requiem.net.au - Science

The psychology of repetition - Why the Workplace Reform commericals will fail

Wed, 5 Sep 2007 11:38:39 +1000

The Washington Post is discussing the results of a US government disease "myths & facts"prevention advertising program. The commercial is styled exactly the same as the Australian Government's Workplace Reform (Work Choices) ad series. Unfortunately for both, the commercials have the opposite of the desired effect. Just three days after viewing the US commerical, participants believed that 40% of the myths stated in the ad were factual. The fatal mistake made in both these campaigns was ignoring the psychology of repetition.

The peculiar nature of this phenomenon first came to popular attention with a quote attributed to Joseph Goebbls "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." Whether the statement repeated is true or false does not seem to matter, what counts is how many times it is repeated. Over the last few years there has been a slew of research pointing to the importance of repetition in people believing a statement as fact [1, 2].

Repetition and the Big Lie propaganda technique, first discussed by Hitler in Mein Kampf, has been used extensively by the current White House administration. Its most forceful proponent is Dick Cheney who today still maintains the following associations are synonymous - Iraq, Al Qaeda, 9-11, WMD's. He perpetuates these myths even after the associations 'Iraq 9-11', 'Iraq Al Qaeda', 'Iraq WMD' long ago had been repeatedly dismissed as false by the CIA and many others.

The Laws of Thermodynamics

Wed, 4 Jul 2007 14:24:00 +1000

The Laws of Thermodynamics are a bedrock of modern physics. Crucial to an understanding of the universe, these laws cut across all scientific disciplines. If you surf the web long enough you'll no doubt come across them quoted in one form or another. Knowing these laws will inform your understanding of both the physical world and everyday technology.

Zeroth Law - "If two thermodynamic systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other." For example, if you have a hot cup of coffee, the cup will radiate heat until both the coffee and the surrounding air are at the same temperature, or thermal equilibrium.

First Law - "In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant." Energy may change from one form to another, be passed between systems, but it cannot be created nor destroyed.

Second Law - "The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium." Put simply, everything degrades over time. Entropy is a measure of usable energy, and can be considered a measure of "chaos". The universe is moving from a state of structured order (stars, galaxies, atoms, metals) to a cold homogeneous soup, devoid of usable energy. See Heat Death.

Third Law - "As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant." The Universe will attain absolute zero when all energy and matter is randomly distributed across space. The current temperature of empty space in the Universe is about 2.7 Kelvins.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Our solar system is not part of the Milky Way Galaxy

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:04:24 +1000

UPDATE 2: Actually, it is. This theory has now been debunked by Bad Astronomy and should be disregarded.

UPDATE 1: The validity of the claims made in the linked article cannot be verified at present, they should be viewed with caution until a more reputable source can be located. Specifically, none of the references in the linked article mention the claim [1, 2].

A team of astrophysicists today announced [2] an astounding discovery - the Earth's solar system Sol is not part of the Milky Way galaxy but instead belongs to the relatively unknown Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy. Data taken from Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) determined that the Milky Way is currently engaged in a form of galactic cannibalism. The much heavier Milky Way's gravitational force is pulling in our own smaller dwarf galaxy, with our solar system right at the nexus.

The infrared image below shows the Milky Way in blue, its mass 10,000 larger than the Sagittarius galaxy in red, and Sol as the small yellow circle at the crossroads between the two.

xkcd and the Philosophy of Science

Tue, 3 Apr 2007 23:06:17 +1000

Last week the popular geek webcomic xckd published a rather humorous little strip which poked fun at the difference between a scientist and a normal person. Reading the strip I immediately thought of Karl Popper, one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century.

Popper proposed a brilliant and important theory, in essence: "no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive" -wiki. This means that no scientific theorem developed by humankind can ever be proven true by scientific testing, rather it is only believed to be true, until it is proven false. Thus, the only thing that can be achieved by scientific testing is not verifiability, but falsification.

