In the New York Times: A 23-year-old Malaysian man was killed on Thursday night after
reportedly enraging other customers who felt that he “hogged the
microphone”…
Read more here.
Last spring, I was eating dinner in a semi-fancy restaurant that incongruously had flat screen TVs playing news in the corner. (This is very Dallas, by the way.) My taste for food faded as I saw a commercial for Japanese Foot Pads which reportedly sucked various toxins from your feet while sleeping. It was both gross and grossly implausible. Here’s the ad:
Recently, All Things Considered on NPR (or, as my wife affectionately calls it, “the nipper”) had a feature that pretty conclusively unveiled the sham. Listen here as Sarah Varney blackens her soles for science. I still see these things in stores. More evidence that people are idiots.
Five dollars to whomever answers this ad and turns this asshole in.
From Craigslist.
I am in immediate need of somebody to help me with several written
assignments for a graduate level on-line Ethics class. I have invested
as much time and energy as I am able and am still struggling. I need
someone who can do some light reading and then help me prepare a
written response to the instructor’s questions.
Interesting result found on Scientific Blogging about how younger people are more susceptible to a common form of fallacious reasoning. Young people are more likely to keep watching a bad movie if they’ve paid for it than if it was free. Old people are as inclined or disinclined to keep watching whether they’ve paid or not. Interesting, for sure. The oldies come out as more rational. I’m not sure I agree with the psychologist’s reasoning about the source of the disparity between young and old, though. There’s another explanation waiting in the wings–the value of time for young people is less than it is for older people since they have more of it. That probably doesn’t explain everything, but you’re much more likely to hear an older person say “life’s too short to watch bad movies.”
Sunk Cost Fallacy And Positivity – Why Young People Will Finish Watching A Bad Movie
Submitted by News Account on 10 July 2008 – 12:00am. Psychology
The economic and psychological term known as “sunk-cost fallacy” is a bias that leads someone to make a decision based solely on a previous financial investment. For example, a baseball fan might attend every game of the season only because he already purchased the tickets. But not everyone would force themselves to brave the pouring rain for a single game in one season simply because they previously paid for the seats.
So who is more likely to commit or avoid the sunk-cost fallacy and why? In a recent study, psychologists JoNell Strough, Clare Mehta, Joseph McFall and Kelly Schuller from West Virginia University found that younger adults were more likely to commit to a situation if they had already invested money into it, and that older adults showed a more balanced fiscal perspective of the same situation.
To get to this conclusion, the researchers presented college students and senior citizens with two vignettes to test how likely each age group would be to watch a boring, paid-for movie versus a boring, free movie.
The first vignette specifically read, “You paid $10.95 to see a movie on pay TV. After five minutes, you are bored and the movie seems pretty bad”; the other vignette did not include a cost. Participants then selected from five options regarding their projected time commitment—stop watching entirely, watch for ten more minutes, watch for twenty more minutes, watch for thirty more minutes or watch until the end.
The results in the July issue of Psychological Science, show the older adults spent the same amount of time watching the movie regardless of monetary investment. In contrast, the young adults chose to invest more time in the paid-for movie than the free movie in order to avoid wasting $10.95. The psychologists attribute the distinction between younger and older peoples’ decisions to differences in the way each group thinks about gains versus losses.
“Younger adults show a negativity bias,” Strough explained. “They weigh negative information, such as the lost investment, more heavily than positive information and so they try to ‘recover’ the lost investment by investing more time.”
On the other hand, older adults are more likely to view the positive side of situations; therefore, their decisions reflect a more balanced view of gains and losses. According to the psychologists, older adults’ more balanced view may help them recognize that, once made, this type of investment cannot be recovered simply by committing more time to the activity.
The following story appeared today on CNN:
When Scott Hoover bought a $5 scratch-off ticket in Virginia called “Beginner’s Luck” last summer, he carefully studied the odds. Even though he figured his chances of winning were a long shot, he felt the odds were reasonable.
Hoover, a business professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, wasn’t surprised when his tickets didn’t bring him the $75,000 grand prize, but he was shocked to learn the top prize had been awarded before he bought the ticket.
“I felt duped into buying these things,” Hoover said.
He discovered the Virginia State Lottery was continuing to sell tickets for games in which the top prizes were no longer available. Public records showed that someone had already won the top prize one month before Hoover played. He is now suing the state of Virginia for breach of contract.
It appears to me that this guy is a jackass, but I’m willing to entertain arguments to the contrary. Surely no one thinks the odds posted on the card mean that every player has an equal chance to win simpliciter. They mean (suppose) one ticket in a million is a big winner, not that Hoover at his local 7-11 has a one in a million chance to win all things considered. “All things considered” surely includes the fact that the winning card is not, as a matter of fact, in that store. If it’s not there, it’s not there a moment before Hoover buys the card. The fact that Hoover would not have a winner was determined by a complicated set of conditions involving card marking, shuffling and distribution before he even bought the card In a real sense, Hoover didn’t have a chance to win, even if the winner hadn’t purchased his card yet. It only seemed he had a chance to win because he didn’t know the determining information when he bought his card. But, of course, the situation is no different if the winning card is actually scratched: he has no more of a chance in one case than the other, and his apparent chances at the moment of purchase are identical, since in both cases his winning is consistent with the information he knows. If the game is fair in one case, it seems it should be fair in another.
