Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

by Robert Krulwich


Later today you are going to do something, something you don't know about yet.

Yet somehow, it's already happened. Somehow, it's already affected you.

Huh?

One of the most respected, senior and widely published professors of psychology, Daryl Bem of Cornell, has just published an article that suggests that people — ordinary people — can be altered by experiences they haven't had yet. Time, he suggests, is leaking. The Future has slipped, unannounced, into the Present. And he thinks he can prove it.


Already critics are jumping up and down, saying this can't be, time is not porous, the experiments are flawed. But because this is the Professor Daryl Bem (he's in your high school textbook for his work on self perception) and because the journal publishing his article is top-of-the-line rigorous, all over the world psychologists are trying to duplicate what Dr. Bem has done. If serious scientists can repeat his results, this story is going to be big.

Two Very Queer Experiments

But while we're waiting, let me tell you what he did. (Or at least what I think he did. I'm not a psychology buff, so I hope I get this right) The details are fascinating.

Dr. Bem has been quietly testing extrasensory perception claims for 8 years. His paper reports a series of 9 different experiments, but two especially caught my eye.

Experiment Number 1: Who's Got the Porn?

The first is a computer quiz. 100 Cornell students, 50 males, 50 females, were invited to sit in front of some computers. Here are Bem's instructions:

This is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all. Several of the pictures contain explicit erotic images (e.g., couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts). If you object to seeing such images, you should not participate in this experiment.

OK, that's two curtains. One is hiding nothing. The other hides a picture, often a hot picture with much nakedness.

Since a computer randomly chooses what's behind each curtain, one would expect the students to choose correctly half the time. Fifty-fifty.

But that is not how it turned out. In the 100 sessions, the hit rate for those shown erotic stimuli was 53.1 percent. Why? It could have been a fluke, but with the results session after session consistently better than random, one explanation might be that the subjects somehow 'knew' that a particular choice would be especially arousing. How did they know? One possibility is that the tasty reward of "hot action" somehow got passed backwards through time more effectively. (Don’t laugh: The hit rate of those shown non-erotic picures, at 49.8 percent, did not deviate from chance. Curious.)

Sexual Arousal Going Backwards in Time?

Weirder still, Bem reports that the news appeared to arrive at the brain before the computer made its choice. "The remarkable finding [we made] is that their physiological responses are observed to occur about 2-3 seconds prior to the appearance of the picture, even before the computer has decided whether to present a non-arousing or an arousing picture," Bem told the Cornell Daily Sun.

Here's the second study.

Everybody knows practice improves performance. If you study a list of words, if you try to memorize them, you should be able to remember them better later. But suppose you reverse the process? Suppose you study the words after the test? Your friends will smirk. "After the test is too late, loser. People who study after tests don't graduate."

Well, let's see.

In one of Bem's studies, 100 college students were shown a list of 48 common nouns flashed on a computer, one at a time, for three seconds each. The instructions said: Look at the word, try to visualize it (see "tree;" imagine "tree") and then go on to the next word.

Afterward, they were told, Surprise! We're going to give you a quick memory quiz. How many of the words we just showed you can you recall?

Students typed in the words they remembered.

Then a computer went through the same list of words and chose 24 — totally randomly; no human was involved.

Before you leave, the students were told, we still want you to scan and then type the words the computer selected. As they typed, the students were, of course, committing those randomly selected words to memory. But who cares? The test was over.

Did The Future Whisper The Answers?

Now comes the surprise. When Dr. Bem checked the original surprise recall test, a weird pattern emerged. He noticed the students for some reason turned out to be better at recalling the words they had scanned and retyped after the test.

A second group of 24 words served as a control. The computer never asked students to retype them. Those words weren't recalled as often.

Then Bem drops his bomb: "The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words."

The results show that [this test] does, in fact, reach back in time...

- Professor Daryl Bem
What? Apparently, scanning and retyping those words later somehow improved recall earlier. Cue the Twilight Zone music.

You can well understand why this paper is raising hackles all over psychology-ville. This is not the first time a prominent psychology professor has found statistical evidence of extrasensory perception, but in these experiments, the methods are classical, simple, well known and repeatable. Already one attempt to repeat Bem's work has failed.

For me (untrained in these matters) the niggling question is Bem's numbers: 53.1 percent is slightly better than chance. It's not 50-50, but is this really significant? The effect shows up across nine different experiments, involving more than a thousand subjects. So the effect in cumulative. But is that enough?

