Intelligent life

Does Weather Affect Mood? Let Me Count the Ways

2012-02-09T19:20:00.002-05:00

Theo Klimstra, of longitudinal personality analysis fame, recently did a study on whether weather affects mood in a way that varies across persons. He found that there are Summer Lovers (better mood with warmer and sunnier weather), Unaffected (weak associations between weather and mood), Summer Haters (worse mood with warmer and
sunnier weather), and Rain Haters (particularly bad mood on rainy days). I'd classify myself as a Rain Hater, although I'm also a Summer Lover. I suspect there's a negative correlation between those two anyway. It's interesting that http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthere are truly people who hate warm, sunny weather. Of course, that could be good for you if you live in the Netherlands, which is where Klimstra works.

Here's the study: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/emo/11/6/1495/

The Habsburg Empire May Be Dead, but its Honest Bureaucracy's Legacy Lives On

2012-01-16T22:50:00.002-05:00

When I think Habsburg Empire, I think of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination famously marked the beginning of World War I and less famously, the decline of the empire itself until its dissolution in 1918. However, the silhouette of the empire still marks a psychologically different part of Europe, according to research by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann. In their 2011 short paper, The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy, (summarized here) they compared levels of trust on opposite sides of the long-gone Habsburg Empire border within five countries. Surprisingly, they found that the border was still meaningful. Within the border, firms and people have higher trust in courts and police. Outside the border--specifically in regions that were once part of the Ottoman empire--levels of trust are relatively lower. Historians have described the Habsburg bureaucracy as “fairly honest, quite hard-working, and generally high-minded” (Taylor 1948). According to Becker and Woessman, this lies at the root of the higher trust levels.

References
Taylor, AJP (1948), The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, Penguin Books (reprint 1990)

The Best Books of 2011: A Review

2011-12-27T09:52:00.002-05:00

I used to try compiling a list of "best books" there were mentioned on several annual lists. I eventually gave up, but I recently discovered that the Williamsburg public has the ABBC: All the Best Books Compilation for 2011. The top novels are The Tiger's Wife, The Marriage Plot, and State of Wonder. The top books in non-fiction are In the Garden of Beasts, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, and Lost in Shangri-La.

The 2012 Annual Review of Psychology, with a cursory look at An Rev Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science

2011-12-07T15:14:00.005-05:00

For some reason, the Annual Review of Psychology now seems to have a blast from the future, what with it's 2012 edition being released in September 2011. I somehow missed the release of the 2012 edition, but I downloaded it today. The big names in this issue are Paul Bloom in "Religion, Morality, Evolution" and Joshua Knobe in "Experimental Philosophy." However, the articles that I immediately want to read are "Intelligence" by Ian J. Deary and "Personality Processes: Mechanisms by Which Personality Traits “Get Outside the Skin”" by Sarah E. Hampson. The Hampson article reviews the mechanisms that connect personality traits to real behavior. And there's an article about the psychological experience of unemployment. (I'm also wonky so I plan to read "Sources of Method Bias in Social Science Research and Recommendations on How to Control It" but I'll absolve those of you who skip it. )

The Annual Review of Anthropology focuses on mind and migration, two topics that I love, and it opens with a prefatory chapter on technology design, which is great for HCI people out there. However, if I read just one article, it will be "Concepts and Folk Theories" by Susan Gelman and Cristine Legare.

The Annual Review of Political Science includes "The Contribution of Behavior Economics to Political Science" by Rick Wilson, and "The Big Five Personality Traits in the Political Area" by Alan Gerber et al.

The Annual Review of Sociology--well, here's some cheap humor: the article "Foucault and Sociology" is written by Michael Power (sic)-- includes "The Sociology of Storytelling," "Statistical Models for Social Networks" (inner wonk again) and "Emotions and Social Movements."

If you're looking for annual reviews of a completely different nature, here are some top-10 book lists from the New York Times, Esquire, WaPo and other folks.

A Thanksgiving limerick for Psychologists

2011-11-23T13:21:00.002-05:00

For the introduction of Charles (Chuck) Carver at UT Austin in 2011:

If you lash out when down on your luck,
Then Doc Carver may get you unstuck.
It's the low serotonin
Got you mopin' and moanin',
So try turkey instead of ground Chuck.

I'm surprised they didn't throw in a joke about carving. But I guess you can't have it all. Anyway for more groaners, visit the the UT Austin departmental limerick contest.

Faculty members don't understand how human memory works

2011-11-16T21:40:00.003-05:00

That's the thesis of this Chronicle essay by James M. Lang called "Teaching and Human Memory, Part I." I expected this to be an essay by a psychology professor, but surprising Lang is an English professor. However, most of the material for the essay comes from Michelle Miller, the chair of the psychology department at Northern Arizona University. Unfortunately, Lang seems to be saving his actual advice for Part II, which will be published next month.

Does the economy suffer from bipolar disorder?

2011-11-14T10:14:00.003-05:00

So says this J. J. B. Morgan paper from 1935.

Manic-depressive psychoses of business

Psychological Review, Vol 42(1), Jan 1935, 91-107.

Morgan, J. J. B.

An analysis of the various theories offered to explain the business cycle of alternate booms and depressions shows that all these theories are based on a superficial study of symptoms, rather than on an analysis of the real causes, which the author believes are psychological in nature.

Business is compared to a patient suffering from a manic-depressive psychosis, in which the boom period parallels the manic phase and the subsequent slump parallels the depressive phase. It is argued that, in business as in the individual psychosis, the manic period is not a period of real optimism or even over-confidence, but is really a period of fear, for which the excessive speculative activity is a compensatory mechanism.

This fear is induced by a lack of confidence in the credit system and a desire to beat it. Two alternative solutions are offered: one is to strengthen the credit system by building up a group of heroic leaders; but this is utopian at present. The other is to discover a better defense mechanism and adopt it.

(via Mind Hacks, which also has a helpful post about where to download recent BBC programs on the brain)

Failure in Psychotherapy

2011-10-19T12:15:00.000-04:00

That's the theme of the latest issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Steve Jobs' gift to cognitive science

2011-10-17T21:54:00.003-04:00

Christian Jarrett has a post about Steve Jobs' gift to cognitive science: iPhones that allow standardized apps, which now enables us to collect daily data from all over the world. The post is about cognitive science, but it applies to psychology as well.

Was Hemingway right about the rich?

2011-10-11T14:29:00.003-04:00

Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me | Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

Alas, this conversation never actually happened, although Fitzgerald did write, in "The Rich Boy" (1926), "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful...."

While there is some recent research to support the idea of the greater insensitivity of the rich, I don't know of any psychologist who has shown that they're soft or cynical relative to the 99%--99% being the fashionable term for people who aren't in the top 1%. One reason that the 1% may balk at paying extra taxes, though, is that both we and they are on the same hedonic treadmill, a plight that makes the rich not different from you and me. After adapting to their rich lifestyle, it's likely they find themselves, on average, moderately happy but not excessively happy. Thus taxes may seem just as burdensome to them, because they don't see themselves as significantly happier than the 99%, and accurately so. Thus they don't consider themselves particularly fortunate. In fact, there's recent research on what affects the pace of the hedonic treadmill, and wealth level is not a factor that affects the treadmill's pace.

This similarity between the rich and me may help explain a couple of recent instances in the WSJ and on TV, where someone making over 500 thousand dollars a year has complained about not really having that much pocket money after all the bills are paid. Certainly, the hedonic treadmill is not the only factor here, but it may explain some part of this trend.

Are story spoilers as bad as we think?

2011-09-29T12:30:00.003-04:00

Or do we make yet another error in forecasting how we think we'll feel about something? A new article by psychologists Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld at UC-San Diego, entitled "Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories" (also see pdf version) suggests that we enjoy a story regardless of whether the ending has been spoiled for us. It's a short article, so the authors didn't investigate whether the same path to enjoyment occurs in both spoiled and non-spoiled cases, but they do speculate:

It is possible that spoilers enhance enjoyment by actually increasing tension. Knowing the ending of Oedipus Rex may heighten the pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character marching to his doom. This notion is consistent with the assertion that stories can be reread with no diminution of suspense (Carroll, 1996).

Daniel Kahneman, Leda Cosmides, Steven Pinker, Michael Gazzaniga, and Elaine Pagals Walk into a Wine Bar

2011-09-24T13:51:00.003-04:00

Yes, they walk into a wine bar.* In Napa. And give a series of masterclasses on the science of human nature.

The talks that already online are:
Daniel Kahneman, "The Marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking"
Martin Nowak, "The Evolution of Cooperation"

The rest--which include Pinker talking about the history of violence--will probably be online in the next month. By the way, there's a full text version of the Kahneman talk, but if you've never heard Kahneman speak before, I'd recommend the video.

*Technically, these talks were at a vineyard, but I assume they did not speak amidst the vines.

Cracking the Brain Code

2011-09-22T15:30:00.002-04:00

Although I anticipated this would happen sometime, I didn't expect it this year: Scientists at UC-Berkeley were able to use a algorithm to decode fMRI images into accurate visual patterns. The images were admittedly blurry, and not surprisingly images of people were clearer than images of objects. Nevertheless, the fact that there was some accuracy is astounding.

For a second, I thought this was voodoo correlations all over again, but according to the news article, the algorithm was prepared in advance, presumably from prior research.

