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Tantrik flops on live TV

Found this on boing-boing today. I wish I had seen this live. Would have been great to watch:

India TV, one of India’s major Hindi channels with national outreach, invited Sanal Edamaruku for a discussion on “Tantrik power versus Science”. Pandit Surinder Sharma, who claims to be the tantrik of top politicians and is well known from his TV shows, represented the other side. During the discussion, the tantrik showed a small human shape of wheat flour dough, laid a thread around it like a noose and tightened it. He claimed that he was able to kill any person he wanted within three minutes by using black magic. Sanal challenged him to try and kill him.

The tantrik tried. He chanted his mantras (magic words): “Om lingalingalinalinga, kilikili….” But his efforts did not show any impact on Sanal – not after three minutes, and not after five. The time was extended and extended again. The original discussion program should have ended here, but the “breaking news” of the ongoing great tantra challenge was overrunning all program schedules.

Now the tantrik changed his technique. He started sprinkling water on Sanal and brandishing a knife in front of him. Sometimes he moved the blade all over his body. Sanal did not flinch. Then he touched Sanal’s head with his hand, rubbing and rumpling up his hair, pressing his forehead, laying his hand over his eyes, pressing his fingers against his temples. When he pressed harder and harder, Sanal reminded him that he was supposed to use black magic only, not forceful attacks to bring him down. The tantrik took a new run: water, knife, fingers, mantras. But Sanal kept looking very healthy and even amused.

After nearly two hours, the anchor declared the tantrik’s failure. The tantrik, unwilling to admit defeat, tried the excuse that a very strong god whom Sanal might be worshipping obviously protected him. “No, I am an atheist,” said Sanal Edamaruku. Finally, the disgraced tantrik tried to save his face by claiming that there was a never-failing special black magic for ultimate destruction, which could, however, only been done at night. Bad luck again, he did not get away with this, but was challenged to prove his claim this very night in another “breaking news” live program.

See full article

Taaz.com is way too much fun

Taaz.com is a very easy to use online service that allows you to give any photo a makeover:

This was the original:

If you look closely (by clicking on the photo to get the full size version), you’ll notice that I’ve applied lipstick, foundation, blush, blue contact lenses, mascara, and of course, changed the hairstyle. For each one of those, there are many different options to choose from. Obviously, the “doctoring” of the photo is very visible, but I did not spend too much time trying to get it just right. I have other things to do.

But, try Taaz.com yourself. You’ll have lots of fun.

Why I cannot resist surfing the web

Apparently, scientists are doing research into why I spend so much time surfing the web (and indeed why you are reading this). New information, or information that needs to be analyzed gives us a high. Wall Street Journal has an article about this research:

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ ”

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

Apparently, this is hardwired into our brain due to evolutionary forces. Just like cats and laser pointers:

Many cat owners know that the lasers are the easiest way to keep the pet amused. The cats will ceaselessly, maniacally chase it as it’s beamed about the room, literally climbing the walls to capture what they surely regard as some form of ultimate prey.

Obviously, cats are hard-wired to hunt down small, bright objects, like birds. But since nothing in nature is as bright as a laser, they are powerless to resist its charms.

[...]

Watching a cat play with a laser, you realize the cat never learns there is no real “prey” there. You can show the cat the pointer, clicking it off and on, and it will remain transfixed.

But we can hope that:

People presumably are smarter than cats, and as we become more familiar with the Web and its torrent of information, maybe we’ll do a better job learning what is useful and what isn’t.

Then again, maybe not.

See full article.

Hackers can hack your pacemaker!

Up till now, the worst that computer hackers could do was steal your passwords, and maybe your money from your bank accounts. Now, comes evidence, that it is theoretically possible for a hacker to wirelessly hack into the pacemaker that a is installed in a person’s chest and modify its settings - and actually kill the person.

See this post for:

To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.

The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

Gives a new meaning to the phrase “he is in the hospital with a virus infection”.

See full article. (via slashdot.)

Student families in school

My kids’ school, Vidya Valley, has just introduced something they are calling “Tutor groups” in school. A tutor group is a group of 15 to 20 students consisting of a few students from each class from 5th to 10th standard (aka grade). Each tutor group is assigned one teacher (”Guardian Tutor”) whose job it is to ensure the full welfare of the children in this group. Here, “full welfare” specifically refers to non-academic issues, like mental and physical welfare (for example to help with bullying, truancy issues, or special medical attention).

