Archive for the ‘Behaviour’ Category

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Shubh Diwali

November 2, 2013

It is that time of year again. Diwali is celebrated this year on 2nd November in the South and on 3rd November in North India.

For Indians and the Indian diaspora it is the biggest festival of the year. For the children, the excitement is unbearable and the anticipation is sublime.

A time for Presents. New clothes. Lights. Fireworks. Nuts. Sweets galore. And for the young men (mainly) there a session of teen patte (three-card brag) with a modicum of alcohol through the night. And the whiff of bhang is not unkown.

If there was any religious significance to the day it has long since gone (though it may still seem faintly religious on the surface). It is also the time for corporate gift giving in a very big way. Suppliers to customers. Petitioners to politicians. Litigants to the legal fraternity. Tenants to landlords. Patients to their doctors. Giving thanks in advance (call it relationship building to be kind or you could call it a form of social bribery) for the year to come.

But within the family or feudal unit it is different. Here there are new clothes, sweets and money and presents. From parents to children, From the head of the family to the servants. From the zamindars to the tenant farmers. From the masters to the serfs. At every household the local artisans and service providers will call to receive their baksheesh. The newspaper guy, the electrician, the plumber, the carpenter, the cable guy, the vegetable hawker and even the beat policeman. (And you can be sure that the receivers compare notes about the generosity of the various households).

You may give little if you cannot afford more, but to refuse to give baksheesh is most unseemly and beyond the pale.

But it is generally a time of goodwill  – and I reckon the goodwill level is about 10% higher than the long -term average. (Which of course begs the question as to when the goodwill is lower than average?).

A Happy Diwali to you all.

File:DiwaliOilLampCrop.JPG

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Posted in Behaviour, India | 1 Comment »

A waggish tale of tails and wagging and of the sinister

November 1, 2013

Tail wagging in dogs certainly originates from their wolf ancestry. Wolves also communicate with their tails.

There are two specific styles of tail wagging that wolves perform: rigid or fluid movement. A rigid tail (like a pendulum) wag means the wolf is excited and has dominant tendencies. A fluid, or snake-like wag typically is a signal of play or greeting toward other pack members. 
The elevation and movement of each wolf’s tail work together to describe the behavior of each individual. So, a wolf who is rigidly wagging a T1 tail is exhibiting intense dominance, however a wolf fluidly wagging a T3 tail is probably soliciting social play with other pack members. 

But new research shows that in dogs, wagging on the left is quite different and communicates a different message to wagging on the right. Needless to say tail-wagging on the sinister side was a cause for concern to other dogs while a wag on the dexter side was reassuring!

 Siniscalchi et al.: Current Biology, Seeing left or right asymmetric tail wagging produces different emotional responses in dogs, 10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.027

EurekAlert:The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 31 show that dogs, like humans, have asymmetrically organized brains, with the left and right sides playing different roles.

The discovery follows earlier work by the same Italian research team, which found that dogs wag to the right when they feel positive emotions (upon seeing their owners, for instance) and to the left when they feel negative emotions (upon seeing an unfriendly dog, for example). That biased tail-wagging behavior reflects what is happening in the dogs’ brains. Left-brain activation produces a wag to the right, and right-brain activation produces a wag to the left.

While monitoring their reactions, the researchers showed dogs videos of other dogs with either left- or right-asymmetric tail wagging. When dogs saw another dog wagging to the left, their heart rates picked up and they began to look anxious. When dogs saw another dog wagging to the right, they stayed perfectly relaxed.

“The direction of tail wagging does in fact matter, and it matters in a way that matches hemispheric activation,” says Giorgio Vallortigara of the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento. “In other words, a dog looking to a dog wagging with a bias to the right side—and thus showing left-hemisphere activation as if it was experiencing some sort of positive/approach response—would also produce relaxed responses. In contrast, a dog looking to a dog wagging with a bias to the left—and thus showing right-hemisphere activation as if it was experiencing some sort of negative/withdrawal response—would also produce anxious and targeting responses as well as increased cardiac frequency. That is amazing, I think.”

Not so implausible.

We take sticking out the left hand when greeting someone as not quite the proper thing to do. In Asia where the left hand is associated with cleaning oneself, the use of the left hand inappropriately could be taken as insulting. Monica Watkins writes, “Left-handedness has been, and in some cases still is, considered an inconvenience, a bad habit, or a symbol of the “sinister””.  A Yale study just published also claims that left-handed people are more likely to have psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. Another study claims that our handedness is a major subliminal influence in the choices and decisions we make in all aspects our daily lives.

