Scroll Of Esther, Venice, 18th Century

Why do men have Adam's apples. It's so sexy but seems so unnecessary

It basically is unnecessary lol

It’s not that only men have Adam’s apples, women do too, but it’s less prominent. An Adam’s apple is just a piece of cartilage that protects your larynx (the voicebox) directly behind it. As boys & girls go through puberty, our voicebox grows which:

1. Causes our voice to deepen 2. Pushes the cartilage further forwards

In boys, the larynx grows in size significantly more which therefore pushes forward the evident bump of cartilage we like to call an Adam’s Apple.

Happy Birthday, @smokey-bear (August 9th)!

Everybody loves Smokey the Bear and truthfully what’s not to love?  His message of conservation and environmental concern is even more relevant today than it was in 1944 when the campaign was created.  In 1952 the Smokey the Bear song was written by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins and became a grade school standard.  Feel free to sing along: here are the lyrics from Living, Learning, Loving West Virginia from the Conservation Commission of West Virginia, 1958.  Have fun and remember “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

(Image caption: If this picture makes you feel uncomfortable, you feel empathic pain. This sensation activates the same brain regions as real pain. © Kai Weinsziehr for MPG)

The anatomy of pain

Grimacing, we flinch when we see someone accidentally hit their thumb with a hammer. But is it really pain we feel? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and other institutions have now proposed a new theory that describes pain as a multi-layered gradual event which consists of specific pain components, such as a burning sensation in the hand, and more general components, such as negative emotions. A comparison of the brain activation patterns during both experiences could clarify which components the empathic response shares with real pain. 

Imagine you’re driving a nail into a wall with a hammer and accidentally bang your finger. You would probably injure finger tissue, feel physical distress, focus all your attention on your injured finger and take care not to repeat the misfortune. All this describes physical and psychological manifestations of “pain” – specifically, so-called nociceptive pain experienced by your body, which is caused by the stimulation of pain receptors.

Now imagine that you see a friend injure him or herself in the same way. You would again literally wince and feel pain, empathetic pain in this case. Although you yourself have not sustained any injury, to some extent you would experience the same symptoms: You would feel anxiety; you may recoil to put distance between yourself and the source of the pain; and you would store information about the context of the experience in order to avoid pain in the future.

Activity in the brain

Previous studies have shown that the same brain structures – namely the anterior insula and the cingulate cortex – are activated, irrespective of whether the pain is personally experienced or empathetic. However, despite this congruence in the underlying activated areas of the brain, the extent to which the two forms of pain really are similar remains a matter of considerable controversy.

To help shed light on the matter, neuroscientists, including Tania Singer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, have now proposed a new theory: “We need to get away from this either-or question, whether the pain is genuine or not.”

Instead, it should be seen as a complex interaction of multiple elements, which together form the complex experience we call “pain”. The elements include sensory processes, which determine, for example, where the pain stimulus was triggered: in the hand or in the foot? In addition, emotional processes, such as the negative feeling experienced during pain, also come into play. “The decisive point is that the individual processes can also play a role in other experiences, albeit in a different activation pattern,” Singer explains – for example, if someone tickles your hand or foot, or you see images of people suffering on television. Other processes, such as the stimulation of pain receptors, are probably highly specific to pain. The neuroscientists therefore propose comparing the elements of direct and empathetic pain: Which elements are shared and which, by contrast, are specific and unique to the each form of pain?

Areas process general components

A study that was published almost simultaneously by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the University of Geneva has provided strong proof of this theory: They were able to demonstrate for the first time that during painful experiences the anterior insula region and the cingulate cortex process both general components, which also occur during other negative experiences such as disgust or indignation, and specific pain information – whether the pain is direct or empathic.

The general components signal that an experience is in fact unpleasant and not joyful. The specific information, in turn, tells us that pain – not disgust or indignation – is involved, and whether the pain is being experienced by you or someone else. “Both the nonspecific and the specific information are processed in parallel in the brain structures responsible for pain. But the activation patterns are different,” says Anita Tusche, also a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and one of the authors of the study.

Thanks to the fact that our brain deals with these components in parallel, we can process various unpleasant experiences in a time-saving and energy-saving manner. At the same time, however, we are able register detailed information quickly, so that we know exactly what kind of unpleasant event has occurred – and whether it affects us directly or vicariously. “The fact that our brain processes pain and other unpleasant events simultaneously for the most part, no matter if they are experienced by us or someone else, is very important for social interactions,” Tusche says, “because it helps to us understand what others are experiencing.”

