[…]

according to a new study, the food you ate just before your walk past the bakery may impact your likelihood of stopping in for a sweet treat—and not just because you’re full.

Scientists at Northwestern University found that people became less sensitive to food odors based on the meal they had eaten just before. So, if you were snacking on baked goods from a coworker before your walk, for example, you may be less likely to stop into that sweet-smelling bakery.

The study, “Olfactory perceptual decision-making is biased by motivational state,” will be published August 26 in the journal PLOS Biology.

Smell regulates what we eat, and vice versa

The study found that participants who had just eaten a meal of either cinnamon buns or pizza were less likely to perceive “meal-matched” odors, but not non-matched odors. The findings were then corroborated with brain scans that showed brain activity in parts of the brain that process odors was altered in a similar way.

These findings show that just as smell regulates what we eat, what we eat—in turn—regulates our sense of smell.

[…]

To conduct the study, the team developed a novel task in which participants were presented with a smell that was a mixture between a food and a non-food odor (either “pizza and pine” or “cinnamon bun and cedar”—odors that “pair well” and are distinct from each other). The ratio of food and non-food odor varied in each mixture, from pure food to pure non-food. After a mixture was presented, participants were asked whether the food or the non-food odor was dominant.

Participants completed the task twice inside an MRI scanner: First, when they were hungry, then, after they’d eaten a meal that matched one of the two odors.

“In parallel with the first part of the experiment running in the MRI scanner, I was preparing the meal in another room,” Shanahan said. “We wanted everything fresh and ready and warm because we wanted the participant to eat as much as they could until they were very full.”

The team then computed how much food odor was required in the mixture in each session for the participant to perceive the food odor as dominant. The team found when participants were hungry, they needed a lower percentage of food odor in a mixture to perceive it as dominant—for example, a hungry participant may require a 50 percent cinnamon bun-to-cedar mixture when hungry, but 80 percent when full of cinnamon buns.

Through brain imaging, the team provided further evidence for the hypothesis. Brain scans from the MRI demonstrated a parallel change occurring in the part of the brain that processes odors after a meal. The brain’s response to a meal-matched odor was less “food-like” than responses to a non-matched meal odor.

[…]

Source: Your sense of smell may be the key to a balanced diet

[…]

Parkour is rooted in French military history, and more specifically escape and evasion tactics using only the human body, trained using “parcours du combattant”; an obstacle course based training method.

Whilst sharing common features, it should not be confused with freerunning, which places less of an emphasis on efficiency, allowing for more acrobatic movements.

[…]

Experienced traceurs do not seek the adrenaline rush which can often be part and parcel of engaging in the riskier aspects of the activity. Instead they seek to challenge themselves to overcome the shackles of their inhibitions. Their training allows practitioners to learn to manage risk rather than seek it.

[…]

# The basics:

1. Balancing

The ability to balance is a vital aspect of parkour. Practitioners spend a decent amount of time jumping onto and walking along narrow railings and walls.

2. Running

Parkour involves both explosive sprinting and endurance running so be sure to add in some middle distance as well as short sharp sprint sessions into your training regime to ensure you are parkour fit.

3. Jumping and Dropping

Whether it’s to bridge gaps or scale heights, jumping plays a significant role in parkour movement patterns. Dropping involves moving from areas of high ground to low, and requires a proper understanding of how to land safely, which will be discussed below.

4. Landing

Landing properly after jumping or dropping is an essential skill which will enable you not only to engage in parkour safely but also allows for efficient transition between movements and obstacles. The way in which you choose depends on a number of factors:

• The height from which you are landing;
• The landing area;
• The distance of the jump

Landing on two feet should always be your preference as this will limit the amount of stress you place on your joints. The objective should be land as softly as possible, which means bending at the knees on contact with the surface. If your dropping from a particularly high level or landing with significant forward momentum then you may want to sink at the hips too and use your hands and arms to absorb some of the force.

Rolling on landing is a really useful way of dissipating the force you experience on making contact with the ground across more of your body. This is definitely something to add to your repertoire when you start to drop from levels higher than head height or when jumping with a lot of forward momentum. It’s a vital skill to help you remain safe and injury free whilst partaking in parkour.

5. Vaulting

A maneuver to help you negotiate those obstacles which are to high to jump over but don’t require climbing, the vault is probably one of the most iconic aspects of parkour. It normally involves you using your hands to propel yourself over an obstacle a little bit like a monkey. There are numerous ways in which you can achieve this basic principle. The below video takes you through a step by step guide to 10 different ways suitable for beginners.

6. Climbing

When taking the most direct (efficient route), a cornerstone of the parkour philosophy, it is inevitable that you’re going to be required to climb in order to scale obstacles which are too high to jump or vault over. This is where climbing comes to the fore. There are a number of different ways in which to climb, largely depending on the height you are required to scale.

Undoubtedly one of the most useful techniques in parkour generally has to be the ‘wall run’. This skill will enable you to climb over walls which would ordinarily be way out of reach. Check out the video below for a quick tutorial.

A slight variation on the wall run, known as the ‘tic tac’ can be a great way of using adjacent surfaces to help you generate the required momentum to climb your target wall.

The ‘cat leap’ is a combination of jumping and climbing. Particularly useful when you are attempting to traverse a gap which is too wide for you be able to land on the target area on your feet. Instead you must aim to land with your feet on the front face of the wall fractionally before gripping the top of the wall with your hands.

7. Swinging (Lache)

Just like when you were a kid swinging from tree branches. This can be a particularly useful method of passing through an obstacle or even dropping from a height which would ordinarily be too high. Traceurs will also use this technique to traverse gaps between bars, where gripping the bar and hanging rather than landing on your feet is more preferable.