Time on the Brain

2011-09-18T23:07:00.002-04:00

Scientific American reviews some of the most recent research on how people perceive (and misperceive) time. Here's a sample:

A fish’s reach does not exceed its grasp. For land animals, though, things are quite different: their sensory volume is much bigger than their motor volume, since light travels much farther in air than in seawater. So when our ancestors crawled out of the sea, they gained the opportunity to plan their behavior in advance. No longer restricted to reacting to immediate stimuli, they had time to take in the scene and deliberate before moving.... MacIver speculated that this set the stage for the evolution of consciousness. After all, what is consciousness, but the ability to make plans and gain some advantage over our environment?

Can being surveyed change your behavior?

2011-09-16T13:30:00.003-04:00

I don't often veer into the developmental economics literature, but when I do, it's to read papers like this: Being surveyed can change later behavior and related parameter estimates [pdf] (2011) by Zwane et al.

Why do people have different development trajectories?

2011-09-08T22:30:00.002-04:00

I'm reading this fascinating new-ish article by Frankenhuis and Panchanathan--anthropologists publishing in a psychology journal--and the authors argue that we usually sample cues from the external world in much the same way that psychologists sample populations: randomly. With psychology research, you hope that you mostly get typical people in the "middle" of the population range with a few in each tail. But you keep in mind there's a chance that purely by coincidence, you've selected a sample that doesn't have that nice bell-shaped contour. (This is why larger samples are better; over a larger samples, the odds of this mishap decrease--but they never reduce to zero.) Similarly, when we, as biological beings, sample cues from the external world, the majority of us get a truly random sample of experiences, which consists of mostly typical stuff with a tiny tail of unusual stuff at each end. But a few of us get an awkward mix that doesn't make sense. Instead we get a heterogenous set, and so we have to keep sampling. Thus, the people who get the nice bell-shaped sample develop faster, while the others take more time.

The authors make three predictions about what data we should find if this hypothesis is true. But they don't have data, so this is conjecture, albeit very informed conjecture.

Collecting Data in Uganda via SMS

2011-08-31T16:28:00.004-04:00

Sorry for the light blog posting over the past weeks. Although I haven't blogged about this before, I'm a fan of collecting data in the field rather than in the laboratory, so I've been following the work of people like Sam Gosling over the past year. One new development in field methods is the use of SMS data and here's a new article about using such data in the developing world to find out what beneficiaries of social programs want and need. The results from the polls are posted on the uReport website. Here's one example of mapped results.

If internet use is decreasing our memory, is it necessarily a bad thing?

2011-07-15T15:24:00.002-04:00

Here's an article that been making the rounds this week. So internet use is dramatically reducing our internal memory (as opposed to our offloaded memory) and perhaps even shrinking our hippocampi. Should we look at this as an alarming new fact about life in the 21st century? Or should we think of this in evolutionary business as usual? Given that computers are here to stay, there's no reason to think computers and humans aren't going to co-evolve in the same way millions of other animals have co-evolved, except in this case computers aren't evolving through natural selection.

What Predicts A Longer Life?

2011-06-27T21:55:00.003-04:00

Melanie Greenberg summarizes The Longevity Project.

And Susan Whitbourne writes on the stages of life, an idea whose time has gone.

"You do not talk about Fight Club if you do not notice Fight Club"

2011-06-16T13:23:00.002-04:00

That's the title of this new study on inattentional blindness.

Abstract: Inattentional blindness—the failure to see visible and otherwise salient events when one is paying attention to something else—has been proposed as an explanation for various real-world events. In one such event, a Boston police officer chasing a suspect ran past a brutal assault and was prosecuted for perjury when he claimed not to have seen it. However, there have been no experimental studies of inattentional blindness in real-world conditions. We simulated the Boston incident by having subjects run after a confederate along a route near which three other confederates staged a fight. At night only 35% of subjects noticed the fight; during the day 56% noticed. We manipulated the attentional load on the subjects and found that increasing the load significantly decreased noticing. These results provide evidence that inattentional blindness can occur during real-world situations, including the Boston case.

On the behavior of reviewers: Why unconventional ideas are rejected

2011-06-07T14:37:00.004-04:00

"Editors, with good reason, send submissions to scholars who are knowledgeable about, and who have previously published on, the particular topic of the paper submitted. However, it is exactly those scholars, though, who have most to lose when a new idea that undermines the approaches and ideas they have championed over many years is promoted. Such reviewers knowingly or unknowingly introduce a marked conservative bias. Well-established ideas tend to be favoured and unconventional ideas rejected particularly because the latter are normally less well formulated and tested than those following the trodden path."

From the section "Protecting Intellectual Capital" in "Editorial Ruminations: Publishing Kyklos" by Frey, Eichenberger, and Frey.

What is left unsaid is that this problem is aggravated by the gap between perception and reality when people discuss how many times a scholar is cited. Conventionally, the perception is that a scholar is frequently cited if he or she is doing high-quality . Realistically, a scholar is frequently cited if he or she is doing moderate-quality research on a topic that lots of other researchers are already interested in.

Of course, there's also the problem of political bias, at least in American social psychology.

Using Mechanical Turk to Gather Psychological Data

2011-06-03T14:36:00.002-04:00

Buhrmester, Kwang and (the ubiquitous) Sam Gosling published a paper about this recently, entitled "Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data?" Here's a bit of the abstract":

Findings indicate that (a) MTurk participants are slightly more demographically diverse than are standard Internet samples and are significantly more diverse than typical American college samples; (b) participation is affected by compensation rate and task length, but participants can still be recruited rapidly and inexpensively; (c) realistic compensation rates do not affect data quality; and (d) the data obtained are at least as reliable as those obtained via traditional methods. Overall, MTurk can be used to obtain high-quality data inexpensively and rapidly.

As a social psychologist, I'm particularly impressed by (a) because social psychology is one area where it's really troublesome to generalize the findings you get with college students.

From "Cognitive Dissonance: A History in Tweets"

2011-05-25T10:38:00.002-04:00

In the beginning:

seeker7: Feeling excited, nervous. End of the world tomorrow.
About 57 years ago

seeker7: Still excited. In a few hours the world will end in cataclysmic flood. We await Guardians’ spacecraft to take us away.
About 57 years ago

seeker7: Confused. No flying saucer; no cataclysm. WTF? But
wait! It’s OK: We have been saved by our unflagging faith!
About 57 years ago

Leon: Working hard. ‘‘When Prophecy Fails’’ provides great
example of the theory in action. Writing new book about the
theory itself.
About 56 years ago

And later:

heartlessbastard: @newlooker3: What, you think we should
be using the IAT instead? LOL.
About 10 years ago

newlooker3: @heartlessbastard: Ignoring you. Generating
boatloads of results and counting thousands of citations instead.
So yeah: LOL.
About 10 years ago

Excerpted from a journal article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, LOL. Here's the pdf:

We are all Newt Gingrich

2011-05-18T23:00:00.002-04:00

Well, not quite, but the idea that some people aren't hypocrites is difficult to sustain:

Take hypocrisy. Increasing amounts of research show convincingly that the label hypocrite is not only reserved for politicians like Mr. Gingrich or ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer. As research from our lab has repeatedly shown, hypocrisy appears to be a fundamental part of the human condition. To demonstrate this, we often present individuals with two tasks that need to be completed: one long and onerous, the other short and fun. We give them a coin to flip to decide whether they or the person waiting in the room outside to go next will complete the onerous task. We then leave them alone while viewing their subsequent actions on hidden video surveillance. Once left to their own devices, 90% of people do not flip the coin; they simply give themselves the good task dooming the next person to drudgery. When they're later asked anonymously how fairly they behaved, they judge their actions as acceptable. However, when people are asked to judge the exact same action committed by another person, they universally condemn his or her not flipping the coin and taking the pleasant option for themselves. After all, the mind has no need to rationalize away another person's bad behavior. " --- From "Newt Gingrich and the Vicissitudes of Character" by David DeSteno, Northeastern Univ.

It's worth reading the rest of DeSteno's post, and his blog on character. I expect hypocrisy (and evil) to be big topics in social psychology and liberalism over the next few decades, especially in terms of treating them as things to be managed rather than as things to be destroyed.

Can Psychotherapy Be Too Evidence Based?

2011-05-10T11:36:00.002-04:00

In this review of a review of Sex in Psychotherapy: Sexuality, Passion, Love, and Desire in the Therapeutic Encounter, Eddie Clark tackles this question. It's unfortunate that the question is worded this way because the real issue under discussion is implicit intuition vs. explicit rule-based monitoring of therapy. Explicit rule-based monitoring is usually based on evidence, but intuition developed over the course of several years of experience can be particularly incisive.

Our Need to Long

2011-04-25T11:18:00.002-04:00

"In resolving our need to love, we do not always resolve our need to long."-- Alain de Botton, On Love (UK title: Essays in Love) (1995)

"Could Your Boyfriend's Wandering Eye Save Your Relationship?" -- news summary of this JPSP article by Nathan deWall et al. (2011)

Is it time to reconsider the fundamental attribution error (FAE)?

