Missing Children and handling the media

As a parent, nothing is more unnerving  than reading about a case of child abduction. The problem is these stories are so emotionally disturbing, so vivid and on such an close and important theme that the usual human biases when handling media stories kick in to maximum effect. For all the vague awareness of actual improbabilities, there's always a voice that says, "yes, unlikely, but what if", which is very hard to counter.One problem is this 'vague awareness', and the media itself is often to blame in this, For example, this Guardian article highlights that 2,185 children are reported missing in the US every day. This sounds horrific, until one realises that given the sensitivity of the topic, many a scared mother rings the police when little johnny isn't home on time, even though he's probably just thoughtlessly gone round to little billy's house without telling her. At least (and to the article's credit, and a great advantage of reading online) the source of this statisic (the US National Centre for missing children) is provided by hyperlink, and while still not good (since not zero), the actual statistics for number and type of abductions are :


The U.S. Department of Justice reports

• 797,500 children (younger than 18) were reported missing in a one-year period of time studied resulting in an average of 2,185 children being reported missing each day.
• 203,900 children were the victims of family abductions.
• 58,200 children were the victims of non-family abductions.
• 115 children were the victims of “stereotypical” kidnapping. (These crimes involve someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently.)

This would indicate only 32% of the reported missing are actual abductions (still ~700 a day), but most importantly only 115, or 0.01% are 'real' kidnappings (though the description is not perfectly clear here).
Looking at the demographics for the US it seems there are ~74.7 million children under 18 in the US, so 115 per year of this is ~1 in 650,000,  or between 1 and 2 in a million.  Of course this means still several children in every city, and each individual case is a horrific tragedy if it really comes to the worst, but it has to be remembered that there are many many horrible events at this order or probability (even focused on Children - for example more than 1 in 6000 children under 15 in the US have cancer , making it 10 times more likely than abduction). The point is not to fear these things, but to fear the appropriately to the likelihood, since if we really considered what could happen we would be paralyzed by fear. So while horrible to read about such stories as Etan Patz or Madeline McCann, we can at least be comforted by the fact that they make the news because they are news, something out of the ordinary. It's a scary world, but (most of the time) the odds are with us.

The future internet, no dogs allowed?

Online identity: is authenticity or anonymity more important?
Before Facebook and Google became the megaliths of the web, the most famous online adage was, "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog". It seems the days when people were allowed to be dogs is coming to a close

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/19/online-identity-authenticity-anonymity

The argument (and trend) seems to be that real identities enable more people to trust the web, and thus take part in it :
"Allan believes the benefits of authentic identity outweigh the costs. Facebook and other services with an assurance of security and credibility are more inclusive, and open up the web to new audiences who never would have gone online before, he says. "We're optimists. Facebook enables hundreds of millions of people to express themselves online because they didn't have or know how to use the tools they needed." Facebook, he believes, is a stepping stone to the rest of the web."

My personal position is that while it would be good to have consistent identities online (regular use of same psuedonym, or a limited set of psuedonyms, across platforms) there are many reasons why this should not mean real life identity. The biggest reason is perhaps the dangers people would expose themselves to, from the obvious cases of antagonizing a repressive (or even democratic) systems laws to the more widespread risk of 'peer-to-peer' persecution and mob justice. The internet often brings out the worst in both people and state in how they react to perceived violations of norms and values, and revealing one's true identity would expose one to this. Of course it may be argued that if everyone is identifiable then the risk from trolls etc. is also removed, but while this might temper it, and prevent outright illegal persection, it would not prevent plenty of malign and vindictive behaviour. Furthermore it is a fact that the nastiest people are often the most passionate, and hence most likely to go to the effort to bypass any authentication system (something which will always be possible no matter how well implemented).

Furthermore, on a lower level, but still important, there is the problem of interaction with real world relationships - friends, acquaintances, co-workers employers etc. The sharing and linking of the web means anything one says or does can easily be passed on, taking it out of the intended social circle, and out of context. The result would be that, if real identities were necessitated on services such as blogger, one would have the option of either limiting who can hear to a (hopefully) trustworthy small circle of friends, or resort to comments so bland and innane as to be worthless (and even this might not work, since even a fair and balanced statement might anger a racist or bigotted associate).

