Month: March 2013

The Hues Of Attraction

Adam Alter explores the importance of colors in online dating profiles:

Several years ago, Andrew Elliot, a professor at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues began by asking heterosexual male undergraduates to spend five seconds looking at the photo of a young female stranger, and to rate her attractiveness on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all attractive) to 9 (extremely attractive). All of the undergrads saw the same woman wearing the same clothes—but the experimenters randomly changed the color of the thick border that framed the photo, alternating among white, red, blue, and green. …

Across five experiments, the results were always the same.

The male undergrads who rated the photo bordered in red, found the woman more attractive, were more interested in asking her on a date, and willing to spend more money during the date. The researchers were also careful to show that the effect was specifically tied to sexual interest. They showed, for example, that when heterosexual women rated the attractiveness of the same female stranger, they weren’t swayed by the border’s color. In addition, men didn’t believe the red-bordered woman was more likable, kind, or intelligent—only that she was more attractive and sexually appealing.

Truthiness Serum

Judge William Sylvester recently ruled that if Aurora mass-shooter James Holmes wants to plead insanity, he has to undergo narcoanalysis, “in which defendants are injected with drugs to lower their inhibitions and presumably be more willing to tell the truth about their alleged crimes under questioning by prosecutors.” Vaughan Bell delves into the history of the dubious practice:

This was born in the 1920s where the gynaecologist Robert House noticed that women who were given scopolamine to ease the birth process seemed to go into a ‘twilight state’ and were more pliant and talkative. House decided to test this on criminals and went about putting prisoners under the influence of the drug while interviewing them as a way of ‘determining innocence or guilt’. Encouraged by some initial, albeit later recanted, confessions House began to claim that it should be used routinely in police investigations.

This probably would have died a death as a dubious medical curiosity had Time magazine not run an article in their 1923 edition entitled “The Truth-Compeller” about House’s theory – making him and the ‘truth drug’ idea national stars. These approaches became militarised: firstly as ‘narcoanalysis’ was used to treat traumatised soldiers in the World War Two, and secondly as it was taken up by the CIA in the Cold War as a method for interrogation and became a centrepiece of the secret Project MKUltra.

Bell’s conclusion:

There is no evidence that ‘narcoanalysis’ actually helps in any way, shape or form, and at moderate to high doses, some of the drugs may actually impede memory or make it more likely that the person misremembers. I suspect that the actual result of the bizarre ruling in the ‘Colorado shooter’ case will just be that psychiatrists will be able to give a potentially psychotic suspect a simple anti-anxiety drug without the resulting evidence being challenged.

Update from a reader:

The order from the Colorado Court does not state that James Holmes will be given a truth serum; it states “It shall also be permissible to conduct a narcoanalytic interview of you with such drugs as are medically appropriate”.  See item #13 here (pdf) . This part of the judge’s order simply quotes verbatim Colorado Statute 16-8-106(3)(b). The judge and the statute leave it up to the physicians to determine what drugs are “medically appropriate”.  I think the mainstream media, including Time magazine, which you cited as your source, has sensationalized this order and read something into it that it does not say.  If in fact the physicians do decide that it would be medically appropriate to administer a “truth serum” (and I doubt they will), they will still have to be justify to the court that their procedure meets the Daubert Test of being reliable and accepted by the scientific community.

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew foretold trouble for GOP if they continued their anti-gay rhetoric, felt optimistic about Francis’ influence on the Church, and provided a home for difficult pictures. In politics, conservative opponents of capital punishment hid in the shadows, congress trailed popular opinion on gay rights, and Charles Pierce railed on Ezra Klein’s “unmitigated codswallop.” While Obama visited Israel, his Israel speech wowed as Israelis and Palestinians diverged from a peace agreement. Elsewhere overseas, the Middle East heated up, Dahr Jamail showed us the human cost of the Iraq War, and Felix Salmon worried about Cyprus and the EU.

In assorted coverage, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribed history, publishing was always subject to the whims of the market, and we examined personalized book dedications. CentUp mixed micropayments and charity, Kyle Wiens wished that buying something meant you owned it, and Michael Hahn photoshopped a drone. As readers drilled down into the arguments on fracking, Eric C. Anderson looked to the stars for raw materials, and researchers miniaturized heart attack prevention. Fallows lost faith in Google products after Reader and Bozhan Chipev achieved equality through piracy as Twitter turned seven.