Here's what Melissa Burkley writes in her blog at Psychology Today:

...small effect sizes are not that uncommon in psychology (and other sciences). For example, on average, the Bem studies showed an effect size of .20 (out of a possible range of 0-1). Although that is fairly small, it is as large as or larger than some well-established effects, including the link between aspirin and heart attack prevention, calcium intake and bone mass, second hand smoke and lung cancer, and condom use and HIV prevention (Bushman & Anderson, 2001). And as Cohen has pointed out, such small effect sizes are most likely to occur in the early stages of exploring a topic, when scientists are just starting to discover why the effect occurs and when it is most likely to occur.

So who knows? Maybe psychologists, like quantum physicists, will have to deal with the deep strangeness of our universe. Maybe time doesn't behave properly. Maybe it makes little leaps, suddenly appears uninvited when porn is in the air. Or maybe not.

It's not like we've never thought about this before. In his paper Bem recalls that in "Through the Looking Glass," the White Queen casually mentions to Alice that in her realm, "memory works both ways."

Not only does the Queen remember past events, she can also remember "things that happened the week after next."

Alice, always puzzled, says "I'm sure mine only works one way...I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen seems a little sorry for Alice. "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," she says.

In a year or so, Bem coolly suggests, we may have to agree with the Queen

Source:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/01/04/132622672/could-it-be-spooky-experiments-that-see-the-future

OZ FLOOD SNAKES AND CROCS

Source: The Sun
http://www.thesun.co.uk


VICTIMS of the devastating Australian floods were last night facing a new threat from killer snakes, spiders and crocodiles.

Emergency supplies of snakebite anti-venom were being flown into Queensland as the rising water cut off 20 towns in the state — affecting 200,000 people.
The deadly reptiles have been moving to higher ground to seek refuge from the flood water.
And snakes six and a half feet long have been spotted in the major town of Rockhampton.
Highly venomous taipans, brown snakes and red-bellied blacks are climbing trees and hiding in houses for shelter.
Officials have warned the beasts are even more dangerous than usual because they are in their mating season, which makes them 'cranky'.
There is no end in sight to the "biblical" floods which are expected to last for weeks — with water levels set to peak at 30ft.
State premier Anna Bligh warned: "We will have major issues through January."
A third person died yesterday. A driver drowned after his car was washed away in Aramac.
More than 1,000 homes have been abandoned after days of driving rain last week caused river banks to burst.
More Australians fled their homes today and sandbagged properties.
In Rockhampton tens of thousands of people were bracing themselves for complete isolation.
So far flood waters have swamped an area bigger than France and Germany and closed the town's airport and railway.
Rumours of crocodile sightings have been rife in the cattle farming hub.
Emergency officials warned crocs pushed out of rivers could easily be mistaken for floating debris.
Pioneer Hotel pub owner Suzanne Miller added: "The snakes are a massive problem. I've shut all the doors because they're coming in."
State Emergency Service (SES) operations director Scott Mahaffey said: "Snakes are in their mating season and they've been flushed out of their environment.

"Snakes are very, very cranky right now.
"And the problem with crocodiles now is it's very, very hard to pick them out with the amount of debris."

Thousands of poisonous cane toads were also spotted around Rockhampton while authorities say the town will also be hit by sandflies and disease-carrying mosquitoes breeding in the standing water.

Meanwhile bridges have been washed away, coal mines forced to close, farms washed out and towns forced to undergo military evacuations by helicopter.
The worst is yet to hit the southern Queensland town of St George, which has begun evacuating residents and strengthening levees to keep out waters expected to peak on Sunday or Monday.

How To Learn Any Accent - Amy Walker

Part 2

http://www.AmyWalkerOnline.com

A masterclass with Amy Walker (of "21 Accents") to empower You to teach yourself any accent on the planet. Learn the way Amy learned -with the world as your classroom.

http://www.21Accents.com Amy's current feature film project: http://www.ConnectedFilm.com

Amy's personal website: http://www.AmyWalkerOnline.com

Vibes to You in all you do!

The English Language In 24 Accents

Me attempting to do 24 different accents from my own country and from other countries around the world. Hopefully I got most of them right but I may have made mistakes and I can do some better than others. However, I made this video for my friends because I promised them I would do an accent video. I mean no offence to anyone and please don't be upset if I have not included your specific accent or got it wrong.

Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top

The fact that the average American working woman earns only about 8o% of what the average American working man earns has been something of a festering sore for at least half the population for several decades. And despite many programs and analyses and hand-wringing and badges and even some legislation, the figure hasn't budged much in the past five years.

But now there's evidence that the ship may finally be turning around: according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%). (See TIME's special report on the state of the American woman.)