The below tutorial takes you through a step by step guide in how to introduce yourself to the skill of lache.

Top Training Exercises To Get You On Your Way

There are some great ways in which you can prepare yourself for parkour before you even turn up for your first meet or join one of the new age parkour specific gyms.

Here are 10 of the best to get you started:

1. Forward walking lunge:

The strength and stability built from lunges is directly transferable to many of the movements which make up parkour. Jumping or landing from one foot, wall runs and tic tacs all require unilateral strength. The best way of developing such strength is by completing single leg weight bearing exercises, of which the forward lunge is a particularly good example. The intensity of the exercise can easily be increased by adding dumbbells or a barbell.

2. Wall handstand:

Parkour has numerous similarities to gymnastics, and it doesn’t get much more acrobatic (for beginners that is) than handstands. Mastering this type of exercise is a great way of developing upper body strength (a key component of climbing and swinging), as well as spatial awareness and balance. By practising against a wall you can negate some of the potential danger associated with the traditional handstand.

3. Overhead barbell press:

A fundamental exercise for developing upper body strength,the overhead press translates perfectly into actions such as vaulting. If you just starting out use an unloaded barbell to ascertain how much load is appropriate for your relative strength. Standing with your feet around hip width apart, hold the bar with an overhand grip just in front of your collar bones with your elbows pointing towards the ground. Push the bar upwards in front of your face, finishing above your head with your arms straight, locked out at the shoulders and elbows. Once you have reached the top of the range, pause momentarily before returning the bar slowly to the start position and repeating.

4. Broad jump:

This is probably one of the most important exercises to include in your parkour preparation training. The most fundamental of movements, involved in every jump you make from obstacle to obstacle. This is a great way of developing the power you will be sure to need in order to get the most out of your foundation parkour movements.

There will be plenty of occasions when parkour requires you to jump and land on just one of your legs so why not add in single leg jumps too. Mix up taking off and landing on the same foot and taking off and landing on opposite feet.

5. Back Squat:

There’s no getting away from the back squat. It is such a fundamental movement pattern which can be applied to so many different every day as well as athletic pursuits. Consequently, it is a must do exercise if you’re looking to get into parkour. There are few gym movements which are better at building general lower limb strength and will help pretty much with every aspect of parkour, including jumping, landing, and wall running.

6. Wall dip:

A slight variation on the traditional dip exercise you will see regularly in the gym, this is a perfect upper body exercise which has excellent cross-over with a common feature in movement such as the vault and the second phase of a climb.

Find a wall or equivalent surface which is between hip and shoulder height. Place your palms flat on top of the surface fingers pointing forwards. In the start position, your arms should be straight, completely holding your body weight off the ground. Lower your legs towards the ground by bending at the elbow in the same way as if you were performing a standard push up, lowering your chest towards the top of the wall. Once your elbows are bent to around 90 degrees, push against the surface through your palms and lift your body weight, extending your arms until straight. Repeat the movement.

7. The monkey plant:

These are a great exercise for building upper body strength in a more parkour specific training environment. Stand in front of a wall which is approximately hip height with one foot slightly in front of the other and both hands in contact with the top of the wall. Using both your legs and your upper body, propel yourself forwards and upwards so that you finish on top of the wall on both feet.

The monkey plant is also a great stepping stone to more advanced parkour exercises like vaulting.

8. Pull ups:

One of the most fundamental upper body strength exercises going, the pull up will help you generate the necessary strength to haul your body weight up walls with your upper body alone. Pretty useful then. Once you’ve mastered the bodyweight pull up for a decent number of sets and reps (3 x10 for instance) why not increase the intensity by adding extra weight using dumbbells or discs.

9. Bear crawl:

This exercise is a great full body workout generating stress on both the lower and upper body. It is a particularly appropriate form of training for parkour as there will often be times when you are required to move on all fours, whether it be to squeeze under low obstacles, or to provide a little extra stability when traversing obstacles at significant heights.

10. Vertical jump:

Along with the broad jump, this is also one of the most fundamentally applicable exercises to parkour. A great way of converting the strength you build in your legs using exercises such as the back squat and forward lunge into power, one of the most important assets to have if you are going to traverse those gaps or run those walls.

To make the exercise even more parkour specific, be sure to land softly each repetitions, bending at the knees and folding at the hips (making contact with the ground with your hands) in order to practice dissipating the force you will experience when you drop from considerable heights.

How

Source: Parkour: The Ultimate Guide For Beginners – Sport Fitness Advisor

Scientists in the UK say the same sort of echolocation practiced by bats may also help people living with blindness better navigate the world. In a new study, they found that blind and sighted participants who took part in a 10-week training program were able to learn how to perform echolocation, and the blind participants largely reported that it seemed to improve their mobility and ability to live independently afterward.

[…]

In this new research, published in PLOS One, Thaler and her team wanted to test if inexperienced people, both with and without sight, could be taught how to echolocate in a relatively short period of time and if this skill would then actually help people with blindness.

They recruited 14 sighted people and 12 people who became blind early in life for the experiment, which involved 20 training sessions conducted over 10 weeks. The volunteers were between the ages of 21 and 79, and none had regularly used echolocation in their lives beforehand (two of the blind individuals did have some experience, but everyone else had none). To validate their tests and set a benchmark, they also enlisted the help of seven people who had been practicing echolocation for at least a decade.

Overall, the team found that all of the individuals noticeably improved their performance on tests of echolocation over the 10-week period. These tests would involve situations like being able to recognize the relative location and size of nearby objects or being able to navigate through a natural environment outside of the lab without sight. These improvements didn’t seem to be influenced by the age or degree of blindness among participants. A few people even performed as well as expert echolocators on certain tasks, while some sighted people did better than some blind people.

