As you might know, most languages and cultures have swear words (or as we from the South like to call them, cuss words). There are lots of reasons people swear, we usually start off being shocking, and after a while it just becomes habit. Like the great Yoda once sort of kind of said “being shocking lets of steam, letting you might know, most languages and cultures have swear words (or as we from the South like to call them, cuss words). There are lots of reasons people swear, we usually start off being shocking, and after a while it just becomes habit. Like the great Yoda once sort of kind of said “being shocking lets of steam, letting off steam leads to habit, and habit…leads to Physioprof”.

But there’s no denying that swearing is usually deemed inappropriate for at least some kinds of society (like, you know, 5 year olds, your grandmother, etc). So people wonder what USE swearing has in certain contexts. Like, say, in pain. Why do people swear when they are in pain? Whatever happened to “ouch”? Or “AAAAARRRRRGHHHHHH”.

Well, these authors hypothesized that swearing as related to pain was actually a maladaptive response, one that occurred because, at the time of the pain, negative thoughts and emotions come to the fore. So they thought that swearing while someone was in pain would make the perception of the pain worse, making people more intolerant to pain. But of course, being scientists, you have to TEST it first.

So they…

http://scicurious.scientopia.org/2010/10/15/friday-weird-science-that-motherfking-hurts/

Last week, FiveThirtyEight published nearly 3 million tweets sent by handles affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll factory.” That group was a defendant in one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments, which accused the IRA of interfering with American electoral and political processes.

[…]

What follows is a sampling of reader projects that came to my attention via Twitter (where else?) and email. The projects reinforce and expand upon the Clemson researchers’ initial finding: The trolls were engaged in a sophisticated and intricate Russian assault on the political debate in America and several other countries. It was an assault waged both before and after the 2016 presidential election — and an assault that appears to continue, at least in some form, to this day.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-you-found-in-3-million-russian-troll-tweets/

Zuckerberg explained that when they come across content that contains Holocaust denial, they essentially remove it from all promotional algorithms to curb it’s spreading on the platform.

As a free-speech absolutist (please don’t mistake me for a constitutional originalist, I am not), I found the reaction extremely disturbing. Rather than seeing Twitter explode with conversations about the potential dangers of social network CEOs deciding what speech to promote and what not to, there was an outcry that Zuckerberg wasn’t doing enough to censor ‘fake news’.

The words extremely disturbing above might read as hyperbolic, especially in this particular context of censoring abhorrent, easily falsifiable claims like ‘the Holocaust didn’t happen’. But I don’t think are, decisions like this one by Facebook to censor Holocaust denial set a precedent that normalizes behavior (censorship) that can be used it far less benign in the future.

Make no mistake, I think fake news is a problem on Facebook and they do need to measures to prevent falsehoods from rapidly spreading and influencing elections, but I don’t think this is the answer.

You might think this precedent isn’t a big deal. It is censorship of things we almost universally agree to be false and damaging, so would a social network ever censor important, less controversial opinions? Things that, might actually be true? Well, we don’t even need to think up a hypothetical future situation —this is already happening on YouTube. That’s what makes this really scary.

Source: Stop begging social network CEOs for censorship – Sam – Medium

British sculptor Debbie Lawson works in the space between two and three dimensions, forming wild animals that emerge from old-fashioned rugs. The artist builds her animals from scratch, using chicken wire and masking tape, and then covers them with identical or near-identical Persian carpets to create the illusion that the creature is fused with the hanging rug.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/08/life-size-animals-emerge-from-persian-rugs-in-perception-defying-sculptures-by-debbie-lawson/

I’m nearly certain that I just saw a fox run across the street from my neighbor’s yard. It made my night; I hadn’t seen a fox in Asheville in maybe a decade. I start a new job on Monday, so I’m having fun imagining it to be an omen, and thinking about what foxes can signify…

Huh. Maybe?

Look at county-level maps of almost any closely contested presidential race in our history, and you see much the same fault lines: the swaths of the country first colonized by the early Puritans and their descendants — Yankeedom — tend to vote as one, and against the party in favor in the sections first colonized by the culture laid down by the Barbados slave lords who founded Charleston, S.C., or the Scots-Irish frontiersmen who swept down the Appalachian highlands and on into the Hill Country of Texas, Oklahoma and the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.

