Interesting polling data on my generation:

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.

They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.

Their entry into careers and first jobs has been badly set back by the Great Recession, but they are more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.

Read More – Pew Research: Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

(via Theoretick)

See also: Generational Differences.

Photo by Kris Krug

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and the co-founder and co-organizer of Cyborg Camp. You can find her on Twitter here.

Klint Finley: Please tell us what you mean by “cyborg anthropology” and explain what it is that you do on a day-to-day basis.

Amber Case: Cyborg anthropology is the study of human and non-human interaction, especially tools and networks that are formed by networks of human and non human objects.

My work relates to tracing the history of tool use and how it has affected culture over time.

For instance, one can look at a hammer and notice that over the last 300 years the design and function of the hammer has not changed very much.

The shape and form and function are still similar but when one looks at the first computers, which were large machines running on vacuum tubes, and computers now — one sees that the computer’s overall look and function and shape and size has drastically changed.

So then one must look at the idea of the hammer or knife. An animal must evolve a better tooth, or sharp edge in which to capture and kill prey. If a tooth breaks, or is not sharp enough, or the animal is not fast enough, that animal dies and cannot reproduce.

But the human has externalized the evolution by making a tool outside of their mouths. The knife is an extension of the tooth that can be thrown. The speed and excellence of the knife depends on the worker or the person who has power enough to have a worker who can create that tool.

Once we externalized objects and processes, we externalized evolution.

But the computer is different. Tool use has been physical for most of human evolution. Now we see computers as an interface not to the physical self, but to the mental self.

The mental self is an internal space, which is unseen, and a lot of what we see on a computer is unseen unless we look at it through an interface or portal.

So what I do in cyborg anthropology is consider how people upload their bodies into hyperspace, and how humanness is produced through machines and machines through humanness.

I also consider online presence, cell phones and the technosocial self.

Read the rest of this entry »

People who have no religion know right from wrong just as well as regular worshippers, according to the study.

The team behind the research found that most religions were similar and had a moral code which helped to organise society.

But people who did not have a religious background still appeared to have intuitive judgments of right and wrong in common with believers, according to the findings, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Dr Marc Hauser, from Harvard University, one of the co-authors of the research, said that he and his colleagues were interested in the roots of religion and morality.

Telegraph: Atheists ‘just as ethical as churchgoers’

(via Religion News)

Here’s the original essay. There was also a previous follow-up that I missed.

She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.

Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck.

Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about “the life of mind.” They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, “there are no guarantees.” But that phrase suggests there’s only a chance you won’t get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’

(Thanks David)

See also:

What’s a Degree Really Worth?

Can Ivy League education be provided for $20 a month?

Even Americans who are lucky enough to have work in this economy are becoming more unhappy with their jobs, according to a new survey that found only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work.

That was the lowest level ever recorded by the Conference Board research group in more than 22 years of studying the issue. In 2008, 49 percent of those surveyed reported satisfaction with their jobs. [...]

Workers have grown steadily more unhappy for a variety of reasons:

- Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.

- Incomes have not kept up with inflation.

- The soaring cost of health insurance has eaten into workers’ take-home pay.

AP: Americans’ job satisfaction falls to record low

(via Cryptogon)

Basically we’ve got an emergent, market-driven global financial system that was all about a faith-based market fundamentalism. It was deprived of oversight for three good reasons (a) it rapidly brought
prosperity to billions (b) under globalization, money is inherently global while governance is inherently local (c) complete regulatory capture of the system — nobody but bankers understands how to bank. There’s no caste of regulators left anywhere who have the clout or even the knowledge to do anything usefully stabilizing. No, not even if you give them guns, lawyers, money and back issues of DAS KAPITAL.

Too big to fail. So, what can you do? Cross your fingers, basically. Make some reassuring noises. Cheerlead instead of reforming the infrastructure. And pawn what’s left of the credibility of government. [...]

Some day this too will pass. “What comes after network culture?” We’re so enmeshed in network culture that it’s hard for us to envision anything outside it now. That’s dangerous. It’s like believing in contemporary finance to the point that alternatives become unthinkable.

