Upper class people are more likely to behave selfishly, studies suggest

http://gu.com/p/35nby

to sleep, perchance to sleep again

 A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

Facebook's guidelines, no breastfeeding, crushed head ok

Facebook's nudity and violence guidelines are laid bare
Nipples are rude but crushed limbs are OK. a document leak has revealed the social network's attitudes to sex and violence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/21/facebook-nudity-violence-censorship-guidelines

Iran: false nuclear fears cloud the west's judgment

I personally think that while a dangrous development, a nuclear armed Iran is not the nightmare scenario it is often claimed to be,and rational analysis of the real dangers and likelihoods is needed, both in public and political discourse. So agree to a large extent with this article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/16/iran-false-nuclear-fears
After all, the cold war subsided without armageddon, and that was a much worse situation. One valid point however is that the mechanisms that were developed between the US and USSR to prevent 'accidents' (misunderstandings which could lead to reaction and counter-reaction) aren't in place between places like Iran and Israel , and if Iran did have nuclear weapons then the lack of such a diplomatic safety apparatus would make it a very very dangerous situation. As the documentary 1983, Brink of Apocolypse showed, even with these mechanisms, the world could and did come frighteningly close to accidental annihilation during the cold war.

update : this following article also lists several reasons why a nuclear Iran might be containable :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/21/nuclear-alarmism-iran

How 1-Minute Intervals Can Improve Your Health

[the] routine involved one minute of strenuous effort, at about 90 percent of a person’s maximum heart rate , followed by one minute of easy recovery. The effort and recovery are repeated 10 times, for a total of 20 minutes. Despite the small time commitment of this modified HIIT program, after several weeks of practicing it, both the unfit volunteers and the cardiac patients showed significant improvements in their health and fitness.


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/how-1-minute-intervals-can-improve-our-health/

The death of the cyber flaneur

The Death of the Cyberflâneur - NYTimes.com

Some extracts:

-) The flâneur would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.”
-)It’s easy to see, then, why cyberflânerie seemed such an appealing notion in the early days of the Web. The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonized by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (“Internet Explorer,” “Netscape Navigator”).
-) Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely.
-) the idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,”
-)According to Benjamin, the sad figure of the sandwich board man was the last incarnation of the flâneur. In a way, we have all become such sandwich board men, walking the cyber-streets of Facebook with invisible advertisements hanging off our online selves. The only difference is that the digital nature of information has allowed us to merrily consume songs, films and books even as we advertise them, obliviously.

Really the final act in the Greek tragedy?

Greece really seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place, and while of course as a country largely responsible for its own mess, are the individual voters really to be punished with years of misery for the incompetence of their government, or even of their society? Is it the economic equivalent of punitive repatriations after an aggressive and foolhardy war? On the one hand the Greeks played along with the game, the bloated state and the evasion of taxes, but on the other this was just one more example of the weaknesses in the global economic system we are all signed up to, since even if Greece borrowed recklessly, there were plenty ready to lend to them.
Personally I think the only long term option for Greece is total but rapid collapse via default and exit from the euro, and then perhaps at least some possibility to rebuild from the ground up a newer more stable society. Any other course, like the punitive loans and extreme "austerity" measures, will I think just drag out that collapse, and worse, make it unfairly distributed, so that those with the most resources, scrabble back to the top of the rubble that buries their compatriots.

I fear for a social explosion: Greeks can't take any more punishment | World news | The Observer

I fear for a social explosion: Greeks can't take any more punishment | World news | The Observer

The fickle heart of the modern consumer society

Illouz, a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, attempts to explain the specific modern form of "romantic misery and happiness". She says our consumerist, capitalist culture has changed the face of our relationships beyond all recognition.
Love hurts more than ever before (blame the internet and capitalism) | Life and style | The Observer
"Men and women are definitely needing each other less as their roles converge," said Glenn Wilson, a fellow of the British Psychology Association and visiting professor at Gresham College, London. "I think the main change over the years is the Hollywood-driven belief that love and marriage should be contiguous – go together like horse and carriage. Because passion is short-lived, this results in our pattern of serial monogamy – repeated divorce and remarriage, leaving a trail of destruction.

