Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XXIV

First, the surprising similarity of all animals:

Though big and little creatures look very different, below the surface there is a surprising unity. Biologists have compared the heartbeats of mammals and discovered that on average (this won't apply to any individual, just to groups) elephants and shrews and most of the critters in between have a limit of about a billion and a half heartbeats in a lifetime and then they die.

That is, except for us:

Human beings used to fit into this pattern, but now that we have learned to drink safe water, wash and bathe and create medicines, we last longer than our size would predict.

You can hear the details at NPR's Krulwich Wonders.

Earth Shattering Odds

As I was catching up on my blog reading tonight (still yet to completely get there since Europe) I came across an article comparing the different proposed methods for dealing with an asteroid headed for Earth. Here's how it closes:

The researchers do note that the asteroids they used in their calculations are not immediate threats.The asteroid Apophis is expected to fly harmlessly by Earth on April 13, 2036, with only a 1-in-233,000 chance of hitting our plane

When I saw that number I wasn't comforted. It felt a little too likely. So I compared it to the chances of winning the South Carolina Education Lottery:

Not sure if this makes me more nervous about asteroids or people who play the lottery.

Time Flies When You're Having Fun/Fear/Fever

Last year I shared how the amount that time flies can make it seem like we are having more fun. Maybe that's because the things that make us happy are usually the things that speed up our internal clock:

Your internal clock is just like that digital watch in some ways. It measures time in what scientists call pulses. Those pulses are accumulated, then stored in your memory as a time interval. Now, here's where things get weird. Your biological clock can be sped up or slowed down anything from drugs to the way you pay attention. If it takes you 60 seconds to cross the street, your internal clock might register that as 50 pulses if you're feeling sleepy. But it might last 100 pulses if you've just drunk an espresso.

So if you're having a good time, just sit back relax (slow your heartbeat) and enjoy it. However, a faster internal clock can also make it seem like time slowed down. In an experiment neuroscientist David Eagleman dropped participants from a SCAD free fall tower. Each person was asked to look at a chronometer when they fell and when they landed and then afterward use a stopwatch to go back over the fall and estimate the feeling of length. Here are the results and explanation:

Eagleman’s subjects overestimate the length of their fall by thirty-six per cent. To his surprise, though, the speed of their perception doesn’t change as they drop: no matter how hard they stare at the chronometer, they can’t read the numbers. “In some sense, that’s more interesting than what we thought was going on,” Eagleman told me. “It suggests that time and memory are so tightly intertwined that they may be impossible to tease apart.”

One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

When your internal clock speeds up, but you are still taking in the same amount of information, sometimes it can actually feel like time slowed down. A pretty good argument to have new experiences later in life (to slow time down). Interestingly enough, being sick can have a similar outcome:

Eagleman traces his research back to psychophysicists in Germany in the late eighteen-hundreds, but his true forefather may be the American physiologist Hudson Hoagland. In the early nineteen-thirties, Hoagland proposed one of the first models for how the brain keeps time, based partly on his wife’s behavior when she had the flu. She complained that he’d been away from her bedside too long, he later recalled, when he’d been gone only a short while. So Hoagland proposed an experiment: she would count off sixty seconds while he timed her with his watch. It’s not hard to imagine her annoyance at this suggestion, or his smugness afterward: when her minute was up, his clock showed thirty-seven seconds. Hoagland went on to repeat the experiment again and again, presumably over his wife’s delirious objections (her fever rose above a hundred and three). The result was one of the classic graphs of time-perception literature: the higher his wife’s temperature, Hoagland found, the shorter her time estimate. Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got.

Yesterday I tried to figure out whether we should let people know the length of time allotted for good and bad tasks. I think it might depend on what that task does to our internal clock.

Follow Your Heartbeat

I've come across a few articles recently all on how our heartbeat influences us. Here's a snippet from an interesting paper related to my previous post on our unconscious thoughts. In the study students were asked to figure out a game with no obvious strategy:

Most players gradually found a way to win at the card game and they reported having relied on intuition rather than reason. Subtle changes in the players' heart rates and sweat responses affected how quickly they learned to make the best choices during the game.

Interestingly, the quality of the advice that people's bodies gave them varied. Some people's gut feelings were spot on, meaning they mastered the card game quickly. Other people's bodies told them exactly the wrong moves to make, so they learned slowly or never found a way to win.