The Quaker-founded Midlands, the swing region of American politics that makes up a great swath of the heartland, has often been the physical and political buffer between rival regional coalitions, its pluralistic, community-oriented culture at peace neither with the Yankee’s utopian drive to engineer social improvements nor Southern culture’s emphasis on individual freedom above all else. It played the kingmaker’s role again in 2016.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/urban-rural-united-states-regions-midterms.html

Given social psychology’s poor track record on statistical techniques and research methods, I’m pretty skeptical. But this is an interesting idea:

The field of social psychology has recently embraced a psychophysical technique called “reverse correlation” that aims to do just that: To provide visual proxies of the content of mental representations. The reverse correlation method (or the “classification image technique”, as it has also been called) is a data-driven method that originated in the field of psychophysics and has its roots in signal detection theory and auditory perceptionp In signal detection paradigms, participants see stimuli that sometimes contain signal, and always contain noise. They respond to the presence of signal and their accuracy is computed based on their hits (correctly detecting the signal) and false alarms (mistakenly responding that signal was present). False alarms are particularly interesting cases, because participants might see signal in noise. The noise just happens to match the expected signal to some degree. Reverse correlation was invented to identify those features of the noise that trigger false alarms. Contemporary reverse correlation paradigms are essentially signal detection paradigms, but consist of stimuli for which the intended signal is not specified by the experimenter. The stimulus set is random and it is the participant who decides whether signal is present in a stimulus or not. This is why the technique is called “reverse correlation”: Tthe standard procedure where an experimenter specifies signal in stimuli for participants to identify is reversed.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2017.1381469

http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/dwell/

We exist in a feedback loop with our devices. The upbringing of conversational agents invariably turns into the upbringing of users. It’s impossible to predict what AI might do to our feelings. However, if we regard emotional intelligence as a set of specific skills – recognising emotions, discerning between different feelings and labelling them, using emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour – then it’s worth reflecting on what could happen once we offload these skills on to our gadgets.

Interacting with and via machines has already changed the way that humans relate to one another. For one, our written communication is increasingly mimicking oral communication. Twenty years ago, emails still existed within the boundaries of the epistolary genre; they were essentially letters typed on a computer. The Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) could write one of those. Today’s emails, however, seem more and more like Twitter posts: abrupt, often incomplete sentences, thumbed out or dictated to a mobile device.

‘All these systems are likely to limit the diversity of how we think and how we interact with people,’ says José Hernández-Orallo, a philosopher and computer scientist at the Technical University of Valencia in Spain. Because we adapt our own language to the language and intelligence of our peers, Hernández-Orallo says, our conversations with AI might indeed change the way we talk to each other. Might our language of feelings become more standardised and less personal after years of discussing our private affairs with Siri? After all, the more predictable our behaviour, the more easily it is monetised.

https://aeon.co/essays/can-emotion-regulating-tech-translate-across-cultures

Goop knew what readers were clicking on, and it was nimble enough to meet those needs by actually manufacturing the things its readers wanted. When a story about beauty products that didn’t have endocrine disrupters and formaldehyde got a lot of traffic in 2015, the company started Goop by Juice Beauty, a collection of “clean” face creams and oils and cleansers that it promised lacked those things. When a story about “postnatal depletion,” a syndrome coined by one of the Goop doctors, did even-better-than-average business in 2017, it introduced Goop Wellness, a series of four vitamin “protocols” for women with different concerns — weight, energy, focus, etc. Goop says it sold $100,000 of them on their first day.

The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And then, of course, the more Goop was criticized: by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous — no, now it was dangerous. And elsewhere people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site — among them those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn’t find help in mainstream medicine.

With assaults coming from all sides, Goop began to dig its heels into the dirt, not only because dirt is a natural exfoliant and also contains selenium, which is a mineral many of us are lacking and helps with thyroid function. Now Goop was growing only more successful. Now Goop was a cause, and G.P. was its martyr.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/magazine/big-business-gwyneth-paltrow-wellness.html