It is interesting that such a anonymous-but-traceable approach is supported even in the restrictive regimes of China and South Korea:
"An online identity can be as permanent as an offline one: pseudonymous users often identify themselves in different social networks using the same account name. But because their handles aren't based on real names, they can deliberately delineate their identity accordingly, and reassert anonymity if they wish. Psychologists argue that this is valuable for the development of a sense of who one is, who one can be, and how one fits into different contexts. This kind of activity is allowed even in countries where social network account holders are required to register for a service using a national ID, as in South Korea and China; their online public identities are still fabrications. Even with this explicit link with the state, when users are aware that their activities online are traceable, identity play continues."

This would make it seem that in some ways China is more permissive than Google, since although the state might want to know if you're a dog, it will still let you bark around the virtual park if you want; when it comes to Google+ however, no dogs allowed.

how many freeloaders in a trusting society?

I always think it is a good sign of the overall health of their societies that cities like Munich and Vienna, despite their size, still can implement an 'honesty' ticket system on the public transport. While of course there are regular checks, my own personal experience is to have traveled many times and only had my ticket checked once or twice, and having only once seen someone else in the carriage being forced to pay during such a check, it was obvious the level of conformity was quite high. But it is interesting to get some hard numbers on just how many 'cheats' these checks turn up. The following story from the Austrian News reports 60,000 violators, out of approximately 2 million people checked. While 60,000 sounds a lot, it works out as just 3%, which is remarkably low. One could also expect that the checks are presumably carried out at the most likely times for people to cheat (I would guess there's more temptation at night than on a regular morning commute) so overall the percentage is probably even slightly lower. So good to hear, and a good example of how people can be trusted to do the right thing...at least in Vienna!
http://wien.orf.at/news/stories/2529980/

Share and enjoy

Now for the good news – sharing can make you happy. Pass it on
some extracts:
-Social media have tapped into something quite fundamental and the sharing urge in human nature may stem from something more basic than anything else: simple arousal and the fight-or-flight response that we share with our distant ancestors. .
-A group of students was asked either to sit still or jog in place for 60 seconds and then to read a neutral news article that they could email to anyone if they so desired. Fully 75% of the joggers decided that the article was fascinating enough to email to someone else. And the non-joggers? Only 33% thought sharing was the right option. Perhaps Facebook's next major acquisition should be StairMaster.
-being virtually rejected actually activates the same brain areas that are associated with physical distress, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula.
-Psychologist and novelist Charles Fernyhough once referred to Twitter – on Twitter, of course – as "a great example of what Piaget called 'collective monologues'. Lots of people chattering away with no attention to each other."
-Indeed, a recent study suggested that individuals who ranked higher on emotional instability were more likely to share online, though not in person, echoing the findings of psychologist John Cacioppo that a greater proportion of online interactions correlates with increased loneliness and isolation. Clearly, not all sharing is created equally.
-According to unpublished results by Eva Buechel, now at the University of Miami, online sharing can actually make us feel better, serving as a very real form of emotional therapy. It's as if every tweet that gets passed on, every link that is re-shared activates our brains' pleasure centres, releasing endorphins in much the same way as physical pleasure, exercise, excitement or strong sensory stimulation.

Moral behaviour in Animals

Excellent TED talk from Frans de Waal on Moral Behaviour in animals :

"Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity -- caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share."
http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals.html

The basic point is that the foundations for the pillars of our morality, fairness/reciprocity and compassion/empathy can be seen in animal behaviour, and thus have a long evolutionary history.

In this talk de Waal shows examples of co-operation, even when no immediate gain to one partner, and perhaps more important, awareness of another, and even concern. So while perhaps unsurprising that Chimpanzes will work together to obtain a treat, or even that one will help out even if not hungry (presumably in anticipation of getting the favour returned in the future) it is less expected that even if they obtain the same treat, they will favour a mechanism whereby another Chimp obtains something as well over one in which only they are rewarded. The most amusing example was of 2 Capuchin monkeys being handed different treats. Initially the first monkey was happy to be rewarded with some cucumber, but when it saw its neighbour being rewarded with a grape for the same task, it not only got upset, but hurled the cucumber treat back at the experimenter. Even just being upset while being simply economically rational would still indicate awareness to the how the other monkey is being treated, but the fact that the first monkey is so upset as to reject its treat completely is irrational, and fits well with a concept of fairness which is so emotionally ingrained that its violation trumps immediate self-interest (as captured in the human phrase to cut off one's nose to spite one's face).