2011-04-18T15:05:00.003-04:00

Pick up any introductory psychology text, turn to the chapter on social psychology, and look for a description of the fundamental attribution error (FAE) . (It's also called the actor-observer hypothesis).* I'd estimate a 100% chance of finding it. It's the error of assuming other people behave in a certain way because of their personality, but I behave in a certain way because of my situation. In other words, assume someone has left a quarter in a soda machine. If someone else picks it up, you think, "He picked up the quarter left in the soda machine because he's dishonest.:" But if you pick it up, you think "I picked up that quarter because someone is going to take it anyway." But a new meta-analysis by Bertram Malle suggests that this error isn't nearly as robust as social psychologists think it is. To quote Malle, the discrepancy is only found when:

[...] the actor was portrayed as highly idiosyncratic, when hypothetical events were explained, when actor and observer were intimates, or when free-response explanations were coded. In addition, the asymmetry held for negative events, but a reverse asymmetry held for positive events.

* To be precise, the actor-observer hypothesis is not the same as the fundamental attribution error, but the differences are unimportant for the purposes of this post. Specifically, the fundamental attribution error is a hypothesis about an error: it assumes the actor is correct, and the observer is making the error.

Towards an economics of unhappiness

2011-04-12T23:42:00.002-04:00

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin writes:

For at least the last decade, there has been a boom in work on the economics of happiness. But following Tolstoy[1], I’ve always wondered why we don’t study the economics of unhappiness instead: after all, there’s so much more data.
For the last year or so, I’ve been planning a paper in which I took off from this point and made the case for unhappiness as a driver of economic activity and particularly of economic change (including ‘growth[2]’). But, as usually happens[3] with my thoughts along these lines, it looks as if someone has beaten me to it.
If you follow the link, check out Chris Bertram's first comment too.

Bribery; And a Rebel Sociologist in Libya

2011-04-06T21:42:00.003-04:00

From APS comes a new article on the collectivism-bribery connection as researched by Nina Mazar and Pankaj Aggarwal. Both correlational and experimental research support the idea that collectivism predicts bribery. (Unfortunately, the full journal article is in Psychological Science, which I can't access.)

Meanwhile in Libya, a PhD sociology candidate who has embedded himself with the rebel forces is blogging at Revolutionology (found via MindHacks). While some of the posts are the length of short magazine articles, others are snippets that are reminiscent of early P. J. O'Rourke:

Kaboom (Part Ithnayn [Part Two])

Susanne: “Mehdi, are you carrying a gun?”
Mehdi: “No.”

Susanne: “Under the circumstances, don’t you think that might be a good idea?”

Mehdi: “We don’t need one.”

Susanne: “Why not?”

Mehdi: “I have this.” [Rummages in the beat-up Mazda's glove compartment and pulls out a hand grenade.]
Susanne (stunned): “What the hell are you going to do with that?”

Mehdi: “I’m going to throw it at Gaddafi when I see him.”

Also see Kaboom (Part Wahid [Part One])

Does social psychology need an Alan Sokal? Does it now have one?

2011-03-30T21:49:00.004-04:00

Blogger John Rosenberg explores this topic in a new discussion of the anti-conservative bias in social psychology. By new, I mean this doesn't just go over what Jonathan Haidt already point earlier this year, but points to a concrete case where social psychologists assume that the definition of a good person is a person who supports affirmative action and the banning of violent video games. Sadly, the primary author, Krishna Savani, doesn't appear to be an Alan Sokal in waiting. Maybe next year we'll have one.

When four psychoanalysts in a row fall asleep on you

2011-03-30T00:27:00.002-04:00

I don't have time for a long blog post this week, but here's a case study of psychoanalysis from a patient's point of view. Found via mindhacks.com.

Switch and push order effects in moral judgments: An experimental philosophy quandary

2011-03-23T21:19:00.006-04:00

You may be familiar with the trolley problem. If not here are two variations and you should pick at random which order to read them in--in other words, you might want to read them in the order I present them or you may want to read the second one before the first one, so pick an order at random and then start reading.

FIRST PROBLEM

A runaway trolley is about to pass you on a railroad. You are at a railroad switch. If you do nothing, the trolley will proceed along line A and kill five people. If you activate the switch, the trolley will be diverted to line B and kill one person. Will you activate the switch?

SECOND PROBLEM

A runaway is about to pass below you, while you stand atop a small cliff. There is a fat man standing next to you. If you do nothing, the trolley will proceed along line A and kill five people. If you push the fat man onto the track, he will be killed, but his body will stop the trolley, thus preventing the deaths of the five people. Will you push him?

Philosophers have been using these questions for years, but recently they've discovered that your answers to these questions actually depend on the order in which you read them. Why? Because the answers to the switch scenario are less stable, and they ascend or descend depending on what came before. But answers to push are quite stable. Psychologists (and now philosophers too) call these order effects, because the order in which you ask the questions changes the results. Eric Schwitzgebel has an enlightening blog post about this problem and its implications.

This is an even worse conundrum for psychologists, who are ultimately trying to study moral choices in the real world. In the real world, there are an infinite number of possible precedents to moral scenarios. And in the real world, you're not dealing with fictitious scenarios but real ones, so the realism may aggravate or ameliorate the effect too.

Blogging has been light, but here's something about the American Anthropological Association’s witch hunt

2011-03-15T21:20:00.005-04:00

Not just a witchhunt, but--on a parallel track--part of a continuing war between evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists. The story begins here in 2000 with a fictitious story about a measles epidemic about the Yanomamo. Much has been published about this in the last 10 years and now there's a new paper out Robert Kurzban, an evolutionary psychologist, summarizes it and notes its implications for evolutionary psychologists. I'd recommend the summary, but if you prefer the full paper, it's here in pdf form and the abstract is:

In September 2000, the self-styled “anthropological journalist” Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney’s claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney’s claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA’s problematic actions in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney’s falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles.

Note that Kurzban's post is worth reading even if you do read the whole paper.

Mirror Neurons and the Domino Effect

2011-03-06T22:24:00.002-05:00

No, not that domino effect. I'm referring to the scientific phenomenon of one groundbreaking work that topples the conventional wisdom about a topic. Not only that, it also leads to a burst in research on that area--a pattern similar to that in the adoption of innovation. Tversky and Kahmneman did it. Lakoff and Johnson did it. And in 1992, Rizzolati did it--with the discovery of mirror neurons. Here's an overview of the research spawned by the mirror neuron discovery. Particularly interesting to me is the research on mimicry, which could explain a lot of the conformity research in social psychology:

Mimicry, linked to mirror neurons, makes monkeys bond. The idea that mimicry helps humans bond is well-accepted, but the first controlled experiment, with a monkey, came last year, Ferrari says. In that study, reported in Science, his team presented monkeys with a token and rewarded them with treats if they returned it. The monkeys had a choice of returning the token to either of two investigators, only one of whom was imitating the monkey. The monkeys consistently chose to return the token to the person who imitated them and spent more time near that investigator.

How Effective is Psychotherapy in General? What about Psychodynamic Therapy?

2011-01-20T19:25:00.002-05:00

In The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Jonathan Shedler tackles both of those questions. The article is succinct enough that I won't summarize it here, except to mention that the conclusion is that psychodynamic psychotherapy (also known as psychoanalysis) is just as effective as other empirical therapies according to the meta-analyses cited here. Shedler's paper is also useful as a guide to what became of Freudian psychoanalysis. It's easy to incorrectly assume that psychodynamic therapy hasn't changed since Freud, so Shedler points out that Freud's "outlandish and inaccessible" speculations aren't representative of today's psychodynamic school of thought.

'Ongoing Victim Suffering Increases Prejudice:The Case of Secondary Anti-Semitism'

2011-01-08T21:04:00.002-05:00

'Ongoing Victim Suffering Increases Prejudice: The Case of Secondary Anti-Semitism,' a paper by Roland Imhoff and Rainer Banse, is a worthwhile read if you're interested in how one's empathy towards suffering doesn't particularly extend to suffering that was initiated in the distant past but is still ongoing. Here's the abstract:

Some people have postulated that the perception of Jews’ ongoing suffering from past atrocities can result in an increase in anti-Semitism. This postulated secondary anti-Semitism is compatible with a number of psychological theories, but until now there has been no empirical evidence in support of this notion. The present study provides the ﬁrst evidence that ongoing suffering evokes an increase in prejudice against the victims. However, this effect became apparent only if respondents felt obliged to respond truthfully because of a bogus pipeline (BPL); without this constraint, the perception of ongoing victim suffering led to a socially desirable reduction in self reported prejudice. The validity of the BPL manipulation was conﬁrmed by the ﬁnding that itmoderated the relation between explicit and implicit anti-Semitism, as measured with an affect misattribution procedure.

And here's the first paragraph:

‘The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.’’ This famous quip by the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex (e.g., Buruma, 2003) describes the core assumption of secondary-anti-Semitism theory, which suggests that every reminder of the German
atrocities and the victims’ suffering still evokes aversive feelings of guilt and thus increases a defensive anti-Semitism—even in Germans born decades after 1945 (e.g., Adorno, 1955; Bergmann, 2006). Despite the popularity of this assumption in the
social sciences and its compatibility with a number of psychological theories, it has never been empirically tested.

Because the paper is concise and quite strong, I don't have anything to say about the content, but I do have something to say about the context. In order to measure explicit anti-Semitism, the researchers used a 29-item agree-disagree survey. You can get the whole survey by e-mailing the authors but here's the only item that's cited in the paper: "Jews have too much influence on public opinion." The problem with this statement as a measure, which the authors neglect to discuss, is that in the current context, Israel is perceived as a Jewish nation, and Jewish people are semantically connected with Israel and the United States. (And within the U.S., Jewish people are--at least semantically--more connected with AIPAC than, say, J Street.) So it's impossible to tell whether people answering this item were really responding to "Jews have too much influence." or "Israel has too much influence" or "Israel and AIPAC have too much influence." I don't think any sort of rephrasing would help either. "Jews, apart from those in the U.S. and Israel, have too much influence on public opinion" might separate the U.S. and Israel, but it still makes them salient in a reader's mind.