Blind volunteers were also surveyed three months later about how the training may have affected their lives. They all reported experiencing improvements in their mobility as a result of the training, while 83% also reported feeling more independent. The findings, according to Thaler, suggest that this training can be easily adopted by many people—and that it can help blind people with everyday activities.

[…]

Source: Researchers Trained People to Echolocate in Just 10 Weeks

According to Action News Jax, Bartram Trail High School altered 80 different yearbook photos – all of them of girls. In many of them, crudely photoshopped rectangles in the colour of the girls’ clothing can be seen covering up their chests.

Many of those students have expressed outrage.

“I felt confident that day and I looked good, in dress code,” ninth grader Zoe Iannone told Action News Jax. “When I sent it to my mom and all of us saw it, I felt very sexualized, like that was what they were worrying about.”

Parents are furious as well.

“Our daughters of Bartram deserve an apology,” one anonymous mother told the station. “They are making them feel embarrassed about who they are.”

[…]

Source: Parents outraged after Florida high school edits girls’ yearbook pictures to make clothes more conservative

I thought this was the land of the free?!

[…]

It turns out a process called galvanic vestibular stimulation—also known as GVS—can be used to alter a human’s sense of balance by electrically stimulating a nerve in the ear using electrodes. Researchers haven’t quite figured out the best uses of the technology—medical, military, and entertainment companies are all investigating it—but when used properly it can convince a person that they need to move their bodies to the left or right to maintain balance, which the body will automatically do all on its own, even if they’re standing perfectly still. As a result there’s a peculiar side effect of GVS: the technology can be used to partially control a human’s movements as if they were being operated remotely.

That’s exactly what Mean Gene Hacks is doing here. Using about $50 worth of external hardware (plus the cost of a gaming PC) they’ve made BeamNG.drive, a highly realistic physics-based driving simulator—interface with GVS hardware. Custom code translates an in-game vehicle’s motions into the electrical signals that alter a player’s balance, which are delivered to a player’s nerve endings through a pair of adhesive electrodes that attach to the neck just behind the earlobes. The resulting effect has the player uncontrollably leaning to the left or to the right while playing, as if effected by the same G-forces the car in the game is experiencing.

[…]

Source: Terrifying Driving Simulator Lets a Player Feel a Car’s Motions by Short-Circuiting Their Sense of Balance

Scientists working on the psychology of problem solving may have hit upon why things always seem to get more complicated.

A newly uncovered heuristic – a mental shortcut or rule of thumb – shows bias towards adding features to find a solution, rather than subtracting existing features.

A simple experiment in Lego has provided some insight into the phenomenon.

A team led by Gabrielle Adams, assistant professor of public policy and psychology at the University of Virginia, presented 197 participants with a Lego tower, four Duplo blocks high, six-by-six nodules on the horizontal plane. Above the tower was an 8×8 flat roof supported in the corner by a single 2×2 block.

The objective was to stabilise the roof so it would not fall onto a figure below when a brick was placed on top of it.

All the participants were told they could alter the structure however they wanted to. A control group was told “each piece that you add costs ten cents” while a “subtraction-cue condition” group was told “each piece that you add costs 10 cents but removing pieces is free.”

The simplest and cheapest solution was to remove the single block supporting the roof and attach it directly to the tower. But only 41 per cent of participants went with this solution. The remainder decided to add three bricks to support the roof. However, for the group given the subtraction-cue condition, 61 per cent of participants took the first option.

Adams and team also studied how participants make a 10×10 grid of green and white boxes symmetrical on a computer screen. They found people tend to add green boxes to the emptier half of the grid rather than removing them from the fuller half, even when doing the latter would have been more efficient.

The researcher also studied how people completed this task under “cognitive load.” While working on the task, they were asked to press the “F” key whenever they saw a 5 in a string of numerals passing across the top of the screen. The result was that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations.

[P]eople are biased towards creating solutions by adding features rather than taking them away…. A study also observed the tendency at an organisational level

The researchers seem to have discovered a heuristic that people are biased towards creating solutions by adding features rather than taking them away. A study also observed the tendency at an organisational level.

For example, looking at university archives, they found that an incoming president had requested suggestions for changes that would allow the institution to better serve its students and community. Only 11 per cent of the responses involved removing an existing regulation, practice or programme.

Click to enlarge

The research, published in Nature, argued that the discovery could have far-reaching ramifications.

“As with many heuristics, it is possible that defaulting to a search for additive ideas often serves its users well,” the paper said. “However, the tendency to overlook subtraction may be implicated in a variety of costly modern trends, including overburdened minds and schedules, increasing red tape in institutions and humanity’s encroachment on the safe operating conditions for life on Earth.

“If people default to adequate additive transformations – without considering comparable (and sometimes superior) subtractive alternatives – they may be missing opportunities to make their lives more fulfilling, their institutions more effective and their planet more liveable.” ®

Source: Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away • The Register

now, for the first time ever, scientists have evidence showing they can reverse false memories, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The same way that you can suggest false memories, you can reverse them by giving people a different framing,” the lead researcher of the paper, Aileen Oeberst, head of the Department of Media Psychology at the University of Hagen, told Gizmodo. “It’s interesting, scary even.”