Put in a practical context, let's say I run an experiment which attempts to test the laws of gravity. I walk to the top of a building and drop a tennis ball off the roof. Logic tells us that the ball will fall to the ground (excluding other extraneous factors). I can go on testing this theorem, dropping ball after ball: ten, twenty, a thousand, ten thousand tennis balls; every ball should drop to the ground. However, this doesn't prove that the one trillion-trillionth ball will also drop to the ground; it may just hover there in space. Thus, the theory of gravity is believed true because we are yet to find a decisive case that proves it incorrect.

I saw the Aurora Borealis

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 08:23:59 +1000

I am currently 1300km south of the North Pole on the island of Spitsbergen, Svalbard. On Sunday night I saw the Aurora Borealis, I also took photos. Yesterday I went on a 10-hour 200km snow-mobile safari out to the east coast of the island to stand at the foot of a glacier and to look for polar bears. While I didn't see any bears, I did push my 660cc 4-stroke snow-mobile to speeds of just over 100km/hr. Tomorrow I go on a Huski ride. But the best thing so far is that my accommodation has free wireless Internet!

The aurora is caused by solar flare emissions from the sun. The plasma bursts (superheated gases) of charged particles strike the earth's magnetosphere, exciting the atoms and causing them to fluoresce. This area typically only sees green lights, caused by emission from Oxygen atoms (that bit I didn't know). Because the aurora is a space event it means it can be predicted with some accuracy. Check out spaceweather.com for viewing alerts. For more information on the aurora see the wiki page.

"Doomsday" seed vault designs for Svalbard, Nowary are unveiled

Fri, 9 Feb 2007 19:35:58 +1000

The Norwegian government has unveiled plans for a massive "doomsday" seed vault, designed to store seeds of all the world's known food crops, protecting them from possible future planetary disasters.

While the story itself is interesting, I'm posting it because the vault is being built in Svalbard, Norway, a place I'll be visiting in just over two weeks. Svalbard is a series of remote islands near the north pole, the main one being Spitsbergen, which is the one I am visiting. The BBC story linked above has an Atlas image.

NASA to announce the discovery of "flowing water" on Mars

Wed, 6 Dec 2006 19:41:32 +1000

While details are sketchy, NASA has announced that in a few hours it will be holding a briefing to "announce significant find on Mars". According to this CBS story, both Aviation Week and Space Technology say that NASA will talk about the discovery of "flowing water". The search for water ramped up in 2000 with the discovery of gullies, thanks to the Mars Global Surveyor; the importance of these gullies being that they may be a niche for life.

Ebay Sniping - A statistically preferable approach

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:48:35 +1000

A team of Korean scientists have found that sniping in eBay auctions, that is coming in at the closing moments with a bid, is a more economically succesful way of bidding. The team at Seoul National University first generated a mathematical model of the auction process, and then tested it against over 500,000 auction records. "Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start." This research confirms earlier such results from 2002 by Alvin Roth and Axel Ockenfels.

Given our unfortunate position in relation to US time zones, it is not always possible to hang around till the closing moments of an auction. In these cases you could employ the services of automated sniping software. Check the wiki on auction sniping for a larger list.

Software algorithm determines most influential chat room participant

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 19:59:02 +1000

A new program developed over at the University of Southern California aims to determine the most influential participant in a chat room, or the most relevant news post from a threaded discussion board. The software operates with an accuracy of around 70% in comparison to human analysis.

Using a dataset taken from the University discussion boards, the developers first manually categorised each of the messages according to their purpose: requests for information, answers or chit-chat. The software then used a lexical database to locate similarities in the language used and to determine relationships between them. A second analysis examined then examined how useful a message was based on the language used in the reply messages. The two analyses were then correlated using the Hypertext Induced Topic Selection algorithm, one that is also commonly used for page ranking by search engines.

Seasons change our body shape

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:42:25 +1000

An Australian study has revealed that fat cells in the body shift around depending on the season. The study proposes that the variation in testosterone levels is the driving force behind weight shifting, with seasonal fluctuations found in both men and women. Testosterone levels were found to be at their highest during autumn for both men and women.