Here's the slightly deflating caveat: this reverse gender gap, as it's known, applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities. The rest of working women — even those of the same age, but who are married or don't live in a major metropolitan area — are still on the less scenic side of the wage divide.

The figures come from James Chung of Reach Advisors, who has spent more than a year analyzing data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do. This is almost the exact opposite of the graduation ratio that existed when the baby boomers entered college. Studies have consistently shown that a college degree pays off in much higher wages over a lifetime, and even in many cases for entry-level positions. "These women haven't just caught up with the guys," says Chung. "In many cities, they're clocking them."

Chung also claims that, as far as women's pay is concerned, not all cities are created equal. Having pulled data on 2,000 communities and cross-referenced the demographic information with the wage-gap figures, he found that the cities where women earned more than men had at least one of three characteristics. Some, like New York City or Los Angeles, had primary local industries that were knowledge-based. Others were manufacturing towns whose industries had shrunk, especially smaller ones like Erie, Pa., or Terre Haute, Ind. Still others, like Miami or Monroe, La., had a majority minority population. (Hispanic and black women are twice as likely to graduate from college as their male peers.) (See the top 10 female leaders.)

Significantly, the conditions that are feeding the rise in female wages — a growing knowledge-based economy, the decline of a manufacturing base and an increasing minority population — are dominant trends throughout the U.S. "This generation [of women] has adapted to the fundamental restructuring of the American economy better than their older predecessors or male peers," says Chung. While the economic advantage of women sometimes evaporates as they age and have families, Chung believes that women now may have enough leverage that their financial gains may not be completely erased as they get older. (Comment on this story.)

The holdout cities — those where the earnings of single, college-educated young women still lag men's — tended to be built around industries that are heavily male-dominated, such as software development or military-technology contracting. In other words, Silicon Valley could also be called Gender Gap Gully.

As for the somewhat depressing caveat that the findings held true only for women who were childless and single: it's not their marital status that puts the squeeze on their income. Rather, highly educated women tend to marry and have children later. Thus the women who earn the most in their 20s are usually single and childless.

The rise of female economic power is by no means limited to the U.S., nor necessarily to the young. Late last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that for the first time, women made up the majority of the workforce in highly paid managerial positions. The change in the status quo has been marked enough that several erstwhile women's advocates have started to voice concerns about how to get more men to go to college. Is there an equivalent to Title IX for men?

Source: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html

Ensino de inglês mira tecnologia

Ensino de inglês mira tecnologia Encontro de professores defende uso de ferramentas modernas e mais qualificação do setor

VANESSA PRATA
COLABORAÇÃO PARA A FOLHA

Foi-se o tempo em que professores de inglês podiam encarar a profissão como um "bico" e o mercado exigia apenas fluência na língua para ingressar na carreira.
Cada vez mais é necessário estar por dentro das novas metodologias e abordagens e utilizar a tecnologia como aliada, sem deixar de lado o aspecto humano do ensino.
Esses foram os motes da Convenção Nacional Braz-Tesol, que reuniu 1.200 profissionais de ensino de inglês do Brasil e do mundo de 19 a 22 de julho em São Paulo.
"A profissionalização do setor é uma tendência. O mercado está mais exigente e precisa de professores qualificados e comprometidos", afirma Vinícius Nobre, vice-presidente da Braz-Tesol, a maior associação de professores de inglês do país.
Na sessão de abertura, Patricia Friedrich, professora da Universidade do Estado do Arizona, dos EUA, destacou a responsabilidade social do professor de idiomas.
"Dar aulas não é só um emprego. Devemos ter consciência do impacto do inglês como língua global e de que a linguagem pode ser um veículo para resolver conflitos."

INGLÊS GLOBAL
Uma das principais tendências no ensino de inglês é o uso de tecnologia, como sites, filmes, vídeos do YouTube, blogs e podcasts (arquivos de áudio on-line).
"O professor tem de conhecer as ferramentas e orientar os alunos a utilizá-las fora da sala de aula também, para o aprendizado na rapidez que o mercado exige hoje", diz o inglês Graeme Hodgson, diretor de língua inglesa do British Council.
"Quem lutar contra a tecnologia sairá perdendo. É importante aprender a lidar e trabalhar com ela", completa David Crystal, autor de duas enciclopédias da Cambridge University Press.
Com a internet, ganha destaque a ideia de um "inglês global", com mais variedade linguística do que a tradicional divisão entre o inglês britânico e o norte-americano.
Para o professor Henrique Moura, respeitar as características culturais dos falantes não nativos é um dos temas em pauta atualmente.
"Na China, há mais alunos aprendendo inglês do que nativos dessa língua, e isso tem impacto no ensino. Não é preciso ter a preocupação de soar como um nativo, mas de ser compreendido globalmente", declara Ben Goldstein, professor de cursos on-line da Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, na Espanha.

