The Dish

Susan Brink surveys research that investigated the question, “Who has the better memory: the young person who knows a little and remembers all of it, or the older person who has learned a lot and forgets a little of it?”

It could be that older, wiser heads are so chock full of knowledge that it simply takes longer to retrieve the right bits. …

[Researcher Michael] Ramscar created computer models simulating young brains and older brains. He fed information into both models but added buckets more information to the model meant to simulate an older brain. “I could see precious little evidence of decline in [the models of] healthy, older people,” he says. “Their slowness and slight forgetfulness were exactly what I’d expect” because with more to draw on, there are more places to search, and there’s more information to search through to find an answer.

Benedict Carey digs in (NYT):

[T]he new study is not likely to overturn 100 years of research, cognitive scientists say.

Neuroscientists have some reason to believe that neural processing speed, like many reflexes, slows over the years; anatomical studies suggest that the brain also undergoes subtle structural changes that could affect memory. Still, the new report will very likely add to a growing skepticism about how steep age-related decline really is.

It goes without saying that many people remain disarmingly razor-witted well into their 90s; yet doubts about the average extent of the decline are rooted not in individual differences but in study methodology. Many studies comparing older and younger people, for instance, did not take into account the effects of pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease, said Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at Stanford University.

Thomas Hills weighs in:

Years of research have shown that older people have larger vocabularies than younger people, other things being equal. In their paper, Ramscar and associates show that even this we’ve probably underestimated, because older people tend to know a lot of very low frequency words such as “zaftig” and “arroyo” and “byzantine”, words that are difficult to test because there are so many of them. Younger people tend to know fewer of these words.

http://twitter.com/AmIRiteBot/status/427384696918794241

Leon Neyfakh profiles Darius Kazemi, a botmaker whose “dozens of projects have won him admirers among a range of people so wide it suggests the world doesn’t quite have a category for him yet”:

Kazemi’s first foray into the field was called Metaphor-a-Minute. The way it worked was simple: The bot would pull nouns and adjectives from an online dictionary called Wordnik, and arrange them in a particular order so that each tweet presented a metaphor both bizarre and fleetingly plausible. (Examples: “a premonition is a warren: defenseless and tacit,” “an impression is a mucus: nondomestic, rootlike.”) The effect was that of a very smart but helplessly confused alien being trying to make sense of the English language. To date, the account has generated nearly half a million metaphors.

From there Kazemi was off to the races.

He made a RapBot that used a rhyming database to write hip-hop verses. He created Amirite, a hammy jerk of a bot that makes corny, often nonsensical “am I right” jokes that sometimes strike a nerve: “Wendy Davis? More like Trendy Davis, amirite?” His Startup Generator lampooned tech culture with a constant stream of dubious business ideas (“Paypal for dropouts”).

More recently he created his most popular bot to date, Two Headlines, which crawls the latest news stories on Google, picks two at random, and switches important keywords to generate a series of broken windows into the popular conversation: “Beirut seeks love advice from Katy Perry”; “Iran Is Working On Smart Contact Lenses That Can Monitor Your Body’s Health.” Bogost now considers himself part of Kazemi’s growing fan base, waiting for the next bot to be born. “You have a favorite comedian or favorite artist and you look forward to what they say, because you want to see the world through their eyes,” [professor Ian] Bogost said. “The same kind of thing is happening with Darius.”

Federal law makes it impossible for the legal marijuana industry to put its money in banks. The dangers this produces:

One benefit of banks is the security they offer. And with all the marijuana-related cash exchanging hands in Colorado these days, security is a pre-eminent concern. It doesn’t help that there seem to be fewer and fewer people around to help guard that cash. Last summer, the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly began pressuring armored-car companies to stop working with marijuana companies. And last month, the Denver Police Department barred its off-duty officers from working security at marijuana operations, despite the fact that many moonlight as security guards at liquor stores and bars. That’s because department policy prohibits off-duty officers from working with any business that “constitutes a threat to the status of dignity of the police,” such as porn stores, strip clubs—and now, pot shops.

“They’re setting marijuana up to be a cash business that can’t protect itself,” says [Michael] Elliott [executive director of the Medical Marijuana Industry Group]. “The roles have switched. Now the marijuana industry is the one working to keep things safe.”

Update from a reader:

I’m a credit analyst for a small holding company with locations in Colorado. More and more over the last several years we’ve seen weed businesses on property rent rolls.

In previous years, if a customer wanted to purchase or refinance a building with a dispensary we would require removal of the tenant prior to closing. This was simply a matter a risk management. No one knew what would happen if the feds decided to shut it all down. Executives in most community banks have taken a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach.

I’m not a compliance expert, but right now it appears that Treasury is deciding how to handle the issue of suspicious activity reports required by law when large cash deposits are made. I am certain they understand that legalized cannabis is upon us and there’s no going back. Hell, even my most conservative friends in the industry have accepted as much. And I believe there is sincere concern among both bankers and regulators about the safety issues that arise from the transport and storage of huge piles of cash. They are just trying to figure out a way to solve the problem without a huge bureaucratic mess. When Treasury figures out how to finesse the issue, we will get some direction and can respond accordingly.

Once marijuana businesses can make deposits, they will quickly be considered legitimate in the eyes of their community banks. Instead of avoiding cannabis businesses, we will compete for them.