Ability to co-operate in light of future interaction, awareness of others, and an ingrained and importantly emotionally powerful sense of fairness are key to a functioning moral system, and it is fascinating to see these at work in other species, showing a clear evolutionary basis.

While not shown, de Waal even suggested the Capuchin monkeys once demonstrated the ultimate moral element -  self-denial in solidarity with others - when one monkey was seen to refuse the grape unless the other got one too. While this might be aberrant Capuchin behaviour, it also must have some evolutionary history so could well be present, if partially and easily overrided, in such animals.

You choose your friends, but only 150 of them

Interesting talk from TEDxObserver given by Robin Dunbar :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07IpED729k8&list=PL880EAF3F736F99AC&index=6&feature=plpp_video
"Robin, currently director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology of the University of Oxford, is renowned for creating a formula which is now known as 'Dunbar's number' - and that number is 150. This calculates the 'cognitive limit' of the number of people we can hold meaningful friendships with. When it was first formulated it created a fevered debate about the nature of and the differences between, online and real 'friendships'.
Robin will explore the psychology and ethology of romantic love to find out if the brain - and science - can help us explain how and why we fall in love."

In the talk he mentions also that we have circles of levels of friendship, with the average number of close friends being 5, then a next level of about 15, etc. Perhaps not surprisingly being in a romantic relationship costs 2 close friends, due mainly to the lack of time available to devote to such friendships. Indeed time spent is a key factor in how friendships are maintained, though there are it seems gender differences, with women spending more time in verbal communication (average female phone call was something close to an hour) than men (average phone call something like 7 seconds! 'meet you at 10? yip! grand so'). And face to face time, meeting in person or even skype, is the most valuable of all, which indicates that online relationships face major hurdles in being maintained

Also interesing is from this guardian interview with him on the question as to whether Dunbar's number can be increased :

"We're caught in a bind: community sizes were designed for hunter-gatherer- type societies where people weren't living on top of one another. Your 150 were scattered over a wide are, but everybody shared the same 150. This made for a very densely interconnected community, and this means the community polices itself. You don't need lawyers and policemen. If you step out of line, granny will wag her finger at you.
Our problem now is the sheer density of folk – our networks aren't compact. You have clumps of friends scattered around the world who don't know one another: now you don't have an interwoven network. It leads to a less well integrated society. How to re-create that old sense of community in these new circumstances? That's an engineering problem. How do we work around it?"

Since a major issue in the modern world is how to view, shape and even sign up to 'society' then the fact that our brains are evolved for such small social groupingswill have to be taken into account. Perhaps one element of a solution would be to consider 'groups' as 'persons'. So maybe if one viewed 'other commuters' or 'Germany' or 'bankers' as 1 of the 150 individuals one can keep track of, then it would allow the rest of society to be some how kept socially 'in mind' rather than being a blurry 'other'. Of course the main problem with this would be the risk of stereotyping and blanket generalization, but since we have know complex and deep individuals, maybe we can similarly have 'friendship' with complex and complicated groups. Of course this is just a spur of the moment idea, but the point is we need to take our natural dispositions into account if we are to adapt to the modern world.

UK Tax report : 25% who cheat means 75% who don't

Tax, and who should pay what, and who actually does, is a cornerstone of modern society, so interested to see some statistics on tax payments for higher earners 

Treasury reveals how little tax the super-rich pay | Society | The Guardian

The article reports "The new Treasury figures show 10,000 UK taxpayers earn between £1m and £5m, and, of those, 10% pay between 30% and 40% in tax, 5% pay between 20% and 30% tax, and 3% pay less than 10%. Of those earning between £250,000 and £500,000, 27% were paying tax of less than 40%. All the figures cover the financial year 2010-11."
While it is disgraceful that significant numbers seem to be avoiding paying what they should in tax, at least these numbers suggest that at least 75-80% of higher earners are paying above 40%, which I assume is roughly the appropriate rate. Furthermore the most suspicious cases (paying tax of less than 10% on vast income)  seem to correspond to about 5% at all levels (250,000-500,000,1m to 5m, above 5m etc).

While of course this is a disgrace, and apart from the moral problem corresponds to significant lost revenue, one can always find 5% of people with some kind of objectionable behaviour/outlook (for example in all countries roughly far right parties attract this level of support or more), so this would tend to suggest it's not a failure of morals in society (the UK is not a nation of cheats) but a failure of enforcement and policy. One could probably expect at least 5% to try to cheat, the issue is how many get away with it.