EXIGÊNCIAS ATUAIS
PARA PROFESSORES

- Qualificar-se em cursos de graduação (letras, pedagogia ou educação), pós-graduação ou mestrado
- Buscar certificação internacional (como Celta e Icelt, na área de metodologia, e CAE ou CPE, na de proficiência)
- Estar antenado com a tecnologia como ferramenta de ensino (vídeos on-line, podcasts e sites, por exemplo)
- Conhecer diversas metodologias e abordagens, como a comunicativa e a lexical
- Conhecer e aplicar conceitos de ensino afetivo e neurolinguística
- Buscar aperfeiçoamento constante
- Entender a responsabilidade social do professor

Fonte: Folha On Line

NEVER WAKE UP: THE MEANING AND SECRET OF INCEPTION

By Devin Faraci


This entire article is a major spoiler for Inception. Please do not read it until you've experienced Christopher Nolan's film for yourself.

Every single moment of Inception is a dream. I think that in a couple of years this will become the accepted reading of the film, and differing interpretations will have to be skillfully argued to be even remotely considered. The film makes this clear, and it never holds back the truth from audiences. Some find this idea to be narratively repugnant, since they think that a movie where everything is a dream is a movie without stakes, a movie where the audience is wasting their time.

Except that this is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he's ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.

I believe that Inception is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn't an extractor. He can't go into other people's dreams. He isn't on the run from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he's being chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.

She asks him that in a scene that we all know is a dream, but Inception lets us in on this elsewhere. Michael Caine's character implores Cobb to return to reality, to wake up. During the chase in Mombasa, Cobb tries to escape down an alleyway, and the two buildings between which he's running begin closing in on him - a classic anxiety dream moment. When he finally pulls himself free he finds Ken Watanabe's character waiting for him, against all logic. Except dream logic.

Much is made in the film about totems, items unique to dreamers that can be used to tell when someone is actually awake or asleep. Cobb's totem is a top, which spins endlessly when he's asleep, and the fact that the top stops spinning at many points in the film is claimed by some to be evidence that Cobb is awake during those scenes. The problem here is that the top wasn't always Cobb's totem - he got it from his wife, who killed herself because she believed that they were still living in a dream. There's more than a slim chance that she's right - note that when Cobb remembers her suicide she is, bizarrely, sitting on a ledge opposite the room they rented. You could do the logical gymnastics required to claim that Mal simply rented another room across the alleyway, but the more realistic notion here is that it's a dream, with the gap between the two lovers being a metaphorical one made literal. When Mal jumps she leaves behind the top, and if she was right about the world being a dream, the fact that it spins or doesn't spin is meaningless. It's a dream construct anyway. There's no way to use the top as a proof of reality.

Watching the film with this eye you can see the dream logic unfolding. As is said in the movie, dreams seem real in the moment and it's only when you've woken up that things seem strange. The film's 'reality' sequences are filled with moments that, on retrospect, seem strange or unlikely or unexplained. Even the basics of the dream sharing technology is unbelievably vague, and I don't think that's just because Nolan wants to keep things streamlined. It's because Cobb's unconscious mind is filling it in as he goes along.

There's more, but I would have to watch the film again with a notebook to get all the evidence (all of it in plain sight). The end seems without a doubt to be a dream - from the dreamy way the film is shot and edited once Cobb wakes up on the plane all the way through to him coming home to find his two kids in the exact position and in the exact same clothes that he kept remembering them, it doesn't matter if the top falls, Cobb is dreaming.

That Cobb is dreaming and still finds his catharsis (that he can now look at the face of his kids) is the point. It's important to realize that Inception is a not very thinly-veiled autobiographical look at how Nolan works. In a recent red carpet interview, Leonardo DiCaprio - who was important in helping Nolan get the script to the final stages - compares the movie not to The Matrix or some other mindfuck movie but Fellini's 8 1/2. This is probably the second most telling thing DiCaprio said during the publicity tour for the film, with the first being that he based Cobb on Nolan. 8 1/2 is totally autobiographical for Fellini, and it's all about an Italian director trying to overcome his block and make a movie (a science fiction movie, even). It's a film about filmmaking, and so is Inception.