Each student stays in the same tutor group for all the 5 years, and the guardian tutor of the group remains the same throughout. Each year, the students of Std. 10 will obviously pass out and leave the group. At this time, new students from Std. 5 will enter the group. This whole set-up creates a sort of a family unit, where the guardian tutor becomes the surrogate parent, and the other students become surrogate siblings.

The tutor group meets every day for a little time - the school time-tables have been adjusted to allow for this. In addition, they meet once every two weeks for a longer period. These meetings have no agenda. Just hang out and bond and behave like a family.

See this pdf for a more detailed description of the guardian tutor system in Vidya Valley.

It sounds like a very interesting idea, and I have not really heard of anything like this being used in Pune schools (but I could be mistaken). In any case, seems like a neat thing to have. They have introduced it just a few months ago, so it will be interesting to see how it works out in real life.

Internet for the villages

This is what the internet looks like for a village.

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley’s Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it’s like those “executive assistant” telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).

[...]

The Question Box has been deployed live in Phoolpur village in Greater Noida, close to New Delhi and it was a stonking, smashing success, and will now be expanding further.

Found: here. See also the home page of the question box project.

Bloggers are happier - feel bloggers

ABCnews is reporting on a study which says that after a couple of months of regular blogging bloggers feel they have a better social life than non-bloggers. Excerpt:

The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog.

[...]

Bloggers reported a greater sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people and feeling more confident they could rely on others for help.

All respondents, whether or not they blogged, reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking.

Blogging is good for your (perceived?) social life. And online social networks are good for your mental health. Cool. (Looks like the bloggers in question hadn’t started receiving comments from users yet!)

See full article (via techcrunch)

The Nocebo Effect: Placebo’s Evil Twin

The Washington Post has an interesting article about the nocebo effect:

Ten years ago, researchers stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn’t hold such fatalistic views.

The higher risk of death, in other words, had nothing to with the usual heart disease culprits — age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight. Instead, it tracked closely with belief. Think sick, be sick.
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That study is a classic in the annals of research on the “nocebo” phenomenon, the evil twin of the placebo effect. While the placebo effect refers to health benefits produced by a treatment that should have no effect, patients experiencing the nocebo effect experience the opposite. They presume the worst, health-wise, and that’s just what they get.

Another example:

Fifteen years ago, researchers at three medical centers undertook a study of aspirin and another blood thinner in heart patients and came up with an unexpected result that said little about the heart and much about the brain. At two locations, patients were warned of possible gastrointestinal problems, one of the most common side effects of repeated use of aspirin. At the other location, patients received no such caution.

When researchers reviewed the data, they found a striking result: Those warned about the gastrointestinal problems were almost three times as likely to have the side effect. Though the evidence of actual stomach damage such as ulcers was the same for all three groups, those with the most information about the prospect of minor problems were the most likely to experience the pain.

So why haven’t you heard of this nocebo effect before? Here’s why:

Despite the smattering of doctors’ anecdotal reports and a few modest clinical studies, research on the phenomenon has not been robust, mostly for ethical reasons: Doctors ought not to induce illness in patients who are not sick.

See full article (found via A.Word.A.Day).

Why is beauty?

I know the title does not make grammatical sense. But think about it. Normally we focus a lot on who is beautiful. Not so much on the why. I’ve alluded in the past to the evolutionary reasons behind beauty. This idea is expounded in detail by Nancy Etcoff in her book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, which makes the case that “looking good has survival value, and that sensitivity to beauty is a biological adaptation governed by brain circuits shaped by natural selection”.

This is what boing-boing has to say about the idea:

Why do we think that certain things are beautiful? Because our ancestors did; it connotes an advantage to survival and reproduction.

When people are asked to describe a beautiful landscape they say the same thing: lake, river, mountain trees. We evolved to think it is beautiful becuase it is safe with escape routes.

When asked to describe beautiful people: clear skin, bright eyes, shiny hair — all of these things connote health fertility, protection.

There is interesting research backing up these claims:

Psychologists find that babies stare significantly longer at the faces adults find appealing, while the mothers of “attractive” babies display more intense bonding behaviors. The symmetrical face of average proportions may have become the optimal design because of evolutionary pressures operating against population extremes. Gentlemen may prefer blondes not so much for their hair color as for the fairness of their skin–which makes it easier to detect the flush of sexual excitement.

(source: Amazon’s review of the book.)

While looking into the background of these claims, I stumbled onto a bunch of fascinating facts about beauty and related aspects (like the handicap principle) that I plan to cover in future posts. Stay tuned.