psychology dector

Kevin Richardson is a South African zookeeper who has been accepted into several clans of spotted hyenas and prides of lions. His years-long relationship with these animals illustrates a different side of them: they can be affectionate and cuddly. Given how many atrocities humans commit to get their food, you have to wonder what one should consider the “true nature” of lions and hyenas. More information: A 15 minute documentary with Kevin Richardson shows him cuddling lions and hyenas. He also tells stories about their personalities and mentions interesting facts such as hyenas being matriarchal. Lions may be extinct within 20 years. At Richardson’s website you can volunteer and donate to help protect them and other African wildlife. Richardson has founded a wildlife sanctuary whose goal it is to “minimize the number of large carnivores being kept in captivity and to highlight the direct link between the cub petting industry and the ‘canned’ hunting industry, by educating...

Quoting “ Why Are Some People So Smart? ” by MG Siegler: If parents use IVF to conceive, then a genetic test—an extension of the screening tests for genetic diseases that are already routinely done on embryos—could let them pick the smartest genome from a batch of, say, 20 embryos. Smartest as in “results in the highest IQ”. We need to distinguish between intellect and intelligence. An intellect enables you to solve problems, intelligence additionally enables you to pick the right ones. For example: building an atom bomb requires intellect, but is it also an intelligent thing to do? The above approach may not only be ethically questionable, it may also not be an intelligent thing to do. To truly fix the messes that we are currently in (environmentally, socially, economically), we need intelligent people, not people with a great intellect. My impression is that the project tries to produce the latter, not the former (which should be even harder to do, because there are even more fac...

Due to the NSA spying program PRISM [1] , we are again discussing the importance of privacy. People who don’t mind its current erosion have one compelling argument on their side: If spying – by whatever means – can prevent just a single terrorist attack then isn’t it worth it? This blog post mentions some of the risks of widespread spying. A tremendous amount of power Surveillance data gives people with access to it a tremendous amount of power. Quoting “ You commit three felonies a day ” by Jason Kottke for kottke.org: The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Thus, if the state wants to put you in jail, it can. Too many people have access to the information collected by the NSA Quoting “ If the NSA Trusted Edward Snowden With Our Data, Why Should We Trust the NSA? ” by Farhad Manjoo for Slate: Let’s note what Snowd...

I’m really not much of a conspiracy theorist, but “ Triangulating on truth – the totalitarian state ” (by Michael Arrington for Uncrunched) presents a good one: On the Washington Post story [about the NSA spy program PRISM], that means one of these things must be true [emphasis is mine]: The NSA presentation is fake and the Washington Post got duped, or Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. are lying, or The presentation is real, and the companies are carefully drafting responses so that they aren’t technically lying. I believe the third option above is truth. The denials The following subsections contain the official denials by Facebook , Google and Apple . Read them and judge for yourselves. I’ve typeset words in bold that I found interesting and/or passages that are similar between documents. I’ve also numbered paragraphs that are similar. Mark Zuckerberg’s post on Facebook I want to respond personally to t...

In the article “ Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley's Elite ”, Ashlee Vance profiles Netflix and its CEO Hastings for Businessweek. The article mentions a few interesting tidbits about the company’s technology and hiring practices: Netflix data comprises a third of the incoming data in North American homes. Their infrastructure is based on Amazon Web Services. In off-peak hours, Netflix’s systems are repurposed to analyze data. The results are used to pre-cache data and to determine the likelihood of success of a show that Netflix might finance. As an employer, Netflix pays well: Managers routinely survey salary trends in Silicon Valley and pay their employees 10 percent to 20 percent more than the going rate for a given skill. Fired employees also get ultragenerous severance packages; the idea is to remove guilt as an obstacle to management parting ways with subpar performers. And they prefer to ha...

Cute: two pets lost their ability to use their hind legs, so their owners built them wheelchairs. First: the piglet “ Chris P. Bacon ”. Second: the kitten “ Brigitta ”.

Quoting “ News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier ” (by Rolf Dobelli for The Guardian): In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. This has been on my mind for a long time: Most of the stuff you learn via the news is just as relevant for your actual life as, for example, the politics of Westeros . It’s too far away to matter, a single incident (that we can’t help but generalize), too limited a perspective (a single person writing about a general issue), etc. The uselessness of that knowledge can be easily demonstrated by looking at a newspaper from a year ago: how much of its content is sti...

Have you had your daily dose of cute already? If not, then look no further. The picture below is one of several . Background, quoting “ A soldier and his squirrel ”: Soldiers in Belarus found a little squirrel and brought it to the Warrant officer. The squirrel was very weak and about to die, so the officer took care of it and fed it like a baby every four hours. Three months ago, the guy left the army and now works as a taxi driver and the squirrel is always in his pocket, no matter where he goes! Squirrels really are like super-heroes, but in cute: they can climb trees and (rough) walls like Spider-Man and have ears like Batman. More questions about squirrels? Consult this FAQ , which, among others, answers how old they become and if they make good pets.

Idle question of the day: What temperature has the same degrees in Celsius and Fahrenheit? Converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius Formula: C = (F–32) · (5/9) Approximate version (to do in your head): C = (F–30)/2 Converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit F = C·9/5 + 32 Approximately: F = C·2 + 30 The same degrees in both systems? To get the answer, you have to solve the following equation: x = (x–32) · (5/9) The answer is x = –40. Thus: –40°C is the same temperature as –40°F. Most of us can thus agree that that’s very cold.