'Modern Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Attitudes' is another paper where this same contextual issue occurs. In this study, the authors (including Lee Jussim, who does some fascinating research) measure attitudes towards Israel, India and Russia to see if people are more severely critical of Israel's activities in Palestine, than they are towards India's activities in Kashmir and Russia's activities in Chechnya. The problem here is even more obvious. The authors are correctly relying on the notion that Israel equals Jewish people for most people, but then concluding that their findings apply to measures of anti-Semitism, when they actually apply to the conflated concept of anti-Israeliness, which includes some uncertain element of anti-Semitism.

The same problem would occur if you're measuring anti-Muslim attitudes either by (a) using Saudi Arabia as a proxy for Muslims or (b) neglecting to subtract any anti-Saudi element from your anti-Muslim variable. It would also occur if you're measuring anti-Hindu attitudes either by (a) using India as a proxy for Hindus or (b) neglected to subtract any anti-India attitudes from your anti-Hindu variable. Because some countries in the world are inextricably associated with certain religions, you'll probably end up measuring some conflated concept, which absolutely deserves attention but nonetheless deserves new nomenclature. The old nomenclature is too precise.

Time Flies When You're Listening to Music

2011-01-02T18:34:00.003-05:00

A new study from Clermont University in France shows that music affects how accurately you judge the amount of time that has passed. In other words, musical sounds were judged shorter than neutral sounds of the same duration. Although the authors don't have a clear theory about why this occurs, they refer to this study, which shows that emotional sounds were judged longer than neutral sounds. So music makes time pass faster while emotional sounds make time pass slower, regardless of whether the music is cheerful or melancholy.

Incidentally, time also flies when you're reading swear words.

Promoting Happiness Through Public Policy

2010-12-28T18:14:00.003-05:00

An article by Tim Hartford on aiming for happiness through public policy. By liberal standards, the idea of explicitly promoting happiness seems so manipulative as to be distasteful (which is unfortunate). It would have been nice to see that issue addressed here, but Hartford focuses on the measurement issues, which are more of a liability only when you're doing across-country comparisons. Given that we know a number of things make people happier, I think we'll see some government policies that nudge people toward greater happiness in some of the more liberal states in the U.S. over the next two decades, but not much at a national level.

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-25T16:38:00.003-05:00

Social Cognition: Special Issue on Social Neuroscience

2010-12-22T22:58:00.002-05:00

In this month's special issue on social neuroscience (only available to subscribers), you can find most of the big names of social neuroscience: Banaji, Cacioppo, Ito, Bartholow and Kihlstrom. Here's a summary of what it contains:

Each of the contributors to this special issue offers a valuable perspective on these questions. Banaji provides a rousing introduction to the issue in a letter to young researchers considering a social neuroscience approach, arguing that the advent of social neuroscience methods presents a historical opportunity for scientific advances in the field. Cacioppo offers a big picture view of the breadth of the social neuroscience approach and of how different levels of analysis inform one another. This integrative perspective is also emphasized by Ito and illustrated with important examples. Amodio presents a detailed discussion of the advantages and challenges of social neuroscience approaches, drawing the important distinction between mapping and hypothesis testing, and offering a set of recommendations about how to make social neuroscience relevant to social psychology. Cunningham also discusses the important role of brain mapping in social neuroscience research. Bartholow focuses on the use of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to advance social psychological theory, and provides some very detailed examples of how such advances may be realized. Klein emphasizes the breadth of social neuroscience approaches and the importance of taking advantage of that breadth, focusing specifically on the use of neuropsychology. Finally, Kihlstrom offers a skeptical view of the ability of social neuroscience to constrain social psychological theory and of the ability of domain-specific functional modules to account for many important aspects of human psychology and behavior.

One issue that a number of the authors address is that question that pretty much crops up all the time: does all of this amount of uninformative reductionism? According to the introduction, both Cacioppo and Kihlstrom argue that the psychological level of analysis is the not the same as the neural level of analysis. Apparently, both of them also argue that social neuroscience is valuable is important even if it doesn't enrich psychological theory. I'm not sure how they pull that off, but I'm planning to skim Cacioppo and read Kihlstrom.

Incidentally it's notable that nearly everyone on this list is doing research on racial stereotyping, a field that I think isn't well-suited for study in the U.S., because the U.S. is currently remarkable for its lack of racism rather than its racism, because the race-culture correlation in the U.S. makes it difficult to ascertain if race-based categorization is really culture-based, and because race can become unimportant within minutes after zero acquaintance.

What's the Point of It All?

2010-12-12T20:05:00.003-05:00

I'm just about done with my first semester, so it's an appropriate time to think about whether this whole pursuit of psychological knowledge thing is worthwhile. Let's look at "On the Purposes Served by Psychological Research and its Critics":

We concur with Wallach and Wallach's (1998) subjective assessment that much psychological research contributes little to our corpus of knowledge, but we dispute their analysis of the causes of this problem. A critical assessment of their analysis reveals it to be (a) logically flawed, (b) irrelevant to hypotheses conceming psychological processes, and (c) potentially injurious to the processes through which creative scientific hypotheses are developed. The Wallachs' article may serve a valuable purpose-but only if read very critically.

I plan to read the rest in a few days but it definitely grabs my attention to see a critique of a critique where the authors still reach the same conclusion, namely, that psychology is largely worthless.

If You Murder Another Researcher To Steal Their Data

2010-11-30T21:57:00.002-05:00

At least you have good precedent. Maybe

Would You Rather Have Little Power or No Power?

2010-11-28T15:32:00.002-05:00

In a situation where your opponent has an overwhelming amount of power, you would still want to hold on to the power that you do have. This study suggests that, in at least one respect, you'd better be off coming across as entirely powerless. If you're entirely powerless, your opponent feels duty bound to be more generous towards you, whereas if you have declining power, not so much.

Less Power or Powerless? Egocentric Empathy Gaps and the Irony of Having Little Versus No Power in Social Decision Making
Authors: Michel J. Handgraaf, E. Van Dijk, R. C. Vermunt, H. A. Wilke, & C. K. De Dreu
Affiliation: Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

2010-11-26T17:34:00.001-05:00

"The pioneering neuroscientist Michael Merzenich believes our brains are being 'massively remodeled' by our ever-intensifying use of the Web and related media. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Merzenich, now a professor emeritus at the University of California in San Francisco, conducted a famous series of experiments on primate brains that revealed how extensively and quickly neural circuits change in response to experience. When, for example, Mr. Merzenich rearranged the nerves in a monkey's hand, the nerve cells in the animal's sensory cortex quickly reorganized themselves to create a new 'mental map' of the hand. In a conversation late last year, he said that he was profoundly worried about the cognitive consequences of the constant distractions and interruptions the Internet bombards us with. The long-term effect on the quality of our intellectual lives, he said, could be 'deadly.'"

That was an excerpt from Does the Internet Make You Dumber?, a WSJ Essay by Nicholar Carr.

And here's a preview of Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains."

Carr and other scholars were featured on today's episode of To The Point, a KCRW radio show.

Siblings Share Genes, But Rarely Personalities : NPR

2010-11-24T13:22:00.000-05:00

Siblings Share Genes, But Rarely Personalities : NPR

Then in the 1980s, a researcher named Robert Plomin published a surprising paper in which he reviewed the three main ways psychologists had studied siblings: physical characteristics, intelligence and personality. According to Plomin, in two of these areas, siblings were really quite similar.

Physically, siblings tended to differ somewhat, but they were a lot more similar on average when compared to children picked at random from the population. That's also true of cognitive abilities.

"The surprise," says Plomin, "is when you turn to personality."

Does the Institutional Review Board System Encourage Deceit?

2010-11-23T16:30:00.003-05:00

I have much to criticize about the Institutional Review Board (IRB) system, which requires all psychological experiments to be reviewed for ethical concerns before they are implemented. The institutional review system was formed for medical research, where it was needed, but its scope expanded to include psychology, sociology and even history departments, where it has done all sorts of harm. For instance, IRBs can not only fail to ensure ethical standards but can actually lower ethical standards[pdf link] by motivating researchers to submit deceptive proposals.

For a complete work on the problems with the IRB system in the social sciences, see Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009 by Zachary M. Schrag.

Thinking About the Past and Future: Recent Psychological Research

2010-11-23T16:03:00.003-05:00

View more presentations from Chris Martin.

Anti-Racism: Does the Witchhunt Become the Primary Goal?

2010-11-19T00:06:00.003-05:00

Calling anti-racism a witchhunt is certainly provocative, but when you put the two side by side, there are certain commonalities: the idea that the superordinate, defining feature of a person with racist beliefs is racism, the assumption that a person with racist beliefs as inherently disgusting, and the belief that the punishment should entail a permanent banishing of the person in question.

Given these similarities and America's Puritanical roots, it's not surprising that a few researchers have chosen to measure a person's racism not by whether they actually demonstrate any racist behavior, but by whether they choose to report racist behavior that they view. To put it less gently, they place import on how much you support the witchhunt, not on much you internalize racial equality.