And it might have sinister implications if the Queen were to start waving with her left hand.

What's wrong

A sinister wave?

And I wonder if dogs distinguish between humans who pat them with their right hands and those who use their sinister side?

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Global crisis! Wine consumption exceeds production

October 31, 2013

Wikimedia

This is serious!

Forget peak oil, never mind peak gas, global warming can take its time and Syrian chemical weapons have been destroyed.

Call a meeting of the UN Security Council.

The wine in the world is running out!!

Consumption exceeds production and reserves are sharply down.

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou 

New York Post:A world-wide wine shortage is set to strike because the industry is under-supplied by roughly 300 million cases a year — the worst dry spell in 50 years, the research firm Morgan Stanley claims.

Wine drinkers across the globe are guzzling more vino than vinyards are producing, thanks to a spike in popularity in the U.S. and China, which has quadrupled its wine consumption in the past five years.

At the same time, top wine-making countries such as France, Spain and Italy are producing less due to land use problems, poor harvests and bad weather, the report claims.

And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, which could cause the cost of wine to spike, experts say.

BBC: The report by Morgan Stanley’s analysts Tom Kierath and Crystal Wang says global wine consumption has been rising since 1996 (except a drop in 2008-09), and presently stands at about 3bn cases per year.

At the same time, there are currently more than one million wine producers worldwide, making some 2.8bn cases each year.

The authors predict that – in the short term – “inventories will likely be reduced as current consumption continues to be predominantly supplied by previous vintages”

And as consumption then inevitably turns to the 2012 vintage, the authors say they “expect the current production shortfall to culminate in a significant increase in export demand, and higher prices for exports globally”.

Bache, bene venies
gratus et optatus
per quem noster animus
fit letificatus.

Iste cyphus concavus
de bono mero profluus
siquis bibit sepius
satur fit et ebrius

Hec sunt vasa regia
quibus spoliatur
ierusalem et regalis
babilon ditatur.

Istud vinum, bonum vinum,
vinum generosum,
reddit virum curialem,
probum, animosum.

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Why bug the papal election if not to influence the election – or the next Pope?

October 30, 2013

The report is that the NSA eavesdropped on the papal election. That they may have done so does not surprise. But if they did they must have had some purpose – one presumes. And what other purpose could there be except to either influence the election itself, or to gain influence over whoever was elected pope?

Were the US cardinals privy to the bugging by the NSA? Were they perhaps getting secret text messages from the NSA as to how the election was progressing? Perhaps they were even getting instructions. How heavy was the betting on the outcome of the election? Any possibilities of spot-fixing? The Sistine Chapel is supposed to have the means to scramble all mobile signals but getting past these ought to be child’s play for the NSA.

The possibilities are endless. It has all the makings of a wonderful conspiracy theory. Maybe even another book by Dan Brown? Perhaps the NSA can even listen in on Pope Francis using his hotline to his Superior.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were true?

I shall be following Papal pronouncements with great interest to see how closely Pope Francis follows a pro-US line!!!!!!!!!

RawStory: 

US secret services allegedly eavesdropped on cardinals before the conclave in March to elect a new pope, Italian weekly magazine Panorama claimed Wednesday.

“The National Security Agency wiretapped the pope,” the magazine said, accusing the United States of listening in to telephone calls to and from the Vatican, including the accommodation housing cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio before he was elected Pope Francis.

The allegations follow a report on surveillance website Cryptome which said the United States intercepted 46 million telephone calls in Italy in December 2012 and early January 2013.

Among those, “there are apparently also calls from and to the Vatican,” Panorama said.

“It is feared that the great American ear continued to tap prelates’ conversations up to the eve of the conclave,” it said, adding that there were “suspicions that the conversations of the future pope may have been monitored”.

Bergoglio “had been a person of interest to the American secret services since 2005, according to Wikileaks,” it said.

The bugged conversations were divided into four categories: “leadership intentions”, “threats to financial systems”, “foreign policy objectives” and “human rights,” it claimed.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said “we have heard nothing of this and are not worried about it.”

