up. On November 24th, we'll vote for one of the above men to be Prime Minster.

How will we decide? On policy? Party allegiance? Boondoggling?

Perhaps. However, I recently came across a very cool study (Tondorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005) that seems to show that elections are determined, to a surprisingly large extent, by candidates' facial characteristics -- yes facial characteristics.

Participants in this study were shown pairs of photographs of politicians. Each pair depicted the winner and runner up of from a US Senate or House of Reps race. Each pair was flashed on a screen for 1 second, and participants were asked "which person is the more competent?". Care was taken that the participants had no prior knowledge of the politicians.

Amazingly, participants' competency ratings predicted the winner about 70% of the time. It suggests that our initial intuitive judgments about politicians (uninfluenced by advertising, policy, social pressures, party endorsement etc.) have quite a large influence on who we vote for.

But could competent people just have competent looking faces? Did Howard tame his eyebrows just as he tamed the economy?

And for any non-Australian readers out there, please tell us, from your naieve standpoint, which of the gentlemen shown above looks the most competent?

More on the Tondorov et al. study here and here.

(And for the stats nerds out there: the correlation between the differences in competency ratings and the difference in the proportion of votes between the winner and runner up was .44 -- equivalent to nearly 20% of the variance in the winning margins). That seems quite impressive to me.

References

Todorov, A., Mandisodza, A. N., Goren, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes, Science (Vol. 308, pp. 1623-1626): American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A New Blog Is Born

I've decided to start a new blog to bring in the new year. OK, so I'm a little early, but consider me in 'beta' until January 1. I need a couple of months to find my feet.

Unlike my previous blogs, I'm aiming to keep this one focused, lucid, and regularly updated. My posts will (mainly) focus on:

a) psychology -- cool little ideas, tricks, experiments, and illusions that I've picked up on my travels as a psych student

b) technology -- recommendations of handy gadgets, software, and websites, plus speculation about when we'll finally get flying cars and jet packs

c) nerdology -- that family of interests obligatory for any self respecting nerd (e.g., sci-fi, video games, and propeller hats)

The title of the blog is my attempt at being all literary and sophisticated. It alludes to the Pierian Spring from Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism. High brow enough for ya?

Stay tuned. If you're into RSS feeds, you may want to subscribe.