[…]

“As the field of memory research has developed, it’s become very clear that our memories are not ‘recordings’ of the past that can be played back but rather are reconstructions, closer to imaginings informed by seeds of true experiences,” Christopher Madan, a memory researcher at the University of Nottingham who was not involved in the new study, told Gizmodo

[…]

Building off of that, Oeberst’s lab recently implanted false memories in 52 people by using suggestive interviewing techniques. First, they had the participants’ parents privately answer a questionnaire and come up with some real childhood memories and two plausible, but fake, ones—all negative in nature, such as how their pet died or when they lost their toy. Then they had researchers ask the participants to recall these made-up events in a detailed manner, including specifics about what happened. For example, “Your parents told us that when you were 12 years old during a holiday in Italy with your family you got lost. Can you tell me more about it?”

The test subjects met their interviewer three times, once every two weeks, and by the third session most participants believed these anecdotes were true, and over half (56%) developed and recollected actual false memories—a significantly higher percentage than most studies in this area of research.

These findings reveal the depth of false memory and fit closely with prior research in the field, according to Robert Nash, a psychologist at Aston University who was not involved in the study. “Such as the fact that some of the false memories arose almost immediately, even in the first interview, the fact that they increased in richness and frequency with each successive interview, and the fact that more suggestive techniques led to much higher levels of false remembering and believing,” Nash told Gizmodo.

According to Henry Otgaar, a false memory researcher at Maastricht University who was a reviewer of this study, there’s been an increase in people thinking that it’s difficult to implant false memories. This work is important in showing the relative ease by which people can form such false memories, he told Gizmodo.

“Actually, what we see in lab experiments is highly likely underestimation of what we see in real-world cases, in which, for example, a police officer or a therapist, suggestively is dredging for people’s memories that perhaps are not there for weeks, for months, in a highly suggestive fashion,” he said, suggesting this is what happens in some cases of false confessions.

But researchers, to some extent, already knew how easy it is to trick our memories. Oeberst’s study is innovative in suggesting that it’s equally as easy to reverse those false memories. And knowing the base truth about what actually happened isn’t even necessary to revert the fake recollections.

In the experiment, Oeberst had another interviewer ask participants to identify whether any of their memories could be false, by simply thinking critically about them. The scientists used two “sensitization” techniques: One, source sensitization, where they asked participants to recall the exact source of the memory (what is leading you to remember this; what specific recollection do you, yourself, have?). And two, false memory sensitization, where they explained to the subjects that sometimes being pressured to recall something can elicit false memories.

“And they worked, they worked!” Oeberst said, adding that of course not every single participant was persuaded that their memory was false.

Particularly with the false memory sensitization strategy, participants seemed to regain their trust in their initial gut feeling of what they did and didn’t remember, as if empowered to trust their own recollection more. “I don’t recollect this and maybe it’s not my fault, maybe it’s actually my parents who made something up or they were wrong,” Oeberst said, mimicking the participants’ thought process. “Basically, it’s a different solution to the same riddle.” According to Oeberst, the technique by which false memories are implanted is the same used to reverse them, “just from a different angle, the opposite angle.”

The memories didn’t completely vanish for everybody; 15% to 25% of the participants still believed their false memories were real, and this is roughly the same amount of people who accepted false memories right after the first interview. A year later, 74% of all participants still recognized which were false memories or didn’t remember them at all.

“Up until now, we didn’t have any way to reject or reverse false memory formation,” said Otgaar, who has published over 100 studies on false memory. “But it’s very simple, and with such a simple manipulation that this can already lead to quite strong effects. That’s really interesting.”

The researchers also suggest reframing thinking about false memories in terms of “false remembering,” an action determined by information and context, rather than “false memories,” as if memories were stable files in a computer.

“This is especially important, I think, insofar that remembering is always contextual. It’s less helpful for us to think about whether or not people ‘have’ a false memory and more helpful to think of the circumstances in which people are more or less likely to believe they are remembering,” said Nash.

[…]

Source: Scientists Implant and Then Reverse False Memories in People

[…]

According to a recent report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (2020), each year in the U.S. farmers throw away up to 30% of their crops, equal to 66.5 million tons of edible produce, due to cosmetic imperfections.

[…]

They discover that consumers expect unattractive produce to be less tasty and, to a smaller extent, less healthy than attractive produce, which leads to its rejection. They also find that emphasizing aesthetic flaws via ‘ugly’ labeling (e.g., “Ugly Cucumbers”) can increase the purchase of unattractive produce. This is because ‘ugly’ labeling points out the aesthetic flaw in the produce, making it clear to consumers that there are no other deficiencies in the produce other than attractiveness. Consumers may also reevaluate their reliance on visual appearance as a basis for judging the tastiness and healthiness of produce; ‘ugly’ labeling makes them aware of the limited nature of their spontaneous objection to unattractive produce.

[…]

“We sold both unattractive and attractive produce at a farmer’s market and find that consumers were more likely to purchase unattractive produce over attractive produce when the unattractive produce was labeled ‘ugly’ compared to when unattractive produce was not labeled in any specific way. ‘Ugly’ labeling also generated greater profit margins relative to when unattractive produce was not labeled in any specific way—a great solution for sellers to make a profit while reducing food waste.” In the second study, participants were told that they could win a lottery worth $30, and could keep all the cash or allocate some of the lottery earnings to purchase either a box of attractive produce or unattractive produce. ‘Ugly’ labeling increased the likelihood that consumers would use their lottery earnings to purchase a box of unattractive rather than attractive produce.

In Studies 3 and 4, ‘ugly’ labeling positively impacts taste and health expectations, which led to higher choice likelihood of unattractive produce over attractive produce. Study 5 considers how ‘ugly’ labeling might alter the effectiveness of price discounts. Typically, when retailers sell unattractive produce, they offer a discount of 20%-50%. Cornil says that “We show that ‘ugly’ labeling works best for moderate price discounts (i.e., 20%) rather than steep price discounts (i.e., 60%) because a large discount signals low quality, which nullifies the positive effect of the ‘ugly’ label.” This suggests that by simply adding the ‘ugly’ label, retailers selling unattractive produce can reduce those discounts and increase profitability.

