Why You Can't Fake Your Facebook Profile

from blog.newsweek.com
by Johannah Cornblatt

The photo showed a man in a T shirt and baseball cap standing on top of a mountain. Tien-Yi Lee, a Web-site designer who had joined Nerve.com’s online dating service, says she felt an instant connection. “I saw his picture, and he had a very kind of friendly, sparkly vibe,” she says. “He had a great smile.” A few days later, Lee met the man at a bar in Cambridge, Mass. Lee remembers thinking that the photo on Nerve provided a “very accurate” reflection of her date’s personality in real life. A year after marrying the man from the photo, Lee’s first impressions of her future husband still largely hold true. “The picture was in sync with who he is,” she says.

Lee’s experience is common among those who meet on the Internet, according to a new study on the role of physical appearance in creating first impressions. The study, which will be published in next month’s issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that you can actually learn a great deal about a stranger’s personality from appearance alone.
More than 700 million people worldwide are now using online social networking sites that showcase personal photographs, but few realize just how accurate first impressions online can be. The findings from this study and other research on personality suggest that the photos you post online provide a wealth of information about who you are—whether you like it or not.

In the study, observers looked at full-body photos of 123 people they had never met. The observers viewed the people either in a controlled pose with a neutral facial expression or in a natural pose and then rated them on 10 personality characteristics. The authors of the study combined self-reported ratings from the people photographed with evaluations from close acquaintances to determine how well the observers were able to guess the traits. Even when people stood in the controlled pose, the observers accurately judged some major personality traits, including extroversion, self-esteem, and even religiosity. When people stood in a natural position, the judgments were accurate for nine of the 10 personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, likability, self-esteem, loneliness, religiosity, and political orientation. 

“A lot of people don’t like to admit that they make judgments based on appearance, but it’s inherent in everything that we do,” says Laura Naumann, director of the Personality Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the study. “Anywhere you have a profile and pictures are being posted, people are using that information.” (Accuracy was lowest for neuroticism, a finding consistent with research demonstrating that neuroticism is extremely difficult to detect on first impression in real life.)

How participants stood and whether or not they smiled provided the biggest clues about personality.  Extroverts apparently smile more, stand in energetic and less tense poses, and appear healthy, neat, and stylish. While more obvious cues—like wearing a cross or a Star of David—gave viewers information about religiosity, there was also a strange correlation in this study between standing in a relaxed position and being more devout. “I think a lot of people forget that our posture says a lot of things about us,” Naumann says. “Even if we were to put everyone in the same white jump suit, people’s inherent personalities might still come through in how they stand.”

Clothes and accessories can be misleading. While men who dressed more neatly and formally were accurately judged as more conscientious, assessing conscientiousness in women was much more difficult. “Some women might not do their homework on time or show up to a meeting on time but still have a conscientious appearance,” Naumann says. The report suggests that this gender disparity might stem from the fact that society places more pressure on women to look their best.

Research has shown that people are often clueless about how they’re viewed on the basis of their online profiles. “A lot of the time we think we come across a certain way, but we don’t,” says Simine Vazire, an assistant professor of psychology who runs Washington University’s Personality and Self-Knowledge Lab and an author of the study. “On the Internet, that’s multiplied by a million, so we should be careful about how we broadcast ourselves.”

A forthcoming study on Facebook, which will be published in Psychological Science next year, found that online social networking sites are not effective for promoting “idealized” identity. Instead, such sites often portray personality quite accurately, a finding that might help explain their popularity. As with the study on personality based on physical appearance, the Facebook study found that accuracy was strongest for judging extroversion and openness.

While it’s difficult to influence the way strangers judge you from a photograph, it’s even harder to control your overall online persona when other features like friend lists and Facebook message walls come into play. “If I want to appear extroverted, I can’t just suddenly create 450 friends and have them post on my wall and have photos of me yelling drunkenly at the camera at yet another party,” says Samuel Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas and an author of both personality studies. “You can’t just fabricate those.”

Vazire says the research suggests that strangers can know as much about your personality as acquaintances just by looking you up on the Internet. “It’s another example of how pervasive personality is,” she says. “You can’t outrun your personality. It’s going to follow you everywhere.”

Vazire warns against putting too much stock in a single profile photo, though. And Tien-Yi Lee should know. Although she instantly fell for her future husband’s smile on Nerve.com, he was the fourth date she found on the Internet that week—and number 97 overall. 

Do the Evolution - Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam - Do The Evolution (Official Music Video)

I don't think I fully appreciated this music video when it came out, so here it is again.