Stewart Brand, years ago: “And the larger fear looms: we are in the process of building one vast global computer, which could easily become The Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage — the
system doesn’t really work; it can’t be fixed; no one understands it; no one is in charge of it; it can’t be lived without; and it gets worse every year.” Does that sound familiar? It’s sounds plenty familiar if you’re talking about the global economy now, but that’s not what Stewart was talking about.

“Today’s bleeding-edge technology is tomorrow’s broken legacy system. Commercial software is almost always written in enormous haste, at ever- accelerating market velocity; it can foresee an ‘upgrade path’ to
next year’s version, but decades are outside its scope. And societies live by decades, civilizations by centuries…”

The Well: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010

I was particularly struck by his analysis of the now-infamous video of Sarah Palin book-buyers explaining to a snarky interviewer how they support her despite the fact that they can’t really identify any of her positions. Greenwald notes the obvious parallel:

“The similarity between that mentality and the one driving the Obama [supporters] is too self-evident to require any elaboration. Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual. These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies.”

I completely agree with Greenwald and I know that what he’s saying is true because I did exactly the same experiment the Palin interviewer tried — at Obama’s inauguration. I interviewed dozens of people and almost without exception the answers to the question “What specific policies do you expect the new president to enact?” were of the following character:

“I think he’s going to bring people together.”

“He really cares about us.”

“I believe that he’s going to help people.” [...]

Anyone who wonders why the Obama administration seems to be bending over so far backwards to appease conservatives and industry leaders in the health care debate and Wall Street in the financial regulatory reform debate can find their answer there: those groups make Obama pay for their financial/political support with real actions and policy concessions, while Obama’s “base” will continue their feverish support in exchange for mere gestures and marketing hocus-pocus, for news about the new family puppy or an appearance on Jay Leno.

Matt Taibbi: Obamania

I suspect it runs a bit deeper than this – that everyone, including Taibbi and including me, chooses their politics based not on reason but on some calculus of social and cultural influence, personal preference, and individual psychological eneds and rationalizes it later (“what the thinker thinks, the prover proves,” as Bob Wilson said).

Most of us snuff out the question instantly or toy with it occasionally as a harmless mental escape hatch. But every year, thousands of adults decide to act on it, walking out the door with no plan to return and no desire to be found. The precise number is elusive. Nearly 200,000 Americans over age 18 were recorded missing by law enforcement in 2007, but they represent only a fraction of the intentional missing: Many aren’t reported unless they are believed to be in danger. And according to a 2003 British study, two-thirds of missing adults make a conscious decision to leave.

People who go missing do so with an endless variety of motives, from the considered to the impulsive. There are of course those running from their own transgressions: Ponzi schemers, bail jumpers, deadbeat parents, or insurance scammers dreaming of life in a tropical paradise. But most people who abandon their lives do so for noncriminal reasons — relationship breakups, family pressures, financial obligations, or a simple desire for reinvention. The federal government’s Witness Security Program provides new identities for endangered witnesses, but thousands of people who testify in lower-profile cases are on their own to face potential retribution or flee to a safer identity. So too are those trying to escape the unwanted attention of stalkers, obsessive ex-spouses, or psychotically disgruntled clients.

Wired: Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?

(via Theoretick)

Socially learned behavior and belief are much better candidates than genetics to explain the self-sacrificing behavior we see among strangers in societies, from soldiers to blood donors to those who contribute to food banks.

This is the conclusion of a study by Adrian V. Bell and colleagues from the University of California Davis in the Oct. 12 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Altruism has long been a subject of interest to evolutionary social scientists. Altruism presents them with a difficult line to argue: behaviors that help unrelated people while being costly to the individual and creating a risk for genetic descendants could not likely be favored by evolution: at least by common evolutionary arguments.

