Know thyself. That was Socrates’ advice, and it squares with conventional wisdom. “It’s a natural tendency to think we know ourselves better than others do,” says Washington University in St. Louis assistant professor Simine Vazire.
But a new article by Vazire and her colleague Erika N. Carlson reviews the research and suggests an addendum to the philosopher’s edict: Ask a friend. “There are aspects of personality that others know about us that we don’t know ourselves, and vice-versa,” says Vazire. “To get a complete picture of a personality, you need both perspectives.”
It’s not that we know nothing about ourselves. But our understanding is obstructed by blind spots, created by our wishes, fears, and unconscious motives—the greatest of which is the need to maintain a high (or if we’re neurotic, low) self-image, research shows. Even watching ourselves on videotape does not substantially alter our perceptions—whereas others observing the same tape easily point out traits we’re unaware of.
Not surprisingly, our intimates and those who spend the most time with us know us best. But even strangers have myriad cues to who we are: clothes, musical preferences, or Facebook postings. At the same time, our nearest and dearest have reasons to distort their views. After all, a boorish spouse or bullying child says something to the other spouse or parent. “We used to collect ratings from parents – and we’ve mostly stopped, because they’re useless,” notes Vazire. What such data would show: Everyone’s own child is brilliant, beautiful, and charming.
Interestingly, people don’t see the same things about themselves as others see. Anxiety-related traits, such as stage fright, are obvious to us, but not always to others. On the other hand, creativity, intelligence, or rudeness is often best perceived by others. That’s not just because they manifest themselves publicly, but also because they carry a value judgment—something that tends to affect self-judgment. But the world is not always the harsher critic. Others tend to give us higher marks for our strengths than we credit ourselves with.
Why doesn’t all this information add up to better personal and mutual understanding? People are complex, social cues are many, perceptions of others are clouded by our own needs and biases, studies show. Plus, the information isn’t easy to access. “It’s amazing how hard it is to get direct feedback,” Vazire notes, adding that she isn’t advocating brutal frankness at any cost. There are good reasons for reticence.
The challenge, then, is to use such knowledge for the good. “How can we give people feedback, and how can that be used to improve self-knowledge?” Vazire asks. “And how do we use self-knowledge to help people be happier and have better relationships?”
The first answer to these questions may be the most obvious, but not the easiest to practice: Listen to others. They may know more than you do—even about yourself.
The paper was published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
From HERE.
###
###
Reference.com “Reference.com – a free online encyclopedia and information reference. Research articles from Columbia Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Due to its high value, most gold discovered throughout history is still in circulation. However, it is thought that 80% of the world’s gold is still in the ground. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
###
A Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA locate Osama bin Laden has been convicted of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison. Held for a year, Shakil Afridi was tried under a set of tribal laws that human rights organizations have criticized for failing to provide due process — people have no rights to legal representation, to present material evidence, or to cross-examine witnesses.
U.S. officials say Afridi helped the CIA by running a hepatitis vaccination program to collect DNA and verify bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had hoped to see Afridi freed, saying his work served Pakistani and American interests.
Pentagon spokesman George Little said today that “anyone who helped the United States find bin Laden was working against al-Qaida, and not against Pakistan.”
This development does not bode well for U.S.-Pakistani relations — the two countries currently are engaged in talks over reopening NATO supply routes to U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan.
From HERE.
###
###
8 Interesting International Tripoints Worldwide
he International tripoint is a geographical point at which the borders of three countries meet. There are currently 157 international tripoints i.e., tricountry points by some accounts. Usually, the more neighbours a country has, the more international tripoints that country has. China with 16 tripoints and Russia with 11 to 14 lead the list of states by number of tripoints. This is list of 8 interesting international tripoints worldwide.
1. Treriksröset Sweden/Norway/Finland
MORE.
###
Just for some history here, for those of you who remember Frank Sinatra.
1938 Mug Shot From Sinatra Arrest
###
Welcome to Windmill Week here at OPOD. We will travel back to the days that we used the wind for useful work. Windmills were a critical element in settling the west as they brought water to the areas of the frontier not near rivers. Windmills had already been used in Europe for hundreds of years to power flour and other milling operations. Somewhere along the way we decided it was better to strip mine and use coal to make electricity.
Luckily, we do appear to be getting back to wind power. AeroMotor, one of the original manufacturers of windmills for water wells, has a manufacturing plant in San Angelo, Texas. They make windmills just like the original ones in the old West. They ship them all over the country and all over the world.
###
New Data on Harms of Prostate Cancer Screening
In a controversial finding that will affect at least 44 million American men, a government task force published its final recommendations against regular prostate cancer screening, concluding that the harms of the simple blood test far outweigh any potential benefit.
The recommendations, from the United States Preventive Services Task Force, offer the most detailed breakdown to date of the potential risks and benefits of the prostate specific antigen blood test, commonly known as the P.S.A. test. Most important, the task force found that, at best, one man in every 1,000 given the P.S.A. test may avoid death as a result of the screening, while another man for every 3,000 tested will die prematurely as a result of complications from prostate cancer treatment and dozens more will be seriously harmed.