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Moral in the morning, lying in the evening, cheating by suppertime…

October 30, 2013

Of course it is another paper demonstrating great insight into human behaviour with far reaching conclusions. Needless to say it is a hypothesis dreamed up by social psychologists.

Is it good science? Unlikely. Is it trivial? Undoubtedly. Does it provide real empirical data? Yes. Is it relevant? Hardly.

Is it even science?  

Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac H. Smith, The Morning Morality Effect: The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior, Psychological Science, October 28, 2013,  doi: 10.1177/0956797613498099

Kouchacki is a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard University and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Utah, where Smith is a current doctoral student. Kouchaki has been involved with a previous “priming” study about the effect of thinking about money on morality. And as is now well known, most “priming” studies are highly suspect.

It is not for nothing that the the APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology.

The authors conducted experiments on college-age participants and on a sample of on-line participants:

  1. … college-age participants were shown various patterns of dots on a computer. For each pattern, they were asked to identify whether more dots were displayed on the left or right side of the screen. Importantly, participants were not given money for getting correct answers, but were instead given money based on which side of the screen they determined had more dots; they were paid 10 times the amount for selecting the right over the left. Participants therefore had a financial incentive to select the right, even if there were unmistakably more dots on the left, which would be a case of clear cheating.
  2. … also tested participants’ moral awareness in both the morning and afternoon by presenting them with word fragments such as “_ _RAL” and “E_ _ _ C_ _”

Their results showed that in line with their hypothesis, participants tested between 8:00 am and 12:00 pm were less likely to cheat than those tested between 12:00 pm and 6:00pm — a phenomenon the researchers call the “morning morality effect.” In the second experiment morning participants were more likely to form the words “moral” and “ethical,” whereas the afternoon participants tended to form the words “coral” and “effects,” lending further support to the morning morality effect.

Clearly the arduous field-work consisted of wandering around their dangerous college campus(es) soliciting subjects and then spending many long-nights on-line to get their “on-line” sample.

…. both undergraduate students and a sample of U.S. adults engaged in less unethical behavior (e.g., less lying and cheating) on tasks performed in the morning than on the same tasks performed in the afternoon. This morning morality effect was mediated by decreases in moral awareness and self-control in the afternoon. Furthermore, the effect of time of day on unethical behavior was found to be stronger for people with a lower propensity to morally disengage. These findings highlight a simple yet pervasive factor (i.e., the time of day) that has important implications for moral behavior.

Presumably a good afternoon nap could restore our moral behaviour in the evenings?

It seems to me that the hypothesis has been designed/invented primarily to grab headlines and to ensure publication.

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Horse fighting still allowed in China

October 29, 2013

It may be the 21st century but what passes for civilised behaviour is still in the mind.

And this – in my mind – does not pass the test.

Barbarism is alive and well.

Of course, just banning such events is not a sustainable answer. That will only come when the behaviour of humans becomes civilised – and then any ban will no longer be necessary.

People watch horses fight during a traditional local event held by the Miao ethnic minority in Rongshui county, Liuzhou, Guangxi ethnic Zhuang autonomous region, China October 26, 2013. Horse fighting is a 500-year-old custom for the Miao people. REUTERS-Stringer

People watch horses fight during a traditional local event held by the Miao ethnic minority in Rongshui county, Liuzhou, Guangxi ethnic Zhuang autonomous region, China October 26, 2013. Horse fighting is a 500-year-old custom for the Miao people.
REUTERS/Stringer

Horse fighting has now been outlawed almost worldwide. It still thrives, however, in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, China and South Korea.

To start the competition, two stallions are brought in. A mare in heat is then presented to them and removed. The horses who do not immediately go into battle for the mare are whipped into a fury or gunshots are fired to incite them through fear.

Countries staging horse fights defend it as a cultural tradition that has gone on for hundreds of years, and resist any attempts to ban it.  Gambling appears to be the real and primary reason for its continued existence.

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Posted in Animals, Behaviour, Ethics, Humans | 1 Comment »

Obama’s leadership style is one of “Don’t ask, don’t be told”!

October 29, 2013

When one is President (or a CEO or a General), there are some “unacceptable” activities and behaviours that your organisation indulges in that it is better not to know.  This is a delicate skill that is not easily learned. To know, but not to be seen to know. To be informed but to avoid being told what you don’t wish to know. So that ignorance always remains as a defence if the “unacceptable” action or behaviour is ever revealed.

