Facebook turns nasty

Facebook has developed a mean streak it seems.

This morning I get an unsolicited email from a Facebook app I did not sign up for telling me the following:

In total, you were reviewed for dating 15 times and no people expressed interest in you.
You are more desirable than less than 20% of 23,328,555 people.

Last week you were viewed 5 times and no people expressed interested in you

Way to kick a nerd when he's down, Facebook. Not only do you tell me my love life sucks, you also give me norm referenced stats to prove it. It's the web 2.0 version of a school yard wedgie.

TV Recommendation: HBO's In Treatment

I really don't know much about psychotherapy. I did a semester of 'counseling and interpersonal skills' last year in which I learned that there's only so many times you can say "So.....how do you feeeeeeeeeel about that?" before you start to sound like a broken record. But apart from that, I don't know much. I'm more the data nerd, research type.

Nevertheless, I'm fascinated by psychotherapy from an outside point of view. And so I've absolutely fallen in love with a new HBO series about psychotherapy called In Treatment.

It stars Gabrielle Byrne as the very serene psychotherapist and terrific supporting cast playing his clients (including Australia's very own Melissa George of Home and Away fame, and Michelle Forbes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Battlestar Galactica fame).

Each episode is aprox 30mins and documents one therapy session with one of his regular clients. For the first few episodes, you'll think that the show is just about the clients, but as things unfold you'll realise that it's actually about Paul, the psychotherapist.

It's a tangled web of intrigue. Brilliantly written (infact, it's an adaption/remake of an Israeli series), brilliantly directed, and brilliantly performed.

It's really gotten inside of me.

If you've got the means of seeing it, I highly recommend it.

UPDATE: To my great surprise, it looks like you can download the full episodes as a podcast from the In Treatment website. And here was I thinking I was being naughty.

Predjudice at the Puddle: results of the Implicit Association Test

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a cool little experimental procedure for testing for unconscious associations people may have between certain concepts. It's been used in particular in research on prejudice. The participant in the experiment sits at a computer and is required to sort various word and/or pictures into one of two categories as fast as possible. For example, one might sort of a series of words (happy, sad, angry, cheerful, fantastic, murder) into the categories of either 'good' or 'bad', or sort various faces into the categories of either 'white' or 'black. The clever part of the test, however, is when the participant is required to sort a combination of things (e.g., words and faces) into various pairings of categories (e.g., 'black OR good', 'black OR bad', 'white OR good', 'white OR bad'). The amazing thing is that even amongst those desperately trying not to be racist, reaction times for the prejudiced pairings (e.g., 'black OR bad' and 'white OR good') are faster than for the other pairings. The theory is that pairing 'black' with 'bad' and 'white' with 'good' is easier, even amongst people who abhors racism, because we've all to some degree learned to associate those two concepts in our culture...it's an 'implicit association'.

There's a great little interview over at Edge with Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, inventors of the IAT. Check it out.

There's also a website over at Harvard that lets you take the IAT yourself. I highly recommend it. (Follow the 'demonstrations' link to start with). There's a number of different versions you can take, including ones designed to test for predjudices regarding religion, sexuality, politics, race, gender, disability etc.

I thought I'd give the disability version a go. I was presented with various symbols related to either disability (wheelchairs, crutches etc.) or ablebodiedness (skiing, running, etc.) as well as positive and negative words. My results:

"Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Abled Persons compared to Disabled Persons."

This, despite the fact that I myself have quite the cripple credentials, having a physical disability myself. ;-) Wow!

And here's how others did:


This kind of stuff is experimental psychology at its best.

On hoaxes and creationism journals

Very recently, the Answers in Genesis (AiG) organisation has launched its own 'peer-reviewed' Young Earth creationism research journal -- the Answers Research Journal. AiG are the people behind the Creation Museum in Kentucky. They seek to rebut the standard theory of evolution and promote the biblical account of the creation of life on earth as literal scientific truth. Their new journal hopes to be a home for creationism friendly research that can't get published elsewhere.

My prediction: within the year, the Answers Research Journal will fall for a Sokal Affair style hoax.

The Sokal Affair was a hoax perpetrated on a postmodern cultural studies journal called Social Text by the physicist Alan Sokal. Sokal said that he wanted to see if the journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." He wrote a hilariously silly paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" full of the most amazing nonsense, submitted it, and they published it. (If you're familiar with postmodernist writing and understand just a couple of the basic ideas of Einsteinian physics, you'll find the article very funny.)

Surely someone else will have the same idea for hoaxing the Answers journal. A hoax of this type wouldn't be an immature game, it would serve to test the intellectual standards of a journal trying to sell itself as being a serious peer-reviewed science journal. It will be interesting to see whether there are any lines of argument in favour of creationism that the folks at Answers won't endorse.

End of the calendar/world

Friends, gather round. I have something important to discuss.

There's been a lot of talk recently about how the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, and speculation that this indicates the date of the end of the world. A lot of people are very concerned.

But I fear we have overlooked a more immanent threat!

This morning I discovered that the standard Gregorian calendar -- the one used today in most of the western world -- ends on December 31st! That's right! The 31st is the last day in December and after that there is no new month!

Don't take my word for it, go and check your own calendars right now. See for yourself. Only 12 months in the calendar, and December is the last of them!

Now the Gregorian calendar has been used for thousands of years, and has been the foundation of some very advanced civilisations. So clearly this indicates that the end will come much sooner than expected.

Start hoarding your tinned spaghetti people!

Softly softly

I usually listen to my iPod on a medium-ish volume. Last night I thought i'd see how low a volume I can comfortably listen to podcasts at.

To my surprise I discovered that I can listen to podcasts with the volume bar just a millimeter from being completely off. It takes a minute or so to get used to, and it has to be a quiet room, but after a while I couldn't really tell the difference between this volume and my usual volume.

Doesn't work so well for music. Bass is hard to hear at low volumes.

To preserve my hearing I plan on listening at as low a volume as possible from here on.

Pet Peev - misuse of preparatory count ins

For a long time now, one my secret pet peevs has been the misuse of 'count ins'.

When a group of people are about to lift a heavy object, it is customary for someone to count "one, two, three, lift" so that everyone commences lifting at the same time. The point of such a count in is for the interval between each count to be equal so that everyone can anticipate exactly when the moment to 'lift' will be. The time that passes between "one" and "two", and between "two" and "three" tells you exactly how much time to expect between "three" and "lift". That's the point of a count in.

But how I usually hear people count in is this:

"Oooooooone...........(long pause)........twoooooooooo............(longer pause).............(and then when you least expect it) THREE! LIFT IT LIFT IT LIFT IT!"

What is the point of that?

A similar phenomenon is in the counting in of singing amongst non-musical types, particularly for the singing of Happy Birthday. Some will count a rapid "one, two, three" then a few seconds will pass before a very slow "haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapy biiiirthday to you" commences.

What's the point of that!?

In music, a count in is supposed to set the tempo. And besides, in the Happy Birthday song, the "happy" should actually start on the "three" not after it, because it's "birthday" that comes on the main beat. It should be "one two three, one two, Happy birthday to you..."

...i know i know, it's no big deal...it just annoys me. And thus concludes today's insane rant.