The researchers used a mathematical equation, called the Price equation, that describes the conditions for altruism to evolve. This equation motivated the researchers to compare the genetic and the cultural differentiation between neighboring social groups. Using previously calculated estimates of genetic differences, they used the World Values Survey (whose questions are likely to be heavily influenced by culture in a large number of countries) as a source of data to compute the cultural differentiation between the same neighboring groups. When compared they found that the role of culture had a much greater scope for explaining our pro-social behavior than genetics.

Science Daily: Culture Is More Important Than Genes To Altruistic Behavior In Large-scale Societies

A genetic tendency to depression is much less likely to be realized in a culture centered on collectivistic rather than individualistic values, according to a new Northwestern University study.

In other words, a genetic vulnerability to depression is much more likely to be realized in a Western culture than an East Asian culture that is more about we than me-me-me.

The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations.

Depression, research overwhelmingly shows, results from genes, environment and the interplay between the two. One of the most profound ways that people across cultural groups differ markedly, cultural psychology demonstrates, is in how they think of themselves.

“People from highly individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe are more likely to value uniqueness over harmony, expression over agreement, and to define themselves as unique or different from the group,” said Joan Chiao, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

In contrast, people from collectivist cultures are more likely to value social harmony over individuality. “Relative to people in an individualistic culture, they are more likely to endorse behaviors that increase group cohesion and interdependence,” Chiao said.

Science Daily: ‘Culture Of We’ Buffers Genetic Tendency To Depression

Robert Anton Wilson explained this years ago:

The capacity to learn from others is one of the traits that have made humans such a global success story. Relying on it too much, however, could have contributed to the demise of past populations, such as the Maya of southern Mexico in the eighth and ninth centuries and Norse settlers in Greenland 1,000 years ago.

Over-hunting, deforestation and over-population are well-worn routes to societal collapse. Now, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments. They found that conformist social learning — imitating and emulating what the majority are doing — may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic1.

Environments often change in unpredictable ways and over timescales from the seasonal to millennial. Rainfall and temperature change both seasonally and annually; populations of predators, prey and pests rise and fall; soil conditions change.

Biology News: Conformists may kill civilizations

(via Weird Fiction via Blustr)

To promote the common good, should helpers be rewarded, or should free riders be punished? Although the bulk of previous research has fingered punishment as the best enforcer, a new study published online today in Science found that rewards are more effective. [...]

He and his team used a classic public goods game to study how groups of volunteers encouraged the best outcome for the most people. In a series of monetary interactions, individuals decided how much money to contribute to a common pot, and they could then decide whether to reward good contributors or punish bad—both of which would entail spending money.

Previous public goods studies had focused on one-time interactions and found that people were more likely to swindle or punish others. But in situations where interactions were repeated, people found greater success in reward-based structures—in which those that contributed were rewarded and those who didn’t were ignored—than those in which costly punishment was doled out to those who didn’t contribute.

Scientific American: Common good is best achieved through rewards, not punishment

(via Relevant History)

Jeff Vail concludes his series on the “Renewables Hump”:

It was my plan to conclude this series by answering (with pretty graphs, no less!) several questions like this. However, I fear that such an exercise is largely meaningless: I have been unable to come up with a verifiable proxy for EROEI measurement, and without that I would only be addressing hypotheticals. Worse, questions that will be permanently hypothetical.

Instead, I am left with only a confirmed sense of uncertainty. Perhaps that uncertainty is itself valuable. If I have poked holes in (what I believe to be) the widespread assumption that we can surely transition to a renewables-driven economy if only we make the decision to do so, then perhaps this series has been of value. If I shift the discussion (even only in my own mind) toward what to do in light of this uncertainty, then I will feel that this has been worthwhile. It is in answer to this last question that I am most excited: I plan to focus more in the future on decentralized, networked, open-source, platform-based systems that we can use to simultaneously build resiliency, address this fundamental uncertainty, and address the problem of growth by reducing the hierarchal nature of our civilization.

Jeff Vail: The Renewables Hump 7: Can We Transition?

