Derren Brown's Blog, page 10

Punk's not dead, it's just gone to moral rehab

"Indonesian sharia police are "morally rehabilitating" more than 60 young punk rock fans in Aceh province on Sumatra island, saying the youths are tarnishing the province's image.

Since being arrested at a punk rock concert in the provincial capital Banda Aceh on Saturday night, 59 male and five female punk rock fans have been forced to have their hair cut, bathe in a lake, change clothes and pray.

"We feared that the Islamic sharia law implemented in this province will be tainted by their activities," Banda Aceh deputy mayor Illiza Sa'aduddin Djamal, who ordered the arrests, said.

"We hope that by sending them to rehabilitation they will eventually repent."

Hundreds of Indonesian punk fans came from around the country to attend the concert, organised to raise money for orphans.

Police stormed the venue and arrested fans sporting mohawks, tattoos, tight jeans and chains, who were on Tuesday taken to a nearby town to undergo a 10-day moral rehabilitation camp run by police.

A girl cried as women in headscarves cut her long unruly hair into a short bob, and some of the men groaned as their heads were shaved.

"Why did they arrest us? They haven't given us any reason," said Fauzal, 20.

"We didn't steal anything, we weren't bothering anyone. It's our right to go to a concert."

A 22-year-old man from Medan city who did not want to be named said he feared he would lose his job for staying at the camp for 10 days.

"I've just started with a bank in Medan. I don't even know what to tell them because I don't know why I've been arrested.""

Read more at ABC News (Thanks Antony)

PayPal Has No Regrets

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You may have heard about the kerfuffle caused by PayPal recently when they blocked a gift exchange initiative for 200 children organised by Regretsy.

According to Regretsy:

"We took many applications, vetted them carefully and set about creating a giant gift exchange program, where you could buy a gift for the over 200 children we're helping.

We raised so much money that we found ourselves in a position of not just being able to send toys, but to send a monetary gift to the families as well. We hoped it might help them make their holiday dinners more special, or maybe pay a pressing bill.

Paypal shut it down.

Apparently we made the mistake of using the "Donate" button, which Paypal is now claiming is only for nonprofit organizations to use.* They froze the account, which also includes Zazzle money that we use to make emergency gifts. That money isn't in issue, but what the hell! Might as well keep everything!"

You can read the full account, including a jaw-dropping phone conversation with a PayPal representative here.

After Regretsy publicised this and the web caught whiff of what was happening, Paypal reached out to Regretsy again to discuss the usage of the Donation button and to clarify that the information that they'd been given before had been false.

The upshot of all this is that PayPal has now agreed to send a $100 donation to each of the families that Regretsy was planning to send gifts to this Christmas.

Regretsy is the fail blog of hand crafts. Almost everything posted is collected from the web site, Etsy, though sometimes they feature crafting failures from other sites.

(Thanks Bruno)

Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion

"Henrik Ehrsson uses mannequins, rubber arms and virtual reality to create body illusions, all in the name of neuroscience.

It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife.

But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people's sense of self. Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has convinced me that I am floating a few metres behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph.

Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson's repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person1, gained a third arm2, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions3. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls' heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer's basement. "The other neuroscientists think we're a little crazy," Ehrsson admits.

But Ehrsson's unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable."

Read more at Nature.com (Thanks Annette)

GCHQ challenges codebreakers via social networks

"UK intelligence agency GCHQ has launched a code-cracking competition to help attract new talent.

The organisation has invited potential applicants to solve a visual code posted at an unbranded standalone website.

The challenge has also been "seeded" to social media sites, blogs and forums.

A spokesman said the campaign aimed to raise the profile of GCHQ to an audience that would otherwise be difficult to reach.

"The target audience for this particular campaign is one that may not typically be attracted to traditional advertising methods and may be unaware that GCHQ is recruiting for these kinds of roles," the spokesman said.

"Their skills may be ideally suited to our work and yet they may not understand how they could apply them to a working environment, particularly one where they have the opportunity to contribute so much."

The competition began in secret on 3 November and will continue until 12 December.

GCHQ said that once the code was cracked individuals would be presented with a keyword to enter into a form field. They would then be redirected to the agency's recruitment website.