From Wikipedia:
Pearl Jam has stated that the novel Ishmael influenced the writing of the album Yield, and according to the novel's writer, Daniel Quinn, this song comes the closest to expressing the ideas of the book. Vedder stated:

This Daniel Quinn book, Ishmael...I've never recommended a book before, but I would actually, in an interview, recommend it to everyone....But this book, it's kind of the book of my ... My whole year has been kind of with these thoughts in mind. And on an evolutionary level, that man has been on this planet for 3 million years, so that you have this number line that goes like this [hands wide apart]. And that we're about to celebrate the year 2000, which is this [holds hands less than one inch apart]. So here's this number line; here's what we know and celebrate. This book is a conversation with a man and an ape. And the ape really has it all together. He kinda knows the differences between him and the man, and points out how slight they are, and it creates an easy analogy for what man has done, thinking that they were the end-all. That man is the end-all thing on this earth. That the earth was around even so much longer before the 3 million years. Fifty million years of sharks and all these living things. Then man comes out of the muck, and 3 million years later he's standing, and now he's controlling everything and killing it. Just in the last hundred! Which is just a speck on this line. So what are we doin' here? This is just a good reminder...And I'm anxious to see what happens. You know, I've got a good seat for whatever happens next. It'll be interesting.

Do the Evolution Lyrics from PearlJam.com:

I'm ahead, I'm a man
I'm the first mammal to wear pants, yeah
I'm at peace with my lust
I can kill 'cause in God I trust, yeah
It's evolution, baby

I'm at peace, I'm the man
Buying stocks on the day of the crash
On the loose, I'm a truck
All the rolling hills, I'll flatten 'em out, yeah
It's herd behavior, uh huh
It's evolution, baby

Admire me, admire my home
Admire my son, he's my clone
This land is mine, this land is free
I'll do what I want but irresponsibly
It's evolution, baby

I'm a thief, I'm a liar
There's my church, I sing in the choir:
(hallelujah, hallelujah)

Admire me, admire my home
Admire my son, admire my clones
'Cause we know, appetite for a nightly feast
Those ignorant Indians got nothin' on me
Nothin', why?
Because... it's evolution, baby!

I am ahead, I am advanced
I am the first mammal to make plans, yeah
I crawled the earth, but now I'm higher
2010, watch it go to fire
It's evolution, baby
Do the evolution

Dogs worse for the planet than SUVs? That's barking mad!

From Sightline Daily via my friend Carol R-L
Original post by Posted by Clark Williams-Derry

You may have seen the meme circulating around the internet:  some researchers from New Zealand are claiming that owning a dog has as much impact on the planet as owning an SUV.  I'll let New Scientist summarize their case:

[A] medium-sized dog...consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food...So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares...
Meanwhile, an SUV...driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser's eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

It's just the sort of counter-intuitive claim that gets lots of attention on the brave new internet era.  So interesting!  So science-y!  So Twitter-able!

And yet, so false!  Once you sniff around the numbers, it quickly becomes apparent that those researchers are barking up the wrong tree.

Let's get one thing out of the way:  I'm not a dog owner.  Much to my kids' dismay, I don't even want a pet.  Nor do I own an SUV.  So, in theory, I...er...don't have a dog in this fight.  Still, this claim struck me as so wrong that it made the hair on my neck stand up.  And I'd hate to have someone catch scent of this meme and conclude that buying an SUV is no big deal -- "It's not like I'm buying a dog or anything" -- if the real numbers don't support that conclusion.  (That's the risk of bad information: it can lead us to make choices that are in stark conflict with our values.)

So let's paws for a moment, and see if this sleeping dog is actually a lie.

First, let's look at that SUV.  The calculations behind the internet meme say that it's driven about 6,200 miles per year (10,000 km).  And yet, according to the US Department of Energy, a real SUV in the US is driven an average of 13,700 miles annually.  Already, the internet meme is off by a factor of roughly 2.2.  I haven't checked whether the 10,000 km figure is reasonable for New Zealand -- but it for the US, their mileage assumptions certainly skews the numbers in favor of SUVs, and against dogs.

And then there's the total energy estimates.  The pet-pessimists estimate that an SUV (in their calculations, a 4.6 liter Toyota Land Cruiser driven about 6,200 miles) consumes 55.1 gigajoules of energy in both fuel and amortized manufacturing energy every year.  That, too, is low.  A Land Cruiser gets about 15.25 mpg in combined city/highway driving -- meaning that if it's driven 10,000 km, it consumes about 407 gallons of gas, or 53.6 gigajoules worth of energy.  But once I add in the energy used to produce that gas, along with what's likely a low-ball estimate of the "embodied" energy from vehicle manufacturing, I get get about 74.9 gigajoules -- 44 percent more than the authors estimate.  Yet again, they've low-balled the impacts of the SUV in a way that makes dogs look worse by comparison.  (Here, I'm drawing from the data collection and calculations I did for our CO2-by-transportation-mode charts. And I'm looking only at energy, not at the additional climate and pollution impacts of emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks.)