The best baseball players don’t always get elected All-Stars. And the Nobel Prize doesn’t always go to the most deserving member of the scientific community. This, according to a pair of recent studies, is because such recognition can depend upon how well known an individual is rather than on merit alone. Moreover, because it’s human nature for people to try to find common ground when talking to others, simple everyday conversations could have the unfortunate side effect of blocking many of the best and most innovative ideas from the collective social consciousness.

“In our research, we found that people are most likely to talk about things they think they have in common with others, rather than topics or ideas that are more unusual or striking,” said Nathanael J. Fast, a PhD student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Fast is one of three authors of the paper “Common Ground and Cultural Prominence: How Conversation Reinforces Culture,” with Chip Heath of the Stanford Business School, and George Wu of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. “This has the effect of reinforcing—or even institutionalizing—the prominence of familiar cultural elements over ones that are perhaps more deserving.”

Stanford Graduate School of Business: Seeking Common Ground in Conversations Can Stifle Innovation and Reward the Wrong People

(thanks G.V.)

There’s more to alcohol than getting pissed but you’d never know it from the papers. In a period of public hand wringing over ‘binge drinking culture’, our understanding of the ‘culture bit’ usually merits no more than an admission that people do it in groups and this is often implicit in the work of psychologists.

In a recent Psychological Bulletin review on the determinants of binge drinking, psychologists Kelly Courtney and John Polich devote only a few sparse paragraphs to the social issues in an otherwise impressive review, despite the fact that drinking alcohol is one of the most socially meaningful and richly symbolic activities in our culture. [...]

But it is not just the meaning of drinks which determine the role alcohol plays in our lives, it is the meaning of drinking as well. Sociologists have been exploring this territory for years and we would do well to read their maps, because it shows us how culture influences not only our views on drunkenness, but the experience of being intoxicated itself. [...]

While health campaigns are focusing on risk reduction, research by Sheehan and Ridge with teenage girls in Australia found that any harm encountered along the way tends to be “filtered through a ‘good story,’ brimming with tales of fun, adventure, bonding, sex, gender transgressions, and relationships”.

Mind Hacks: Binge and tonic

Obviously, this will be too general: people stay for lots of reasons. I knew someone once who had a bad heroin habit, and while getting involved with a guy who beat her up if she tried to leave the house would not be my preferred method of detoxing, it worked for her. (She was still clean the last time I heard.) But generalizations might be better than nothing. I will also refer to abusers as ‘he’, and to their victims as ’she’; this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.

In some cases, understanding why someone stays is easy. A lot of women are afraid that their abuser would try to harm them if they leave. And with good reason: about a third of female homicide victims were killed by a spouse, lover, or ex-lover; and that’s not counting the women who are “merely” beaten, stalked, and so forth. Staying in a case like this, at least until you had figured out how to leave safely and cover your tracks, is not mysterious or perplexing.

Moreover, while I think the assumption that battered women stay because they are just dumb, or have staggeringly bad judgment, is wrong and insulting, there are a whole lot of battered women, and it would be very surprising if none of them stayed for such reasons. We asked women who came to our shelter when the abuse had started; one woman told me that her husband had thrown her from a moving car on their first date, at which point I wondered silently why on earth there had been a second date, let alone a subsequent marriage. But in my experience such women were a vanishingly small minority.

Obsidian Wings: Why Do They Stay?

(via Appropedia)

I live in the unhappiest city in America:

Portland, Ore.
St. Louis, Mo.
New Orleans, La.
Detroit, Mich.
Cleveland, Ohio
Jacksonville, Fla.
Las Vegas, Nev.
Nashville-Davidson, Tenn.
Cincinnati, Ohio
Atlanta, Ga.
Milwaukee, Wis.
Sacramento, Calif.
Kansas City, Mo.
Pittsburgh, Pa.
Memphis, Tenn.
Indianapolis city, Ind.
Louisville, Ky.
Tucson, Ariz.
Minneapolis, Minn.
Seattle, Wash.

Full Story: Business Week

(via Tara)

The older I get the more “why this generation is so different from that generation” articles grate on me.

Case in point: this Harvard Business Review article on “Generation Y in Workforce.”