The last two studies demonstrate that ‘ugly’ labeling is more effective than another popular label, ‘imperfect.’

[…]

Importantly, these findings largely contrast with managers’ beliefs. “While grocery store managers believed in either not labeling unattractive produce in any specific way or using ‘imperfect’ labeling, we show that ‘ugly’ labeling is far more effective,” says Hoegg

[…]

Source: How “ugly” labels can increase purchase of unattractive produce

Playing through the greenery and litter of a mini forest’s undergrowth for just one month may be enough to change a child’s immune system, according to a small new experiment.

When daycare workers in Finland rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth such as dwarf heather and blueberries, and allowed children to care for crops in planter boxes, the diversity of microbes in the guts and on the skin of young kids appeared healthier in a very short space of time.

Compared to other city kids who play in standard urban daycares with yards of pavement, tile and gravel, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds at these greened-up daycare centres in Finland showed increased T-cells and other important immune markers in their blood within 28 days.

“We also found that the intestinal microbiota of children who received greenery was similar to the intestinal microbiota of children visiting the forest every day,” says environmental scientist Marja Roslund from the University of Helsinki.

One daycare before (left) and after introducing grass and planters (right). (University of Helsinki)

Prior research has shown early exposure to green space is somehow linked to a well-functioning immune system, but it’s still not clear whether that relationship is causal or not.

The experiment in Finland is the first to explicitly manipulate a child’s urban environment and then test for changes in their micriobiome and, in turn, a child’s immune system.

[…]

The results aren’t conclusive and they will need to be verified among larger studies around the world. Still, the benefits of green spaces appear to go beyond our immune systems.

Research shows getting outside is also good for a child’s eyesight, and being in nature as a kid is linked to better mental health. Some recent studies have even shown green spaces are linked to structural changes in the brains of children.

What’s driving these incredible results is not yet clear. It could be linked to changes to the immune system, or something about breathing healthy air, soaking in the sun, exercising more or having greater peace of mind.

Given the complexities of the real world, it’s really hard to control for all the environmental factors that impact our health in studies.

While rural children tend to have fewer cases of asthma and allergies, the available literature on the link between green spaces and these immune disorders is inconsistent.

The current research has a small sample size, only found a correlation, and can’t account for what children were doing outside daycare hours, but the positive changes seen are enough for scientists in Finland to offer some advice.

[…]

Bonding with nature as a kid is also good for the future of our planet’s ecosystems. Studies show kids who spend time outdoors are more likely to want to become environmentalists as adults, and in a rapidly changing world, that’s more important than ever.

Just make sure everyone’s up to date on their tetanus vaccinations, Sinkkonen advises.

The study was published in the Science Advances.

Source: Daycares in Finland Built a ‘Forest Floor’, And It Changed Children’s Immune Systems

Formula 1 drivers have been told they cannot wear clothing bearing any slogans or messages while doing official duties after grands prix.

The move is a reaction to Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton wearing a T-shirt at the last race in Tuscany referencing the case of a woman killed by US police.

The FIA said podium finishers “must remain attired only in their driving suits done up to the neck”.

This must be the case throughout the podium ceremony and interviews.

The requirements include a “medical face mask or team-branded face mask”.

The move had been expected after talks between the FIA, Mercedes and Hamilton’s representatives before this weekend’s Russian Grand Prix.

At Mugello, Hamilton wore a T-shirt saying: “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” at the official pre-race anti-racism demonstration and on the podium and during the post-race interviews.

He had previously worn a Black Lives Matter T-shirt for the demonstration, but not after the race, while other drivers wore the FIA official “End Racism” T-shirts.

The FIA looked into whether they should investigate Hamilton on the grounds of breaking any rules, but decided against it.

Political messages have long been banned on the podium in F1.

Hamilton said at the Russian Grand Prix: “I did something that has never really happened in F1 and obviously they will stop it from happening moving forwards.”

[…]

Source: Formula 1 drivers told they cannot wear slogans or messages in post-race duties – BBC Sport

Why are the terms “Nazi Germany” and “Mengele” become trending topics on Twitter? The words dominated the social media platform on Monday after it was revealed that a whistleblower has alleged “high numbers” of immigrant women at a U.S. concentration camp in Georgia were sent to be given unnecessary hysterectomies. Many of the women reportedly didn’t know why they were being sent to have the surgery and were all sent to the same doctor, according to the complaint, with one woman describing the facility as an “experimental concentration camp.”

Twitter users made several analogies to various Nazi atrocities on Monday, like the sadistic medical experiments performed on Jews by Josef Mengele during the Holocaust in the 1930s and ‘40s. And while U.S. concentration camps aren’t currently operating as anything close to the European death camps of the Holocaust, there’s still reasonable concern about what the fuck is happening in the U.S. right now under the Trump regime.

The whistleblower, a nurse named Dawn Wooten, worked full time at a concentration camp run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement called the Irwin County Detention Center, until her work hours were cut in July, a result of alleged retaliation for speaking up internally about health and sanitary conditions in the prison. The facility is technically owned by a private company called LaSalle Corrections, much like several other ICE and CBP concentration camps across the U.S. that currently house tens of thousands of detainees under a for-profit model.\

[…]

the most shocking revelations involve many women who were sent to have hysterectomies—a medical procedure to remove the uterus, rendering the women unable to become pregnant and have children—without getting a clear answer on why they were having the surgeries done.

