Yuri van Gelder, Dutch gymnast, went out for a few to celebrate making the final. Apparently he got carried away and had some alcohol (shock! horror!) and came home at some time in the morning. So the Dutch team have sent him home, without allowing him to participate in the final. His behaviour sounds slightly irresponsible for an athlete in the Olympic final, but then again, if he got there and he’s good enough to perform drinking alcohol that’s his business. It’s not like he was doing anything illegal. And I can understand the urge to celebrate as well. this performance by the Dutch Olympic Sports Bond sounds like a reformed church Christian religious fanatic throwback.

Source: Van Gelder misdraagt zich in Rio en moet naar huis – Olympische Spelen 2016 | NOS

In comparing how well people read a square pie chart, a circular pie chart, a donut shaped pie chart or a bar chart, it turns out that people do worst on the bar and best on the square pie charts.

Source: A Reanalysis of A Study About (Square) Pie Charts from 2009 – eagereyes

D-PLACE – the Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment – is an expandable, open access database that brings together a dispersed body of information on the language, geography, culture and environment of more than 1,400 human societies. It comprises information mainly on pre-industrial societies that were described by ethnographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The team’s paper on D-PLACE is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

“Human cultural diversity is expressed in numerous ways: from the foods we eat and the houses we build, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we marry and the types of games we teach our children,” said Kathryn Kirby, a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Geography at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. “Cultural practices vary across space and time, but the factors and processes that drive cultural change and shape patterns of diversity remain largely unknown.

Source: Massive open-access database on human cultures created

D-place.org

In the first of the two studies, the researchers sought to determine which genes out of about a thousand might still be functioning in zebrafish and mice in the immediate days following death. To their surprise, the researchers found that hundreds of genes sprung back to life. Not only that, the activity of some of these genes actually increased. Most of these genes eventually gave up after about 24 hours, but some remained active for as much as four days after death. That’s surprising, to say the least.

The majority of these zombie genes were not random in terms of function. Each of them play an important role when an animal experiences some kind of trauma or illness. For example, some genes that were ramped up are responsible for stimulating inflammation and the immune system as well as for countering stress. Some genetic activity, like a gene that’s responsible for embryonic development, baffled the scientists. Noble suspects that this gene becomes active because the cellular environment in dead bodies must somehow resemble those found in embryos.

A new equation, showing how our happiness depends not only on what happens to us but also how this compares to other people, has been developed by UCL researchers funded by Wellcome.

The team developed an equation to predict happiness in 2014, highlighting the importance of expectations, and the new updated equation also takes into account other people’s fortunes.

The study, published in Nature Communications, found that inequality reduced happiness on average. This was true whether people were doing better or worse than another person they had just met. The subjects played gambles to try to win money and saw whether another person won or lost the same gambles. On average, when someone won a gamble they were happier when their partner also won the same gamble compared to when their partner lost. This difference could be attributed to guilt. Similarly, when people lost a gamble they were happier when their partner also lost compared to when their partner won, a difference that could be attributed to envy.

“Our equation can predict exactly how happy people will be based not only on what happens to them but also what happens to the people around them,” explains one of the study’s co-lead authors, Dr Robb Rutledge (UCL Institute of Neurology and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research). “On average we are less happy if others get more or less than us, but this varies a lot from person to person. Interestingly, the equation allows us to predict how generous an individual will be in a separate scenario when they are asked how they would like to split a small amount of money with another person. Based on exactly how inequality affects their happiness, we can predict which individuals will be altruistic.”

Source: Happiness equation: New equation reveals how other people’s fortunes affect our happiness

The selfies are accepted as collateral for loans up to 15,000 yuan – about US$2,200 – on a whopping 30 per cent rate of interest per week. That may, however, have to do with translation: China Daily says the interest rate is 30 per cent per year.

As well as the selfies, borrowers had to provide other forms of identity such as their student cards, and contact details for family members.

With the issue going public, PDO reports that lenders have been sending messages via Tencent’s QQ telling readers they’re no longer accepting nude photos.

Source: Chinese loan sharks seek salacious selfies as collateral

Tinder is discontinuing use of the app for everyone under the age of 18 starting next week, according to a statement from Tinder VP of Communications Rosette..

Source: Tinder discontinues service for users under 18

If you are held responsible for what happens during human interaction because you facilitate the meeting of the humans, there is something very wrong with the law.

A study into abusive tweets sent from UK Twitter accounts suggests large-scale misogyny, with women responsible for half of such tweets.

Source: Twitter abuse – ‘50% of misogynistic tweets from women’ – BBC News

And men for the other half.

The bill would make businesses come up with hours during which employees cannot check or send emails.

And it comes as workers are finding it increasingly difficult to detach themselves from work, Socialist MP Benoit Hamon told BBC News.

“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work,” he said.

“They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

[…]

A 2015 study from the Center for Creative Leadership, an executive education firm, Center for Creative Leadershipfound that employees who use smartphones end up working as much as 13.5 hours every day — and as many as 72 hours every week when you include weekends.

The research also found that people are only spending about three hours every day on activities such as working out and family time.

But subjects in that study didn’t blame technology for their extra work hours — they blamed their employers’ lousy time and people management.