Dunn and his co-authors found this link between gut feelings and intuitive decision making to be stronger in people who were more aware of their own heartbeat. So for some individuals being able to 'listen to their heart' helped them make wise choices, whereas for others it led to costly mistakes.

So being aware of your heartbeat makes your "heart" and your "head" more connected. Similar to this and connected to my recent post on empathy, being aware of others' feelings can change our heartbeat. In the study some of the participants were forced to bond and some weren't. Then:

the other student was allocated the task of running on the spot vigorously for three minutes. This time, the sight of their partner running apparently caused the socially connected participants to experience increased heart rate and blood pressure, as compared with the participants who hadn't been prompted to feel socially connected. A weak bond had led the strangers' hearts to beat together.

So being socially connected makes you feel what they feel. So being aware of your heartbeat can help you access your subconscious, be more empathetic, and in this last study, improve your internal clock:

Thirty-one participants listened to auditory tones of either 8, 14, or 20 seconds duration. After each one, they heard a second tone and had to press a button when they thought its duration matched the first. Counting was forbidden during the task and a secondary, number-based memory task helped enforce this rule. Heart-beat perception accuracy was measured separately and simply involved participants counting silently their own heart-beats over periods of 25, 35, 45 and 60 seconds.

The take away message is that the participants who were more in tune with their heart-beats also tended to perform better at the time estimation task.

Perhaps these are some of the benefits of silent meditation and prayer.

Responding to Communication Overload

In the third part of my series against self-verification I'd like to revisit a list I made a while back of things I hate. One of the items on that list was when people do not respond to messages. I had several people in mind when I wrote that, but one of them was the owner of the DSI Comedy Theater, executive producer of the North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival, and all around busy guy, Zach Ward. I recently mentioned this to him and our conversation was very insightful.

He said that he gets so many messages in the day, by his count in the hundreds, that to give a thoughtful response to each would be a full time job. As Get-It-Done-Guy Stever Robbins puts it, email has changed the burden of communication. In the past the sender had write, stamp, and mail a letter. No one spent 20 cents and 20 minutes writing something that's not worth 2 minutes to read. Now we've written and sent with barely a thought. That doesn't mean, however, that we can't cut out other communication tools like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, to spend more time responding to personal messages. But as I now understand, there is a major difference between public and private conversations.

Firstly, private messages are only seen by a few. Social networking sites are just that, for building a large social network. A response on Twitter is seen and appreciated by many more people than an email. Also, being successful is partially about being a super-connector. More connections means more messages. So what's the solution? Here's some ideas that might help those who feel overwhelmed:

1) Realize that too many social connections have costs. Each person you connect with is another potential message. There is a cost to being popular.
2) Realize that too many social connections have benefits. An idea from Economist Jeff Ely is that by using public communications tools like Twitter and Facebook you can signal to others that you are busy. If you're too busy, people may assume their message got lost in the shuffle.
3) The more you raise the awareness of your message overload, the more sympathy others will have for your late/no response. Blogger Alexandra Samuel has decided to let everyone know she's too busy with an email auto-reply and a Too Big For One Person (#TB41P) hashtag.
4) There are plenty of messages that only require a little response. If I send you an interesting link, I'm usually just looking for an "awesome, thanks".
5) Any private question that requires more than a simple request can be made public. I've done that with my reader request posts. Try to turn a time consuming private questions into public production.
6) Top economics blogger Greg Mankiw proposes a tax on emailing him (I think Tyler Cowen wanted the opposite, but I can't find the link). Maybe if the email is worth his read, you can get your money back.
7) We can all be more sympathetic. I personally can't remember the last time I had an empty inbox. When I send someone a message, I try and forget about it. If they respond they respond. If they don't, they don't.

One final thing worth mentioning is that I am not overwhelmed by the number of messages I receive. So feel free to email or comment and as always, thanks for spending your precious time reading.

The Reverse Placebo

If education and ignorance can be positive placebos, can the reverse be true?:

Researchers from Britain and Germany used brain scans to map how a person's feelings and past experiences can influence the effectiveness of medicines, and found that a powerful painkilling drug with a true biological effect can appear not to be working if a patient has been primed to expect it to fail.

Via Justin Landwehr.