In their study, they were attempting to determine whether teaching children colorblindness is an effective means to end future racial inequality. But they rig their study to come to the conclusion they want to. Instead of measuring any indications of implicit (or, for that matter, explicit) racist behavior by the child, they choose to measure whether the child reports a racially charged incident to the authorities. The authors elide the fact that this is exactly a sort of scenario where you would definitely expect colorblind children to behave exactly as they did. Colorblindness, by definition, preempts one from comprehending that a conflict has a racial element.

Moreover, a society that is comprised of colorblind people cannot, by definition, have racial conflicts, so it would be completely moot to find out whether people are alarmed by racist conflicts. There is a transitional period when a society moves from non-colorblindness to colorblindness, but I imagine the goal of colorblindness supporters is to achieve colorblindness among all citizens or at least enough to establish herd immunity.

I'm not making this argument because I think there's compelling evidence that colorblindness is effective. I am, however, arguing that this study is thoroughly flawed, but, remarkably, the flaws are more informative than the content.

Disclaimer: I can't get the full text version of this article through my library, so I'm working from the abstract here. Even if the authors addressed the above issues in their paper, I doubt that they have a compelling defensive argument for their choices in methods and measures.

Article: Apfelbaum, E. P., Pauker, K., Sommers, S. R., & Ambady, N. (2010). In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality? Psychological Science, 21 (11), 1582-1586.

Writing Papers for No Credit

2010-11-13T22:09:00.002-05:00

At least not the sort of credit we're used to. Here's an interview with a ghost paper writer who completes student assignments for money. He reminds me of a character on Veronica Mars:

The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.

Eighty-eight miles per hour: sufficient or necessary?

2010-11-12T17:23:00.002-05:00

According to Daryl Bem, it's not necessary because events from the future can cause events in the present. His journal article, which is available in preprint [pdf] and also summarized in plain English by New Scientist, will be published by one of the prestigious psychology journals, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. From New Scientist:

[The paper] describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather than before it.

Incidentally, the mean effect size was only 0.22 so this is a fairly weak effect overall, but the effect is stronger among extraverted, sensation-seeking persons.

Days 1 and 2: Arrived in Russia. Wish I had learned Spanish a little better.

2010-05-03T14:44:00.002-04:00

All of my planes left on schedule so my only gripe about the trip to Russia is having to spend five hours in JFK. I can't really think of one thing I like about that airport. Arriving in St. Petersburg, I found a cold, unhelpful immigration official who stopped me for no reason I could gather. Her supervisor eventually showed up, made a phone call and cleared me. I suppose immigration officers all over the world aren't that different after all.

Getting to the hotel was easy. I took a minibus from the airport for just over a dollar and it dropped me a block from the hotel. The driver was a 22-year old Uzbek. He spoke English so we chatted for a while. He doesn't like the weather in St. Petersburg and hopes to move to America some time. I told him I couldn't employ him but I'd be glad to hear from him by e-mail if he ever makes it. He noticed I was carrying a copy of The Master and Margarita and mentioned it was one of his favorite books. And he told me that racism was in fact a noticeable problem in Russia.

I spend the afternoon at the Russian Museum. I thought I had three hours to spend there, but my watch being on Helsinki time deceived me, so I only got two hours there and didn't see about a third of the collection. In the evening, my hosts took me and a few other guests to a tango concert of songs and quintet pieces by Astor Piazzolla. The ensemble was good, although the amplification was a bit overdone. The singer had as much verve as one could ask for, but with all the singing being in Spanish, I thought about how nice it would have been to know better Spanish. I bought one of the CDs by the quintet though. Though I thought of getting it autographed, I forgot about that by the end of the concert. I suppose my tiredness got to me.

Day 2:
Got up at noon, which was disappointing. Definitely going to set my alarm tonight so it doesn't happen again.

It was sunny today and a bit less cold than yesterday so I headed out with a sweater but no jacket. After a quick visit to a cybercafe I caught a minibus to the palace grounds at Peterhof. Unfortunately the grand palace there is closed on Mondays, but the grounds were open and the fountains are the main attraction anyway, especially this one. That large Samson fountain on the right shoots water about 20 metres in the air. There are many other fountains in the park though. Also, there was a surprise appearance by a four-person mallet percussion ensemble whose rendition of the third movement of Vivaldi's Spring was surprisingly tasteful.

The highlight of the evening was a meal at the Armenian restaurant across the canal from my hotel. Now I'm off to bed.

One Art

2009-12-09T09:57:00.001-05:00

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

How to Bring Explosives into Bombay Airport (or at least bypass Bombay Airport Security) with a $20 Bribe

2009-11-28T11:55:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately as I was entering the airport a few minutes ago I realized that I forgot to bring a printout of my e-ticket, so I was stopped at the entrance gate. It's standard procedure at Bombay to only allow entrance to people with an airline ticket, which is inadequate because if you're a terrorist with an agenda you can (a) buy a cheap plane ticket and get in or (b) take an old e-ticket and modify the html to make it look like a current ticket.

However, let's assume for the sake of the plot that you don't bring an e-ticket printout, as I did. I asked the security guard what I should do and in typical Indian babu style, he said there was nothing I could do. Then he changed his mind and said talk to security guard #2 who has access to the passenger lists. So I accompany security guard #2 to the passenger list and find my name on it, only to find out that the guard isn't actually interested in verifying that my name is on the list. He's interested in a cash bribe. Seriously. So I pulled out a $20 bill, which in retrospect is stupid because of the 500 rupee bill that I also had. Twentyu dollars was enough to get me in.

P.S. If you're looking for the guard in question, he's the sardarji at the entrance to gate A tonight.

Rome Wasn't Built In a Day But This Mosque In Ajmer

2009-11-18T08:14:00.002-05:00

Is called the Two-And-A-Half Day Building. There are two explanations for the name, the less plausible one being that it was built in 2.5 days. There's a festival that lasts 2.5 days and that's probably what gave it this name.

It's architecturally more interesting than the big religious monument in Ajmer, the Dargah, although the Dargah has more religious importance. The Dargah is the most important Islamic shrine in India, according to at least one guidebook.

Before visiting these two shrines we visited a bizarre yet awe-inspiring Jain temple, which featured a mini world inside it made out of gold. It depicts stories in the life of a Jain saint, but it looks like one of those giant Lego cities that people used to build. Here's a good photo. And another that shows that the whole structure is two stories tall.

After lunch, which included real biryani at Jannat, Mom went back to the hotel and I climbed a hill to get to Taragarh Fort. I thought the fort would be typically Indian--not much at the top except tourists. It turns out there's a pilgrimage site at the top so there are stalls all along the trail selling quack religious cures. There are old loudspeakers on each stall with recordings spouting out stuff like:"Does your child have bad dreams? Does your child wake up in the middle of the night? Use this magical necklace. Two for five rupees; four for ten." I suppose you have to buy two in case the first one is defective and not covered by a warranty. The shrine at the top of the fort is worth a visit but you will be asked for money by a couple of religious people and you won't get a receipt, which is unlike the shring at the bottom of the hill, the aforemention Dargah, where all donations are recorded.

I descended the hill using a different trail which was mostly paved so it took only 25 minutes or so. I liked the views along the ascent more but during the descent, I believe I saw the elite prep school east of town, which is referred to as the Eton of the East.

Incidentally Ajmer gets very few Western tourists. I saw fewer than ten today. I did find one at the precise moment at which I needed to look at the Lonely Planet map of Ajmer, though.

Tonight we're taking a train to Jaipur.

28 Hours in Udaipur Without Any James Bond

2009-11-17T10:37:00.002-05:00

A lot of hotels in Udaipur have a daily or a non-stop showing of Octopussy, which was mostly filmed here. Somehow I missed out on this, so I will have to go to netflix and put the dvd on the top of my queue. I did enjoy this city and I wish I could spend another day here. Unfortunately I have to get on a train that arrives in Ajmer at 3.45 am. Ugh. Not even sure whether Ajmer is worth visiting at this rate, but we have a reservation so that's that.

My goof for the day was setting my camera to take low-res pics and forgetting to reset it back to high-res. So some of my best sunset pics are lowish res now. Oh well I do have more spare memory on my card, which is good.

For some good pics of Udaipur taken by other people, see www.flickr.com/groups/udaipur/

In Udaipur Tonight

2009-11-16T10:21:00.002-05:00

The morning in Jodhpur went well with a visit to Umaid Palace followed by shopping. The palace itself looked squat from the outside and wasn't very impressive except for its size. The interior however featured some worthwhile objets d'art including some of the most fascinating clocks I've ever seen.

The shopping trip including stops at a textile store and three antique shops. The first two had good collections and I ended up buying a small card box from one. The third was more like a warehouse of everything one could possibly fit under one roof.

For lunch we went to Bollygood restaurant, where we ended up getting to know the owners of the restaurant and adjoining hotel. They were both very gracious. I also got a tour of the hotel. The furnishings were quite interesting, especially in the honeymoon suite.

In the late afternoon we flew to Udaipur. The flight arrived on time but the ride to the hotel took some time due to traffic. When we finally got to the hotel the sun had set but we still got a view somewhat like this.

Still in Jodhpur, the Blue City

2009-11-15T13:08:00.002-05:00

I had a delightful day, which is more than I can say for the previous days on this trip. Of course this is only one of three days on this itinerary on which I'm not in transit, which makes it more peaceful. Tomorrow I'm flying to Udaipur, which has a lake.