Perhaps too newspapers should report the 80% number as well, since I read once of a case in Australia where tax payments rose after it was reported by the revenue commission there that 'most' people pay their taxes fairly. If people think everyone else is doing the right thing, then they are more likely to do so themselves, even if not being obeserved. Similarly they are probably more likely to do the wrong thing if they think everyone else is. So while it is worth pointing out that 5% of people cheat to extremes, it's also worth highlighting that 95% don't.

The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'

A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2012/01/esc_brain_decides_sell_out.html
Some points from the study :

• The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.
• "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," Berns [ Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study] says. "Our findings indicate that it?s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people?s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."
• Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms" Berns says.
• The experiment also found activation in the amygdala, a brain region associated with emotional reactions, but only in cases where participants refused to take cash to state the opposite of what they believe."Those statements represent the most repugnant items to the individual" Berns says, "and would be expected to provoke the most arousal, which is consistent with the idea that when sacred values are violated, that induces moral outrage."
• Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples.

The full report is available here

Virtuous Behaviors Sanction Later Sins

People are quick to treat themselves after a good deed or healthy act:

"the study, published in the journal Addiction, is the first to examine the health ramifications of the licensing effect, but others have shown its influence on moral behavior. In 2009 a study found that reminding people of their humanitarian attributes reduced their charitable giving. Last year another experiment showed that when individuals buy ecofriendly products, they are more likely to cheat and steal.
"Sometimes after we behave in line with our goals or standards, it's as if our action has earned ourselves some moral credit," says psychologist Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto, an author of the green products study. "This credit can then subsequently be used to engage in self-indulgent or selfish behaviors without feeling bad about it."

 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=license-to-sin


While I think it is already clear that morality relies on feeling ‘good’ about something (but this is not to denigrate it, just to point out it’s mechanism is tied to our emotions ) maybe these findings indicate that the emphasis is more about feeling good about oneself, as opposed to feeling good about any particular action. I.e. it is not at the low level of individual moral choices that the emotional drives work, but at the higher level of our overall self-image, whether we see ourselves as ‘good’ people. Seen in this way, maybe if one boosts one’s self-perception, by for example giving to charity, or making an effort to recycle, then there is temporarily less drive to boost it any further. This ‘I’ve done my bit’ approach is of course insidious, since can lead to a slippery slope of moral abrogation, and it is our actions in all moral spheres that matter.

Are there any possible solutions? If this really is the case  then the most effective one might be to try to make the right actions less ‘special’  but instead consider them basic minimum of what we should do, and hence less  ‘boosting’ individually to our overall image. So for example if green behavior is the exception, then it might lead to excessive moral self-congratulation, whereas if it is the norm, then this effect is limited. Nobody feels particularly good about not having dropped litter, since it is just expected, and such ‘baseline’ attitudes need to be expanded. Of course ‘norms’ rely on society at large, and are slow, and hard, to change. Incidentally this is perhaps another argument against the ‘makes no difference’ response, since even if the action itself (recycling one’s own waste) results in no tangible effects, it has a social effect by serving as an example, and might help change the norms so that eventually enough people act so as to make a difference (and of course arguing against it has an even greater corrosive negative effect, since it also contributes to what the ‘norm’ will be).

But what can the individual do? As suggested in the report self-awareness seems the best candidate to try compensate for the ‘license to sin’ effect. Knowing that we are predisposed to such behavior may make us analyze each future choice that bit more, and by centering our focus on the now and not the past, our self-perception will be perhaps less biased by the good things we’ve done previously.

"You may be able to avoid the pitfall simply by remembering that the feeling of having "earned it" leads down a path of iniquity."
 
Hopefully this will work, since to twist the famous phrase, it seems all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to have done some good before.

Aristotle : actions speak louder than reasons

From Story, by Robin McKie :
"As Aristotle observed, why a man does a thing is of little interest once we see the thing he does. A character is the choices he makes to take the actions he takes. Once the deed is done his reasons why begin to dissolve into irrelevancy."