I suppose a case could be made that the entertainment value of playing depends upon the idea that everyone playing is simultaneously in a state of ignorance about the outcomes, but that has nothing to do with the fairness of the game, and it is a false assumption anyway since people who have played several times and failed to win knew something about the outcomes (and the odds) than Hoover didn’t.
I wonder, does Hoover ever watch sports on Tivo? Would he be willing to make bets on a match before he watched it but after it was played? Hmmm. I say Jackass. Anyone second the motion?
Submitted by News Account on 2 June 2008 – 12:00am. Psychology
The actor Sir Peter Ustinov once famously said “Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who get there first.” Psychologists now believe there is some truth to this argument.
Rather than picking our friends based on intentional choice like common values and interests, our friendships may be based on more superficial factors like proximity or group assignments, like a department where you work or even an entirely new job.
Mitja Back, Stefan Schmukle, and Boris Egloff of the University of Leipzig sought to test the notion that random proximity and random group assignment at zero acquaintance would foster friendship in the long run. The researchers investigated 54 college freshmen upon encountering one another for the first time at the beginning of a one-off introductory session and randomly assigned them a seat number in a group of chairs organized in rows.
They wrote of their results in a recent issue of Psychological Science, stating that sitting in neighboring seats as a result of randomly assigned seat numbers when meeting for the first time led to higher ratings of friendship intensity one year later. The same was true even if participants were merely in the same row.
The counterintuitive finding suggests that friendships may not be as deliberate we think.
“In a nutshell,” write the authors, “people may become friends simply because they drew the right random number.”
June 01, 2008 02:15pm
WA scientists are challenging the myth that inbreeding always leads to unhealthy babies.
The highly contentious, often-tabooed practice has in the past been linked to deformities such as heart disease, mental retardation, deafness and even blindness.
Australian research published in 2001 showed that babies born to first-cousins are nearly three times more likely to have serious birth defects.
But Professor Alan Bittles, an adjunct professor at the Centre for Comparative Genomics at Murdoch University, who has spent 30 years researching the topic says most children born to first-cousins are healthy.
In WA, about 500 marriages are between first-cousins.
“In Western culture there is a general belief that first cousin marriages lead to negative genetic outcomes, yet a large majority of children born to first cousins are healthy,” he said.
Prof Bittles reviewed 48 studies from 11 countries and found that the risks of birth defects rose from about 2 per cent in the general population to 4 per cent in consanguineous or same blood couples.
He found that only 1.2 per cent suffered higher infant mortality rates, a find similar to another review from 2002 that suggested first-cousin children are less than 3 per cent more likely to have genetic deformities.
The issue has sparked a major medical debate with some researchers and politicians claiming inbreeding between first-cousins in UK has led to a rise in rare recessive disorders – many of them fatal.
Prof. Bittles was the lead speaker at the Royal Society of Medicine in East London this week where these divisions were hotly disputed.
Speakers at the event argued that warnings on the negative genetic consequences of such unions should be as prominent as alcohol and tobacco cautions.
Einstein and Darwin married their first-cousins, so did Jerry Lee Lewis and Jessie James and according to Prof. Bittles about 500 West Australians have followed suit.
First-cousin marriages are also a common tradition in countries such as Pakistan, south Asia and the Middle East.
Muslim doctors at the East London debate agreed with Prof. Bittles and suggested the risk of birth defects is only 4 per cent higher for parents who are closely related – making it ‘not likely’ there will be a genetic problem.
“There is widespread misconception that these marriages rare,” Prof. Bittles said.
“In reality there are over 1000 million people worldwide that live in regions where 20 – 50 per cent of marriages are between blood relatives.”
Prof. Bittles believes as more migrants move into Australian communities there will be a greater incidence of first-cousin marriages.
Given the large numbers of cousin marriages Prof. Bittles is calling for more in-depth health-based studies on the issue.
Activists Keep the Faith, if Not Their Money
By Jonathan Mummolo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 31, 2008; Page B05
The price of regular at a Shell gas station in Petworth gleamed defiantly in the midday sun: $3.91 a gallon.
But unlike the customers rolling up to the station’s pumps this week, resigned to the fact that their wallets were about to take a beating, Rocky Twyman and company had a plan to bring that number tumbling down.
They would ask God to do it.
“Our pockets are empty, but we’re going to hold on to God!” Twyman, a community organizer from Rockville, said as he and seven other people formed a semicircle, held hands and sang, pleading for divine intervention to lower fuel prices.
It was the latest demonstration by Twyman’s movement, Pray at the Pump, which began in April. Since then, he has held group prayers at gas stations as far away as San Francisco, garnering international media attention and even claiming success in at least a couple of cases.
Some would say the proof of whether Twyman has the ear of the Almighty is in the result. On the first day of the movement, April 23, the national average price of a gallon of unleaded was $3.53, according to AAA. As of yesterday, it was $3.96.
But Twyman said true faith does not demand instant gratification, and he plans to keep his pump-side prayers going “until God tells us to stop.”
“This whole thing is a wake-up call from God to Americans, because we idolize men so much,” said Twyman, 59, a public relations consultant and Seventh-day Adventist who believes that high gas prices are a sign of the apocalypse drawing nigh. “I think through this crisis, God is trying to call us back to depend on Him more.”