History of US Energy Production

That's from the US Energy Information Administration. So what do we expect for the future? A combination of more nuclear, more solar, more oil, maybe more geothermal, hopefully less corn and all at about the same price.

The Most Important Person You've Never Heard Of

Nobel peace prize winning plant scientist Norman Borlaug:

He received the Nobel in 1970, primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted -- for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine -- 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

A great example of how the market (or maybe in this case an individual scientist) can influence global history. Mr. Borlaug died a couple of years ago.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XVII

First, a similarity:

Chimpanzees sometimes smile from pleasure, as when baby chimps play with each other. But chimpanzees also smile when they’re trying to strengthen a social bond with another chimpanzee.

Dr. Niedenthal thinks that some human smiles fall into these categories as well. What’s more, they may be distinguished by certain expressions. An embarrassed smile is often accompanied by a lowered chin, for example, while a smile of greeting often comes with raised eyebrows.

Chimpanzees sometimes smile not for pleasure or for a social bond, but for power. A dominant chimpanzee will grin and show its teeth. Dr. Niedenthal argues that humans flash a power grin as well — often raising their chin so as to look down at others.

“ ‘You’re an idiot, I’m better than you’—that’s what we mean by a dominant smile,”

Now here's something we're better at:

But most importantly, Dr. Niedenthal argues, people recognize smiles by mimicking them. When a smiling person locks eyes with another person, the viewer unknowingly mimics a smile as well. In their new paper, Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues point to a number of studies indicating that this imitation activates many of the same regions of the brain that are active in the smiler.

A happy smile, for example, is accompanied by activity in the brain’s reward circuits, and looking at a happy smile can excite those circuits as well. Mimicking a friendly smile produces a different pattern of brain activity. It activates a region of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, which distinguishes feelings for people with whom we have a close relationship from others. The orbitofrontal cortex becomes active when parents see their own babies smile, for example, but not other babies.

If Dr. Niedenthal’s model is correct, then studies of dominant smiles should reveal different patterns of brain activity. Certain regions associated with negative emotions should become active.

Embodying smiles not only lets people recognize smiles, Dr. Niedenthal argues. It also lets them recognize false smiles. When they unconsciously mimic a false smile, they don’t experience the same brain activity as an authentic one. The mismatch lets them know something’s wrong.

Economics of Leno vs. Conan

Or, why Leno's 10 o'clock show didn't stand a chance:

In 2009 key demographic group ratings for network 10 P.M. shows were just half of what they had been five years earlier. And a reason for that was that some 40 percent of households now had the technology of digital video recorders, allowing people to easily program their own TV schedules.

And a habit many people had apparently gotten into was to use the 10 P.M. hour to catch up on programs they had recorded either earlier that night or even earlier in the week. So Leno at 10 wasn’t just up against alternative network programming. Thanks to consumer technology, he was up against millions of people’s personal programming options, too. 

Practical Solution to Panhandling

A while back I posted my explanation for why you shouldn't give money to panhandlers. Sadly the conversation about the post was moved to Facebook (don't get me started). I'll summarize by saying a stranger threatened to beat me up and friend came to my rescue and assured everyone I'm too easy to beat up. Nonetheless, I wanted to follow up on the topic and offer a practical solution. I've always been weary of problems when the solution is to act better or smarter or more rational. To really change actions you need to change situations. Here's what I mean:

That's a donation meeter in Denver, CO. Here's the explanation from the mayor:

The donation meter program is designed to increase awareness about Denver’s Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, and it is also an effort to redirect the money given to panhandlers into initiatives that provide meals, job training, substance abuse counseling, housing, and other programs for those in need. This grassroots campaign is projected to raise roughly $100,000 per year giving the general public a constructive way to help Denver’s homeless. “The donation meter demonstrates yet another innovative way in which this community is responding to Denver’s Road Home and our commitment to ending homelessness”

As of September 2007 Denver has eighty-six meters downtown. Within the first month they raised $2,000.