The organisation said it was not worried that the problem's answer might be spread around the internet.

It said it would still benefit because the resulting discussion would "generate future recruitment enquiries".

However, it added that anyone who had previously hacked illegally would be ineligible. The agency's website also states that applicants must be British citizens."

Read more at BBC News (Thanks @siobha)

How Music Affects the Brain and How You Can Use It to Your Advantage

"Music can often make or break a day. It can change your mood, amp you up for exercise, and help you recover from injury. But how does it work exactly, and how can you use it to your advantage?

Photo by JT Theriot.

Recently, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords used music therapy to help her learn to talk again. The still unproven theory revolves around the idea that music is represented in multiple parts of the brain and therefore accesses deeper pathways between neurons. Music then helps patients connect the stored knowledge of words through songs and helps create the new connections needed for speech. This same idea has been used for stroke victims in the past, and has been referred to as the Kenny Rogers Effect.

You don't need to have suffer from brain damage to get the benefits though, lets take a look at how music affects the brain in a more casual sense, and how you can use it to enhance your day-to-day.

Recall Memories

You might remember reports back in the 1990s that said that studying while listening to Mozart increases the likelihood of performing well on a test, but that has been disproven in some studies, and in turn, studies have shown some music has a negative affect on fact retention if you're studying numbers or lists. Still, performing music has been proven to increase memory and language skills, but for listeners, it's better used as a means to recall memories. It has been shown in Alzheimer's patients to help with memory recall, and even restore cognitive function. It works for Alzheimer's patients in the same way it works in everyone else.

When you listen to music you know, it stimulates the hippocampus, which handles long-term storage in the brain. Doing so can also bring out relevant memories you made while listening to a particular song. So, even though the Mozart-effect has essentially been disproven, the idea that forming a new memory with music, and then using the same music again later to recall the memory still appears to be a sound idea. If you're having trouble remembering something, you might have better luck if you play the same music you were listening to when you first made the thought."

Read more at Lifehacker (Thanks Annette)

People Will Virtually Kill One To Save Five

"It's a moral and ethical problem that has been studied before: you see a train heading towards five hikers and you have the power to save them. Just pull a switch to make the train swerve out of the way on another track. BUT you'll kill another hiker who won't see the train coming at all. What do you do? Intervene? Or no?

Variations on this have vexed philosophers (and their students) for decades. Carlos David Navarrete, an evolutionary psychologist at Michigan State University, decided to apply a little technology to the problem.

He created a 3D, virtual environment in which subjects would experience the actual situation. Each subject was given a joystick that would throw the (virtual) switch, thus saving five people by sacrificing one. To monitor their emotional states, he attached sensors to the subjects' fingertips. This is the first time anyone has measured a "physical" response to the ethical dilemma.

The result itself wasn't that surprising: of the 147 participants, 133 (90.5 percent) pulled the switch to divert the train, resulting in the death of the one person. Fourteen participants allowed the train to kill the five. Eleven participants did not pull the switch at all, while three pulled the switch but then returned it to its original position. All this is consistent with earlier studies that didn't use virtual reality.

The new data shows, however, that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. Nobody knows why that is. It may be because people "freeze up" during highly anxious moments, such as when soldiers fail to use their weapons in battle, Navarrete said in a press release.

For Navarette, the interesting thing was that while most people made the utilitarian choice -– sacrificing one to save many –- humans have to overcome a natural aversion to hurting other people. Rationalizing the choice (weighing the costs and benefits) can help people overcome that to make tough decisions like that. But in some cases, a person can get so anxious that they can't make a decision at all, or make the wrong one."

Via Discovery News (Thanks Annette)

Atheists and rapists top list of people religious believers distrust the most

"Religious believers distrust atheists more than they do members of other religious groups, gays or feminists, according to a new study by University of B.C. researchers.

The only group the study's participants distrusted as much as atheists was rapists, said doctoral student Will Gervais, lead author of the study published online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

That prejudice had a significant effect on what kinds of jobs people said they would hire atheists to do.

"People are willing to hire an atheist for a job that is perceived as low trust, for instance as a waitress," said Gervais.

"But when hiring for a high-trust job like daycare worker, they were like, nope, not going to hire an atheist for that job."