The latest James Bond movie, “Skyfall” was widely liked by critics and audiences. I left the movie a bit unsatisfied. There were also three plot holes that bothered me. All three have easy fixes. [Warning: Spoilers ahead.] The plot holes: Plot hole: Q examines Silva’s laptop, plugs in a network cable and the software on the laptop is able to infect the MI6 network via that cable. Not taking precautions against such an attack is amateurish. Fix: Invent a different way in which the laptop compromises the network, e.g. wirelessly. Plot hole: Going to Skyfall already seemed under-explained. But why didn’t they come a little better prepared – they had ample time to do so. Yes, Kincaid sold the armory, but why not bring a few MI6 gadgets? Fix: Invent an incident that prevents them from going somewhere else and from preparing. Plot hole: Silva sees M and Kincaid because they are using flashlights in the darkness. That is a rookie mistak...

New Samuel is a font by Aurelian Hallhuber that he derived from Morse code (Samuel is one of Morse ’s given names). Creating New Samuel The following steps were used to create the font: In Morse code, each of the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet is encoded via at most 4 signals (dot or dash). Write those dots and dashes into a 2×2 matrix, starting at the bottom left cell, continuing counter-clockwise. Create a square whose corners encode what’s in the matrix: If a cell is empty then the corner is a single line (e.g. / for the top left corner). If a cell contains a dot then the corner is round. If a cell contains a dash then the corner is angular. Add features to these squares to make them recognizable as characters. As a result, you get a font whose characters reflect their Morse code combinations. The following diagram illustrates the process: This is the full alphabet: Morse code signals: more than bits 4-signal morse codes give you more combi...

Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith resigned via an article in the New York Times, on March 14: It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. [...] I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. [...] It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. The article was only the prelude to a book [ affiliate link ] that has come out on Oct 22. So you can see that Greg Smith was after publicity when he revealed some of the inner workings of the notoriously secretive Goldman Sachs. But he also sounds believable when he says that he cares about the company and ...

A few days ago, daylight savings time (DST) ended again in Germany (we call it Sommerzeit, literally “summer time”). Changing the time twice a year is a silly thing to do – it brings few savings and quite a bit of cost and inconvenience. The Pirate Party has now started a European initiative (page in German) for abolishing DST. The complicated thing in Europe is that all states have to participate, otherwise changing regulations does not make sense. Dirk Haage pointed me to a nice visualization of daylight savings time. The visualization makes it obvious how we should change time – we should always have DST. I’d rather have slightly longer afternoons than early mornings. As a complementary measure, schools could start later. There is even evidence (page in German) that starting at 8 o’clock is too early for children (it certainly is for parents).

We should never forget that programming was initially a female profession . It was only later that women were slowly driven out of the industry. I’ve always been surprised that there aren’t more women in tech. I suspect that it is partially an image problem – especially computer jobs are much better than their reputation. Case in point: at the university of Munich, many more girls study “Bioinformatics” or “Media Informatics” than plain ”Informatics”. (Valid) reasons I’ve heard were: seemed more interesting and contains less math. The interesting part is that, in my experience, students of Bioinformatics and Media Informatics are just as good at Informatics as Informatics students and often end up in “normal” computer jobs. Yet, prior to these degrees, these girls might not have studied anything computer-related. Word needs to get out that computer jobs are great. A few talking points: Computer jobs are diverse: You really need people skills these days, as most of software developm...

Intriguing concept: the JavaScript Summit 2012 (Nov 13-15) is an online conference . How it works Here is how the JavaScript Summit works (quoting the website): [...] sign in and enter the [Flash-based] virtual meeting space. Once you are signed in, you'll be able to see and hear the presentations as they happen, ask questions as needed and chat with the other attendees if you like! Additionally, tickets include acess to slides and video recordings of the talks. Benefits Benefits compared to offline conferences. The main benefit of an online conference is that one doesn’t have to travel to attend. In fact, one doesn’t even have to leave one’s home. The audience benefits twice: First, it’s more pleasant for them. Second, the chance of good speakers attending increases, as they don’t have to travel, either. Another benefit of online conferences is that their locations are virtual – large audiences can be accommodated cheaply. That’s good for organizers (more money), but also f...

At New York Comic-Con, there was a panel for Joss Whedon’s space western Firefly . The show was canceled on TV in 2003 and followed up by a movie in 2005. Actor Nathan Fillion was asked the usual “Will there be more Firefly?” question. He answered: “If we’re dreaming, tell me what you think about this: ‘Firefly – the animated series’.” After the panel, Sean Maher provided more information. Quoting ” ‘Firefly’ cartoon in the works? “ (by Kate Storey for the New York Post): Sean Maher told The Post, “I know somebody who is actually trying to get that done, who has approached Joss [Whedon, the creator] about it. He used to work with Guillermo del Toro.” Earlier, Fillion mentioned that the logistics of doing an animated series are simpler, because voiceover is much less work for the stars and they can telecommute. At the panel, it was heartwarming to see how close the actors still were. For example, they see each other every few months.

Quoting “ Mitt Romney and the myth of self-created millionaires ” by George Monbiot for The Guardian: We could call it Romnesia: the ability of the very rich to forget the context in which they made their money. To forget their education, inheritance, family networks, contacts and introductions. To forget the workers whose labour enriched them. To forget the infrastructure and security, the educated workforce, the contracts, subsidies and bailouts the government provided. It comes down to the question “How much more than normal employees should executives and company owners make?” And these are interesting points to consider.

Some swear-words and exclamations made up on TV and in the movies are really good. Favorites of mine: Odin’s beard! (Thor in The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes ) Whiskers! ( Thundercats ) Frak , fraking ___, etc. ( Battlestar Galactica ) Great Scott! (Doc Brown in Back to the Future )