From the complaint to the OIG, which is available online:

One woman told Project South in 2019 that Irwin sends many women to see a particular gynecologist outside the facility but that some women did not trust him. She also stated that “a lot of women here go through a hysterectomy” at ICDC. More recently, a detained immigrant told Project South that she talked to five different women detained at ICDC between October and December 2019 who had a hysterectomy done. When she talked to them about the surgery, the women “reacted confused when explaining why they had one done.” The woman told Project South that it was as though the women were “trying to tell themselves it’s going to be OK.” She further said: “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”

The whistleblower, nurse Wooten, explained in her own words how one unnamed doctor was allegedly carrying out this mass sterilization effort on immigrant women. Wooten even called the doctor a “uterus collector”:

Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody. He’s even taken out the wrong ovary on a young lady [detained immigrant woman]. She was supposed to get her left ovary removed because it had a cyst on the left ovary; he took out the right one. She was upset. She had to go back to take out the left and she wound up with a total hysterectomy. She still wanted children—so she has to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids… she said she was not all the way out under anesthesia and heard him [doctor] tell the nurse that he took the wrong ovary.

[…]

We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out…That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly…is he collecting these things or something…Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.

The complaint also alleges that the women in custody aren’t getting clear communication about what procedure is about to be done on them, with some medical staff in the facility allegedly using Google to translate things from English to Spanish before surgery. Some women were told conflicting things about why they needed to have hysterectomies, like one woman who was given three very different reasons

[…]

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday morning, but sent out a statement to several news outlets insisting that, “in general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve.” Notably, that’s not a flat denial of the allegations. And DHS restricts access to the facilities to such a degree that journalists have previously tried to use drones just to get a look inside. Even members of Congress have struggled to get an unfiltered look at what’s happening in these facilities.

ICE and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, have a history of outright lies and running interference for objectively racist policies. The former head of DHS, Kirstjen Nielsen, lied to Congress on multiple occasions, claiming that the Trump regime did not have a policy of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border. That was flatly wrong and Nielsen has never been held accountable for the lies, let alone the atrocities she committed against countless asylum seekers. The current head of DHS, Acting Secretary Chad Wolf, has never been confirmed by the Senate and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found last month that he was illegally appointed to his position in late 2019. Wolf is still the head of DHS.

[…]

Source: U.S. Concentration Camp in Georgia Sent Women to Be Sterilized

It turns out that where in traditional face to face leadership, people prefer leaders who are vocal, charming, friendly (ascription qualities). In virtual leadership, people prefer leaders who facilitate, are organised and actually do stuff (achievement factors).

 In two independent samples—a laboratory experiment involving 86 teams (n = 340; sample one) and a semester long project involving 134 teams (n = 430; sample two)—we found that in low virtuality contexts, ascription factors accounted for incremental variance over achievement factors in predicting leadership emergence, and had larger relative importance. Conversely, in high virtuality contexts, achievement factors accounted for incremental variance over ascription factors in predicting leadership emergence, and had larger relative importance.

Source: Who Emerges into Virtual Team Leadership Roles? The Role of Achievement and Ascription Antecedents for Leadership Emergence Across the Virtuality Spectrum | SpringerLink

This seed of professional vexation has borne fruit, with new data showing that the confidence, intelligence and extroversion that have long propelled ambitious workers into the executive suite are not enough online, because they simply don’t translate into virtual leadership. Instead, workers who are organised, dependable and productive take the reins of virtual teams. Finally, doers lead the pack – at least remotely.

The study shows that, instead of those with the most dynamic voices in the room, virtual teams informally anoint leaders who actually do the work of getting projects done. “They are the individuals who help other team members with tasks, and keep the team on schedule and focused on goals,” says lead author Radostina Purvanova, an associate professor of management and leadership at Drake University in the US state of Iowa.

Source: The surprising traits of good remote leaders

253 emails have been leaked from private (high-level) mailing lists of Debian, in which its representatives vocally complain about the talk Linus Torvalds gave at the most recent DebConf conference. Some people insist that he should be permanently banned from future conferences because the language he uses is inappropriate and infringes on the project’s Code of Conduct. This could set a very bad precedent for the open source community, which has recently seen an influx of various CoC policies applied to a number of high-profile projects mostly after very vocal concerns from the people who barely participate in the open source community. Some observers believe that it’s a plot by Microsoft to destroy the open source movement from the inside.

Source: ‘Linusgate’: Debian Project Leaders Want To Ban Linus Torvalds For His Manners – Slashdot

Early detection has the potential to reduce cancer mortality, but an effective screening test must demonstrate asymptomatic cancer detection years before conventional diagnosis in a longitudinal study. In the Taizhou Longitudinal Study (TZL), 123,115 healthy subjects provided plasma samples for long-term storage and were then monitored for cancer occurrence. Here we report the preliminary results of PanSeer, a noninvasive blood test based on circulating tumor DNA methylation, on TZL plasma samples from 605 asymptomatic individuals, 191 of whom were later diagnosed with stomach, esophageal, colorectal, lung or liver cancer within four years of blood draw. We also assay plasma samples from an additional 223 cancer patients, plus 200 primary tumor and normal tissues. We show that PanSeer detects five common types of cancer in 88% (95% CI: 80–93%) of post-diagnosis patients with a specificity of 96% (95% CI: 93–98%), We also demonstrate that PanSeer detects cancer in 95% (95% CI: 89–98%) of asymptomatic individuals who were later diagnosed, though future longitudinal studies are required to confirm this result. These results demonstrate that cancer can be non-invasively detected up to four years before current standard of care.