We got off to a late start but spent four hours or more at the Mehrangarh Fort(pic pic pic) , which was more interesting than the Bikaner and Jaisalmer forts and had better views too. I'm glad I saw those two forts before I saw this one. (Not that I'm recommending skipping B and J if you're ever in Rajasthan. In fact, you could visit Pokaran too and have a P,B and J.)

After the descent we also saw the clock tower; the pic that I link to shows the full glory of the market around the tower. And we had some desserts at a small sweet shop that The Lonely Planet recommended.

In the evening we had dinner at the Mehran fort restaurant--somewhat expensive yet paling in comparison to the Umaid Taj place only a few miles away, where you have to pay about USD 70 per person just to get into the restaurant. We were the only ones at Mehran, so it was very peaceful and the food was commendable.

Incidentally, there's a tight rickshaw mafia in Jodhpur so rickshaw drivers get into extended discussions though not necessarily heated ones with other rickshaw drivers about who "owns" you as a customer. All of this is sort of comical because many rickshaws are awfully slow around here and you'd think they'd focus their energy on the slowness problem. I swear I could outrun pretty much any rickshaw in this city; I miss the rickshaws in Pune.

Tomorrow I'm flying to Udaipur, the Octopussy city. I'm looking forward to looking at a lake instead of a desert.

In Jodhpur

2009-11-14T13:22:00.002-05:00

Ah, so much to write about, so little time. Yesterday morning my mother and I took a quick tour of the havelies in Jaisalmer and then went on a camel safari in the evening. The safari included a couple of visits to village in the desert, one of which was the hometown of our driver. The campfire at the end was enjoyable, but would have been better had it not been cloudy outside. It even drizzled. In the desert. Seriously. I did see some stars before the clouds covered the entire sky though.

This morning my mother and I toured Bada Bagh and a couple of Jain temples in the outskirts of Jaisalmer. We also saw a tiny but scenic lake. It was cloudy today too but we had some interludes of sunshine.

The train journey to Jodhpur was mostly pleasant. There were a bunch of really loud college students on the train but they tired themselves out by about 8 pm. The train itself got to the first Jodhpur station on time, but then stayed there for 45 minutes. We had to exit at the second Jodhpur station, so we got to our hotel fairly late. Ratan Vilas appears to be a very comfortable hotel though, so it's a nice change.

In Jaisalmer

2009-11-12T08:01:00.000-05:00

A> Jaisalmer is really cold. The train journey here was really unpleasant because it was freezing. Even the Germans on the train were complaining about the cold
B> The Artist Hotel in Jaisalmer is an interesting concept (in that it supports musicians), but it has a LOT of problems.
C> The fort in Jaisalmer is gorgeous
D> I need to get back to the hotel before it gets too cold outside

Q. How Do I Unintentionally Avoid Indians in Rajasthan

2009-11-10T06:35:00.002-05:00

A. Pick your hotel from Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide.

Demographic trends at tourist attractions in Jaipur:
Jantar Mantar: mostly Indians
City Palace: mostly Western Europeans
Hotel Pearl Palace: mostly Scandinavians
Hawa Mahal: mostly nobody

We started out by visiting Hawa Mahal, which was surprisingly empty. We hired a tour guide who said that the recession and H1N1 were responsible for driving tourist away. "How many cases of H1N1 does Rajasthan have?" I asked. "Oh, 60% of the cases in India are in Rajasthan," he replied. Awkward silence.

Later he mentioned that the Mumbai terrorist bombings were also a factor. Jantar Mantar and The City Palace seemed reasonably crowded, though, so I suppose all is not lost. We had lunch at Ganesh Restaurant, which sits on the old city wall. The kitchen is open so you can see how much oil (answer: a lot) goes into the food. They have a real clay oven and the garlic nan that came out of it was one of the best I've ever had.

Afterwards we struggled to find some form of motorized transportation to a nearby fort, and upon failing, decided to take a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel. Cycle rickshaws are quite popular here; it's odd because you'd think they'd be impossible to drive in the summer heat in Jaipur. Incidentally, they're single-geared.

Now we're just killing time until our 9pm train to Bikaner. I've never been on an overnight train journey before, so I hope I can fall asleep.

And We're Off

2009-11-09T11:38:00.002-05:00

My mother and I took the early express train to Bombay too. (Don't let 'express' fool you; it still takes three hours to traverse 220km.) On the plus side you don't have diesel fumes bothering you, so it is better than the expressway.

After arriving we spent some time at the house of a family friend--which was memorable because Mr. M said "How old are you", paused and then said "OK I'm not going to ask you the next question: when are you getting married." We left for the airport at about 1.50 which was plenty of time for the 3.30 flight. And we got the airport and checked in for our 3.30 flight. And we sat near the checkin counters for a while because we figured we had plenty of time before our 3.30 flight. And then my Mom noticed that our departure time on the TV screen was 2.30. AAAARGH! Why does Indian Airlines not email people when they change their schedules. Well we got on the flight in time, although we were paged and it was extremely cringeworthy to hear my mother and me referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Martin.

Now we're in Jaipur at this place, which is quite comfortable although my Mom has found about fifteen things to complain about in the last two hours. We stopped at the Birla Temple on the way to the hotel. The Birlas are the Indian equivalent of the Rockefellers, and they sponsored this temple. It's unusual not only for the stained glass but also because in one corner of the exterior they have statues of non-Hindu figures including Jesus and Socrates. Somehow Confucius ended up next to the Madonna and Child.

Tomorrow we're off to see the City Palace and other Jaipur sights.

Here We Go Again

2009-10-22T14:30:00.001-04:00

I'm going to resurrect this blog, since Facebook character limits are a bit of a problem and Facebook notes just seem too obscure. So here we go.

En Guatemala

2008-11-20T12:27:00.001-05:00

I'll be off to Guatemala in two days so my blog will rise again and I will be updating it with my misadventures, just as I did for my Morocco trip. Stay tuned.

Atlanta's Most Walkable Neighborhoods - Walk Score Neighborhood Rankings

2008-07-20T19:19:00.000-04:00

Atlanta's Most Walkable Neighborhoods - Walk Score Neighborhood Rankings:

1 Five Points 95
2 Poncey-Highland 93
3 Sweet Auburn 88
4 Midtown 87
5 Atlanta-Inman Park 86
6 Old Fourth Ward 84
7 Downtown 81
8 Virginia-Highland 80
9 Home Park 76
10 Cabbage Town 74

I just found this through Atrios's post about walkable neighborhoods in Philly. I'md a bit surprised that Decatur isn't here, although it technically falls outside the city of Atlanta, so that could be why. Having worked downtown, I'm very surprised that Downtown is more walkable than Va-Hi. Having lived in Home Park in the late 90s, I also consider it about 20 points behind Virginia Highland, not a mere 4 points.(I'm also pretty certain that they mean Little 5 Points, not Five Points, although even native Atlantans get those two mixed up.)

Will you please 'stop'?

2008-04-15T11:39:00.003-04:00

The BBC web team has been using quotation marks inappropriately for about a decade now, but somehow I find this instance even more irritating than usual.

BBC World Service - Documentary Archive

2008-03-22T19:37:00.000-04:00

BBC: The Kids Who Ran Iraq
I always thought one of the oddest aspects of the Iraq war was the appointment of 20-something to senior positions in the Iraq provisional authority. So I'm looking forward to listening to this from the BBC. Their blurb:

After the invasion of Iraq in 2003 hundreds of young American recruits were sent by Washington to help run the Coalition Provisional Authority, the body set up to administer Iraq. The CPA's tenure was widely criticised, as were its staff who, critics say, were simply political appointees with little or no experience relevant to the massive task they faced. Five years on Pascale Harter speaks to some of the so-called Brat Pack of US recruits to find out if they feel proud of what they achieved.

Last Day in Morocco

2008-03-17T18:50:00.003-04:00

Well I had a somewhat frustrating day. The two things I most wanted to see were both closed. First, I wanted to start the day by visiting the Archaeological Museum, which was hard to find since neither the taxi driver nor anyone in that neighborhood seemed to know where it was. I had to get out of the taxi and walk around for a while only to run into the same taxi driver again who pointed me the right way after he figured it out. But the museum was closed.

I then visited the Kasbah des Oudaias, where I was hassled quite a bit at the entrance, but I made it through the gauntlet and enjoyed a visit to the Jewelry museum, Andalusian gardens and le plateform. I noticed a few men dressed up as Gnaoui musicians who were trying to make money by posing for pictures with them. It's the second time I've noticed fake Gnaoui musicians in Morocco--the first time was in a kitschy restaurant in Fes. Anyhow I gave in to the temptation to get a picture with them.

I then visited the never completed Hassan Mosque and the neighboring mausoleum. After that I visited the chellah, which is an odd multi-cultural site with Roman ruins next to mosque ruins. After that I went to Sale, the neighboring town, hoping to get to the medersa before it closed at 4:30. Unfortunately the gardien left early for the day since tourist traffic is somewhat low. I was really looking forward to seeing the medersa, since medersas seem to be the most interesting buildings in Morocco. I wound up taking a long walk around the medina and then strolling across the bridge to Rabat while the sun set over the ocean. The beauty of the sunset resolved the tension of the day, but I did end up lost once I crossed the bridge. Fortunately a taxi wasn't too far off.

While in Sale, I had a pastry binge and after dinner here I had another one. I think I like traditional Moroccan pastries more than French ones, especially since they're similar to Indian nut-based pastries.