Psychologists fear US manual will widen mental illness diagnosis

While I'm all for quantitative measuring methods, I too have serious concerns about the DSM, and while it is hard to generalize, would think that there can be too much 'medicalization' of mental problems.The dangers are (a) that some kind of amazing level of balanced happiness is then considered both normal and achievable and that (b) those who can't achieve it are then considered 'sick', which generally implies external remedies are necessary. This is I think detrimental to both the 'well' and the truly 'sick'.
But, it is a complicated area, since of course as a materialist I am fully convinced that all behaviours originate from the chemical/neuronal status of the brain, and from this perspective, any mood can be changed. The problem is to manually force a change is to intervene in an amazingly complex and normally efficiently self-regulating system, and while sometimes the situation merits this, until the techniques are more developed (and their mechanisms properly understood) then I think it is not appropriate unless the person involved has serious problems coping with daily life. Life shouldn't be hell,but there's no reason to think it should be all rosy either...

"Hundreds of thousands of people will be labelled mentally ill because of behaviour most people would consider normal, if a new edition of what has been termed the psychiatrists' diagnostic bible goes ahead, experts are warning."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/09/us-mental-health-manual

• Psychiatrists and psychologists in the UK are speaking out against the publishing of DSM-5, an updated version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that categorises every type of mental disorder, including some that the psychologists say should not exist. 
• Under the DSM-4, last revised 12 years ago, children who argue and refuse to obey parents can be classified as having oppositional defiant disorder."
•  "Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology at Kings College London, said: "The proposals in DSM-5 are likely to shrink the pool of normality to a puddle with more and more people being given a diagnosis of mental illness." "

Dividing younger pupils by ability can entrench disadvantage, study finds

Unsurprising, really, but still worth noting:
"The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based thinktank, analysed successes and failures in education systems in 39 of the world's most developed nations.It found that countries that divided pupils into ability groups at an early age tended to have higher numbers of school drop-outs and lower levels of achievement."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/feb/09/dividing-pupils-ability-entrench-disadvantage
Perhaps more interesting is the differences in what school leads to :
" In the UK, 69.5% of pupils in the last years of secondary school are on academic courses, while 30.5% are on vocational courses. This is the eighth lowest proportion on vocational courses of all countries. Across the OECD, the split between the two types of courses is almost equal, while in Germany, Austria and Finland a higher proportion of pupils are enrolled on vocational courses than academic ones."

the way your data can spread beyond facebook

This story in the guardian is another reminder of how if you don't pay for something online you're not the customer, you're the product...and the innocuous default settings can result in your data being spread far and wide. Most people probably don't know that the default privacy settings in facebook mean that if a facebook friend of yours uses an app, then the website/company behind that app (which might be respectable , or dodgy, or unaccountable, or untraceable one) has access to all your data that the friend can see. So if you share a photo with a facebook friend, a website you have nothing to do with can  access and even use that photo, as in the case below.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/feb/08/date-rating-site-data-protection-act

The Schoolification Of Early Childhood

I've read many times before about the difference between UK/Ireland and the rest of Europe with respect to when kids start with proper 'academic' tasks (the 3 'Rs'), but since heard being discussed again on the Today programme this morning, thought worth posting an article by one of the people they interviewed (Susan Palmer)

http://www.suepalmer.co.uk/modern_childhood_info_the_schoolification.php

An extract :
"Why do other countries do better than us on all three counts? One huge difference is the school starting age. Most British children now start school well before they’re five, some just after their fourth birthday, and are expected to crack on with the 3Rs straight away – in England all five-year-olds are expected to read and write (using punctuation!). Elsewhere the starting age is at least six. Indeed, in Finland, where literacy standards are the best in the world, it’s seven. In these countries, children follow a ‘kindergarten curriculum’ from the age of three, based on play (especially outdoors), stories, music, art and drama. The idea is to develop their language, attention, and social skills, creating firm foundations for successful formal education."