Source: Non-invasive early detection of cancer four years before conventional diagnosis using a blood test | Nature Communications

After slogging through that book, I began paying attention to similarly stereotyped descriptions of bodies in other books. Women are all soft thighs and red lips. Men, strong muscles and rough hands.

I was frustrated by this lazy writing. I want to read books that explore the full humanity of their characters, not stories that reduce both men and women to weak stereotypes of their gender.

Before getting too upset, I wanted to see if this approach to writing was as widespread as it seemed, or if I was succumbing to selective reading. Do authors really mention particular body parts

more for men than for women? Are women’s bodies described using different adjectives than those attributed to men?

[…]

It’s easy to dismiss or overlook the differences in the way men’s and women’s bodies are depicted because they can be subtle and hard to discern in one particular book—one or two extra mentions of “his bushy hair” may not register over 300 pages.

But when you zoom out and look at thousands of books, the patterns are clear.

In real life, women are obviously more dimensional than soft, sexual objects. Men are more complex than muscular lunkheads. We should expect that same nuance of the characters in the books we read.

Instead of focusing on her perfect hair and soft hips and wet eyes, tell me about her strong legs

that carry her through the world, or her capable hands that do her life’s work. Don’t reduce him to his muscular forearms and rough knuckles and chiseled jaw. I want to read about his silly smile for his family or his soft heart for animals.

 

Source: The Physical Traits that Define Men and Women in Literature

People applying for software engineering positions at companies are often asked to solve problems on a whiteboard, under the watchful eye of an interviewer, as a way to assess technical problem solving skills.

But recent research suggests that whiteboard technical tests – so daunting to job seekers that there are books on how to deal with them – often fail to assess technical skill, according to new research. Instead, they’re all about pressure.

In a paper [PDF] to be presented later this year at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, researchers from North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Microsoft in the US argue that whiteboard sessions test for stage fright rather than, y’know, coding competency.

The title of the paper hints at its conclusion: “Does Stress Impact Technical Interview Performance?” NCSU authors Mahnaz Behroozi, Shivani Shirolkar, and Chris Parnin, with Titus Barik from Microsoft, say it most certainly does.

“Through a happy accident, the software industry has seemingly reinvented a crude yet effective instrument for reliably introducing stress in subjects, which typically manifests as performance anxiety,” the paper explains.

“A technical interview has an uncanny resemblance to the Trier Social Stress Test, a procedure used for decades by psychologists and is the best known ‘gold standard’ procedure for the sole purpose of reliably inducing stress.”

As a consequence, whiteboard interviews may fail to assess coder competency. Rather, the researchers argue, they measure how well job candidates handle anxiety.

Using 48 graduate and undergraduate students with programming experience, the researchers conducted a randomized controlled trial to compare the traditional technical interview (done while being watched) with a private session evaluation (done without being observed). The experiment was designed to measure cognitive load and stress through the collection of eye tracking metrics, specifically fixation duration and pupil dilation.

The researchers found that stress hinders interview performance, with participants in the traditional technical interview exhibiting higher cognitive load, lower scores, and higher stress levels. In essence, social anxiety took otherwise qualified job candidates out of the running because of the circumstances of the interview.

Further flaws

What’s more, whiteboard technical interviews appear to favor men over women.

“We also observed that no women successfully solved the problem in the public setting, whereas all women solved it correctly in the private setting,” the paper says.

In a phone interview with The Register, Christopher Parnin, assistant professor at NC State University and one of the paper’s co-authors, said he doesn’t have a conclusive reason why this might be the case. He said there’s some support in academic literature to indicate the women have more performance anxiety than men, but he stressed that’s a gross oversimplification because men experience performance anxiety too.

For Parnin, the problem is whiteboard tests themselves. “It all comes down to the fact that the test is designed to make almost anyone fail,” he said. “You’re basically having to interview tons of people just to find those who can pass it.”

Parnin took issue with the way the industry has dealt with the difficulty of its tests. Rather than coming up with a fair way to evaluate software engineers, companies like Google advise at least 40 practice sessions – a time commitment that’s not an option for everyone. This amounts to stress inoculation training and it does help people pass whiteboard tests, he said, but it doesn’t make the tests an effective skill assessment tool.

As an alternative, the paper points to the way devops biz Honeycomb (Hound Technology) – overseen by a female CEO, CTO, CMO and VP of engineering – approaches hiring. The company provides interview questions in advance so it’s not a Trier Social Stress Test.

As the company explains on its website, its goal is to avoid surprises. “The research is clear: unknowns cause anxiety, and people don’t perform well when they’re anxious,” the company says.

“The big picture is to provide more accessible alternatives,” said Parnin. “There are a lot of ways to test for the same thing without putting all this pressure on people.”

Source: You’re testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are ‘anti-women psychological stress examinations’ • The Register

What Parnin forgets, is that pressure is actually a great part of a software developers’ life and so a very valid thing to test for.

They say they applaud a recent “needed reckoning” on racial justice, but argue it has fuelled stifling of open debate.

The letter denounces “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” and “a blinding moral certainty”.

Several signatories have been attacked for comments that caused offence.

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” says the letter.

US intellectual Noam Chomsky, eminent feminist Gloria Steinem, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and author Malcolm Gladwell also put their names to the letter, which was published on Tuesday in Harper’s Magazine.

The appearance of Harry Potter author Rowling’s name among signatories comes after she recently found herself under attack online for comments that offended transgender people.

Her fellow British writer, Martin Amis, also signed the letter.

• What unites young people against Obama and Trump

It also says: “We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

“But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.”

