Mapping The US By Porn Search Terms

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We like to believe in the United States of America that regionality and socioeconomics don’t separate us, that the American experience is the human experience. The only real difference between us may be an accent here or there and maybe a predilection for regional cuisines. Well, apparently tastes in pornography are just as much a regional dish as kringles, poi, and Cincinnati chili. Pornhub recently published a rundown of the three most popular (erotic) search terms per state, and FlowingData’s Nathan Yau converted them into a series of stark maps.

More at FastCoDesign

Just Add "Neuro-"

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Where's the bacon section?

Steven Poole in The New Statesmen:

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

In my book-strewn lodgings, one literally trips over volumes promising that “the deepest mysteries of what makes us who we are are gradually being unravelled” by neuroscience and cognitive psychology ... In general, the “neural” explanation has become a gold standard of non-fiction exegesis, adding its own brand of computer-assisted lab-coat bling to a whole new industry of intellectual quackery that affects to elucidate even complex sociocultural phenomena.

... Happily, a new branch of the neuroscienceexplains everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix “neuro” to whatever you are talking about. Thus, “neuroeconomics” is the latest in a long line of rhetorical attempts to sell the dismal science as a hard one; “molecular gastronomy” has now been trumped in the scientised gluttony stakes by “neurogastronomy”; students of Republican and Democratic brains are doing “neuropolitics”; literature academics practise “neurocriticism”. There is “neurotheology”, “neuromagic” ... and even “neuromarketing”. Hoping it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon, I have decided to announce that I, too, am skilled in the newly minted fields of neuroprocrastination and neuroflâneurship.

Illumination is promised on a personal as well as a political level by the junk enlightenment of the popular brain industry. How can I become more creative? How can I make better decisions? How can I be happier? Or thinner? Never fear: brain research has the answers. It is self-help armoured in hard science. Life advice is the hook for nearly all such books ... Quite consistently, their recommendations boil down to a kind of neo-Stoicism, drizzled with brain-juice. In a self-congratulatory egalitarian age, you can no longer tell people to improve themselves morally. So self-improvement is couched in instrumental, scientifically approved terms.

More here.

Via 3 Quarks Daily

Monkey Monday | The Two Sides Of Using Chimpanzees In Research

Two letters regarding the use of chimpanzees in research were recently published in the Washington Post:

From Kathleen Conlee, Senior Director of Animal Research Issues at the Humane Society of the United States:

An Institute of Medicine committee met this month to debate whether U.S. scientists should continue conducting medical research on chimpanzees [“Advances in research may help spare medical chimps,”]. Those with a financial interest or self-interest in the research tried to argue for continued chimpanzee use, but when pressed by the committee they couldn’t defend their claim that chimpanzees are scientifically necessary.

Ethical and economic issues cannot be divorced from science. It is expensive to warehouse chimpanzees in laboratories and unethical to confine these magnificent, long-lived animals in barren cages.

Congress’s Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would end invasive research on chimpanzees and retire government-owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, would save taxpayers about $30 million annually and provide chimps the peaceful life they deserve. Let’s do right by the chimpanzees, taxpayers and medical research and pass this legislation.

From Alice Ra'anan and Claire Edwards, employees of the American Physiological Society:

The article on using chimpanzees for research noted that the United States is the only developed nation where this approach occurs. However, scientists from countries without chimpanzee research colonies regularly conduct such studies in the United States. In fact, when the Netherlands disbanded its colony, it explicitly cited research in the United States as a safeguard against future need.

Research with chimpanzees is highly regulated. The animals have access to excellent veterinary care and are housed whenever possible in compatible social groups and in an enriched environment.

Many nuances emerged in the discussions with the Institute of Medicine panel. Several experts who said that chimpanzees were no longer a primary research model in their fields nevertheless noted that small-scale chimpanzee studies might still be needed to resolve specific problems, such as providing proof of concept that a new drug or delivery system is likely to work in humans.

While the need may be small, instances remain where no other research model can provide timely answers without undue risk to humans.

Read the referenced article here.

Toby Ng | The World Of 100

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These posters are part of a 20-set project created by graphic designer Toby Ng.

Via Nag on the Lake

How Many Americans Have Passports?