The antipathy does not seem to run both ways, though. Atheists are indifferent to religious belief when it comes to deciding who is trustworthy.

"Atheists don't necessarily favour other atheists over Christians or anyone else," he said. "They seem to think that religion is not an important signal for who you can trust."

The researchers found that religious believers thought that descriptions of untrustworthy people – people who steal or cheat – were more likely to be atheists than Christians, Muslims, Jews, gays or feminists.

Gervais was surprised that people harbour such strong feelings about a group that is hard to see or identify. He opines that religious believers are just more comfortable with other people who believe a deity with the power to reward and punish is watching them.

"If you believe your behaviour is being watched [by God] you are going to be on your best behaviour," said Gervais. "But that wouldn't apply for an atheist. That would allow people to use religious belief as a signal for how trustworthy a person is.""

Read more at The Vancouver Sun (Thanks Berber)

Church of England bans hosting civil partnership ceremonies

"The Church of England will not allow its churches to be used for civil partnership ceremonies unless the full General Synod gives consent, it says.

A new law which allows civil partnership ceremonies to be conducted in places of worship in England and Wales comes into effect on Monday.

The Church said it would not host them just as a "gentlemen's outfitter is not required to supply women's clothes".

The government said no religious group would be forced to hold ceremonies.

In a letter to the general synod – its national assembly – secretary general William Fittall wrote that no Church of England religious premises would be allowed to host the registration of civil partnerships unless they had written permission from the General Synod.

The legal office of the Church says this move does not constitute unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act as marriage and civil partnerships are different services and so legally distinct concepts.

It says: "A gentlemen's outfitter is not required to supply women's clothes. A children's book shop is not required to stock books that are intended for adults. And a Church that provides a facility to marry is not required to provide a facility to same-sex couples for registering civil partnerships."

The legal office added that if legislation was changed to allow same-sex marriage, this issue would need to be re-addressed.

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell is urging clergy to defy the ban, which he described as "dictatorial and homophobic".

He said it was "ironic" that the government was allowing civil partnerships in religious premises, but continuing to ban religious gay marriages even if a faith organisation wanted to conduct them.

Mr Tatchell said it was an "infringement of religious freedom" and accused the equalities minister of supporting discrimination.

When the law was approved, Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone said no religious group would be forced to host them, but those who wished to could apply by the end of the year."

Read more at BBC News (Thanks @TammyWebsterX & @RichardWiseman)

Top Ten Myths About the Brain

"1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.

This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.

True, we have some brain reserves. Autopsy studies show that many people have physical signs of Alzheimer's disease (such as amyloid plaques among neurons) in their brains even though they were not impaired. Apparently we can lose some brain tissue and still function pretty well. And people score higher on IQ tests if they're highly motivated, suggesting that we don't always exercise our minds at 100 percent capacity.

2. "Flashbulb memories" are precise, detailed and persistent.

We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people's memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later. The test subjects tend to be confident that their memories are accurate and say the flashbulb memories are more vivid than other memories. Vivid they may be, but the memories decay over time just as other memories do. People forget important details and add incorrect ones, with no awareness that they're recreating a muddled scene in their minds rather than calling up a perfect, photographic reproduction."

Read the rest at smithsonianmag (Thanks Annette)

'Jet Man' Flies In Formation Over Alps

"A self-styled "jet man" has performed another death-defying stunt – flying alongside two Albatross aircraft above the Swiss Alps. Adventurer Yves Rossy flew in a custom-built jet suit over the mountain range in formation with the aircraft. Rossy, 51, launched himself from the side of a helicopter before taking his place alongside the two jets high above the Alps.

The daredevil – who used to fly fighter jets with the Swiss airforce – wears a jet suit which has a wing span of two metres. The pack weighs around 120lb and is fitted with four engines that enable him to travel at speeds in excess of 125mph. Once the flight was completed, the adventurer safely parachuted back down to the ground.

Rossy is still the first man in the history of aviation to fly with a jet-propelled wing, a feat he first achieved in 2006. In May 2008, he flew in his suit over the Swiss Alps for the first time and then crossed the English Channel later that year. Since then, he has worked on the design of his jet-pack which has led to his first formation flights and acrobatics."

Read more at Sky (Thanks Annette)