Even so, the suggestion that men should give up annual prostate cancer screening has met with resistance, particularly from prostate cancer advocacy groups as well as some medical groups, including the American Urological Association.
MORE.
###
###
73-Year-Old Woman Summits Everest for Second Time
Tamae Watanabe, who 10 years ago became the oldest woman in the world to summit Mount Everest, has broken her own record, reaching its 29,035-foot (8,850-meter) peak for the second time at the age of 73. Everest has been scaled by some 3,700 climbers since Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first climbed it in 1953. The oldest person to successfully make the dangerous climb is a Nepalese man, Min Bahadur Sherchan, who did so in 2008 at the age of 76. More …
###
ESPN.com – All the world is staged
ON THE MORNING of Feb. 20, 2011, a man from Singapore walked into the central police station of Rovaniemi, Finland, a town that sits along the Arctic Circle. The man told officers that another Singaporean, Wilson Raj Perumal, was in Rovaniemi on a false passport. He offered no other information before leaving the station abruptly.
Though puzzled by the seemingly random tip, Rovaniemi police put Perumal under surveillance. Three days later, they followed him to a French restaurant near the soccer stadium, where the local club, Rovaniemen Palloseura, had just completed a 1-1 draw. Officers watched as Perumal sat down with three Palloseura players. They saw him scold the players, who cowered in fear. The next day, based on the false passport, the Finnish police detained Perumal. They phoned officials at the Finland Football Federation, who in turn contacted FIFA, soccer’s international governing body.
One week later, Chris Eaton, FIFA’s head of security, arrived in Rovaniemi. He knew exactly who Perumal was. Eaton informed Finnish investigators that they had just caught the world’s most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches, an elusive figure whom Eaton had been chasing for the past six months.
Perumal had rigged hundreds of games across five continents, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent gambling winnings for Asian and European syndicates. He was finally in custody. And he had been turned in by one of his own.
THE WORLD’S MOST popular game is also its most corrupt, with investigations into match fixing ongoing in more than 25 countries. Here’s a mere sampling of events since the beginning of last year:
MORE.
###
As scientific puzzles go, the origin of dogs may not be as important as the origin of the universe. But it strikes closer to home, and it almost seems harder to answer.
Cosmologists seem to have settled on the idea that 13.7 billion years ago the universe appeared with a bang (the big one) from nothing — albeit a kind of nothing that included the laws of physics.
With dogs, the consensus is that they came from wolves. Beyond that, there are varying claims. It seems dogs appeared sometime between 15,000 and 100,000 years ago, in Asia or Africa or multiple times in multiple places.
There is a reason for this confusion, according to Greger Larson at the University of Durham in England. In a new research paper, he argues that the DNA of modern dogs is so mixed up that it is useless in figuring out when and where dogs originated.
MORE.
###
The Ultimate Counterfeiter Isn’t a Crook—He’s an Artist
On a bright May afternoon in 2007, a German artist and printmaker named Hans-Jürgen Kuhl took a seat at an outdoor café directly opposite the colossal facade of the Cologne Cathedral. He ordered an espresso and a slice of plum cake, lit a Lucky Strike, and watched for the buyer. She was due any minute. Kuhl, a lanky 65-year-old, had to remind himself that he was in no rush. He’d sold plenty of artwork over the years, but this batch was altogether different. He needed to be patient.
Tourists milled about the platz in front of the cathedral, Germany’s most visited landmark, craning their necks to snap pictures of the impossibly intricate spires jutting toward the heavens. Kuhl knew those spires well. He had grown up in Cologne and painted the majestic cathedral countless times.
On the other side of a low brick wall surrounding the café, Kuhl finally spotted her. Tall, blond, and trim, Susann Falkenthal looked about 30. As was the case during their previous meetings, she wore practical shoes, an unremarkable blouse and pair of pants, and little makeup. Kuhl thought her plain look was something of a contradiction for a businesswoman who drove a black BMW convertible, but no matter.
MORE.
###
Galalith
Galalith is a biodegradable, nonflammable plastic material made of the milk protein casein and formaldehyde. Called “milk stone,” it was one of the first synthetic materials ever produced. It was used for Art-Deco jewelry, buttons, and pens and replaced ivory in piano keys. Though it could be easily dyed and cut, it could not be molded, and this drawback, along with milk rationing in WWII, led to its commercial demise. It can be easily produced at home with milk and what other common ingredient? More…
###
###
WILL fatherhood make me happy? That is a question many men have found themselves asking, and the scientific evidence is equivocal. A lot of studies have linked parenthood—particularly fatherhood—with lower levels of marital satisfaction and higher rates of depression than are found among non-parents.
Biologically speaking, that looks odd. Natural selection might be expected to favour the progeny of men who enjoy bringing them up. On the other hand, the countervailing pressure to have other children, by other women, may leave the man who is already encumbered by a set of offspring dissatisfied.
To investigate the matter further Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, decided both to study the existing literature, and to conduct some experiments of her own. The results, just published in Psychological Science, suggest parenthood in general, and fatherhood in particular, really are blessings, even though the parent in question might sometimes feel they are in disguise.
