amyvdh

If the Dari meaning last week for "Operation Moshtarak" was "together," the new translation this week is: "Where's my Map Quest?"
First described by the Marines as a city of 80,000, news reports eventually ballooned that number to 125,000 during the supposedly critical battle of Marjah.
Looking at the pictures over the multi-week offensive, it did seem the backgrounds -- characteristic of the shot above, and as we see here and here -- looked a little sparse. What now comes to light by way of independent reporter Gareth Porter, however , is that -- except for a few buildings here and there -- Marjah is a mirage.
(posted and linked photo: Brennan Linsley/AP. caption: Green smoke marks the landing zone as seen through the plexiglass window of a quickly-descending U.S. Army Task Force Pegasus helicopter on a mission to evacuate a wounded U.S. Marine, in Marjah, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Tuesday March 2, 2010. The "chase" or security helicopter circles in the background. Pegasus crews provide the fast medical evacuation of seriously wounded combatants and civilians.)

The San Francisco Exploratorium is the Mind Hacks of science museums - every exhibit is hands on, giving you the chance to experiment with and experience for yourself scientific principles.

Obviously, one of my favourite exhibits was a psychology demonstration, one based on a classic visual illusion known as the "Ames' Room". We've a small model of this in Sheffield, which I use when teaching PSY101, but the Exploratorium's "distorted room" is full size demonstration of the effect. Here's me and a friend in the room:

Notice anything odd? We're the same size in reality, but I (on the right) look significantly larger.

The illusion takes advantage of the unavoidable principle that size and distance are confounded - known as "Emmert's Law". It is Emmert's Law that means that big things far away can look the same size as small things near by. Our brain makes assumptions about how far away things are and uses these to inform our impression of size. The distorted room is built so that, from one perspective only, the two sides of the room look an equal distance away. In fact, the corner on the right is far closer to the viewer (the camera in this case) than the corner on the left. Because I really am nearer the camera I make a larger image on the retina (take up more pixels on the camera), but because the brain assumes that I am the same distance away as my friend on the left the only conclusion that my visual system can draw is that I must be much larger than him.

Normally your visual system isn't fooled about depth - clues in the scene, the difference between the image on your two eyes and movements of your head can all help reveal how far away different parts of the scene are. The distorted room removes some of these clues by forcing you took look at the room with one eye from a fixed point, and other clues it deliberately tricks (like the shape of tiles on the floor, which look the same from left to right, but actually get smaller, because the tiles on the right are closer).

The confounding of size and distance is the same principle behind illusions like this:

The effect only works because it is in a photograph (so from one perspective) and because the relatively featureless desert removes other clues to the depth of objects.

So the next time you close one eye and line up someone in the distance between your thumb and forefinger while muttering "I'm crushing your head!", think of Emmert's Law. And if you are in San Francisco, visit the Exploratorium!

Rocky Galloway (L) and Reggie Stanley (R) hug each other during their wedding on March 9, 2010, the first day same-sex couples are legal to wed in Washington, DC. The couple's two daughters attended the wedding. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.A live video of the first same-sex marriage in DC - a simple must-see - is here.

Cannabis smokers often report that when stoned, their thoughts have a free-wheeling quality and concepts seem connected in unusual and playful ways. A study just published online in Psychiatry Research suggests that this effect may be due to the drug causing 'fast and loose' patterns of spreading activity in memory, something known as 'hyper-priming'.

Priming is a well studied effect in psychology where encountering one concept makes related concepts more easily accessible. For example, classic experiments show that if you see the word 'bird' you will react more quickly to words like 'wing' and 'fly' than words like 'apple' and 'can' because the former words are more closely related in meaning than the latter.

In fact, it has been shown that the more closely related the word, the quicker we react to it, demonstrating a kind of 'mental distance' between concepts. Think of it like dropping a stone into a pool of mental concepts. The ripples cause activity that reduces in strength as it moves away from the centre.

'Hyper-priming' is an effect where priming happens for concepts at a much greater distance than normal. For example, the word 'bird' might speed up reaction times to the the word 'aeroplane'. To return to our analogy, the ripples are much stronger and spread further than normal.

The effect has been reported, albeit inconsistently, in people with schizophrenia and some have suggested it might explain why affected people can sometimes make false or unlikely connections or have disjointed thoughts.

As cannabis has been linked to a slight increased risk for psychosis, and certainly causes smokers to have freewheeling thoughts, the researchers decided to test whether stoned participants would show the 'hyper-priming' effect.

The experiment used a classic 'lexical decision task' where the volunteers are shown an initial word ('time') and then after a short gap are shown a nonsense word ('yipt') and a true word ('date') at the same time and have to indicate as quickly as possible which is the real world.

The experimenters altered how related the initial word and true word were to test for the semantic distance effect, and also varied the gap between the initial word and the test to see how long the priming effect might last.

Volunteers who were under the influence of cannabis showed a definite 'hyper-priming' tendency where distant concepts were reacted to more quickly. Interestingly, they also showed some of this tendency when straight and sober .

