LarsonsWorld -- just another persons /dev/null

Current social networks may have been present in the earliest modern humans -- Ars Technica

If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That's right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is, without the cars, the written language, and of course, the smartphone). In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other.

Modern human social networks share several features, whether they operate within a group of schoolchildren in San Francisco or a community of millworkers in Bulgaria. The number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected are all very regular across groups of people living very different lives in far-flung places.

So, the researchers asked, are these traits universal to all groups of humans, or are they merely byproducts of our modern world? They also wanted to understand the social network traits that allowed cooperation to develop in ancient communities

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Matt Bors -- 14 December 2011

The Cognitive Benefits Of Chewing Gum -- Wired

Chewing gum boosts mental focus, but the effect dies after about 20 minutes. Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explores the neuroscience behind this strange relationship.

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Researcher shows how to "friend" anyone on Facebook within 24 hours -- Ars Technica

If there's any doubt how social networks have presented hackers with a wealth of social engineering tools, a Brazilian security researcher recently demonstrated how he could "friend" even allegedly more wary Facebook users in less than 24 hours. At the Silver Bullet security conference in São Paulo, UOLDiveo chief security officer Nelson Novaes Neto showed how he leveraged LinkedIn, Amazon, and Facebook to convince a target—a Web security expert he called "SecGirl" using social engineering.

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How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect - Wired

The reason we're such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We're social animals, and our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.

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Are Smart People Getting Smarter? -- Wired

The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence -- such as performance on Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland -- have been increasing for at least 100 years. What’s most peculiar is how scores have increased:

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What Caricatures Can Teach Us About Facial Recognition -- Wired

Our brains are incredibly agile machines, and it's hard to think of anything they do more efficiently than recognize faces. Just hours after birth, the eyes of newborns are drawn to facelike patterns. An adult brain knows it’s seeing a face within 100 milliseconds, and it takes just over a second to realize that two different pictures of a face, even if they’re lit or rotated in very different ways, belong to the same person.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of our gift for recognition is the magic of caricature -- the fact that the sparest cartoon of a familiar face, even a single line dashed off in two seconds, can be identified by our brains in an instant. It’s often said that a good caricature looks more like a person than the person himself. As it happens, this notion, counterintuitive though it may sound, is actually supported by research. In the field of vision science, there’s even a term for this seeming paradox -- the caricature effect -- a phrase that hints at how our brains misperceive faces as much as perceive them.

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I found this a very interesting read. It's amazing how our brain is able to do, what we feel, is the most basic thing, but figuring out how to program a computer to do it is infinitely hard.

Study: why bother to remember when you can just use Google? -- Wired

In the age of Google and Wikipedia, an almost unlimited amount of information is available at our fingertips, and with the rise of smartphones, many of us have nonstop access. The potential to find almost any piece of information in seconds is beneficial, but is this ability actually negatively impacting our memory? The authors of a paper that is being released by Science Express describe four experiments testing this. Based on their results, people are recalling information less, and instead can remember where to find the information they have forgotten.

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A Digital Diet: Drop (Calls, Texting, Web) and Give Me 28 (Days of Peace) -- Wired

It was time for something drastic: detox. Sieberg quit all his social networks – his “primary poisons” – and began his own version of the digital diet, which would serve as the basis for the book. The detox phase might be the scariest, he admits, but it’s also just a tiny part of the whole plan. The point is to give people a chance to take a break, get some perspective, and start a discussion.

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Personally, I love just having a basic cell phone. Just phone calls and the occasional text. Of course, I do have a Acer Aspire One netbook that I tend to carry with me, but I still have to have WiFi for internet access. I did install Calibre on it, and thus, I can use it as an e-book reader.

Majority of Kids Would Rather Lose Their Sense of Smell Than Lose Facebook -- PCWorld

Do you value your Facebook profile? Do you value it enough that you'd give up one of your senses to secure access to the site? A new study reveals that 53 percent of young people (ages 16-22) would rather sacrifice their sense of smell than give up their social networks.

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