So even before you start to look at dogs, the authors have underestimated the environmental impacts of SUVs by a factor of at least 3.  And that's not including the indirect impacts of SUVs -- the parking spaces we build for them; the roads and bridges they drive on; the impacts of insurance and licensing operations; etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Then there's flip side:  the authors' claims about the impact of feeding pets.  The anti-doggists estimate it takes .84 hectares -- or about 2.1 acres of cropland -- to meet a a pooch's food needs for a year.  There are a little over 70 million dogs in the US (the Humane Society says 74.8 million, the veterinarians say 72.1 million, and the pet food industry says 66.3 million, for an average of 71.1 dogs).  So by the authors' estimates it must take about 150 million acres of US farmland to feed our dogs.  In all, there are 440 million acres of cropland in the US -- suggesting that the equivalent of one-third of all US cropland is devoted to producing dog food.
We use the equivalent of a third of all US cropland to feed dogs?  That's barking mad!

To see why it's wrong, you can look from the bottom up, at the foods that dogs eat.  Or you can look from the top down, at the aggregate sales of dog food vs. the entire agricultural economy.  I'll do both.

First from the bottom up:  what, exactly, do dogs eat?  The anti-pet-ites seem do a good job of calculating dogs' calorie requirements.  Canines wolf down a lot of food:  a mid-sized dog consumes roughly 30 calories per pound of body weight per day.  (Smaller dogs eat as many as 40 calories per pound of body weight, while larger dogs eat as few as 20 calories per pound.  Call it the yapping-to-napping spread.)  I couldn't find the average weight of dogs in the US, but the median dog breed listed here has an adult weight of 47 pounds.  If that's representative of US dogs, then the average dog will eat 1,410 calories today, give or take -- which, as I read it, is roughly what the authors' figures imply.

So the real problem with the authors' calculations isn't with their estimates of how much each pet eats.  It's with this statement:

[A] medium-sized dog...consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily

Strike that: most dogs DO NOT eat meat and cereals.  With a few exceptions, they eat "meat" and "cereals."  The "meat," in particular, tends to be byproducts -- things that people in the US simply won't eat, even in hot dogs. Here's one description of the ingredients in pet food:

The protein used in pet food comes from a variety of sources. When cattle, swine, chickens, lambs, or other animals are slaughtered, the choice cuts such as lean muscle tissue are trimmed away from the carcass for human consumption. However, about 50% of every food-producing animal does not get used in human foods. Whatever remains of the carcass -- bones, blood, intestines, lungs, ligaments, and almost all the other parts not generally consumed by humans -- is used in pet food, animal feed, and other products. These "other parts" are known as "by-products," "meat-and-bone-meal," or similar names on pet food labels.

Even the cereals dogs eat are often deemed unfit for human consumption. I'm not trying to gross you out here, or encourage you to feed choice cuts to your pooch.  Instead, I think it's probably a good thing that dogs eat things that humans won't -- since otherwise they really would be eating people food, which really would increase their environmental impact.  But since most dogs get their calories and protein from the waste products of people food, the idea that the environmental impact of dog food is additional to the impact of human food is simply wrong.

Of course, that's not to say that dog food has no environmental impact.  Dog food, and meat byproducts generally, provide some financial contribution to the meat industry, and hence to the overall planetary impact of meat production.  Dog food also also requires energy for processing, packaging, and transportation.
Yet when you look at pet food from a macro-economic perspective -- that is, from the top down, rather than the bottom up  -- dog food is little more than a rounding error.  Total retail food sales in the US topped $1.1 trillion in the US in 2008 (see table 36 from the USDA's Agricultural Outlook statistics.)  But according to the pet food industry, retail dog food sales totaled just $11 billion in 2008.  By that measure, dog food represents about one percent of the total food economy.

Looking more narrowly at the economics of meat byproducts, I found these USDA estimates of meat "price spreads", which show that meat byproducts are worth somewhere between 4 and 15 percent of the total value of livestock, depending on the year and the kind of animal.  And obviously, dog food is only one of many uses of those byproducts -- there's also food for other pets, and a variety of industrial uses as well. So based on the economics, there's just no way to attribute much of the impact of agriculture on our dogs.
In short, whether you go by the macro-economics, or by the actual constituent parts of dog food, there's simply no principled way to say that the dog food has the same impact as human food.  I'd be very surprised if ANY principled life-cycle assessment found that dog food has more than a small fraction of the overall environmental impact of US agriculture. My guess is that dog food accounts for a maximum of 5 percent of all US crop production, and possibly as little as 1 percent.  That's a far cry from the one-third that the authors imply.