Walk Faster, Live Longer

I recently got moved into a new wing of our school. It a newer room and it's got a Smart Board. The only problem is, it's much farther from the teacher work room where I make copies and eat lunch. I don't mind walking, but there one thing that keeps high school hallways slow moving, students. It's become a regular problem of getting caught behind a herd of slow students. Perhaps they should take this out-of-class lesson from me, walk faster:

Predicted years of remaining life for each sex and age increased as gait speed increased, with a gait speed of about 0.8 meters [2.6 feet]/second at the median [midpoint] life expectancy at most ages for both sexes. Gait speeds of 1.0 meter [3.3 feet]/second or higher consistently demonstrated survival that was longer than expected by age and sex alone. In this older adult population the relationship of gait speed with remaining years of life was consistent across age groups, but the absolute number of expected remaining years of life was larger at younger ages.

This is Your Brain on Improv

Here's a new TED Talk on what it looks like when [musical] improvisers play inside an MRI machine. Not only is the experiment itself interesting, what is has to say about spontaneous creativity fits with my own experience. Here's Musician and researcher Charles Limb:


It's a bit long, so here's my favorite part:

Really consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe. But we have this combination of an area that's thought to be involved in self-monitoring, turning off, and this area that's thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning on. And we think, at least in this preliminary -- It's one study. It's probably wrong. But it's one study. We think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off, so that you're not inhibited, so that you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses.

Best Ideas of 2010

For the last 10 years the New York Times has created it's annual year in ideas. Here are my favorites from this year:

The 2000s Were a Great Decade:

Two recessions. 9/11. Iraq. Afghanistan. You might think the last decade was among the worst in modern history. But according to the economist Charles Kenny, author of “Getting Better,” a forthcoming book on global development, you’d be wrong. Average worldwide income, at $10,600, is 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago. Thanks to increases in agriculture efficiency, cereal production grew at double the rate of population in the developing world. Vaccine initiatives have helped cut the death rate from common diseases like measles by 60 percent. Child mortality is down 17 percent.

Aftercrimes:

After an earthquake, changes to the earth increase the likelihood of aftershocks occurring in a particular place and time — something that seismologists have become good at forecasting. This year, the mathematician George Mohler showed that what holds for earthquakes also holds true for crime: not only does an initial crime beget future offenses, but these “aftercrimes” also tend to occur according to a predictable distribution in time and space. The idea of follow-on crimes is nothing new — once a house is burglarized, police know that criminals are likely to return to the same house or others nearby — but Mohler showed that the timing and location of the crimes can be statistically predicted with a high degree of accuracy. Using L.A.P.D. burglary data to identify a series of random, initial offenses in a sector of the city and adapting algorithms used to forecast aftershocks, he predicted that 17 percent of the city’s burglaries would occur in a 5-percent area of the city over the next year.

Turbine-Free Wind Power:

Conservationists argue that wind turbines pose a risk to birds, bats and sensitive habitats like shorelines. People living close to wind farms, meanwhile, complain of constant noise and vibration. This year, engineers responded with a new way to draw electricity from the wind: oscillating wind panels.

The Real-time Inflation Calculator:

Measuring inflation is a time-consuming business: at the beginning of each month, government researchers across the country amass troves of data on prices for everything from shoes to milk to phones. Two weeks after the end of the month, the government releases gauges of inflation like the Consumer Price Index. But inflation hunters may now get an advance glimpse of the data, thanks to a real-time inflation calculator devised by two economists at M.I.T., Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon.

Cavallo and Rigobon devised software that scans Web sites for prices, using a method similar to the one that Google uses to index Web pages.

Human Milk for Sale:

Wet nurses have been profiting from the sale of human milk since the dawn of civilization. Why not the nutrition and biotech industries? This year, Abbott (makers of Similac) began selling a new line of "immunonutrition" made entirely from purified, concentrated and pasteurized human milk. The product, called Prolact + H²MF and manufactured by Prolacta Bioscience, is considered a human-milk fortifier, designed to be added to breast milk for premature babies weighing less than 2.75 pounds.

The Train That Never Stops:


D.I.Y. Macroeconomics:

The democratization of economics owes much to the financial crisis that first hit in 2007. That ongoing catastrophe, which few economists predicted, tarnished the profession’s reputation, prompting some to look elsewhere for answers. They turned to — where else? — the Internet, where vast amounts of economic data that had once been hidden from public view were now online. Sites like FRED, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, enabled anyone with a connection to the Web to download data on everything from local home-price indexes to credit-card balances to weekly fluctuations in diesel prices.

At the same time, a growing army of knowledgeable “econo-bloggers” began analyzing the data available online.