If you replace every mention of text messaging with e-mail and replace Josh’s ideas with the idea of building a web site in the first place, this article have run in the mid-90s as an article about Gen X in the work place. The sales exec at the end would be saying Josh didn’t do anything to disprove Gen X’s image as a bunch of slackers more interested in being “free agents” than dedicated salary men.

It could have come out in the 70s as an article on Boomers in the work force and been about how Josh thought they weren’t investing enough in television. The complaint could have been “they’re a bunch of hippies who want to start their own companies in garages and wear jeans every day.”

Every generation looks at the next generation and worries. This isn’t new. I shudder to think of what WWI vets thought of the kids of the 20s. Yikes.

Some people get new technology and business innovation, and some don’t. I think this is more of a cultural disconnect than generational one. Serious technophiles who blog and podcast, Twitter and Torrent seem just as likely to be tech or creative professionals in their 40s or 50s as they are to be teenagers or high schoolers. You know who the first people I knew were to get into Napster? High School teachers. Boomers. Because they had access to high speed internet at work and all of us students still had dial-up at home. Ten years later, I still know people my age and younger who don’t download music, don’t own computers, and/or don’t use text messaging.

I think younger people are more likely to be more tech savvy than our older counter parts, due to having more exposure to computers at school growing up, it doesn’t make us into radically different aliens (like Rushkoff argued in Children of Chaos). Gen Y, Gen X, and the Boomers also have, I think, very similar tastes in music, movies, cars, fashion, etc. What most people perceive as generational differences are usual accidents of culture – when some very traditional rural Christian parent’s kid turns out to be a goth. The parent doesn’t not get her kid because she’s old. She doesn’t get her kid because she’s a traditional rural Christian and her kid is a goth.

Better advice for Gen X and Boomer managers trying to learn how to manage Gen Yers in a corporate environment: think about what it was like to be their age.

Non-generational things to keep in mind, coming from a Gen Y guy who’s been out of college for about 5 years now and is maybe just maybe starting to figure out how this whole “work” thing works:

No one took “Office Politics 101″ in college

No one (except maybe a few business majors) took “Corporate Policies and Procedures 101″ either

Young workers spent the past 4+ years in college seriously exercising their brains, and now they’re doing menial office tasks that people without degrees can do just as well.

In other words: they don’t have a clue about how corporate culture works, and they’re bored out of their minds.

Here are some things that may be unique to the current generation, not because of some deeply ingrained difference in paradigms but because the economy sucks:

Even in the relative hay days of 2005-2006, mass layoffs were common place.

Young people consider themselves to be walking targets during a layoff because they lack experience and seniority.

Tuition was more expensive relative to wages and inflation when Gen Y was in college than any time in history

Thanks to price inflation and stagnant wage growth, entry level jobs pay less now than they have since before the labor movement.

In other words, young workers don’t have any job security and don’t make much money. They make less money than their managers did when they were starting out, and have more student loan debt.

So they’re bored, underpaid, don’t have a clue how the corporate environment works, and know they could be let go without notice at any minute.

And managers wonder why “young people these days” don’t have any company loyalty?

It seems like workers and companies are at a stale-mate right now: companies want committed, hard working employees and with good attitudes. Employees want their work to be valued and want some measure of stability Employers can’t offer this sort of stability to their employees (not as long as they have to make job cuts to satisfy their shareholders), so morale suffers. This isn’t some generational paradigm shift, it’s economics. This isn’t to say that the economy didn’t suck at other times – but I don’t think there was the sort of economic nihilism in the past. People have been saying “all jobs are temp jobs” for a long time, but ours is the first generation to be entering the work force with this mantra already a given.

The creepy corporate paternalism from Enterprise sounds worse than the “get tough on ‘em” attitude from General Tool & Supply. But neither one sounds optimal. As a “Gen Y” worker myself, here’s what I would tell managers:

Mentor employees and advise them on career paths within the company, giving them an idea on when and how they will be able to be more involved with key decisions, make more money, and do more interesting work. It sucks to feel like you’re at a dead-end, or just stumbling around in the dark.

