Recent wars, terrorist acts, and cartel beheadings notwithstanding, the overall trend is that peace is breaking out everywhere.

“The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

Liberal experts vs. conservative “experts”:

Increasingly, the parties are divided over expertise–with much more of it residing among liberals and Democrats, and with liberals and Democrats much more aligned with the views of scientists and scholars. More fundamentally, the parties are increasingly divided over reality itself: over what is actually true, not only about hard science but also social science and simple policy facts such as the contents of the health-care bill.

There’s no doubt these two divides are connected, but the relationship between them isn’t necessarily straightforward. It’s not as if all the brains are on one side, and there’s a total lack of them on the other. So before glorying in the fact that we have more facts, liberals might consider first blowing into an intellectual breathalyzer, to be sure we’re not too intoxicated by our own seeming brilliance. After all, one thing our expertise does not appear to be doing is bringing the country back from the brink of a fully postmodern and fact-free discourse.

Let’s hope so. The takeaway: the suburbs could become as arty, social, and income-generating as the cities, but they’d have to get a lot quirkier.

It’s probably bribery to bring them a snack, although science clearly shows it would work.

They’ve castrated a 78-year old child molester in Louisiana before his parole.

I hope they’re still going to watch this guy pretty closely, because castration is not a sure-fire cure for rapists:

That rate of recidivism in surgically castrated offenders is about the same as it for all sex offenders.

It’s feel-good politics to castrate, but for the most part, that’s all it is. The money could be better used for prevention.

A good essay on a topic loathed by the wingnutterati for some mysterious reason. The writer has attempted to be fair, and yet what still emerges is a portrait of a subculture of Americans whose idea of patriotism includes killing other Americans:

Many people have been justifiably outraged at the traditional media’s insistence that “both sides” use violent rhetoric. But since 1980 the numbers of deaths by right-wing terrorist numbers over 200, versus 4 by the left. In the interest of keeping this list indisputable I left off hate crime victims who were slain for their sexual orientation or race and ethnicity. If I had included them the numbers would have swelled. These are purely politically motivated or ideological based killings. The media loves to bring up the lefts militancy in the 1960’s and 1970’s. But during these decades the right was equally violent in the form of racial violence. But since the 1980’s the right has unquestionably been more violent than the left.

…I left off a number of hate crimes. Although in many (if not most) cases the perpetrators were motivated by right-wing ideology towards racial of religious minorities, or those with a different sexual orientation, drawing a direct POLITICAL motivation would be more tenuous.

Secondly, I left off a number of incidents were the right-wing militias didn’t initiate a terrorist act, but were engaged in a fire fight with law enforcement. Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Republic of Texas incidents fall into this category. Although violent, this list is intended to be a listing of TERRORIST ACTS, where the individuals and groups involved conceived and perpetrated the violence, rather than reacted to them. This also excludes incidents like the police bombing in Philadelphia of MOVE.

Attention reasonable Republicans: time to either take back your party or become Blue Dog Democrats. PS, climate change is real too.

Always fun, here we have the recent tale of a masked mystery man foiling a carjacking, complete with accusations that it was staged.

But the article gives a nice overview of the “Real Life Superhero” um, “movement”, and some of the drawbacks of the superhero approach:

an incident on November 4 where police responded to a scene where Jones and other apparent Movement members were in a stand-off with a man making threatening statements and swinging a golf club. The “costume-wearing complainants” declined to press charges, to prevent revealing their secret identities. As a result, The Club Swinger walked.

The Club Swinger. Nice.

Short version: because politics are involved, it is statistically likelier that the Swedish sex charges against him are trumped up (or at least selectively applied):

…we tend to get lost in the most immediate details and we forget the underlying context.

I was reminded about this recently when reading WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is wanted for questioning by Swedish authorities on charges that that he has committed sexual assault. People have spent a lot of time debating the details of the charges, which invoke a number of difficult questions about what constitutes consent during a sexual encounter. Commenters differ in their interpretations both about the facts intrinsic to the case and in their readings of Swedish law.

I certainly do not intend to resolve those debates, although they are by no means uninteresting or unimportant. What I would suggest, however, is that it would be a mistake, from the standpoint of Bayesian reasoning, to think we can separate out the merits of the charges from their political motivations.