Social Media as Social Index:

Even as several social networks have surpassed the populations of most nations — more than 500 million people are now signed up for Facebook and 175 million for Twitter — we still tend to regard these sites in terms of their value to us as individual users. In the past year, however, social scientists have begun looking more broadly at the aggregate value of social media. According to a number of recent studies, it now seems possible that the networks’ millions of posts and status updates are adding up to something culturally and financially priceless.

This past April, for instance, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman at HP Labs demonstrated that by analyzing the positive or negative sentiments expressed in 2.8 million Twitter messages about 24 movies, they could predict how the films would perform at the box office. Their methodology — an algorithm, actually, that their company is now in the process of patenting — worked significantly better than the Hollywood Stock Exchange, another popular tool for predicting box-office success.

In October, a team led by Johan Bollen at Indiana University reported that by classifying 9.7 million Twitter posts as falling into one of six mood categories (happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality and calmness) they could predict changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. As Bollen explains, when he began his study, he expected that the mood on Twitter would be a reflection of up and down movements in the stock market. He never imagined it would be a precursor.

Here are the ones that didn't make my cut: Relaxation Drinks, The Youth Condom,Cybercom, Literary Near Futurism, The Bra Mask, The Megalobster, Doping Bicycles, The Armored T-Shirt, The Long-Life-Span Smartphone, The Guitar That Stays in Tune, Biocouture, Emotional Spell-Check, Perfect Parallel Parking, More Club Teammates, More World Cup Success, Performance Enhancing Basketball Shoes, The Meat Dress, End-of-Men Fashion, The Ginger-Ale Celebration, The Comeback Album as Testimonial, LeBron James's 'Decision', Taking Your Pulse by Webcam.

To get an idea on the accuracy of these, here are the best of the best ideas of the last 10 years:

2001: “Populist Editing.” Wikipedia has since eclipsed the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta project, and many of us use it almost every day.

2002: “Early-Detection Revisionism.” We often find extra medical treatment hard toturn down, yet frequently it does us little good or even harm, so sometimes it’s better not to know your condition at all. Prostatecancer is one area in which this idea is having an impact.

2003: “Social Networks.” The New York Times has a Facebook page, a Facebook application and a New York Times News Quiz on Facebook; then there are Facebook’s 500 million users.

2004: “Dumb Robots Are Better.” The days of the Jetsons, and housecleaning robots, are not upon us, so settle for less. Be happy if your robot does anything useful at all.

2005: “Touch Screens That Touch Back.” This pick was ahead of its time, as few people realized that this technology, as seen in the2002 Steven Spielberg movie “Minority Report,” would show up so quickly in the iPhone and the iPad.

2006: “Walk-In Health Care.” We’ll need more of this, as general practitioners are harder to see and emergency-room waits get longer.

2007: “The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid.” Send satellites with mirrors to reflect the sun, vaporizing one spot on the asteroid, releasing gases and changing its course. If this ever comes in handy, it will be the biggest idea of them all.

2008: “Carbon Penance.” “ . . . a translucent leg band . . . keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via aspecial power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns intothe flesh of your leg.” Satire is an idea, too. The slightly more practical anti-global-warming idea from 2008 was to eat kangaroos,since they, unlike cows, do not produce methane gas.

2009: “Music for Monkeys.” We still don’t know which of the ideas from last year will pay off, but the idea of generating music that monkeys enjoy (and humans don’t) was the most fun of the bunch.

Bottlenecked Blog Readability

I've posted before on the personality type of this blog. But recently Justin Landwehr posted on one of Google's new advanced search features. It allows you to see and filter your search results based on reading difficulty. Which also means you can check to see the reading difficulty of your own writing. Here's the results for the Bottlenecked Blog:

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Compared to other blogs I read I am above average. A part of me is happy. Everyone likes to be told they have a high reading level. Even though the topics discussed here may be a factor, the sites that are blockquoted probably are too. And reading level doesn't necessarily imply intelligence. It's also possible that Google just couldn't get a good read on the site and just gave it an intermediate score. So what really matters, readability, probably isn't measured very well with this tool. Good thing there's another tool that let's me measure that, the comments section. Please let me know how this blog can be made more readable, even if the answer is better grammar.