Of course, dogs have indirect environmental impacts, just as SUVs do:  veterinarians, energy for heating and cooling, the food calories that humans use while walking their dogs, etc.  I won't even try to tally them up, because there's no real point.  Just looking at the numbers so far -- combining the underestimates of SUV impacts with the overestimates of dog food impacts -- the anti-doggites are off by a factor of at least 18, and probably more.

But because I'm doggedly persistent, I'll mention one final issue.  The authors of the original meme estimate that:

One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year

I haven't looked at the original book, so I have no real idea what this means.  A well-located solar power installation can produce roughly 10 times that much energy per acre per year.  Perhaps it's got something to do with biofuels -- maybe the net annual production of corn ethanol per hectare, after accounting for the energy for fertilizer, tractor fuel, and distilling.  Yet having run the numbers before, I've concluded that there's absolutely no way run the US SUV fleet -- roughly the size of our dog population -- on corn ethanol alone.  There's just not enough cropland in the country to do it. But obviously, we power our fleet of dogs (and cats and people and horses, etc.--and even some cars) fairly easily with the cropland we've got.

Let's be clear -- I'm not claiming that we should ignore the environmental impact of dogs.  That's one of reasons that I, personally, am reluctant to own one!  But I think that making an empirical claim without doing solid research does a grave disservice to public discourse.  Being wrong can have consequences -- including, potentially, encouraging people to make the wrong choices, even if their heart is in exactly the right place.

So I say to the folks who made the original claim:  Bad Researchers!  Fur Shame!!!  And to the rest of you: let's consider the "dogs are worse than SUVs" meme debunked:  buried in the back yard, put to sleep, and whatever other bad dog pun comes to mind.

(Note: I *AM* a dog owner and am totally biased- MA)

The Bare Bears of Leipzig Zoo

via Geekologie,  Dlisted and the Daily Mail

Vets have been left baffled by the sudden hair loss of  the three female Andean/Spectacled bears who live at the Leipzig Zoo. Some experts believe it could be due to a genetic defect though the animals do not seem to be suffering from any other affliction. The bears, which originate from South America, normally have fluffy dark brown fur and would now be growing a thicker fur coat to keep warm during the winter. But instead, Lolita, Bianca & Dolores have developed rashes and inflammations on their skin. Unfortunately for the bears, their lack of hair has been pulling in the crowds who want to catch of glimpse of their bareness.

Chimps.Inc

A video on the U.S. chimpanzee sanctuary Chimps.Inc

Chimps Inc. from Oliver Tatom on Vimeo.

monkey economics: "only the cooperative survive"

Monkey business: Jungle economics

By Kevin Voigt, CNN from CNN.com

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* Primatologists are investigating how economics operate among monkeys

* The more time monkeys are groomed, the richer they are within the group

* Experiments show exchange rate of 'grooms' vary with supply and demand

In Indonesia, researchers have watched how long-tail macaques trade for sex. In South Africa, vervet monkeys climbed the ladder of their social group by learning a new trade in apples.

This line of study examines how economic models explain social behavior in the natural world.

"Animals neither negotiate verbally nor conclude binding contracts, but nevertheless regularly exchange goods and services without overt coercion and manage to arrive at agreements over exchange rates," European researchers wrote in a recent paper on market behavior among vervet monkeys in South Africa.

"It's really looking at the economy of nature," said Michael David Gumert, a primatologist and assistant professor in the division of psychology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Gumert spent 20 months in the jungles of Indonesia studying long-tail macaques, observing the mating market among the monkeys.

While the U.S. dollar may be the primary global currency among humans, in the primate world coinage can be best called "The Groom" -- the more time you get being groomed, the richer you are within the monkey social group, researchers have observed.

Gumert found that male monkeys "pay" for sex by grooming female monkeys. After being groomed, females would mate nearly four times an hour with the groomer, and are less likely to mate with others. But the larger the market of male companions, the higher the price of sex:

Areas with low density of males, the price was only eight minutes of grooming. In areas where there were more males, the price could double to 16 minutes.

Sex isn't the only commodity for sale in the jungle. Female macaques will line up to groom a new mother in order to hold her offspring, Gumert observed. "When a mother has a baby, the other females are attracted to the baby and want access to it," he said.