Photograph of the XS-1 in Flight

On October 14, 1947, Captain Charles “Chuck” Yeager became the first human to break the sound barrier during powered level flight while flying the experimental Bell X-1 aircraft.

File Unit: X-1 Photographs, 12/11/1946 - 10/21/1947. Series: Flight Test Project Files, ca. 1945 - ca. 1959. Record Group 255: Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1903 - 2006 .

Photograph of Captain Charles E. Yeager, 5/1948

Read Chuck Yeager’s notes from the moment that he broke the sound barrier:

“The needle of the machmeter fluctuated at this reading momentarily, then passed off the scale.  Assuming that the off scale reading remained linear, it is estimated that 1.05 Mach i was attained at this time.”

Pilot’s Notes from the Ninth Powered Flight of the XS-1 (First supersonic flight)

Read more Pilot’s notes from these test flights in the  X-1 Correspondence file in the National Archives catalog.

Categorizing Posts on Tumblr

Millions of posts are published on Tumblr everyday. Understanding the topical structure of this massive collection of data is a fundamental step to connect users with the content they love, as well as to answer important philosophical questions, such as “cats vs. dogs: who rules on social networks?”

As first step in this direction, we recently developed a post-categorization workflow that aims at associating posts with broad-interest categories, where the list of categories is defined by Tumblr’s on-boarding topics.

Methodology

Posts are heterogeneous in form (video, images, audio, text) and consists of semi-structured data (e.g. a textual post has a title and a body, but the actual textual content is un-structured). Luckily enough, our users do a great job at summarizing the content of their posts with tags. As the distribution below shows, more than 50% of the posts are published with at least one tag.

However, tags define micro-interest segments that are too fine-grained for our goal. Hence, we editorially aggregate tags into semantically coherent topics: our on-boarding categories.

We also compute a score that represents the strength of the affiliation (tag, topic), which is based on approximate string matching and semantic relationships.

Given this input, we can compute a score for each pair (post,topic) as:

where

w(f,t) is the score (tag,topic), or zero if the pair (f,t) does not belong in the dictionary W.

tag-features(p) contains features extracted from the tags associated to the post: raw tag, “normalized” tag, n-grams.

q(f,p) is a weight [0,1] that takes into account the source of the feature (f) in the post (p).

The drawback of this approach is that relies heavily on the dictionary W, which is far from being complete.

To address this issue we exploit another source of data: RelatedTags, an index that provides a list of similar tags by exploiting co-occurence patterns. For each pair (tag,topic) in W, we propagate the affiliation with the topic to its top related tags, smoothing the affiliation score w to reflect the fact these entries (tag,topic) could be noisy.

This computation is followed by filtering phase to remove entries (post,topic) with a low confidence score. Finally, the category with the highest score is associated to the post.

Evaluation

This unsupervised approach to post categorization runs daily on posts created the day before. The next step is to assess the alignment between the predicted category and the most appropriate one.

The results of an editorial evaluation show that the our framework is able to identify in most cases a relevant category, but it also highlights some limitations, such as a limited robustness to polysemy.

We are currently looking into improving the overall performances by exploiting NLP techniques for word embedding and by integrating the extraction and analysis of visual features into the processing pipeline.

Some fun with data

What is the distribution of posts published on Tumblr? Which categories drive more engagements? To analyze these and other questions we analyze the categorized posts over a period of 30 days.

Almost 7% of categorized posts belong to Fashion, with Art as runner up.

The category that drives more engagements is Television, which accounts for over 8% of the reblogs on categorized posts.

However, normalizing by the number of posts published, the category with the highest average of engagements per post isGif Art, followed by Astrology.

Last but not least, here are the stats you all have been waiting for!! Cats are winning on Tumblr… for now…

A limerick:

Word of the Day: philodox

n. A person who loves or vehemently propounds his or her own opinions; a dogmatic or argumentative person

Image: “Savonarola Preaching Against Prodigality” by Ludwig von Langenmantel. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

im putting together a couple of scottish folk mixes bc that’s what i do and im honestly curious if anyone in my country has ever been unequivocally happy about anything ever

Is Polygamy a Natural Impulse?

A conversation with biologist David P. Barash on the biological underpinnings of human polygamy.

How hard-wired are human beings for polygamy?

Tokyo Stock Exchange, circa 1910, on the right.