“Don’t ask, don’t be told”.

I don’t usually expect the Washington Post to be overly critical of a sitting Democratic President. But Obama’s apparent ignorance of what is done by his administration is getting embarrassing. A couple of articles in the Washington Post by Dana Millbank and Jennifer Rubin take Obama to task.

Jennifer Rubin: The list is growing every week: The IRS scandal, the deteriorating security situation in Libya, spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, spying on journalists and the Obamacare mess. Those are just a few of the things we have been told at one time or another that President Obama he didn’t know about before learning about them in the media. Note to media: You have a critical job in briefing the president, so err on side of over-inclusion.

Then there are the things he had wrong or knew better but said anyway: There is a fatwa in Iran against nuclear weapons, “You will get to keep your health-care plan,” the Benghazi attack was related to an anti- Muslim video, and no predecessor had been compelled to negotiate a budget deal in the context of a potential government shutdown.

This prompts several questions: Who is running the government? Why is the president content not to know so many things? At this point one has to conclude he is intentionally ignorant.  …….

….. The list goes on. You would think the president at some point would be embarrassed to be the least-informed man in Washington, D.C.

Dana Millbank: For a smart man, President Obama professes to know very little about a great number of things going on in his administration.

On Sunday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that he didn’t learn until this summer that the National Security Agency had been bugging the phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders for nearly five years. 

That followed by a few days a claim by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that Obama didn’t know about problems with the HealthCare.gov Web site before the rest of the world learned of them after the Oct. 1 launch.

It stretches credulity to think that the United States was spying on world leaders without the president’s knowledge, or that he was blissfully unaware of huge technical problems that threatened to undermine his main legislative achievement. But on issues including the IRS targeting flap and the Justice Department’s use of subpoenas against reporters, White House officials have frequently given a variation on this theme.

Question: What did Obama know and when did he know it?

Answer: Not much, and about a minute ago…….

Some might argue that this is not a “leadership” style but an abdication of leadership.

 

 

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Greenpeace is just juvenile exhibitionism and hooliganism

October 26, 2013

Media stunts to get attention and cry-babies when their exhibitionistic stunts go wrong.

For some (the so-called volunteers) it is the chance for an “adventure” holiday.

Piracy, hooliganism and the success is measured by the exposure they can get in the media.  Sound and fury signifying nothing.

The Greenpeace 30 can therefore consider their exploits a great success judging by the media attention they have obtained. They will remain in prison in Murmansk at least until November 24th and i see no reason why they should not be forced to bear the cost of all their juvenile high-jinks. A public spanking would not be uncalled for either.

Reuters: A Greenpeace activist suspended himself from the Eiffel Tower on Saturday to call for the release of 30 people who have spent more than a month in a Russian jail over a protest against oil drilling in the Arctic

After lowering himself from the second tier of the Paris landmark, the man unfurled a large yellow sign saying: “Free the Arctic 30.” He was brought down about two hours later by firemen without incident.

 

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RIP: Augusto Odone – creator of Lorenzo’s oil

October 26, 2013

Augusto Odone, a former World Bank economist who challenged the world’s medical establishment and created Lorenzo’s Oil has died in Italy aged 80,

The story of Lorenzo’s Oil is now well enough known (and not least because of the 1992  film). Augusto Odone’s effort is the ultimate example of Citizen Science prevailing over Big Science, of a lone, non-establishment individual battling, persevering and triumphing over an establishment view.

Augusto Odone with his son Lorenzo

Augusto Odone refused to accept medical opinion that his son Lorenzo would die in childhood – BBC

And it is becoming increasingly obvious that Big Science, whether in Medicine or in Physics or in Climate Change suffers from the fundamental weakness which results from a massive inertia which prevents the non-establishment view from surfacing. Consensus Science smothers creativity and ingenuity.

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European Parliament: where they don’t know what they are voting about

October 25, 2013

This only reconfirms my view that the European Parliament is not worthy of any respect and is worthy of much contempt.

(found at Guido Fawkes’ Blog)

A typical day in the European Parliament as MEPs get ready for a vote. But there is a problem. One MEP stands up and explains that the room has no idea what it is voting on, as they haven’t yet been given a chance to read the alterations to the amendments about to be passed.

The response? – “That’s the way we do things here”.

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