How stereotypes influence us, even if we don't accept them

Interesting analysis of the recent Trayvon Martin incident based on psychology studies involving 'the Police Officer's Dilemma' : tests to make split second shoot/don't shoot decisions.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/03/26/trayvon-martins-psychological-killer-why-we-see-guns-that-arent-there/?WT_mc_id=SA_WR_20120330
Some points :

• First of all, no matter how racist the participants were (or were not), they were equally likely to shoot unarmed Black targets; outright levels of racism did not predict the results at all. However, one thing did predict performance on the task ? the participants? level of awareness that there is prejudice towards Black people in American society, even if the participant adamantly did not support those stereotypes. Simply being highly aware of prejudice in the world, even if you don?t agree with, support, or like that prejudice, makes it more likely that you might make the fateful mistake of shooting an unarmed target when making split-second decisions in uncertain conditions. The more aware you are of cultural stereotypes, the more likely you are to make a biased mistake.
• Correll?s research demonstrated that everyone ? even an upstanding college undergraduate lacking any racial prejudice ? is vulnerable to making racially biased decisions, particularly under the split-second pressures of the Police Officer?s Dilemma. Did racism motivate George Zimmerman?s actions against Trayvon Martin? Yes. But does a person have to be racist to make the same split-second decision? No.
• When the ?shooting game? task was given to Black participants, they turned out to be just as likely to accidentally shoot unarmed Black targets as the White participants were.
• At the end of the day, it?s not always about whether or not you are racist, or whether or not you think that Black people are violent. Cultural stereotypes can become automatically activated and applied to our behaviors even when we don?t actually endorse them; the sheer knowledge that these stereotypes exist can be enough to influence our judgments, especially when it comes to split-second decisions. Because of cultural stereotypes, the shooters in Correll?s games had a lower threshold for when they would decide it was OK to shoot at Black targets, although most of them probably could not have told you that this was happening, and most of them would have been appalled to find out about their biases.

David Mitchell on spectator short

As usual a nice humorous piece from Mitchell, but also hits on something important in how many sports have become so professionally perfected that they lose some of the human element that is essential to spectator sport

Without Jocky Wilson, Subo would still be singing in the bath | Comment is free | The Observer

"Spectator sport seems to have changed a lot over my lifetime. I was watching the rugby a few weeks ago and they showed a clip of Bill Beaumont's Grand Slam-winning England team of 1980. It didn't look like sport looks nowadays. They were just normal men. Wearing rugby kit, in relatively good shape, and quite big and burly, but recognisable as people you might see walking down the street, having a pint in a pub or wearing a suit and tie in a meeting.
When rugby union was an amateur sport, it was undoubtedly played to a much lower standard, but no one felt that at the time. The crowds watching Bill Beaumont weren't missing the rugby union of today, ruthlessly played by 30 versions of Mr Incredible. Professionalism has brought remuneration to players, and the greater corporate involvement required to fund that, but it hasn't done much for spectators except put more adverts on the pitch. A higher standard of play isn't in the interests of sport any more than inflation is in the interests of commerce.
With greater demands on their time and physique, it's no surprise that the sportspeople of today can seem one-dimensional – and I don't just mean they're thinner. Like most contemporary politicians, our elite athletes haven't lived normal lives, so there's something alien about them. Simon Cowell, among others, spotted this change. His primetime TV formats are plugging the emotional gap that sport used to fill – replacing Jimmy White and Jocky Wilson in the same way that astrology and homeopathy are supplanting religion."

Teaching kids code not computers, but to other levels as well

" Starting in primary school, children from all backgrounds and every part of the UK should have the opportunity to: learn some of the key ideas of computer science; understand computational thinking; learn to program; and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of excellence in these activities.
We'll get to why this is important and necessary in a moment, but first we need to face up to a painful fact. It is that almost everything we have done over the last two decades in the area of ICT education in British schools has been misguided and largely futile. Instead of educating children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training them to use obsolescent software products. And we did this because we fell into what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle would have called a "category mistake" – an error in which things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another. We made the mistake of thinking that learning about computing is like learning to drive a car, and since a knowledge of internal combustion technology is not essential for becoming a proficient driver, it followed that an understanding of how computers work was not important for our children"
A radical manifesto for teaching computing | Education | The Observer

Overall of course I agree with this, since perhaps the most notable feature of modern technology, is how little specialized skill is needed to use them. Motion sensors, voice recognition and touch screens mean even the input mechanisms are almost "natural" and one barely needs to be able to use even a keyboard and mouse any more. This trend indicates the real need will not be training in tools, since the tools require training less and less,  but education about the tools,  their hidden internal structures,  not only to foster an environment to develop more and better tools, but to maintain an independence from them, since a common downside of ease of use is over reliance and too much trust. The less we have to think about using the tools, the less able we are to handle situations where they go wrong, or , more importantly, even spot when they might.
The only reservation I have is that while incredibly useful, computational, algorithmic thinking can also be restrictive, and am always wary of it being exalted as the paradigm of "intelligence",  and there is a risk that introducing these skills early, without appropriate balance, may have limiting effects on creative development. The point is just as  education should focus on the structures behind the tools, it must also include an analysis of the foundations of those very structures themselves. Education not only go beyond the how to the why, but to the why not as well.