There is virtually no chance that the case against Mr. Assange would have proceeded in quite the same manner if he were instead an itinerant painter named Jens Andersen, or a traveling salesman named John Andrews — instead of an internationally renowned provocateur. Indeed, the charges might not have been brought against Mr. Assange in the first place. Sweden has among the highest rates of reported rape cases in the European Union. But unfortunately, few cases are brought to trial (only between 10 and 20 percent, according to various reports), and fewer still result in convictions.

That alone might not tell us much. There are other ways, however, in which the behavior of the authorities has been quite unusual.

The initial warrant in the case against Mr. Assange had been issued in August. But it was  revoked the next day, due to what the lead prosecutor cited as a lack of evidence. It was only last month – just as WikiLeaks was preparing to release a set of confidential diplomatic cables – that Sweden again issued a warrant to detain him.

After turning himself in to the authorities in London, Mr. Assange was initially denied bail (although he has since been awarded it) — which is particularly unusual given that Swedish authorities have still not formally charged him with a crime, but merely want to bring him in for questioning. Most unusually still, Sweden had issued an Interpol red alert for Mr. Assange’s arrest, something they have done for only one other person this year accused of a sex crime: Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, who is suspected of multiple cases of sexual assault against children.

The handling of the case has been highly irregular from the start, in ways that would seem to make clear that the motivation for bringing the charges is political.

Does that mean, however, that the underlying charges themselves are spurious, trumped up, outright false, or otherwise dubious? (Some have speculated, for instance, that Mr. Assange may have been entrapped.) No, not for certain, of course — but it does have an impact on the probabilities.

And Nate Silver knows him some probabilities.

Oh snap.

There go his glorious dreams of being Sarah Palin’s VP.

Kos tells it like it is.

As per my quick Facebook post, there is quite a focus in the movie “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” on the bind-torture-kill brand of sociopathy. That got me reading Wikipedia about the BTK serial killer Dennis Rader who basically coined the term. There are several gonzo scientific aspects of this case that jump out at me:

1. The torture of animals as a young lad is indicative of sociopathy - that part is well-known I hope - but the name of the complex it’s a part of is called the Macdonald triad. I guess chronic bedwetting past age 5 is also a sign.

2. He had been a Lutheran for 30 years, president of his church, and Cub Scout leader. He was a Deacon when they arrested him. Positions of piety and authority are such excellent cover for evil, aren’t they?

3. He goofed when he asked the police in a letter if floppy disks could be traced, and then he believed them when they said no. So he sent them a floppy disk and they traced it to him.

4. The police didn’t have probable cause to arrest him until they got a warrant to get access to his daughter’s pap smear. DNA testing revealed she was related to the semen sample they had from the killer. This is when they popped Rader.

A horrifying scientific detective story.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a Bible-quoting BTK serial killer glibly explains, “It’s mostly about the sex. The murder is a logical consequence of the rape - there can be no witnesses.” Shudder…

TPM asks, “Which angry Tea Party candidate will be the first to throw a punch?”

Or will Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground do it first..?

…so I guess all these folks who said the wellhead had totally failed and the seafloor itself was about to collapse were full of shit then?

An in-depth examination of the possible selection pressures to account for psychopathology.

STATESVILLE, NC (WBTV) - A man who was with about a dozen people who were looking for a legendary “ghost train” in Iredell County was hit by a locomotive and killed early Friday morning. 

There’s a lesson in here somewhere…

Now available here as a Google Doc.

And when you’re done reading it you can have a nice hot cup of this:

This guy goes off in a hell of a riff about what the culture of the counter-cultural movement has become.