contact lens displays and the darker side of neuroscience

Two interesting tech articles today:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-reality-contact-l : on the possibility of virtual displays in contact lenses within a couple of year


http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/07/neuroscience-soldiers-control-weapons-mind: which while being a bit on the futuristic side, does raise the issue of the ethical issues which will soon arise as a result of developments in neuroscience, and provides some impressive examples of the sort of things that are already being attempted, for example : 

• The US military research organisation, Darpa, has already used EEG to help spot targets in satellite images that were missed by the person screening them. The EEG traces revealed that the brain sometimes noticed targets but failed to make them conscious thoughts. Staff used the EEG traces to select a group of images for closer inspection and improved their target detection threefold, the report notes.
• A growing body of research suggests that passing weak electrical signals through the skull, using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), can improve people's performance in some tasks.
  "Those who had tDCS learned to spot the targets much quicker," said Vince Clark, a cognitive neuroscientist and lead author on the study at the University of New Mexico. "Their accuracy increased twice as fast as those who had minimal brain stimulation. I was shocked that the effect was so large."
   

 Aside from the ethical issues about the use and power of such techniques, there even then arise questions of responsibility, since if the subconcious thinking of a soldier is used to trigger say a missile launch, is he still fully responsible? A complex future...but a fast approaching one it seems....

the golden muddle...

An interesting article on the complacency of electorates. This reminds me of those psychology studies that show that people have a base level of happiness to which they inevitably, and surprisingly, return to, no matter what life changing events befall them. Thus, no matter how terrible they miht imagine some event being, even something like losing a limb, if it actually happens it is not only never as bad as expected, but eventually their rating of their happiness eventually settles back around their 'norm'. There is something of this in politics too, in that no matter how much people may on one hand be concerned and even angry about a situation, on the other there is a very strong tendency to trust the system despite this and assume can 'muddle along'. On the one hand such resilience is a good thing, on the other hand it makes politicians less held to account, and under less pressure to reform things, than they should be.

The mood in Britain is to muddle along | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian

"People are fatalistic. Once they get used to the initial shock and fear of hard times, it seems, they hunker down and find that life, generally, carries on tolerably well.
Put these things together and you get much closer to a truer explanation of a great paradox. People may resent economic distress and have little confidence in governments or politicians, yet they still expect to get through, and so they are generally unattracted by radical change. As the Cambridge political scientist David Runciman put it recently, the overriding temptation is to muddle along. That's the mood in Britain; but it is also the mood, so far at least, in places such as Spain and Greece, where conditions are much more stark. Kicking the can down the road isn't as glamorous as revolution, but it isn't as destructive either.
If this is right, then the implications matter for all politicians and for those who write about politics. The truth is that most people seem to want the system we have got, not some other system. That may not go down well in the grandstand, but it works on the field. Sure, we would like the system to work better in various ways, and we are open to sensible and fair suggestions that don't put what we have at risk. But we also know that things are rarely as bad as they look."

Twitter/Email is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds

Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/03/twitter-resist-cigarettes-alcohol-study

Mind-reading program translates brain activity into words

"Scientist Brian Pasley enrolled 15 patients to take part. He played each a series of words for five to 10 minutes while recording their brain activity from the electrode nets. He then created computer programs that could recognise sounds encoded in the brain waves."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/31/mind-reading-program-brain-words

"Jan Schnupp, professor of neuroscience at Oxford University called the work "remarkable".
"Neuroscientists have long believed that the brain works by translating aspects of the external world, such as spoken words, into patterns of electrical activity. But proving that this is true by showing that it is possible to translate these activity patterns back into the original sound – or at least a fair approximation – is nevertheless a great step forward. It paves the way to rapid progress toward biomedical applications," he said.
"Some may worry though that this sort of technology might lead to mind-reading devices which could one day be used to eavesdrop on the privacy of our thoughts. Such worries are unjustified. It is worth remembering that these scientists could only get their technique to work because epileptic patients had cooperated closely and willingly with them, and allowed a large array of electrodes to be placed directly on the surface of their brains."