Give honest feedback about their work. The generic “Great job! You’re the best” example from the Harvard case is actually a morale killer. If everything you do is received with the same fake praise the praise is meaningless. It leads to either laziness (“why bother doing a good job if even bad work is praised?”) or paranoia (maybe all my work is terrible and they’re just being polite”).

Don’t ask for input if you know in advance you’re not going to use it. Managers do this with the best intentions – to make people feel like they’re involved. But this phoniness is transparent and it makes employees feel like their input isn’t valued ever. If their input isn’t wanted or needed, don’t ask.

Don’t be dismissive of ideas (like Sarah in the story above). Take time to explain what’s wrong with an idea. If similar ideas have failed in the past, explain it. Show that you’re not dismissing an idea because you don’t value the employees input, but because there’s a legitimate reason not to use the idea.

Advice for young workers (what I’ve learned):

Company loyalty is rewarded more than competence or effectiveness. This may sound unfair, but think about this from the company/manager’s point of view: why bother training you, promoting you, etc. if they don’t think you’ll stick around? (I agree: companies should make you WANT to stick around – but if you don’t act like you do they aren’t going to bother promoting you)

If you’re not getting mentorship, you’ve got to seek someone out

Never go over your bosses head unless you’re reporting your boss for serious misconduct

You know you have great ideas and that you’re creative, competent, and have a lot to offer the company. They don’t know that. They hired you because they thought you were minimally competent to perform the duties at hand. If you want to do more, you’ll have to prove yourself. And that takes time.

No matter how great your idea for changing how things work is, it probably has problems and there’s always a chance it will fail miserably. People fear change because change IS dangerous. Trying to fix things can make things much worse.

Because of this, experienced managers are usually in charge of making these decisions. Trying to make a decision that’s “outside your pay grade” so to speak could make you look creative and ambitious, but it will probably just makes you look pushy, impatient, and/or arrogant.

Get involved in things outside of work to help satisfy your creative and intellectual instincts. It could be awhile before you get to do the sorts of things you want to do at work.

Don’t be a complainer/whiner.

Don’t talk about how much money you make, and don’t complain about not being paid enough.

So old timers: tell me why I’m wrong.

I think that that a “moment of silence” would work as an option, but not if it’s “mandatory” (i.e. a law). If you called it “a moment of reflection” and not a “moment of prayer”, then I think this could be beneficial. Isn’t this what “recess” is all about?
Also, I’ve found that those who don’t take the opportunity to reflect are often the ones who need it the most.

“A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional a law passed by the Illinois legislature requiring the state’s schools to require a moment of prayer or reflection on the day’s activities.

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman ruled Wednesday the law crosses the line separating church and state under the Constitution. He says in his ruling that the statute is a “subtle effort” to force students at “impressionable ages” to think about religion.”

(via The Daily Herald)

“The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so. “The mind is a limited machine,”says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

(via Boston.com)

“Stories of people who ruin things for everyone else…or who are accused of that. [..] A bad apple, at least at work, can spoil the whole barrel. And there’s research to prove it. Host Ira Glass talks to Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, who designed an experiment to see what happens when a bad worker joins a team. Felps divided people into small groups and gave them a task. One member of the group would be an actor, acting either like a jerk, a slacker or a depressive. And within 45 minutes, the rest of the group started behaving like the bad apple.”

(via This American Life)

“Marko Manriquez is the founder of The Freegan Kitchen, a site that promotes cooking found food. He’s been diving in dumpsters for food going on three years now. As a result his lifestyle is both environmentally and socially responsible. I recently became aware of freeganism through a mutual friend. Then I got to interview Manriquez about how he’s been off the agri-business grid since. Photo by electromute.

Kelly Abbott: When did you first become interested in the freegan lifestyle and what drew you to it?