A snippet:

What I’m getting instead is the sense that we’ve hyped ourselves for a letdown, that what passes for the latter-day counterculture has traded its prankster roots for something resembling, umm, a culture, a culture complete with ritual, status, fashion, and prophecy.  The definition of counterculture accepted into the official lexicon generally has something to do with an oppositional culture rejecting the dominant culture.  Etymologically, however (and historically, for progenitors of the term are known to have said as much), counterculture means exactly what it states — the opposite of culture, all culture.  Despite McKenna’s ominous admonition that “culture is not your friend,” it’s unlikely that culture is necessarily your foe.  It’s just that, fundamentally, culture is an illusion of security, predictability, identity, and order, and is therefore inherently false.  Culture is useful, of course, and a constant human compulsion, but culture is an inevitable narrowing into a fixed perspective.  Counterculture, then, is the opposite of any such reduction of reality — Mayan or otherwise — from anything other than unbounded creative potential.  Counterculture, in other words, is the reveling chaos of relentless novelty that exists outside our social constructions, and as soon as we pretend to know what’s happening, it ceases to be counterculture and immediately becomes culture.

Dude’s name is Samuel A. Culvert and he’s also a PhD in clinical psychology. His 2008 WSJ article ”Get Rid of the Performance Review” caused some waves and so he wrote a book with a cheeky website.

This other guy, Frank Nikols, wrote an article in 1997 for Corporate University Review (pp.54-59) called “Don’t Redesign Your Company’s Performance Appraisal System, Scrap it.” Here’s his follow-up paper “Now What? What to do after you scrap the performance appraisal system” (pdf file).

I guess this heretical idea has been around a while. There’s a footnote in the Nikols’ pdf file for a “classic” article from the Harvard Business Review, Douglas Macgregor’s “An Uneasy Look at Performance Appraisals”, from 1957.

Here’s a fun bit from from Culver’s cheeky website:

I’ll never forget Oct 20th, 2008. That’s when the Wall Street Journal printed my exposé of performance reviews. It was a high-visibility article – and the response was electric. The article was the top-viewed piece on the Journal’s online site for days, produced a thousand letters to the editor, a heated debate on the site (with plenty of name-calling), was referenced on more than another hundred websites, generated scores of requests to reprint the article in its entirety and provoked a large number of requests for radio and TV interviews. View it for yourself. Overnight I became a rock star.

I also couldn’t have designed a better experiment to gauge how people feel about performance reviews. It was as if I had enlisted a giant focus group on a topic that everyone feels strongly about and few see much to gain by speaking up. More than 80 percent were supportive – and many of them reacted as if the article had been therapeutic, giving voice to the anger and fear they had long felt.

I sympathize. It was a wow moment for me.

…Here’s another book in the same vein…”Abolishing Performance Appraisals” by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins, 2000.

…and some Stanford professor saying the same thing. Here’s a successful model:

To Deming’s point, there is one organization I work with — a high tech firm with about 250 employees — that eliminated formal reviews except when people are being considered for a promotion or when they are having serious performance problems and are placed “on plan” (i.e., where the choice is either shape up or be fired). They have about ten different levels in the organization, and everyone at the same level gets the same pay and same sized bonus.  And they have been emphasizing more frequent and lower stakes feedback instead. 

Saw this linked on kos: endurance athelete needs to go crazy in order to win.

Yet Robic does not excel on physical talent alone. He is not always the fastest competitor (he often makes up ground by sleeping 90 minutes or less a day), nor does he possess any towering physiological gift. On rare occasions when he permits himself to be tested in a laboratory, his ability to produce power and transport oxygen ranks on a par with those of many other ultra-endurance athletes. He wins for the most fundamental of reasons: he refuses to stop.

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

The article is technically correct, but kind of misleading and reductionist in its message, which is what I have become all too used to in mainstream reporting.

“We found that in those patients who experienced the phenomenon, blood carbon-dioxide levels were significantly higher than in those who did not,” said team member Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, of the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

So they basically proved that NDE’s are linked to the brain thinking it is….near death. Bravo, guys. According to the authors of the article, they studied patients undergoing cardiac arrest. A good place to look for low CO2 levels. But as there is this hiccup in the work:

Still, not all scientists are convinced: “The one difficulty in arguing that CO2 is the cause is that in cardiac arrests, everybody has high CO2 but only 10 percent have NDEs,” said neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London.

What’s more, in heart attack patients, Fenwick said, “there is no coherent cerebral activity which could support consciousness, let alone an experience with the clarity of an NDE.”