To use this tool yourself click on advanced search on the Google homepage, and select "annotate results with reading levels" under reading level.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XVI

Yesterday I mentioned that giving cash to panhandlers is more harmful than helpful. Here's a biological explanation of the drug addiction that often leads to real homelessness. From Physician Dr. Gabor Maté:

Well, the human brain, unlike any other mammal, for the most part develops under the influence of the environment. And that’s because, from the evolutionary point of view, we developed these large heads, large fore-brains, and to walk on two legs we have a narrow pelvis. That means—large head, narrow pelvis—we have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, we would never get born. The head already is the biggest part of the body. Now, the horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings aren’t that developed for two years. That means much of our brain development, that in other animals occurs safely in the uterus, for us has to occur out there in the environment. And which circuits develop and which don’t depend very much on environmental input. When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don’t develop the way they ought to.

That's a small portion of a fantastic interview with Democracy Now! about drug addiction and decriminalization. It seems to balance out my earlier post on letting parents relax about their responsibility and my earlier posts on the legalization of drugs. I recommended the whole video.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of WikiLeaks

In the last month Julian Assange, has gone from journalist to lightning rod. Recently his organization, WikiLeaks, released 250,000 US diplomatic cables (essentially emails from diplomats that are called cables because they were once sent via telegraph). Although most of the documents weren't classified, they were written with the understanding they would be private. They have given the world a never before seen look inside American diplomat discussions.  The impact of this can be seen in Assange's victory in the online poll for Time Magazine's Person of the Year (though Time actually gave Mark Zuckerburg the award).

That certainly doesn't mean he's well loved. After all, Hitler won person of the year in 1938. In fact, several groups have separated themselves from Wikileaks since the cable leaks. The site lost it's domain name just days after Amazon dropped the site from its web servers. PayPal froze the account of the foundation accepting donations or the site. Visa and MasterCard have reportedly stopped transactions for those trying to donate money to the organization. The Swiss bank PostFinance has put a hold on the legal defense funds of the founder who was recently arrested on separate, but very controversial, rape charges. He was released on bail yesterday thanks to support from none other than Michael Moore. Assange's home nation of Australia has even threatened to cancel his passport. In response, many of these organizations have themselves been attacked online by "hacktivists" from the pseudo-organization Anonymous.

Although I don't agree with the illegal hacks against these companies, I don't feel much sympathy for them. World governments are understandably upset about their secrets being exposed, but for these companies to jump the gun before any rulings have been made is, in my opinion, cowardice. To understand the strong reactions to these cables it's important to understand what exactly is in them. Clarifying the information is difficult, because it's history's largest classified information release. One of the main things revealed is how American diplomats see and describe foreign leaders. One of the five newspapers given the documents, Der Spiegel, even put summaries of each on the cover. Let me warn you, they're not flattering.

here are the translations

Another uncomfortable revelation was that American diplomats have been asked to spy on other members of the United Nations. Also, it was revealed that the Chinese government hacked into Google, the computers of US officials, and the Dalai Lama. China is also apparently more ready to abandon their ally, and all around troublemaker, North Korea than previously thought. Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt have all asked the US to attack Iran. It revealed that American officials do not have much respect for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's new kind of authoritarianism. Even going as far as to say the current president “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman”. There was even evidence of Afghanistan's top down corruption, a secret military action in Pakistan, and missile strikes in Yemen.

As shocking as these cables are, they aren't the first controversial releases from WikiLeaks. Earlier this year they released a video of an event in Baghdad nicknamed Collateral Murder. Later this year, but before the most recent release, Afghan War documents and Iraq War documents were both leaked. Assange has also hinted at his next target to expose, the banking industry. These major releases have made this organization globally infamous. There have been calls for Julian Assange's arrest and assassination from several world leaders. That's why I'd like to take a chance on this tiny part of the internet to discuss this overwhelming issue. So here are what I see as the good, the bad, and the ugly of WikiLeaks:

The Good: Exposing truth, like sunlight, is often the best disinfectant. Most of what I have learned from the leaks have been information that either should not have happened or when it happened the world should have been informed about it. I don't want my government doing things they don't want me to know. It's also important to know that WikiLeaks is just a conduit for the released information. They were not the ones who actually removed it and have a journalistic obligation to publish what is brought to them. Best of all, even the existence of this organization and the threat it brings improves transparency and diplomatic professionalism. Currently there is too much secrecy, so any movement away is positive. These complex relationships show just our complicated our interventionist foreign policy is. If our government could no longer keep such damaging secrets about what it’s doing abroad, then it would have to change what it's doing abroad.