The findings support the "biological market theory," a term created by researchers Ronald Noe and Peter Hammerstein in trying to understand reciprocal behavior in primates and the unwritten code of trade that appears in the wild.

"(My colleague) said, 'this looks like a market', and we started investigating in those terms," said Noe, a primate ethologist at the University of Strasbourg.

And like in capital markets, supply and demand rules the jungle. In one recent experiment led by Noe's student, Cecile Fruteau, in South Africa, a low-ranking vervet monkey in the wild was trained to open a box of apples for the group. Instantly, the stock value of the monkey shot up.

"The pattern of grooming she got was like the pattern of a dominant animal," Noe said.

Then the researcher trained another low-ranking monkey the same skill to see what competition would do in the monkey market. And like human markets, the duoply reached a point of equal distribution of grooms.

What fascinates Noe is that without any sort of outward system, there seems to be an innate sense among the group of the value of these new goods and services.

"They make the changes very quickly and seem to have a keen sense of what it is worth," he said.

There may be other forms of currency trading hands that the researchers can't compute -- such as greater tolerance among each other when feeding, or stored knowledge that the improved relationship will come in handy in a fight.

"Grooming is something that is consistent and we can easily measure," said Noe.

Researchers stop short of saying this research has -- so far -- signaled that economics is an innate trait in our closest animal cousins, but it raises thought provoking questions if there is an evolutionary dynamic to the forces that gave rise to Wall Street.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the tacit negotiation that happens in primate groups suggests that the maxim that "only the strong survive" isn't quite right, Gumert said. "It seems really more like, 'only the cooperative survive'."

*updated* drink coke in canada and help get $100,000 to polar bears

via the workcabin.ca facebook page

Coca-Cola Ltd. today announced details of its ongoing commitment to WWF-Canada's polar bear conservation efforts. In celebration of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, Coca-Cola will double last year's $100,000 contribution through its holiday program by contributing $200,000 to WWF-Canada's efforts in 2009.

"Global climate change is an important issue that impacts all of us," said Bobby Britain, VP Sparkling, Coca-Cola Ltd. "By continuing our partnership with WWF-Canada we are making a commitment to do our part to slow climate change and support the polar bear population in Canada."

As part of the 2009 holiday campaign, Coca-Cola is asking Canadians to help protect the polar bear by going to icoke.ca and entering icoke PINS found on specially marked Coca-Cola beverages. For every PIN entered, Coca-Cola will make a cash donation to WWF-Canada, up to a total of $100,000. Coca-Cola will also be matching individual consumer donations to WWF, up to a total of $75,000 and will make a $15 contribution to WWF for each holiday eGift redeemed on icoke.ca, up to $25,000.

Canadians who enter eight PINs on icoke.ca can redeem them for one of three Coca-Cola Olympic Games Bears. The plush polar bears, made from 100% recycled PET, serve as a Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games collectible item and a reminder of the impact climate change is having on our polar bears.

"This is an important year for the Arctic and for polar bears," said Gerald Butts, President and CEO, WWF-Canada. "We are pleased to work with Coca-Cola to raise awareness and encourage Canadians to take action."

Since 1912, polar bears have symbolized the joy of coming together in Coca-Cola campaigns around the world. However, experts predict that if current climate trends continue, polar bears could become extinct by the end of this century. Through Coca-Cola's multi-million dollar holiday program, the company hopes to increase awareness of polar bear threats and encourage support for WWF-Canada's efforts.

The holiday campaign will be seen on TV, in cinema, in-store and on specially marked beverage packaging from the beginning of November, 2009 to January 5, 2010.

Coca-Cola is supporting its commitment to the environment by working with WWF-Canada to:

- Conserve freshwater resources in Canada

- Improve efficiency of the company's water use and decrease the
company's greenhouse gas emissions and energy use

- Inspire and engage Canadians to fight climate change and live
sustainable lives

*UPDATE*
editor's note: as a caveat a friend of mine pointed out the following:

"Well, this is a typical ethical dilemma in the world of conservation. Coca-Cola doesn't exactly have a great environmental track record ( e.g., http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3096893.stm)...the question becomes, do we, as consumers, support a company that we know is (probably intentionally) damaging the environment in one part of the world, but donating money to protect the environment in another part of the world. Like BP - many conservation organizations and scientists get funding from BP, but, let's be clear - BP has a terrible environmental record. Do we forgive companies if they donate to our cause? I don't know the answer.

Also see: http://health.yahoo.com/experts/drmao/20270/what-soft-drinks-are-doing-to-your-body/"