Cannabis also had the effect of causing temporary psychosis-like distortions as would be expected from a psychedelic drug, but the smokers did not make more errors and were not more likely to report psychosis-like symptoms when sober, suggesting the effect was not due to general mental impairment and couldn't be explained by underlying tendency to mental distortion.

Although the debate is not completely settled, there is now good evidence that cannabis causes a small increased risk for developing schizophrenia particularly when smokers start young. In fact, additional evidence on this front was published only this week.

The researchers discuss the possibility that long-term smokers who spend a lot of time in a chronic 'hyper-primed' state might make psychosis more likely by loosening the boundaries of well-grounded thought, although exactly how cannabis raises the risk of psychosis, and indeed, how exactly it affects the brain, is still not understood well-enough to make a firm judgement.

Link to PubMed entry for cannabis 'hyper-priming' study.

Ryan Avent reads a report (pdf) on small businesses, which are a major driver of new jobs:[Small business] owners continued to report that their single-most important problem, by
far, is low sales levels (rather than taxes, interest rates, or labour
quality). That's worth keeping in mind as conservatives increase the volume
at which they argue that high unemployment is due to extensions of
government unemployment benefits. The problem is clearly not labour
supply. Rather, the economy's principal job creators are seeing too
little demand to justify increases in hiring.

Here's the photo the NYT ran of Greg Dement (yes, that's his last name) anchoring a Tea Party-inspired, "right-of-the-NRA" demonstration to openly flaunt weapons in public -- given his right to do so in 38 states. (In contrast to other big coffee chains that have barred weapons, Starbucks has officially decided "not to get involved" -- thus turning their stores into protest corrals.)
I'm not sure if the composition of this photo was determined by the pairing of the gun with the coffee cup with the anti-gun protesters. Someone defending Mr. Dement might argue, however, the point was simply to "make him look an ass."
(But if that was the motive, still another person might say this does an even better job.)
(photo: Elaine Thompson/A.P. caption: Greg Dement, left, is handed a Starbucks coffee drink as he sits with a handgun strapped to his belt while looking on at an anti-gun rally in Seattle, Wednesday, March 3, 2010. Starbucks is sticking to its policy of letting customers carry guns where it is legal and said it does not want to be put in the middle of a larger gun-control debate.)

Stephen Von Worley pits the country's 12,000 McDonald's restaurants (black) against the 24,000 other major fast-food joints (non-black):
[E]ach individual restaurant location has equal power.  The entity that controls each point casts the most aggregate burger force upon it, as calculated by the inverse-square law – kind of like a chart outlining the gravitational wells of galactic star clusters, but in an alternate, fast food universe. By far, the largest pocket of resistance is Sonic Drive-In’s south-central stronghold: more than 900 restaurants packed into the state of Texas alone.  Sheer density is the key to victory!

Click here to enlarge. (Hat tip: TDW)

A brain scanning technology called MEG is being used to track the function of unborn babies' brains as they grow inside the womb until after they've been born.

The full name for MEG is magnetoencephalography and it works by reading the magnetic fields created by the electrical signalling in the brain.

One of the advantages is that it can be used at various angles, doesn't require the person to be in a cramped space, and is less sensitive to movement, so is ideally suited to scanning babies.

This includes unborn babies and with a bit of modification, as illustrated in the picture, researchers can pick up signals from the fetal brain in response to flashes or light or sounds.

We discussed the use of fMRI to scan the fetal brain previously, but this is a remarkable study that scanned the brains of babies inside the womb, every two weeks from week 27 until delivery, and then once after they were born.

Clearly, unborn babies are not the best at doing tasks set by experimenters, but there are various tests that just require the individual to experience changes in what's presented to them.

One is called the auditory oddball task, where a series of tones are played that can either be similar ('beep beep beep') or can have include an 'oddball' ('beep beep boop'). The brain is very good at picking out differences and the oddball is known to reliably trigger brain signals related to detecting changes.

This was the exact task used with the babies and the researchers looked to see if they could pick out a brain reaction to the 'oddball'.

They found that they could detect this response 83% of the time in unborn babies, and that the reaction to the 'oddball' increased in speed throughout pregnancy. The newly born babies showed the response every time without fail.

This is an impressive finding as it shows how the brain development of the unborn child can be tracked over time with a brain scanner.

In a recent review article that discusses the development of this technology, the same group of researchers suggest that these and similar techniques could help track how different conditions in the mother affect the developing brain and even how the brain begins to develop its understanding of speech sounds before birth.

Link to PubMed entry for MEG study of developing fetus.
Link to PubMed entry for review article on fetal MEG.

  A reader writes:

Your reader's defense of Mo'Nique was nice but erroneous.  Large black ladies have never been "vilified" in this country.  Made fun of and stereotyped, yes, but not "vilified." 

The notion of the strong Black Mammy is one of the most positive portrayals of Black folk in the US going back to slavery times.  And there was nothing "cringe-worthy" in Hattie McDaniel's portrayal in "Gone With The Wind" -- she was in complete control. In fact, her portrayal was just about the only positive portrayal of Black people in that movie.  And, yes, Mo'Nique's award acceptance speech was extremely self-conscious, self-aware, and self-important.