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From Grey's Blog:

One of the things I’ve often heard while living in the European Union is the meme that only 10% of Americans own a passport. (This assertion is usually followed by the quazi-urban legend that George W. Bush never had a passport before becoming president. This I’ve never been able to prove or disprove any satisfaction)

Such a low number wouldn’t have surprised me. After all, the United States is nearly thrice the size of the EU and borders only two foreign countries, while the EU is made of 27 countries and – depending on how you want to count them – borders another 19.

I wondered aloud about this in my previous post, ‘Work in Progress: The United States Explained‘ and a commentor, Alison, was nice enough to bring this data set about passports from the ever-awesome data.gov to my attention.

The data was only for the past four years, so I had to do some estimates based on issue rates and the 2000 census numbers ...

TDW

RSA | The Secret Powers Of Time

RSA | Fora.TV | Gawker.TV

Philip Zimbardo has taught at Stanford University since 1968. He is noted for his research, for many publications and books, and for "giving psychology away" to the public through his popular PBS-TV series, "Discovering Psychology." His most notable study was the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which was a classic demonstration of the power of social situations to distort personal identities and long cherished values and morality as students internalized situated identities in their roles as prisoners and guards.

Map Of Online Communities v2.0 | xkcd

Randall Munroe

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xkcd via Neatorama

The Number Of Women In A Group Is Linked To Effective Problem-Solving

Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Fox News

Many social scientists have long contended that the ability of individuals to fare well on diverse cognitive tasks demonstrates the existence of a measurable level of intelligence in each person. In a study published Sept. 30, in the advance online issue of the journal Science, [researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Union College] applied a similar principle to small teams of people. They discovered that groups featuring the right kind of internal dynamics perform well on a wide range of assignments, a finding with potential applications for businesses and other organizations.

"We set out to test the hypothesis that groups, like individuals, have a consistent ability to perform across different kinds of tasks," says Anita Williams Woolley, the paper's lead author and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. "Our hypothesis was confirmed," continues Thomas W. Malone, a co-author and Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "We found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group's performance in many situations."

That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of "social sensitivity" were more collectively intelligent. "Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other's emotions," says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York. "Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed," adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.

Read more at Science Daily

The WEIRDest People In The World

The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed.

How much would you offer? If it's close to half the loot, you're a typical North American. Studies show educated Americans will make an average offer of $48, whether in the interest of fairness or in the knowledge that too low an offer to their counterpart could be rejected as unfair. If you're on the other side of the table, you're likely to reject offers right up to $40.

It seems most of humanity would play the game differently. Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia took the Ultimatum Game into the Peruvian Amazon as part of his work on understanding human co-operation in the mid-1990s and found that the Machiguenga considered the idea of offering half your money downright weird — and rejecting an insultingly low offer even weirder.

"I was inclined to believe that rejection in the Ultimatum Game would be widespread. With the Machiguenga, they felt rejecting was absurd, which is really what economists think about rejection," Dr. Henrich says. "It's completely irrational to turn down free money. Why would you do that?"

It turns out the Machiguenga — whose number system goes: one, two, three, many — are not alone in their thinking. Most people from non-Western cultures introduced to the Ultimatum Game play differently than Westerners. And that is one clue that the Western mind differs in fundamental ways from the rest of humanity, according to Dr. Henrich. He and two other UBC researchers authored a paper shaking up the fields of psychology, cognitive science and behavioural economics by questioning whether we can know anything about humanity in general if we only study a "truly unusual group of people" — the privileged products of Western industrial societies, who just happen to make up the vast majority of behavioural science test subjects.

The article, titled "The weirdest people in the world?", appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — people who are WEIRD* — see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family. The UBC trio have come to the controversial conclusion that, say, the Machiguenga are not psychological outliers among humanity. We are.

"If you're a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there's good reason to believe they're wrong," Dr. Henrich says.

Americans are the most "extreme" Westerners, especially young ones. And educated Americans are even more extremely WEIRD than uneducated ones. "The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens," the authors conclude.

Read the rest of the article at National Post. Via Arts & Letters Daily

*Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic

"I Was Hatched By A Couple Of Chicks"*

Link

The results of the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study were published today in Pediatrics magazine and found that "daughters and sons of lesbian mothers, all conceived through donor insemination, were rated higher than their peers in social, academic, and overall competence, and lower in aggressive behavior, rule-breaking, and social problems, on standardized assessments of psychological adjustment." While there have been many studies about the children of gay and lesbian parents, this is the first one to follow children from conception through adolescence.

*NLLFS tee-shirt

Via Gawker