Testosterone increases the waist-hip ratio (WHR) in both men and women. WHR is known to affect perceived levels of attractiveness, where a ratio of 0.7 (waist circumference that is 70% of the hip circumference) is desirable in women, while 0.9 is preferred for males (highly symmetrical). Thus during the autumn period women appear more 'curvaceous', and men more 'portly'. Conversely, men and women are at their most attractive during the hotter periods, with lower WHR ratios. This research is supported by earlier such findings.

The monogamous myth of swans

Fri, 9 Jun 2006 12:33:28 +1000

In Western society the swan is seen as a symbol [2] of fidelity and enduring love. A recent Australian study however has shattered that myth, finding that female swans regularly partake in philandering. DNA tests reported that one in six cygnets are the result of an unfaithful encounter; "[this] recent work has shown that infidelity is rife among black swans," remarked Dr Raoul Mulder.

At this point I could make some bitter remark about how all women are cheating bitches, but that would be unfair. Only 1 in 5 is.

Why we feel sleepy after eating

Mon, 5 Jun 2006 13:17:23 +1000

A study conducted by The University of Manchester has found that the neurons designed to keep us awake are automatically turned off after eating. "We have pinpointed how glucose – the sugar in food – can stop brain cells from producing signals that keep us awake." The findings published in the latest edition of Neuron discuss how glucose inhibits neurons that produce orexins; tiny proteins that are crucial for normal regulation of our state of consciousness.

As a Ph.D. student I am particularly aware of this effect. In an effort to maintain productivity I would routinely skip or delay meals when I was 'in the zone'. I have since desisted this practice due to negative health effects. An alternative approach may be to have smaller, more frequent meals.

Memories become more positive with age

Wed, 31 May 2006 20:29:53 +1000

A study to be published in the Journal of Personality has found that people tend to recall past important events in a more positive light as the memories age. "These findings suggest that healthy individuals work to build a positive narrative identity that will yield an overall optimistic tone to the most important recalled events from their lives," and that "people try to see the positive in even very difficult life experiences, and come to downplay, as much as they can, how negative some events were in the past." For more details please see ABC science news or the paper's abstract.

The myth of hair waxing versus shaving

Thu, 25 May 2006 20:45:51 +1000

On Catalyst tonight the presenters conducted an experiment which examined the waxing and shaving of hair. Specifically, they asked the question "is there really any scientific proof that shaving your hair will make it grow back thicker and darker – or that waxing it will make it grow back thinner and fairer?"

The result: no. Shaving does not increase the number hair follicles you have; consequently these parts of your body will not get hairier over time. Similarly, waxing does not decrease the amount of hair regrowth. However, there is evidence that repeated waxing over many years may destroy some hair follicles.

Hair in waxed regions does grow back more slowly though, and somewhat unevenly. This is caused by the varying ages of the hair follicles that were removed: "hair grows in a three stage cycle and the timing differs from hair to hair. A hair plucked at the beginning of its cycle will take longer to grow back than an old hair that’s up for replacement." That is, the follicle containing aged hair is already prepared to grow a new strand and thus does so more quickly.

Dolphins use names to identify one another

Thu, 11 May 2006 16:54:52 +1000

Recent studies have found that bottleneck dolphins employ whistles to individually identify themselves. The custom whistles are developed in infancy and are kept throughout the animal's lifetime. Dolphins are now the first animals outside of humans that have been clearly shown to use referential communication.

One initial contention was that the dolphins might simply be responding to the individuality of the whistle, that is, the resonance patterns produced by their unique blowhole. This behaviour is common to humans, where we can identify people known to us simply by hearing their voice. To test this, researchers created electronic versions which maintained the pitch changes of the individual whistles, but removed any identifying 'voice' features. In a study of 14 dolphins, 9 were found to respond to the electronically synthesised version of the whistle.