Meknes and Rabat

2008-03-16T19:30:00.002-04:00

On my second day in Meknes I explored the medina. I did get hassled my a couple of people and more so at the end of the day, including one "guide" who wanted a 50 dirham tip for showing me around a two room "museum" that was a carpet shop.

I took a long walk from the southern end of the medina to the imperial city, and then returned to the medina and walked to its northernmost point from where I had a gorgeous view of the hills north of the city. Then I walked all the way back to the square, which, as the Rough Guide points out, is a bit like a small Djemma al Fna. The two major sites of interest that I saw today were the Bou Inania medersa of Meknes and the Mausoleum of Moulay Ismail.

I was worried about catching the train to Rabat on time, but I was one time and the train was delayed so everything worked out fine.

I was able to post a few pictures to flickr but then something happened to the memory card reader on the pc.

More Photos Uploaded

2008-03-16T19:06:00.001-04:00

At my flickr page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrismartin76/

In Meknes Now

2008-03-15T18:49:00.002-04:00

And life is good. I visited Moulay Idriss and Volubilis today. In the evening visited another hammam and got another massage, although this was not quite as severe as the last one. Maybe Islamist terrorists just need to visit hammams more and they wouldn't be so uptight.
Since I'm not staying in the medina here, I have a lot of bakeries in the area, as is typical in the ville nouvelle of every Moroccan city. It's criminal how little pastry eating I've done while here so I made up for it a little after dinner tonight with some cookies and caramel mousse at a local cafe. Will try to get some more over the next three days.

Second Day in Marrakech

2008-03-14T14:19:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was a casual day in which I tried to visit just two museums, but failed at both, which was not a big deal because I mainly wanted to walk around the market anyway. I did twist my ankle just outside the Belghazi museum, which was supposed to be open but was not, and although it didn't hurt at the time, it hurts a lot right now. Fortunately I was able to get a bandage and some ointment for it. I had one of the most lavish dinners of my life at La Maison Bleue last night. There were two Gnaoui musicians there along with an oud player.

Tonight I will probably have dinner at Palais Medina, which has somewhat louder entertainment. I hope it's worthwhile. It was recommended by my tour guide, who, I'm sure, gets some commission from this. I was hoping to hire Jai Chater Rachid as my tour guide based on a recommendation in a book, but Rachid is now in Marrakech, so I hired someone recommended by him named. Hassan. While Hassan was great at navigating the medina, he wasn't as acquainted with the historical and cultural details that I had hoped to hear more about. We saw virtually every site of importance in the medina. Unfortunately one of the two major medersas was closed. But Medersa Bou Inania was lovely.

Tomorrow morning I have to catch a train to Meknes. It's only about 40 minutes away.

From Marrakech to Fes

2008-03-13T07:18:00.002-04:00

Although my hotel in Fes has rather seedy rooms, I'm elated to find a cybercafe here with English keyboards.

It's 11 in the morning and I should be out looking at stuff but it's a good time to relax since I've been walking almost nonstop for the last seven days. It feels like I've spent 20 days in Morocco even though I arrived at 9 am last Thursday. I hired a guide to take me around Old Fes and New Fes tomorrow so I might just see a few smaller museums today and enjoy the cuisine.

Yesterday morning I took a rapid walk through the medine to see the four major sights that were pending on my itinerary--Palais El-Badi, the Bahia palace, the Saadian tombs, and the Dar Si-Said museum. Both the El-Badi and Bahai palaces were grand, but I enjoyed the other two sights more, especially since I love Moroccan doors and ceilings and the Saadian tombs and Dar Si-Said had splendid ones. I was also thankful to have both the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guides at hand. The Rough Guide noted that the gardien at the minbah at El-Badi might let you past the barricade if you are really nice; this is actually true.

I thought my Fes train departed at 2 so I got to the station at 1.30. It was actually a 3 o'clock train, but arriving early was good nonetheless because the availability of the Carte Fidelite, the discount card, is erratic and it gae me time to find the manager who issues those cards. I took a quick trip to the Menara gardens between 2 and 3; it was a bit too hot to enjoy the walk through the garden, but the pool was refreshing.

The train journey was quite pleasant; the trains are much cleaner than in India, bu the vibe is similar. People are friendly and share food. I shared the compartment with a stewardess, a businessman, and a couple of other people. Most of them spoke some English and I received some general advice on French pronunciation once again.

I'm not sure what I'll do today. I hired a guide to take me around the Fes medina tomorrow so I may explore a few smaller museums today and also get a hammam with a massage.

Photos Uploaded

2008-03-13T07:10:00.000-04:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrismartin76/

Darwin award for moi

2008-03-11T19:02:00.008-04:00

I decided to go to Imlil in the mountains today and everything got off to a good start since I found a grand taxi to take me there in about one and a half hours. Started a hike down a trail and didn't realize that I reached the end of that trail so accidentally ended up continuing about another five km until I finally realized I was about a third of the way up Jebel Toubkal, Morocco*s highest mountain. Feel like this deserves a Darwin award of some sort.
Needless to say I was quite exhausted but not ready to quit so I hired a guide and a mule with muleteer to take me on another trail, but mule riding especially on the steep slopes and waterfalls was terrifying--in a good way.
Got a taxi ride back to Mkech. As expected the driver refused to let me put on my seat belt since Allah controls our fates. Fortunately he was a nice conversationalist and didn't fall asleep behind the wheel.

Day 4 in Morocco

2008-03-10T18:29:00.002-04:00

Today has been a long and not entirely pleasant day. After discovering that I had travelers diarrhea, which incidentally comes right after travelers checks in a guide book index, I found myself getting assaulted by unnecessary tour guides again, and I ended up taking two detours. I'm pretty certain at this point that any Moroccan in the medina who starts talking to me is trying to make some money. I visited the major synagogue in the mellah as well as the Jewish cemetery. My "guide" suggested a 20 Dh tip for the (Muslim) caretaker of the synagogue, but a 5 Dh tip for the (Jewish) caretaker of the cemetery. Not sure if I should read too much into that.

I also visited the Jardins Majorelle, a rather large garden created by a French painter. It was a lovely break from the craziness of the medina. After getting lost on the way back though and doing far too much walking I discovered that my BoA debit card was getting rejected at every ATM here. I tried six ATMs and finally figured they had cut me off because of suspicious activity because I hadn't told them in advance that I'm going to Morocco. Fortunately I could call them with Skype which was especially nice given the 20 minute hold time.

The highlight of the evening was a hammam bath and massage. It was very good although I do think the masseuse came pretty close to tearing a ligament. Rested at the hotel for a while and considered spending tomorrow night in the mountains, but figured it wouldn't be worth the trouble. Besides I can get away from the craziness of the medina in my hotel courtyard. Even though it's just yards away from the main drag, it's quite peaceful. Had dinner at Argana overlooking the square. Ordered a pigeon pastille. Finally, took a walk through the Djemma, but at 10 pm there's not as much activity there. Of course, that's a good thing in some ways, but I was hoping to see the full range of entertainment.

So I'm off for a day trip to the mountains tomorrow; I will have to start the day by shaking off the Hindi-speaking hustler who has been shadowing me all day.

In Marrakech

2008-03-09T17:34:00.002-04:00

Arrived in Marrakech. Walked, walked, walked so I desperately need to lie down for a while. Some of the things I heard about this place are certainly true--nearly everyone is trying to make money by being a tour guide or even just giving you directions. The food stall owners in the square are creative however---they speak Hindi to attract Indian customers and they actually have a passable vocabulary and good pronunciation. The fresh fruit here doesn't look quite as fresh as that in Casa but I got some dried apricots. I also got some spice mixes from a place that looked like the Ikea of Berber pharmacies. To see pics --by other people-- of the three most interesting sights I saw today, go to flickr and search for musee du marrakech, marrakech medersa, and koubba ba'adiyn.

First day in Casablanca

2008-03-07T14:10:00.002-05:00

Arrived in Casablanca
Got cheated by a cab driver on the way to the hotel
The hotel is great. The bellboy showed me how to get CNN international on the TV. I guess I can't really get away from Atlanta
Walked around and saw lots of art deco
Went to the precarious top of the cathedral bell tower
Tried twice but failed to catch a train to El Jadida
Ended up taking a taxi to the remote suburban Jewish museum instead, which was small but great--the only Jewish museum in an Islamic country. Great cab driver too. Taught me a little French.
Could not find a taxi back to the town center-don't know if it's part of the Jewish suffering experience.
Ended up hitching a ride on a moped which brought back memories of India. Driver said "Shah Rukh Khan" when I said "je suis Indien." Thus total time between arriving and hearing "Shah Rukh Khan": 8.5 hours.
Stepped into the medina and immediately got approached by a hustler who was reasonably interesting but got me to buy two things I didn't need. Learned some useful Arabic from him though and killed an hour or so. Then he ended up begging which was just absurd.
Then got a book to help me learn some French. There was actually one available here despite what would seem like a lack of demand.
Had a decent shawarma for a snack and now heading to the hotel for dinner. Will probably start the day tomorrow by visiting Hassan II mosque followed by El Jadida and maybe Azzemour.
Getting used to using Internet Explorer and Windows in French. Not too hard.