Meanwhile, Jenni Avins traced the rise of denim, Sharon Astyk spread the word about foster parenting, Emma Maris talked to the mellower marijuana crowd, while the last name debate crossed borders. Readers defended CNN’s Steubenville coverage, Sarah Palin made an appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, and Alyssa Rosenberg gave Iraq War movies a thumbs down for missing context. We waited for spring to come to England in the VFYW, Paulo Wang painted with CGI in the MHB, and a baby bengal bared its teeth in the FOTD.

– D.A.

Pirated Opportunity

After a childhood in Bulgaria with “little access, if any, to high quality western cultural content,” Bozhan Chipev credits piracy with helping him achieve equality:

I pirated the shit out of western culture. Star Wars, The Shawshank Redemption, Half-Life, Nirvana, Adobe Creative Suite – I did it all. At a time and place where knowledge of western languages was the most precious asset and the state educational system was heavily lagging behind, I learned English at quite a decent level, at the cost of no more than my internet connection. To add to that, I acquired skills in using specialized software for design and video production, as well as knowledge about peer-to-peer networks. … Just as Lawrence Liang points out in his article “Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate”, piracy accomplished for me all the things the state and the educational system could not.

Many westerners have scolded me when I’ve told stories of the obscene amounts of music, movies and software I have pirated. What they fail to understand is that I used this mode of distribution for the lack of any realistic access to an alternative. In some cases, a given movie would never even come to cinemas or air on TV. Some bands would never sell their CDs in local stores. And obtaining a legal Adobe Creative Suite would have meant selling most of my organs.

7 Yrs L8r

On the seventh anniversary of the first tweet, Laura Sydell assesses Twitter’s commitment to free speech:

The French court ordered Twitter to block the anti-Semitic tweets, and Twitter complied, says CEO Costolo. “We have to abide by the laws in the countries in which we operate,” he says. “So the capability we built allows us to block those tweets from being seen in the countries in which they’re against the law, while remaining visible to those outside that country.”

Costolo says though people won’t see the tweets in France, Twitter’s software will let them know the accounts are being censored. But the French court also asked Twitter to turn over the names of the people who sent out the hate tweets. Twitter refused. Pontin of MIT Technology Review says he thinks Twitter’s compromise is full of contradictions.

“To their credit, they’re not giving up names and that’s great,” Pontin says. “But they’re no longer compliant with their own little internal rule, which is that they will be locally compliant with law. So they’ve said, ‘We’ll be compliant with this part of the laws.’ “

Meanwhile, Buzzfeed discovered that the promotional video seen above is “absolutely terrifying if you set it to the “Inception” theme.”

Bringing Resources Into Orbit

Fallows chats with Eric C. Anderson, chairman and co-founder of Space Adventures. Anderson wants to colonize Mars and mine asteroids. His vision:

I’m not suggesting that we’re going to start using resources from space next year. But over the next 20 years, resources in space will most likely be used to explore our solar system. And eventually we’ll start bringing them back to Earth. Wouldn’t it be great if one day, all of the heavy industries of the Earth—mining and energy production and manufacturing—were done somewhere else, and the Earth could be used for living, keeping it as it should be, which is a bright-blue planet with lots of green?

A Heart Attack Early Warning System

It could soon be a reality:

A team of Swiss researchers is putting the finishing touches on a truly amazing little gadget. It’s a tiny, 14-millimeter-long mini-spaceship of a device that’s embedded just under your skin and held in place with an adhesive patch. The “tiny, portable personal blood testing laboratory,” as the researchers describe it, then detects the data about the presence of up to five proteins and organic acids. Using Bluetooth, it then transmits that data to a nearby smartphone, essentially giving the host an unprecedented amoung of real-time information about her health. The best part? It’ll cost less than a dollar.

One way this system could save lives:

“There is a molecule called troponin that is released by the heart muscle just three to four hours before the heart attack, once the heart muscle starts malfunctioning,” wrote Sandro Carrara, one of the leaders of a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), in an email to The Verge. “Our system could detect this molecule three/four hours in advance of the fatal event.”