Marko Manriquez: I’ve always considered myself an environmentalist (as well as a bit of cheapskate), so it was a natural fit for my lifestyle. My friends kept finding amazing things from the dumpster, including food. At first, I was apprehensive to eat any of it, taking only timid bitefuls. But, I was surprised at both how much perfectly good food was being thrown away (~14% by conservative estimates) and that no one really knew about it. And it also bothered me that most of our garbage was being literally entombed in landfills rather than composted or returned into the ecosystem. The United States is a culture of enormous consumer appetites (obviously)—we consume (and waste) so much but it never really seems to satisfy our desires. The impulse to buy our way out of anything is very strong, rarely questioned and conditioned into us perpetually from a very early age. I wanted to share this revelation with others. I created FK as a way to both satirize our consumer media bubble (how better than with a cooking show?) while at the same time empower others to alternative forms of sustainability—all the while leveraging the tools of the system to critique itself.”

(via Lifehacker)

In my opinion, we’re all unique individuals with different levels of sexual desire. If one is genuinely happy being (what “society” and the MSM considers) “undersexed” or “oversexed”, how the hell can someone else have the gall to label it as a “dysfunction”? “Really, WTF is “normal”?!

“I’ve seen this story all over the blogs—according to ACOG, 44% of women suffer from sexual dysfunction, usually low desire.  But only 12% said it bothered them.  Which makes a reasonable person wonder if, in a world where we respected women’s opinion of themselves as we respect men’s opinion, we wouldn’t be showing that only 12% of women have sexual problems.  In fact, it seems that the researchers themselves are open about how we frame the expectations put on women in terms of what men want.

In an editorial accompanying the published study, Dr. Ingrid Nygaard, a urogynecologist and professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine, told the story of a female patient “who, not bothered herself by her lack of interest but very bothered by her husband’s distress at her lack of interest, asked, “‘Why am I the abnormal one?’”

“What I see on a near daily basis are women of all ages who feel that because their sex drive is less than their partners’, they are inadequate and in the wrong,” Nygaard said in an interview.

It flips the other way, too.  If you’re a woman whose sex drive outstrips her male partner, you are also made to feel like a freak. Having been in that position in my life, I can remember swinging between feeling hideously ugly and freakish, because we’re just so used to defining “normal” as male.  Luckily, we’ve gotten past thinking of women with high sex drives as dysfunctional, probably under an onslaught of porn that portrays women as insatiable.  But does that mean that there are lots of women out there who are happy with a lot less, but who are being classified as dysfunctional?”

(via Pendagon. Thanks SP!)

“In a city launched by shotgun weddings and quickie divorces, which offers the chance to be wed by faux Liberaces, King Tuts and Grim Reapers, there remains at least one nuptial taboo: you can’t be married by an atheist. Michael Jacobson, a 64-year-old retiree who calls himself a lifelong atheist, tried this year to get a license to perform weddings. Clark County rejected his application because he had no ties to a congregation, as state law requires. So Jacobson and attorneys from two national secular groups — the American Humanist Association and the Center for Inquiry — are trying to change things. If they can’t persuade the state Legislature to rework the law, they plan to sue.

Jacobson, who spends most afternoons reading online or dining at a nearby buffet, is an admittedly reluctant plaintiff. But he’s willing to fight on principle, recalling one time he couldn’t: In the 1960s, the Army demanded that his dogtags note his religion. He reluctantly chose Judaism, which reflected his ancestry if not his beliefs.

“One of the things I like to do is stand up and say I’m a non-believer, so you know you’re not alone,” he said recently. For years Mel Lipman, a friend of Jacobson’s and the American Humanist Association president, had presided over non-religious weddings in Las Vegas. But he belonged to the Humanist Society, a secular branch of the Humanist Association whose tax status as a religious group satisfied the clerk’s requirements.
When Lipman and his wife moved to Florida this spring, Jacobson decided to become the Las Vegas atheist celebrant. “But I’m not going to do it by saying I belong to a religious organization,” he said. “That’s a sham because atheists are not religious.”

(via The Chicago Tribune)

I haven’t watched this yet – I was losing my voice and on the verge of a cold, so hopefully it’s listenable.

Here are my presentation notes.

The rest of the presentations from CyborgCamp are here.