The heist team quite neatly maps to major players in a film production. Cobb is the director while Arthur, the guy who does the research and who sets up the places to sleep, is the producer. Ariadne, the dream architect, is the screenwriter - she creates the world that will be entered. Eames is the actor (this is so obvious that the character sits at an old fashioned mirrored vanity, the type which stage actors would use). Yusuf is the technical guy; remember, the Oscar come from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and it requires a good number of technically minded people to get a movie off the ground. Nolan himself more or less explains this in the latest issue of Film Comment, saying 'There are a lot of striking similarities [between what the team does and the putting on of a major Hollywood movie]. When for instance the team is out on the street they've created, surveying it, that's really identical with what we do on tech scouts before we shoot.'

That leaves two key figures. Saito is the money guy, the big corporate suit who fancies himself a part of the game. And Fischer, the mark, is the audience. Cobb, as a director, takes Fischer through an engaging, stimulating and exciting journey, one that leads him to an understanding about himself. Cobb is the big time movie director (or rather the best version of that - certainly not a Michael Bay) who brings the action, who brings the spectacle, but who also brings the meaning and the humanity and the emotion.

The movies-as-dreams aspect is part of why Inception keeps the dreams so grounded. In the film it's explained that playing with the dream too much alerts the dreamer to the falseness around him; this is just another version of the suspension of disbelief upon which all films hinge. As soon as the audience is pulled out of the movie by some element - an implausible scene, a ludicrous line, a poor performance - it's possible that the cinematic dream spell is broken completely, and they're lost.

As a great director, Cobb is also a great artist, which means that even when he's creating a dream about snowmobile chases, he's bringing something of himself into it. That's Mal. It's the auterist impulse, the need to bring your own interests, obsessions and issues into a movie. It's what the best directors do. It's very telling that Nolan sees this as kind of a problem; I suspect another filmmaker might have cast Mal as the special element that makes Cobb so successful.

Inception is such a big deal because it's what great movies strive to do. You walk out of a great film changed, with new ideas planted in your head, with your neural networks subtly rewired by what you've just seen. On a meta level Inception itself does this, with audiences leaving the theater buzzing about the way it made them feel and perceive. New ideas, new thoughts, new points of view are more lasting a souvenir of a great movie than a ticket stub.

It's possible to view Fischer, the mark, as not the audience but just as the character that is being put through the movie that is the dream. To be honest, I haven't quite solidified my thought on Fischer's place in the allegorical web, but what's important is that the breakthrough that Fischer has in the ski fortress is real. Despite the fact that his father is not there, despite the fact that the pinwheel was never by his father's bedside, the emotions that Fischer experiences are 100 percent genuine. It doesn't matter that the movie you're watching isn't a real story, that it's just highly paid people putting on a show - when a movie moves you, it truly moves you. The tears you cry during Up are totally real, even if absolutely nothing that you see on screen has ever existed in the physical world.

For Cobb there's a deeper meaning to it all. While Cobb doesn't have daddy issues (that we know of), he, like Fischer, is dealing with a loss. He's trying to come to grips with the death of his wife*; Fischer's journey reflects Cobb's while not being a complete point for point reflection. That's important for Nolan, who is making films that have personal components - that talk about things that obviously interest or concern him - but that aren't actually about him. Other filmmakers (Fellini) may make movies that are thinly veiled autobiography, but that's not what Nolan or Cobb are doing. The movies (or dreams) they're putting together reflect what they're going through but aren't easily mapped on to them. Talking to Film Comment, Nolan says he has never been to psychoanalysis. 'I think I use filmmaking for that purpose. I have a passionate relationship to what I do.'

In a lot of ways Inception is a bookend to last summer's Inglorious Basterds. In that film Quentin Tarantino celebrated the ways that cinema could change the world, while in Inception Nolan is examining the ways that cinema, the ultimate shared dream, can change an individual. The entire film is a dream, within the confines of the movie itself, but in a more meta sense it's Nolan's dream. He's dreaming Cobb, and finding his own moments of revelation and resolution, just as Cobb is dreaming Fischer and finding his own catharsis and change.

The whole film being a dream isn't a cop out or a waste of time, but an ultimate expression of the film's themes and meaning. It's all fake. But it's all very, very real. And that's something every single movie lover understands implicitly and completely.

* it's really worth noting that if you accept that the whole movie is a dream that Mal may not be dead. She could have just left Cobb. The mourning that he is experiencing deep inside his mind is no less real if she's alive or dead - he has still lost her.

http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/24477/1/NEVER-WAKE-UP-THE-MEANING-AND-SECRET-OF-INCEPTION/Page1.html