Repeal Prohibition of Sunday Sales of Alcoholic Beverages at Stores in the State of Georgia Petition

2008-02-19T14:33:00.000-05:00

Repeal Prohibition of Sunday Sales of Alcoholic Beverages at Stores in the State of Georgia Petition
I'm not terribly optimistic this will work, but it might.

Criminal Records, Atlanta, GA

2008-02-09T01:11:00.000-05:00

If 2004 was the year of Modest Mouse and Danger Mouse...

From the top 100 sellers this week at Criminal Records
#7 CAT POWER - JUKEBOX
#9 STEVENS, CAT - HAROLD AND MAUDE - SOUNDTRACK

Google SketchUp - Home

2008-02-08T16:55:00.000-05:00

Google SketchUp
Something I would try out if I have the time. It's a CAD system that looks like it woulud be helpful if you get tired of the limitations of the IKEA one.

The Autumn of the Multitaskers

2008-02-08T13:09:00.000-05:00

The Autumn of the Multitaskers by Walter Kirn in the Atlantic "Humans just sort of did stuff. And what they did was not influenced by metaphors about what they ought to be capable of doing but very well might not be equipped for (assuming you wanted to do it in the first place), like editing a playlist to e-mail to the lover whose husband you’re interviewing on the phone about the movie he made that you’re discussing in the blog entry you’re posting tomorrow morning and are one-quarter watching certain parts of as you eat salad and carry on the call." (hat tip, Mind Hacks, which also has a link to this article on the cognitive psychology of film

Media Matters - Gone with the wind

2008-02-06T13:23:00.000-05:00

Policy Differences: Clinton/Obama

From Altercation:

Speaking of saturation election coverage, when you're waiting for Super Tuesday returns tonight, instead of watching the 52 different screens in The Situation Room or listening to a Hardball panel ponder all the reasons Hillary may express emotion, here are five articles to read about the candidates that might tell you something useful:
Ezra Klein on Clinton and Obama's differing visions on how to fix the economy, from the The American Prospect.
Mark Schmitt, also in the The American Prospect, on Clinton and Obama's very different ideas of the presidency as an office.
Obama v Clinton: Who's Greener? from The Nation.
Timothy Noah's breakdown in Slate of Clinton's and Obama's respective health-care plans, here and here.

Books of 2007

2008-02-04T22:51:00.001-05:00

UPDATE--added authors' names

I reviewed some best-of-2007 lists published by newspapers and magazines, specifically the ones that didn't go on and on, and tabulated which books appeared on more than two lists. Here, dear reader, are the results. I would advise caution. I watched a couple of stupefying independent films last year because they had the highest average reviews on Metacritic. In fact, I'm quite sure I'm going to avoid the Ann Pratchett book below.

These books appeared on five lists:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson

Four lists:
On Chesil Beach: A Novel by Ian McEwan

The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Roberto Bolano

And three lists:
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

Run by Ann Patchett

The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer

The Shadow Catcher: A Novel by Marianne Wiggins

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon

Then We Came to the End: A Novel by Joshua Ferris

If you're curious, the periodicals I reviewed were the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post (which cheated and published two such lists), the LA Times, the NY Times, BookSense, the Economist, Entertainment Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Seattle Times.

bubbl.us - free web application for brainstorming online

2007-11-26T12:29:00.000-05:00

bubbl.us - free web application for brainstorming online
I found this on PC Magazine's list of great 2007 web sites. It's similar to the Brain, if you know what that is.

Fimoculous.com: 2007 Lists

2007-11-25T16:48:00.000-05:00

It's only November, but Fimoculous has already begun compiling his 2007 List of Lists. Notable in the Best Albums articles such as this Ann Powers one are the appearance of the MIA album, which is a first for a South Asian. (Unfortunately I don't actually like her music, but she's still more a more notable South Asian to me than, say, Bobby Jindal, whose anti-evolutionist beliefs are depressing.)
Also the Powers list is Bruce Springsteen's Magic, which was produced in Atlanta and features session musicians from the Atlanta area including several members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Classical Music - ArkivMusic

2007-11-23T11:43:00.000-05:00

ArkivMusic is offering $3.95 shipping for unlimited items which is not a bad deal considering they also have Brilliant Classics CDs on sale, so you could get the Mozart Complete Works (170 CDs) for 140 dollars plus a few dollars in shipping.

Skylab � Blog Archive � Darth Vader in Love

2007-11-20T15:23:00.000-05:00

Skylab � Blog Archive � Darth Vader in Love

Catalog Choice - Eliminate unwanted catalogs you receive in the mail

2007-11-12T14:34:00.000-05:00

Catalog Choice -

Here's a way to eliminate unwanted catalogs you receive in the mail. It's free but limited to catalogs unlike 41pounds.org which allegedly eliminates all junk but charges you $41.

what is typography? movie - data visualization & visual design - information aesthetics

2007-11-01T13:14:00.000-04:00

what is typography? movie
Less than 2 minutes long, this movie is a great example of condensation.

WebRunner - MozillaWiki

2007-10-24T10:26:00.000-04:00

I just found WebRunner thanks to a post on DownloadSquad. It's a distraction-free browser. In other words, it has neither toolbars nor a URL bar. In fact it doesn't even have a status bar. So far I've found it useful for gmail and voo2do. It doesn't work well with Google Docs because every document opens in a new Firefox window.

2007-10-16T14:18:00.000-04:00

Where the Famines Are
I grew up hearing my parents say, "Don't leave food on your plate. There are kids starving in India." I did a double-take when I first heard the same injunction in America, although the country named was China. Now Organized Nomad explains the phenomenon in Starving Kids and Your Birthday.

2007-10-15T14:32:00.000-04:00

VHS vs. DVD
I realized while watching Ridicule this weekend that there's one thing I miss about VHS tapes. They keep playing even if they're scratched, unlike DVDs which can grind to a complete halt. The scratched bit on the Ridicule DVD began at the denouement of the film, but fortunately didn't completely halt the film until that scene was over. Still I now have to rent another copy of it to watch the closing scene, which won't have the same effect, because it won't come right after the denouement.

This Into That Gallery: Funniest

2007-09-13T14:53:00.000-04:00

Book Bookshelves
I found this through Kitabkhana. The link above goes to the funniest of the shelves, but the whole gallery is worth looking at.

2007-09-04T12:13:00.000-04:00

Apologies
I'm sorry that blogging has been light. I'm thinking of listening to a bunch of contemporary CDs in a marathon session and posting reviews of them until I cease to be coherent. In the mean time here's Greatest Classical CD Covers EVER? from Too Many Tristans.

2007-08-05T00:49:00.000-04:00

Non-Obvious and Counterintuitive
I knew a professor of psychology who was told by one of his professors that there are two general responses to findings in psychology: "That's obvious" and "That can't really be true." I think the classic can't-be-true experiment is the one on cognitive dissonance. Now comes an article in The Psychologist about other non-obvious findings in psychology and why they are non-obvious in the first place.

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: How many 'Doh!' moments does the average person have?

2007-07-12T17:37:00.000-04:00

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: How many 'Doh!' moments does the average person have?
I often wonder if I'm growing old too quickly because of the number of memory lapses I have, so this study is comforting. Healthy people commit an average of 6.4 “action slips” a week.

2007-07-03T19:23:00.000-04:00

Untouchables: My Family's Triumphant Escape from India's Caste System
by Narendra Jadhav

Untouchables is collage of memoirs by Dr. Narendra Jadhav and his parents. Although the title suggests a political slant, the book actually has a substantial set of stories revolving around family life and Indian village life. Jadhav's father was part of Babasaheb Ambedkar' s movement to eradicate untouchability, but he was just a leader on a local level, so his story is novel to those of us familiar with the great-man approach of history textbooks, Indian and otherwise.

The book's most poignant moments, which made it a worthwhile read for me, come in the parts where Jadhav describes the marriage of his parents, which, though arranged, was very successful. Despite their poverty, they did not seem to have disease or death to deal with, so the book as a whole doesn't have a tragic quality. In fact, the everyday stories are humorous and somewhat familiar to anyone who has spent anyone time among farmers or in villages in any part of the world. Moreover Jadhav's father was an adventurer in Mumbai a la Shantaram, albeit on a small scale, and his garrulity adds much spice to the central chapters.

The book is translated from Marathi by the author himself, who is now a renowned economist. Some Marathi words, such as Aiee (mother), are left untranslated for their endearing quality; a glossary will help non-native speakers translate these words.

Suburban Guerrilla � James Capozzola, 1962-2007

2007-07-03T19:16:00.000-04:00

James Capozzola, 1962-2007:

James's blog, The Rittenhouse Review, was on the very first blogroll I created back when I was just reading about five or ten blogs on a weekly basis. I took for granted that he would always be around, but now comes the news that he died after battling multiple illnesses.

From his own blog:
James Martin (Jim) Capozzola launched The Rittenhouse Review in April 2002, TRR: The Lighter Side of Rittenhouse, HorowitzWatch, and Smarter Andrew Sullivan in July 2002, and Bulldogs for Kerry-Edwards in October 2004. He is also a contributing member of President Boxer.

2007-07-02T13:27:00.000-04:00

Oswald 'had no time to fire all Kennedy bullets'
Blogging has been light lately what with all the other 2,546,504 bloggers out there doing a great job. In the mean time here's some interesting news about Oswald's rifle.

Jaipur to get 200 kids' computer education centres

2007-05-09T13:48:00.000-04:00

Jaipur to get 200 kids' computer education centres
Yes, that's 200 in just one city. Pretty amazing.