The Bad: These releases have the potential to create great instability in the world. It's been been a political and diplomatic disaster for the United States. It's made at least a dozen world leaders look deceitful, inept, or worse. It will make it that much more difficult to deal with controversial nations like Russia, China, Yemen, etc. There has also been fake documents released. The Pakistani media published fabricated cables claiming the Indian generals are genocidal. For two nations with so much tension, and nuclear weapons, these could have been disastrous. The recent controversy has put a damper on the general support for government openness. For example, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2010, which is ten years in the making, was expected to pass through Congress this month. Instead it has been halted by politicians worried by the new WikiLeaks controversy.

The Ugly: The released documents will probably result in more information being labeled classified. One of the least mentioned things about the cable leaks is that the information was already available to millions of military and government employees. It's alleged that a simple army private gave the information to WikiLeaks. That's actually pretty open. The recent controversy will only make that less so. It might also decrease the connectivity between the offices of government made ten years ago in response to 9/11. Perhaps the biggest impact these leaks will have is that honest international discussion will be harder. When you observe anything, it changes, simply because of your presence. Like CSPAN did for the American Congress, these leaks may hinder conversation because no one wants to talk directly anymore. If every conversation becomes public, then every conservation becomes political. Less diplomatic and more pandering. Professionalism has a cost, real valuable conversation. These complicated negotiations can't work if there is no privacy at the negotiation table.

WikiLeaks' actual negotiation table in Stockholm, Sweden

It's certainly embarrassing. There are clear short term problems created. But that doesn't tell us if it's good in the long run. The most important thing to remember is that what is being exposed to the American people is what is being done in the name of the American people. We have a right to know what is being done in our name. I can understand privacy at the negotiation table, but we should know they are at the table. Many claim that this information puts lives at risk, yet I haven't heard any concrete examples. A better question is whether more Americans are at risk if these types of secrets are never revealed? Perhaps our foreign policy would be less complicated and less intrusive. There will certainly be a backlash of privacy, but Julian Assange predicts American secret expansion will only be temporary.

The conversation isn't about Julian Assange or even WikiLeaks. It's about the entire idea of releasing this kind of information to the public. With or without WikiLeaks, the technology now exists to allow copycats to leak documents while maintaining anonymity. Like the Xerox for the Pentagon Papers, the hero or villain isn't a person, but a thumb drive and the internet. I would certainly like to see more information revealed about truly dangerous and corrupt governments. But even when the focus is on the US I think on net it is good (and so does the original whistleblower from the Pentagon Papers). It's possible that WikiLeak-type organizations should be restrained. There are certain things that deserve at least temporary secrecy. That's what American court cases about media leaks are for, deciding on the details. Though according to polls, it doesn't look good for Julian Assange from the perspective of the average American opinion. But I'm often more comfortable not agreeing with average Americans.

If you'd like to read more here is the WikiLeaks' new url. Here's their Wikipedia page. Here's how they've mostly been making public comments, their Twitter page.

Science of the Gold Standard

President Harry Truman once asked why you would ever want "a system in which you pay people to dig things out of the ground and then bury them in the ground again?" NPR's Planet Money asked a similar question in a recent podcast in which they give an element by element breakdown of why gold has been used for thousands for years as the medium exchange all over the world. For obvious reasons the unit of exchange shouldn't be a gas, corrode, explode, too rare, or kill you. Those simple requirements eliminate 116 of the 118 elements, leaving just platinum and gold. And unless you have a furnace that can heat up to 3,000 degrees, you can't melt platinum. So out of all the elements, gold is the clearly the best to use as a standard. Well, that is, except for trust.

Reason and Emotion Drive Market Efficiency

Earlier this year I posted about our two tools for decision making, reason and emotion. Justin Landwehr recently posted a great explanation of the idea:

This is where I think the camera analogy is very useful. If you think of emotions being like the automatic settings and you think of manual mode as being like reasoning, you can ask of a photographer, "What's better: the automatic settings or the manual mode?" And what the photographer will say is "different things are good for different circumstances" -- that if you are in a standard kind of photographic situation, the kind that the manufacturer of your camera could anticipate, then go ahead and use your automatic landscape setting or whatever. But if you're facing a fundamentally new kind of photographic challenge, then you are probably going to have to put your camera in manual mode.