drones, and a dangerous disconnect in war

While use of drones has been going on for a while, there seems to be more discussion of the topic recently, which is definitely a good thing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/30/deadly-drones-us-cowards-war?mobile-redirect=false

For me the biggest concern is the potential disconnect between the aggressor and his/her victim...the more removed and unreal the target, the less emotionally involved the attacker, surely the greater the risk of inhuman attitudes. Of course it could be argued that it is precisely human weakness, fear, overreaction etc that leads to some of the unnecessary brutality in war, and the collateral damage, since a panicked soldier is an unstable one, but I think the following quote from the article is more pressing :
 
"Citing the Germanmilitary theorist Carl von Clausewitz, it [UK Ministry of Defence] warns that the brutality of war seldom escalates to its absolute form, partly because of the risk faced by one's own forces. Without risk, there's less restraint. With these unmanned craft, governments can fight a coward's war, a god's war, harming only the unnamed..... The danger is likely to escalate as drone warfare becomes more automated and the lines of accountability less clear. "

The dogs of war are bad enough, but at least if kept on a leash they drag their owners with them and make them part of it. The drones of war fly a bit too freely...

not just that head of RBS was offered £1m bonus, but that he didn't need it...

In response to the political storm about massive bonuses in bailedout banks, the head of RBS has waived a 1million pound bonus:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/29/rbs-stephen-hester-waives-bonus 


I'm actually not sure what is more revealing about this fact - that banks whose share prices have plummetted would award such bonuses, or that those involved could easily dismiss a bonus of £1m?!
I think it shows how bogus the argument is that 'the rich' would be fly away to other countries if they had to pay even a little more tax, since it's obvious a million here or there doesn't make so much difference to them, that they could reject it overnight, even when legally entitled to it. Though since Hester's yearly package is thought to still amount to about £8m, then taking a 12% cut to avoid being a public hate figure is probably reasonable. But surely the £8m he does get is as much of an issue as the £1m bonus on top of it.

I still remain to be even remotely convinced that anyone can be worth this kind of money, which works out as about £1 per working second. Surely no one can literally make so many decisions, actions to bring in enough additional benefit. Or to put it in terms of daily wage,about £30,000 a day. I.e. 1.5 times annual the median wage for a days work.  Does such a CEO really make such a difference that it is worth more than 200 of the top 25% of earners (which this salary would be in annual terms).

While even less fair to be called 'earnings', at least the massive income people like Bill Gates etc. receive comes  from actual original work and ideas that just generates exponential return over years, but CEOs only 'direct' a company, and I would love to see an analysis of how much tangible difference this makes. Especially since in many areas, e.g. finance, the work of 'experts' is often seen in hindsight to be only as good overall as random chance.

Perhaps also relevant is the comment I heard from a 'city analyst' on the BBC Today programme, claiming that the real danger is 'high flyers' might be discouraged from working for banks in which the state has stake holding, in case their is undue interference in the operation merely as a result of public outcry. Presumably the problem would be that in cases where bonuses were not justified, 'outside interference' might mean they are actually not rewarded. What a blow to our economic system that would be. The irony is that it is mainly  in cases where share prices have fallen etc. i.e. where the holy 'market' has delivered a negative judgement on the competency of the CEO that the public outrage will be noticeable. The best thing about being a 'free market capitalist', is being free of the market when it suits you.

the approaching drone of the...drones...

But the United States and Israel have pioneered the use of drones on the battlefield, with the first operational armed strike by a drone taking place in Afghanistan in 2001. Since then, the use of drones in the military arena for surveillance and targeting has risen at a startling pace, and in 2012 we will see drones appearing closer to home. It is widely anticipated that they will be used as a security measure during the London Olympics, and pressure is mounting on the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to re-examine regulations governing UAVs in order to open up what military companies believe will be a valuable civilian market.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/22/drones-paparazzi-ethics-privacy-america