So it has been shown that some people have these experiences, and doesn’t even broach the subject of the mechanism in the brain that causes such lucid and powerful experiences.How about a follow up article on Peter Fenwick or Rick Strassman’s research? Maybe a bit too gonzo for National Geographic…..

Suggested starting point for keep-you-up-all-night reading on NDE’s. More.

Gosh, did I flush out some crazy people with my cheeky thank you note to Obama over at this local hipster blog?

The gaps in neuroscience’s understanding of the psychopath are filling in:

“There has been a long tra­di­tion of re­search on psy­chop­a­thy that has fo­cused on the lack of sen­si­ti­vity to pun­ish­ment and a lack of fear, but those traits are not par­tic­u­larly good pre­dic­tors of vi­o­lence or crim­i­nal be­hav­ior,” said Van­der­bilt psy­chol­o­gist Da­vid Zald, co-au­thor of the stu­dy. “Our da­ta is sug­gest­ing that some­thing might be hap­pen­ing on the oth­er side of things. These in­di­vid­u­als ap­pear to have such a strong draw to re­ward—to the car­rot—that it over­whelms the sense of risk or con­cern about the stick.”

But get THIS. For the study, they found people with high levels of psychopathic traits - and gave SPEED TO THEM:

The re­search­ers gave the vol­un­teers a dose of am­phet­a­mine, or speed, and then scanned their brains us­ing PET to view dopamine re­lease in re­sponse to the stim­u­lant.…“Our hy­poth­e­sis was that psy­cho­pathic traits are al­so linked to dys­func­tion in dopamine re­ward cir­cuit­ry,” Buck­holtz said. “Con­sis­tent with what we thought, we found peo­ple with high lev­els of psy­cho­pathic traits had al­most four times the amount of dopamine re­leased in re­sponse to am­phet­a­mine.”

…“It may be that be­cause of these ex­ag­ger­at­ed dopamine re­sponses, once they fo­cus on the chance to get a re­ward, psy­chopaths are un­able to al­ter their at­ten­tion un­til they get what they’re af­ter,” Buck­holtz said.

 Namely, speed.

“Pro Family Values”, anti-gay California state senator Roy Ashburn (R), got popped with a DUI last week leaving a gay nightclub. Finally he came out today, saying, “I’m gay.” Congratulations for stating the obvious, dude. Now about that voting record?

He explained his past voting record saying that’s what his conservative constituents wanted.

How did he explain his voting record to his boyfriends, that’s what I want to know… According to wikipedia,

Ashburn has voted against every gay rights measure in the State Senate since taking office,^[4]

with the caveat that

all of which subsequently passed.^[5][6][4]

That’s probably how he rationalized it. Meanwhile,

His religion is listed as Roman Catholic in the biography for him printed by CSU-Bakersfield.

Part of the documentary of extreme experience, “Touching the Void”, about two men caught in a fractal metaphor for the human condition. Screened the whole thing last night at Gonzo Science HQ - more horrifying in its way than the “Alive!” film - which is plenty horrifying itself and which also takes place in the Andes. But these two chaps here just have no luck AT ALL, confronted at every turn with impossible options and mindbending choices. And after this existential scene, it gets worse.

Regarding video formatting issues, for the time being most youtube videos seem to display best in firefox.

Effing religious whackjobs and their violent fantasies. They wouldn’t have stood for this crap for one second if the left had been publically trolling for Bush assassins back when there was an actual fascist in the White House. I agree with this dude in the Maddow interview - support Obama. He needs it, because the crazies want blood.

Kim Peek: The real Rain Man

One of the many features I enjoy about Wikipedia is its selection of lists of fictional things, like an archaeology of the imagination. Here is Wikipedia’s list of fictional elements, materials, isotopes and particles, an exquisite waste of time.

…Related, also scavenged from the Wikipedia: the documented use of the elements of the Periodic Table in comic books.

Just read the J.G. Ballard story “The Object of the Attack”,  (from the book War Fever) which features a fantastic sequence where someone builds an Ames Room to escape from an insane asylum. Good stuff!! As a science fiction writer, Ballard writes less about outer space than about our “concept of space”…

No one could have predicted this would get out of hand.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

They read Bill Clinton’s email!

Conservative gets himself tortured, turns into empathetic socialist.