It seems obvious that the manual mode in our brain is helpful. We do the mental math and calculate which decisions are best. This drives producers and consumers alike. Here's a description of an experiment showing how our automatic setting can hurt and help:

Montague’s experiments go like this: A subject is given $100 and some basic information about the stock market. After choosing how much money to invest, the player watches as his investments either rise or fall in value. The game continues for 20 rounds, and the subject gets to keep the money. One interesting twist is that instead of using random simulations of the market, Montague relies on real data from past markets, so people unwittingly “play” the Dow of 1929, the S&P 500 of 1987 and the Nasdaq of 1999. While the subjects are making their investment decisions, Montague measures the activity of neurons in the brain.

Here's the big reveal:

But then Montague discovered something strange. As the market continued to rise, these same neurons significantly reduced their rate of firing. “It’s as if the cells were getting anxious,” Montague says. “They knew something wasn’t right.” And then, just before the bubble burst, these neurons typically stopped firing altogether. In many respects, these dopamine neurons seem to be acting like an internal thermostat, shutting off when the market starts to overheat. Unfortunately, the rest of the brain is too captivated by the profits to care: instead of heeding the warning, the brain obeys the urges of so-called higher regions, like the prefrontal cortex, which are busy coming up with all sorts of reasons that the market will never decline. In other words, our primal emotions are acting rationally, while those rational circuits are contributing to the mass irrationality.

Limits of Human Progress and the Power of Prayer

Earlier this year I posted C.S. Lewis' fictional description of hell, a world without scarcity. Before that I had confessed that a world without death be very challenging to my understand of Christianity. Recently, my good friend Justin posted a great interview with Christian and renowned scientist, Francis Collins. Although the entire conservation is worth reading, I especially enjoyed his response to the question of scientific innovation removing suffering from our world:

In spite of the fact that we have achieved all these wonderful medical advances and made it possible to live longer and eradicate diseases, we will probably still figure out ways to argue with each other and sometimes to kill each other, out of our self-righteousness and our determination that we have to be on top. So the death rate will continue to be one per person, whatever the means. We may understand a lot about biology, we may understand a lot about how to prevent illness, and we may understand the life span. But I don't think we'll ever figure out how to stop humans from doing bad things to each other. That will always be our greatest and most distressing experience here on this planet, and that will make us long the most for something more.

Mankind has come far, but we still have a long way to go. One way to do that is through prayer. Again, Francis Collins:

Also, prayer for me is not a way to manipulate God into doing what we want him to do. Prayer for me is much more a sense of trying to get into fellowship with God. I'm trying to figure out what I should be doing rather than telling Almighty God what he should be doing. Look at the Lord's Prayer. It says, "Thy will be done." It wasn't, "Our Father who art in Heaven, please get me a parking space."

This idea of prayer influencing the prayer isn't just theological, it's measurable:

the participants were randomly assigned to one of four daily activities: praying for the well-being of their partner, engaging in undirected prayer, thinking about positive aspects of their partner or reflecting upon their day. Participants did as they were asked for four weeks, and kept written logs of what they were praying (or thinking). At the end of this period, the team again measured infidelity and how sacred the participants felt their romantic relationships were.

Dr Fincham and his colleagues report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that although all participants had similar infidelity ratings, averaging 3.5, to start with, at the end those ratings varied considerably between the four groups. People who had prayed for their partners averaged 2.4, significantly lower than their initial scores, whereas those who thought positively about their partners or considered their day both showed ratings of 3.9—significantly higher.

[...]

Scores reflecting participants’ views of how sacred their romantic relationships were changed during the four-week period as well. Values at the start of the study were much the same among all participants, averaging 3.2. However, by the end of the study, those who had prayed for their partners showed stronger beliefs that their relationships were sacred than those who had just had positive thoughts about their partners, with average scores of 3.7 and 2.8 respectively. Dr Fincham suspects that the act of praying about romantic partners leads people to view their relationship as something sacred and not to be damaged. This, he argues, is the force that is reducing infidelity in the study.

Though that data is self-reported, it was confirmed by unbiased observers giving their own assumptions about changes in fidelity.