A heathen manifesto

Atheists are too often portrayed as bishop-bashing extremists and any meaningful debate with the religious becomes impossible. How can this be remedied? At the Guardian Open Weekend, Julian Baggini presented his 12 rules for heathens:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/25/atheists-please-read-heathen-manifesto

1 Why we are heathens
2 Heathens are naturalists
3 Our first commitment is to the truth
4 We respect science, not scientism
5 We value reason as precious but fragile
6 We are convinced, not dogmatic
7 We have no illusions about life as a heathen
8 We are secularists
9 Heathens can be religious
10 Religion is often our friend
11 We are critical of religion when necessary
12 This manifesto is less concerned with distinguishing heathens from others than forging links between us and others

"It has long been recognised that the term "atheist" has unhelpful connotations. It has too many dark associations and also defines itself negatively, against what it opposes, not what it stands for. "Humanist" is one alternative, but humanists are a subset of atheists who have a formal organisation and set of beliefs many atheists do not share. Whatever the intentions of those who adopt the labels, "rationalist" and "bright" both suffer from sounding too self-satisfied, too confident, implying that others are irrationalists or dim.
We need a name that shows that we do not think too highly of ourselves. This is no trivial point: atheism faces the human condition with honesty, and that requires acknowledging our absurdity, weakness and stupidity, not just our capacity for creativity, intelligence, love and compassion. "Heathen" fulfils this ambition. We are heathens because we have not been saved by God and because in the absence of divine revelation, we are in so many ways deeply unenlightened. The main difference between us and the religious is that we know this to be true of all of us, but they believe it is not true of them."

Inter generational fairness

Is the granny tax that unfair? | Money | The Guardian
But let's first ask why people in retirement are awarded better income tax breaks than those who are working? There was a fascinating analysis in the Financial Times last weekend of the economically "jinxed generation" – and they're not pensioners. It found that today's adults in their 20s will be the first generation who won't be better off than their parents. What's more, the disposable income of people in their 60s is now higher than people in their 20s, for the first time ever. We've created a society where the non-working retired earn more than working people – and that's before adding up the largely unearned wealth tied up in the houses of those in their 60s.

Questions for Google, no googling

Google interviews: would you get a job with the search giant? | Technology | The Guardian

Text Advertising Blindness: The New Banner Blindness?

Since I personally think I don't just ignore, but hardly even register (at least consciously) ads in google and facebook etc., then interesting to read about a paper which suggests this is a real psychological phenomenon (abstract here, full paper here)
This is not just relevant to advertisers, since a corrolary to this 'advertising blindness' is that real information might also be ignored if it is easily confused with being advertising, e.g. on the right hand side of the page where ads are often placed.
Some points from the study are :

• Users demonstrate text advertisement ?blindness? when viewing web pages. This means that information displayed in areas of the page dedicated to text ads (e.g., top of the page, right side) is generally ignored or viewed last.
• Users are less likely to find information on a web page if it is located on the right side of the page than on the top of the page if both areas resemble text ads. This is especially true when they are searching for specific information.
• When conducting an informational, or semantic, search, users have equal amount of difficulty finding information that is embedded in an ad either at the top or on the right side of the page.
• The perception of whether a region is perceived as advertising affects how web pages are searched. When a region is seen as advertisements, users will scan the area if it necessitates completing their task and will likely do so only after scanning other content areas. However, if the region is perceived as content, users will integrate the area into their search strategy, possibly as an expected location for their search goal or a location covered by a heuristic.
• Users typically associate the right side of a web page with text ads and consequently view this area of the page last or not at all. As a result, both designers and advertisers should use caution when placing content information on the right side of the page

Jonathan Haidt on 5 moral foundations, and political differences

Another fascinating TED lecture : Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.

Have encountered quite a few articles on this theme (e.g. those mentioned in previous blog post here) but Haidt presents not only some light liberal/conservative trait differences, but a concept for the underlying innate foundation of morality which these stand on.