The letter condemns “disproportionate punishments” meted out by institutional leaders conducting “panicked damage control”.

It continues: “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”

It was signed by New York Times op-ed contributors David Brooks and Bari Weiss. The newspaper’s editorial page editor was recently removed amid uproar after publishing an opinion piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton.

“We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement,” the letter says.

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It adds: “We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.”

One signatory – Matthew Yglesias, co-founder of liberal news analysis website Vox – was rebuked by a colleague on Tuesday for putting his name to the letter.

Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff, a trans woman, tweeted that she had written a letter to the publication’s editors to say that Yglesias signing the letter “makes me feel less safe at Vox”.

But VanDerWerff said she did not want Yglesias to be fired or apologise because it would only convince him he was being “martyred”.

One signatory recanted within hours of the letter being published.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a US author and transgender activist, tweeted: “I did not know who else had signed that letter.

“I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming.”

She added: “I am so sorry.”

Source: JK Rowling joins 150 public figures warning over free speech – BBC News

This is part of a weaponisation of offensive feelings where moralistic high horse people feels that saying that they’re offended by something allows them to transgress the bounds of normal behaviour.

Facebook has finally said it would now prohibit the sale of all historical artifacts due to rampant black market trade in looted antiquitieson the site, per the New York Times—a problem the social media company has known about for years.

The new rules ban any “attempts to buy, sell or trade in historical artifacts,” defined as “rare items of significant historical, cultural or scientific value,” on Facebook or Instagram. It also comes after years of Facebook doing very little to restrict trade in those same objects.

Reporting last month in the Times found at least 90 Facebook groups, mostly written in Arabic, with tens of thousands of members that were “connected to the illegal trade in Middle Eastern antiquities.” In those groups, salespeople would post images or descriptions of objects and often then direct interested buyers to contact them via chat or other services to arrange payment or meetings in person; in some cases, the buyers simply posted that they were interested in acquiring a specific type of artifact. Some of the groups also trafficked in do-it-yourself guides on how others could get into the black market antiquities trade.

Some of the items may have been originally acquired by Islamic State terrorists, who in addition to destroying thousands of years’ worth of artifacts and archaeological sites in regions under their control in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, looted those sites and other cultural institutions like museums for profit. Armed groups affiliated or working with other extremist groups and criminal organizations have participated as well. A United Nations Security Council report in January 2020 noted evidence of numerous excavations by Islamic State or al-Qaeda affiliates and concluded that social media groups “dedicated to antiquities trafficking continue to be created, while the area of origin of trafficked artefacts increases, continuously revealing a web of interconnectivity among antiquities traffickers.”

While in some cases looters and buyers used coded language to discuss the deals, Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project (ATHAR) co-directors Katie Paul told the Times, in other instances it was all playing out in the open, right down to photos and videos of the objects being stolen to prove they were genuine. Paul told Artnet News that the countries of origin are “places where no legal trade exists,” making the sales uniformly illegal.

The total number of groups identified by researchers and activists is at least 200, according to the Times, and those are just the ones that they have caught onto. ATHAR released a report in 2019 finding “488 individual admins managing a collective 1,947,195 members across 95 Facebook Groups” comprised of a “mix of average citizens, middlemen, and violent extremists,” with what appeared to be a high degree of coordination between the admins of those groups:

Group members include a mix of average citizens, middlemen, and violent extremists. Violent extremists currently include individuals associated with Syrian-based groups like Hay’at Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), Hurras Al-Din, the Zinki Brigade and other non-Syrian based Al-Qaeda or Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) affiliates. All of these groups are using Facebook as a platform for antiquities trafficking, whether through direct interaction with buyers and sellers or through the use of middlemen who straddle transactions between the general public and terrorist groups.

Administrators usually demanded that the black market traders cough up fees from any sales related to their membership in groups, according to the report. Around 36 percent of the sellers in an ATHAR case study of Syrian groups were actually located in conflict zones, while another 44 percent were in countries bordering conflict zones.

ATHAR co-director and Shawnee State University professor Amr Al-Azm, who had previously worked in Syria as an antiquities official, told the Times artifacts were also flowing from Yemen, Egypt, and Tunisia and that Facebook could have taken action as early as 2014, when deleting the groups would have had a bigger impact. He added it was a “supply and demand issue” and that deleting Facebook pages instead of archiving evidence destroys “a huge corpus of evidence” that might later be used to track down artifacts.

A Facebook report released on Tuesday acknowledged the issue, conceding significant pitfalls in policies that allowed trade in historical artifacts except where “it is clear that the artifacts have been looted.” Key findings included there is a “good chance that historical artifacts traded online are either illegal or fake, as an estimated 80% of antiquities have ‘sketchy provenances,’” as well as that there “is criticism that Facebook’s policy has led the platform to become a digital black market where users buy and sell illicit antiquities originating from conflict zones.”

Greg Mandel, a spokesperson for Facebook, told the Times that trade in “stolen artifacts” was already prohibited by site rules. (Paul and Al-Azm have disagreed that Facebook was actively enforcing those policies in the past, writing in 2018 that “Facebook does not currently enforce an explicit ban on transactions involving illicit cultural property.”)

“To keep these artifacts and our users safe, we’ve been working to expand our rules, and starting today, we now prohibit the exchange, sale or purchase of all historical artifacts on Facebook and Instagram,” Mandel added.

Paul told the Times the new policy is “an important shift in [Facebook’s] position on the trade in cultural heritage” and demonstrates they are aware of “illegal and harmful activity” on the site. But the policy is “only as good as its enforcement,” she added.

Source: Facebook Bans Sale of Historical Artifacts Due to Rampant Black Market Trade