Another writes:

I don't know about smug and self-righteous, but it certainly made me do a double-take when the first thing she said was that her win was about the performance and not the politics, and then almost everything that followed made her win all about the politics.

Not to mention a teeny bit arrogant and ungracious to assert that yes, she was better than the other nominees. Maybe that's what you meant by self-righteous. (Rule No. 1: you don't applaud yourself; Rule No. 2: smile, if wryly, when they call the other guy's name; and Rule No. 3: whatever you may privately think, it's very bad form to say that yes you were better than the people you beat.)And maybe I'm too post-something-or-other, but why can't it be just about the acting, or the direction? Is it really so much based on the gender and the colour? I'm glad Barbra felt vindicated somehow for her Yenta loss, but I think it demeans Kathryn Bigelow to make her win about her gender and not her undoubted talent and skill, and to imply that somehow the Academy has decided to give a woman director a turn, and an African-American Best Supporting Actress a turn, etc. It's all contradictory anyway: it's either about the work or it's about the politics, and you can't have it both ways.

Another:Your reader is wrong.  She's the fourth black woman to win Best Supporting Actress: Hattie McDaniel (1939 - Gone With The Wind), Whoopi Goldberg (1990 - Ghost), Jennifer Hudson (2006 - Dreamgirls), Mo-Nique (2009 - Precious).

Another:

I'll tell you what was wrong with her speech. And a quick survey of the comments on Bossip, a black gossip website, shows that there are plenty of blacks who agree with me. When she named Hattie McDaniel it was as if she forgot that black actors and actresses have been paving the way for her success for decades now; it's not like there was Hattie McDaniel and then all of a sudden Monique. I think that tells you a lot about her frame of mind.Samuel Jackson's eye-roll said a lot.

The one thing you always knew about the Clintons and those who were close to them in the 1990s: they always, always reeked of fear. They suspected that white Americans could never vote for a black president; they believed you had to triangulate to the right of the GOP to survive; they believed that health insurance reform was political death; they held that standing up for civil rights for gay people was always stupid. And very few represent that kind of politics more than Jim Carville, Stan Greenberg and, yes, Rahm Emanuel, still traumatized after all these years.

Emanuel has a reputation for feistiness and God knows I'm not one to throw stones in my own glass House. But behind the thuggishness is a pathological fear of the right and a remarkably inept and crude set of human skills. He was hired to handle Congress; and yet his rank failure to pass a health insurance bill with a super-majority in the Senate and a big majority in the House for a full year - and the depth of the distrust between House and Senate that has emerged under his watch - reveals that his brand of cowardly principle and bullying practice is not what it is cracked up to be. Now his stupid posturing is also being used - naked in a shower no less - as a tool for Glenn Beck and the nihilist far right. 

But more disturbing is his classic Clintonian refusal to stand up against the Cheneyite right on critical matters such as national security and American values. No wonder he is so beloved of the Cheneyite rump now installed by Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post. All of which is to say: beware this poll from Greenberg on national security this morning.

The poll shows very strong credibility for the president in foreign policy and national security:His handling of Afghanistan (58 percent),
national security (57 percent), "leading America's military" (57 percent),
"improving America's standing in the world" (55 percent), fighting terrorism
(54 percent), and Iraq (54 percent), were all higher than his 47 percent
overall approval rating.

But those numbers were down from levels in the 60s
that were recorded by the same group last May. Fewer respondents now say they
view Obama's handling of national-security issues as better than that of his
predecessor George W. Bush -- Obama's margin here has shrunk from 22 to just 5
percent.

Good Lord. Time to adopt torture and military commissions for all terror suspects; time to keep Gitmo; time to let Emanuel run rough-shod over Holder. Please. Of course these ratings are down from last May - what do you think happens to presidents over time? Of course his lead over his predecessor has declined. It's like gravity. The response is to reiterate just how successful Obama has been in prosecuting terror suspects, killing terrorist leaders abroad, restoring America's moral credibility. But, of course, the Carville-Greenberg-Emanuel trio think it's time to bring in Dick Morris. A reader writes:Greenberg,
now a kitchen advisor to Rahm, represents all his worst
instincts--avoid conflict with the GOP at all costs, adopt their
national security positions to avoid their being able to make headway
on them.  He was an advisor to Gore in 2000, part of the clique urging
him to wear earth colors and "be nice."  He was an advisor to Kerry in
2004, strongly advising against making an issue out of torture, lest
the Dems be seen as "weak"--it was Greenberg who came up with the
genius strategy of saying not a critical word about Bush at the 2004
Dem convention.  The subtext of this "poll" is the same that Greenberg
had been peddling for years:  cede national security to the GOP, don't
make an issue out of it.

Barcelona, Spain, 5.01 pm

Calculated Risk contrasts unemployment rates with levels of education. Ryan Avent has further unemployment thoughts.