The Gender Genie is an online tool, based on an algorithm, based on a study, that claims to be able to tell whether or not you’re male or female based on just your language patterns. Paste some text into The Gender Genie, click submit and it will tell you (with 80% accuracy) whether or not you’re a man or a woman.
I’ve seen similar question & answer tests that guessed whether or not you were male or female (but it’s unfortunately lost now to the vast sea of sites I visited before I del.icio.us existed).
I’m sure you know what Twitter is by now, if you don’t, it’s myspace on crack - instantly update everyone on everything you’re doing every moment of every day. Enter twittervision - it shows you on a global scale using Google Maps who’s doing what in real time. It’s strangely fascinating (okay, actually I’m completely and utterly bored by it already and waiting for the next version).
Ontario gaming officials pulled 87 slot machines that appeared to show subliminal messages. How the they figured out there were subliminal messages in the game is still a mystery.
The games flash winning jackpot symbols at players for a fifth of a second, long enough for the brain to detect even if the players are not aware of the message, some psychologists told CBC News.
It’s not clear if messages are influencing gamblers’ behaviour. That would take further testing, experts said.
Whether or not this affected the behavior of those playing the games remains to be seen, but I suspect the machine’s manufacturer’s and vendors have some very interesting data.
You know the “is good for you/is bad for you” thing where every other week a new study comes out to tell you why doing such & such a thing is essential/horrible for your health. Well now someone came up with a study that says drinkers earn more money.
The study finds that men who drink earn 10 percent more than abstainers and women drinkers earn 14 percent more than nondrinkers. However, unlike men, who get an additional income boost from drinking in bars, women who frequent bars at least once per month do not show higher earnings than women who do not visit bars.
If you look hard enough, you can find correlations all over the place that don’t actually mean anything. For most people this isn’t a big deal, but for scientists spurious correlations can be the difference between a major breakthrough and, well, bad science.
For readers of this blog, it means, unless you can decipher the statistics (if they’re given) in any given study, you may want to take it with a grain of salt.
This is a fascinating article that demonstrates how 15 minutes of positive affirmations can help under-achieving minority groups get better grades in school for the rest of the year.
I’m in the middle of reading Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman’s (former president of the American Psychological Association) book on Positive Psychology. Seligman stumbled on the idea of learned helplessness as a grad student - when dogs who were trained to associate a buzzer with an electrical shock didn’t try to escape, from the shock even when they could, he explained it by saying that they’d simply given up trying. This was contrary to the behaviorists at the time, who believed that animals could only do what they’d been taught to do through conditioning - this kind of abstraction (inescapable pain in one situation to pain in all situations), they believed, required human level thinking.
Seligman persisted, however, and further research bore him out - people can be trained to give up. The theory of learned helplessness eventually became attatched to an area of cognitive psychology known as “attributional style” in which people explain good or bad events as in terms of three dimensions - permenance, universality, and control. That is, will this bad event have a lasting effect (permenance) that affects multiple areas of your life (universality) and do you have the ability to change it (control). Your measure in these three dimensions predicts (according to Seligman’s book) how quickly you’ll recover from setbacks.
I’m not yet up to the part where tells us how to train ourselves to be optimistic, but I’ll keep you up to date. In the mean time, here’s a roundup of my links on happiness & positive psychology.
You know that cereal commercial where they give it to Mikey because he hates everything? There’s a powerful social message there. It turns out that we trust the opinions of people who like the things we like more than the opinion of people who dislike the things we also dislike.
Researchers theorize that this is because if we like something, we tend to like everything about it, but if someone dislikes it, we’re never sure exactly why. Maybe this is a lesson for all the Mikeys of the world - people will trust you more if you like more things.