So, in stark contrast to a 'blank slate' at birth, Hadit proposes we have a 'first draft' of morality, which he explains with a quote from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. "The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience."
Haidt wanted to determine what such a first draft would be, and since it would need to be universal, studied the literature on anthropology, culture variation in morality etc. i.e. as he says "What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines? That you find across cultures and even across species?"
As a result of this they identified 5 best matches, which they call the 5 foundations of morality, to quote (with some omissions) from the TED lecture:

1. harm/care. We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED.
2.  fairness/reciprocity. e.g. "The Golden Rule," and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED.
3. in-group/loyalty. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. (Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
4. authority/respect. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It's based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.
5. purity/sanctity. This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity's not just about suppressing female sexuality. It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.

Surveys of how people prioritized these values, showed reliable differences between liberals and conservatives, even in different countries. While all were agreed that harm/care and fairness were important, they were slightly more important to liberals than conservatives. Where there was much more difference however, was with respect to the other 3 foundations : in group loyalty, authority and purity. These were ranked significantly less than harm/care and fairness by liberals, but the more conservative the subject, the more important these pillars of morality became : 

                                       

The point being made is that all 5 elements are important to morality as resulting from our nature, so none can be dismissed, but people of different political stripe differ in their emphasis. This is not to be relativistic, since in certain times and certain societies some values maybe should take priority over others. Of course while it might be easy for liberals to point out how over adherence to in-group loyalty and authority might lead to things such as authoritarianism and xenophobia, it could also be argued that extreme fairness could be seen as the basis for forced communism, with disregard for individual rights. So these insights do not provide easy answers, but do suggest how we can work towards answers : namely to appreciate that all these strands are fundamental to our societies, and that we need to step back from our own personal convictions to see the whole picture, and properly evaluate the priorities of others. They may not be right, but then again we might not be either. 

Personally I find the whole area of moral psychology one of the most fascinating and challenging, since it cuts to the core of many of the most important issues, both at a personal and a cultural level - how we should live our lives and run our societies. As the ancient greek aphorism suggests, to know what to do, first know thyself, and these studies show science can help us in this, even in such seemingly unlikely and intangible fields as morality.

note : Haidt has an online website where you can complete a survey to determine one's own settings of these 5 moral channels : http://www.yourmorals.org/  

Screen vs. Paper, some information and thoughts

I had assumed the 'retina' (eye can't detect individual pixels at the normal usage distance) display on the latest ipad was really about more impressive graphics, i.e. for games and video playback, but was very interested to see the comment that such displays would make a difference to simple reading.

It seems that the low quality of electronic displays has been postulated to result in significantly slower reading speeds with respect to paper, and the idea is that such vastly improved screens will overcome this. The article linked above says that reading is about half as fast on a standard resolution kindle versus paper, but also that there has not been a lot of recent research on the topic, and one of the most important references is a paper from as far back as 2001 (which suggested 10-30% speed differences).

This is a fascinating area which I think is of increasing importance as screen input becomes more and more the default mechanism, not just for offices, but for schools, colleges and even hobby reading at home.

The 'google scholar' service is an excellent resource for the layman (like myself) to search for related papers, for example those on screen and paper reading differences . What follows are the results from a brief investigation of the topic; however this is something I must return to again, and deal with in more detail.

What the studies say 
One (more) recent (2008) paper  ("Computer- vs. paper-based tasks: Are they equivalent?" provides a nice overview of the state of the literature at that time. According to this paper, pre-1991 many studies indeed resulted in some indication that paper reading was better in terms of reading speed, accuracy and comprehension, but there were also in all areas studies which found no significant differences. One major issue with these old studies is the display technology involved at the time, which for a fact resulted in more tiredness for the eyes, which obviously would have been an influencing factor. Similary the level of competence and experience of subjects in those days, when computer use was much less prevalent, is also something which needs to be considered. In my own view, changes in technology and usage question to some extent, but not completely, the relevance of these old studies.

Of the 10 studies listed :

• 5 found reading slower on screen as compared to paper, 3 found no differences
• 2 found comprehension worse when using a screen, 4 found no differences

The paper goes on to say though that since 1992 studies have been more aware of the need to preserve equivalence between the screen and paper versions of the testing task, and thus less reliance on partial performance indicators such as reading speed. However although now considered of less interest, differences in reading speed have been suggested even in studies using modern technology.