“While technology may be a logical scapegoat, it is actually just a new-age mask for an age-old problem: poor management and poor leadership,” the report said.

Source: France Is Getting Closer To Banning After-Work Emails

Heatmap News gives you a quick overview of what is happening in the world right now. It provides a unique perspective by presenting the most important news stories from around the world on a map.

Source: Heatmap News

Here we show that intracortically recorded signals can be linked in real-time to muscle activation to restore movement in a paralysed human. We used a chronically implanted intracortical microelectrode array to record multiunit activity from the motor cortex in a study participant with quadriplegia from cervical spinal cord injury. We applied machine-learning algorithms to decode the neuronal activity and control activation of the participant’s forearm muscles through a custom-built high-resolution neuromuscular electrical stimulation system. The system provided isolated finger movements and the participant achieved continuous cortical control of six different wrist and hand motions. Furthermore, he was able to use the system to complete functional tasks relevant to daily living.

Source: Restoring cortical control of functional movement in a human with quadriplegia : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

The man managed to pour drinks, play guitar hero, swipe credit cards. Good stuff.

The answer to our world’s plastic pollution problem is here.[…]To show Ari doesn’t just talk a big game, he started studying the strengths and weaknesses of certain substances, eventually landing on a solution to our plastic problem made from algae.[…]If the bottle remains full of water it will keep its shape, as soon as it’s empty it starts to decompose – you couldn’t ask for a better alternative.

Source: A Student In Iceland May Have Just Saved The Planet

Charts of the 10 leading causes of death and injury by age group for the US

An interesting one is when you look at the unintentional injury chart you can see firearm related deaths high on the list at all ages. And people keep claiming it’s not guns that kill people!

We present a new human-computer interface that is based on decoding of attention through pupillometry. Our method builds on the recent finding that covert visual attention affects the pupillary light response: Your pupil constricts when you covertly (without looking at it) attend to a bright, compared to a dark, stimulus. In our method, participants covertly attend to one of several letters with oscillating brightness. Pupil size reflects the brightness of the selected letter, which allows us–with high accuracy and in real time–to determine which letter the participant intends to select. The performance of our method is comparable to the best covert-attention brain-computer interfaces to date, and has several advantages: no movement other than pupil-size change is required; no physical contact is required (i.e. no electrodes); it is easy to use; and it is reliable. Potential applications include: communication with totally locked-in patients, training of sustained attention, and ultra-secure password input.

Source: The Mind-Writing Pupil: A Human-Computer Interface Based on Decoding of Covert Attention through Pupillometry

When practicing and learning a new skill, making slight changes during repeat practice sessions may help people master the skill faster than practicing the task in precisely the same way, Johns Hopkins researchers report.

Source: Want to Learn a New Skill? Faster? Change Up Your Practice Sessions – 01/28/2016

Winning a competition engenders subsequent unrelated unethical behavior. Five studies reveal that after a competition has taken place winners behave more dishonestly than competition losers. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that winning a competition increases the likelihood of winners to steal money from their counterparts in a subsequent unrelated task. Studies 3a and 3b demonstrate that the effect holds only when winning means performing better than others (i.e., determined in reference to others) but not when success is determined by chance or in reference to a personal goal. Finally, study 4 demonstrates that a possible mechanism underlying the effect is an enhanced sense of entitlement among competition winners.

Source: Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior

The precise reasons that people see profundity in vague buzzwords or syntactic but completely random sentences are unknown. Some people might not realize the reason they don’t understand something is simply because there is nothing to understand. Or they might just approach things they hear and read less skeptically.

There are also a few characteristics that seem to correlate with those who are more prone to pseudo-profound language. Specifically, the researchers tested willingness to accept pseudo profound statements along with a host of other personality characteristics. As they describe:

Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions [beliefs in things for which there is no empirical evidence (i.e. that prayers have the ability to heal)] and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.

Source: Why people think total nonsense is really deep – The Washington Post

Beliefs about honesty seem to be driven by psychological features, such as self-projection. Surprisingly, people were more pessimistic about the honesty of people in their own country than of people in other countries. One explanation for this could be that people are more exposed to news stories about dishonesty taking place in their own country than in others

Source: Study finds honesty varies significantly between countries

Stanford sociologist Robb Willer finds that an effective way to persuade people in politics is to reframe arguments to appeal to the moral values of those holding opposing positions.[…]Conservative participants were ultimately persuaded by a patriotism-based argument that “same-sex couples are proud and patriotic Americans … [who] contribute to the American economy and society.”[…]”Moral reframing is not intuitive to people,” Willer said. “When asked to make moral political arguments, people tend to make the ones they believe in and not that of an opposing audience – but the research finds this type of argument unpersuasive.”

Source: New research shows how to make effective political arguments, Stanford sociologist says

In comparison with those who read the transcripts, the evaluators who heard pitches judged the candidates to have greater intellect (to be more rational, thoughtful, and intelligent), on average. They also liked the individuals more, had a more positive overall impression, and — perhaps most important — were more interested in hiring the candidates. Evaluators who saw the videos appeared to be even more favorably impressed, but there was no statistically significant difference between the evaluations of video and audio.

Source: The Science of Sounding Smart