Modern studies pay more attention to other areas. For example there is the theory that using a computer involves more 'cognitive load' than reading from paper, with one study reporting "Although they found no significant difference in the comprehension scores or the overall workload scores for the two media, significantly more workload was reported on the effort dimension for the computer-based task. This finding is interesting, since it suggests that individuals need to put more effort into the computer task:"

Of the 20 post-1992 studies listed, if considered in light of a general 'which is better screen or paper' (speed, comprehnsion, accuracy etc.) half reported no difference, while 4 suggested benefits to the electronic method, and the same number , 4, suggested the opposite, that paper was more advantageous.

Beyond the effect on the individuals behaviour in pursuit of their own private or professional goals, one very important issue mentioned in this paper is the equivalence of paper based tests versus an electronic version. Given the amount of such electronic testing that is now performed, in all kinds of areas, and while many studies have found no differences, some have, and this means equivalence probably cannot always be simply assumed, but needs to be established. The paper concludes " total equivalence
is not possible to achieve, although developments in computer technology, more
sophisticated comparative measures and more positive user attitudes have resulted in a
continuing move towards achieving this goal."


Overall it seems the evidence is inconclusive, with a slight balance in favour of paper versus screen in certain simple areas, such as speed. However, balanced against this are many advantages of electronic formats, for example ease of retrieval and search mechanisms. So while the reading of one particular document might be better done from hard copy, the overall exploration of a volume of information is greatly facillitated by it being in electronic format.


More than just reading
Another important point I think is that studies cannot just focus on limited screen vs. paper tasks performed in isolation, but must consider as well our overall behaviour when it comes to the different media. This is raised in this interesting blog post  which references the point that 'materiality matters' made by an Anne Mangen, who agured in a journal article : "The reading experience includes manual activities and haptic perceptions (what the skin and muscles and joints register), and so as activities and perceptions of that kind are changed from one kind of reading experience to another because of the object, the reading experience, too, will change."

The point, which I consider a very valid one, is that reading on a screen means more than just considering it as electronic paper; the screen is part of a particular world in which we have certain general behaviours.

For example, I personally think that reading documents online is at risk of being contaminated by other online reading habits we have, habits which are adapted to dealing with a torrent of often un/semi-interesting or relevant information. We are so used to scanning webpages, search results, chain emails that I think we have developed mechanisms to skip through them, our hands contsantly on the mouse, scrolling incessantly. This approach is so different to the way we handle paper information, devoting our mind and body completely to it, with relatively little opportunity for distraction, and even physically reading in a different way - moving our eyes across it, and only turning the page occasionally, as opposed to our eyes staying fixed while we scroll the text past them.  Of course we can skim hard copies as well, but I think the brute physical stability of it results in a difference to how we handle webpages, and electronic documents. The point is not that electronic reading is necessarily of lower quality than of hard copy, but that we need to handle different types of information in different ways, and bad habits from one area might infect another. We use computers for many things, and so performing a task with them in reality is going to involve the general habits, attitudes and dispositions we have in dealing with electronic media, and this is something which might not be considered when testing individual tasks in isolation in a laboratory. If someone is used to skimming a newspaper every morning online, then this might affect how they read an important document later in the day when sitting at the same computer in the same environment. In contrast, reading a document as part of a study would be to do so in a completely different psychological setting, and might well be done differently.

Relevant to this is the result in the 'Computer- vs. paper-based tasks' paper above that people reported a higher workload for performing a task on a computer than on paper. Simply the fact of using a computer for the test had a psychological effect on the subjects, and this has to do with how we use computers in general, and not the particular task being tested. Hence only if such background behavioural information is also studied and understood, can it be effectively compensated for in any particular task test.

Beyond the medium being the message, the medium shapes us, and hence pinpointing the differences between media, is never going to be a simple task.

Atheism - it's not because it's funny, it's because it's true.

Julian Baggini on Atheism : 

"Atheists have seemed rather keen in recent years to stress their jolly side.... Stressing the jolly side of atheism not only glosses over its harsher truths, it also disguises its unique selling point. The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy.""
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/09/life-without-god-bleak-atheism
Guess it goes back to the old Woody Allen question as to whether would rather be happy or right. The problem is of course those who just by their nature cannot see the universe otherwise don't really have this choice. But that doesn't mean we can't be happy and right. And since many people can obviously be miserable and wrong, at least we've got a head start, since (I'm sure!) are already halfway there...