Dr Lyubomirsky’s first port of call was the World Values Survey. This is a project which gathers huge amounts of data about the lives of people all around the planet.
MORE.
###
This is the story of one man and an island. Brendon Grimshaw purchased the island in 1962 and set about making the island habitable. He did this with the help of one other man, Rene Antoine Lafortune.Brendon Grimshaw, a British national, was editor to some of the most important newspapers in Africa. But in 1972, he gave it all up to go and live on Moyenne Island, which he purchased for ten thousand pounds.In the thirty-six-years that he has lived on the island, Brendon and his friend, Rene Lafortune, planted sixteen-thousand trees, built 4,8 kilometers of nature paths, and brought and bred 109 giant land tortoises, creating an island of incredible beauty now worth 34 million Euros.Come with us on this journey and discover why an 82-year-old man fears his island will one day be destroyed.
###
A team of archaeologists from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) has discovered a spectacular tomb containing more than eighty individuals of different ages. This discovery – provisionally dated to around 1000 years ago – was made at the site of Pachacamac, which is currently under review for UNESCO World Heritage status.
Tombeau en fouilles Pachacamac 150×150 Spectacular Tomb Discovered in PeruPachacamac, situated on the Pacific coast about thirty kilometres from Lima, is one of the largest Prehispanic sites in South America. Professor Peter Eeckhout – under the auspices of the ULB – has been carrying out fieldwork at the site for the past 20 years. The 2012 season resulted in some particularly remarkable discoveries.
The Ychsma Project team undertook to record and excavate a series of Inca storage facilities (15th-16th c. AD), as well as a more ancient cemetery which had been detected during exploratory work in 2004.
MORE.
###
Halfway through Virgil’s Roman epic the Aeneid, the hero descends into the underworld. There he encounters not just the souls of the dead, but the souls of those about to live—a long line of future Roman luminaries, waiting to be born. Through them Virgil takes us on a triumphant tour of Roman history. We see Romulus and the Scipios, Cato, valiant Caesar. You can almost hear the drums and trumpets: the story of humanity presented as one glorious march of progress, from savagery to civilization, culminating in Octavian Augustus, Virgil’s own emperor.
From the moment it was published in 19 BC the Aeneid was hailed as the most successful and sublime celebration of empire ever conceived. Its author became famous as the patriotic poet par excellence of the West. His reputation was so powerful that long after Rome’s fall, leaders as disparate as Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, and Benito Mussolini borrowed his words to endorse and bolster their own authority. Even the Founding Fathers, who generally preferred Homer, appropriated Virgil’s language.
But beginning in the 1960s, a group of scholars, later dubbed the Harvard school, began to notice a number of alarming problems with such imperialist readings of the Aeneid. They pointed out incident after incident where Virgil undermined the sense of glorious progress, or even overturned it. Beneath the poem’s golden patina they found a far more pessimistic view, one that seriously questioned the idea of human progress and imperial power. This new reading hit Virgilian scholarship like a lightning bolt, revolutionizing and redefining our entire understanding of the Aeneid, Virgil, and Augustan history. Though the debate is ongoing, it is now the dominant interpretation in the field.
The question is: how did we miss Virgil’s real meaning for two thousand years? And what made it possible for this small group of scholars to point it out?
MORE.
###
New York Public Library Dedicated (This day in 1911)
When former New York governor Samuel J. Tilden died in 1886, he left $2.4 million in his will for the creation of a grand public library. At that time, there were two other important libraries in New York City—the Astor and the Lenox—but they were struggling. With Tilden’s gift, they were merged in 1895. The new library’s cornerstone was laid in 1902 at the old Croton Reservoir on Fifth Avenue, and it finally opened to the public in 1911. By 1910, how many miles of shelves had been installed?
###
If alcoholism is a disease, is there hope of finding the cure in a pill?
Yes and no. Having mapped the physical changes the brain undergoes with years of habitual drinking, researchers in recent years have discovered a handful of promising — and some say underused — drugs that, combined with therapy, help alcoholics break the cycle of addiction.
To those for whom such remedies work, they certainly can feel like a cure.
“I felt like I had found something that finally helped me through the cravings,” said Patty Hendricks, 49, who used one such drug, naltrexone, to help control her drinking habit after four failed rehab attempts. “I don’t think I could have gotten sober without it.”
The problem is that alcoholics, like cancer patients, are not a homogeneous group. People drink compulsively for any number of reasons, from genetics to anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder. The pill that helped Ms. Hendricks get sober might do nothing for, say, a veteran who drinks to ward off nightmares.
MORE.
###
Why Johnny Can’t Ride
Childhood obesity rates are soaring, youth participation in sports and other active pursuits is plummeting, and a generation is coming of age with little understanding of the joy and freedom of unsupervised play. There’s a simple solution—but all across the nation our schools earn a failing grade when it comes to letting kids ride their bikes.
David Darlington
Created 2012-04-27 09:03
Photo by Adam Marino of Saratoga Springs, NY, sparked a national debate simply by trying to ride to middle school. (Nathaniel Welch)
When the sun came up in Saratoga Springs, New York, on May 15, 2009, it looked like a great morning for a bicycle ride: clear and sunny with temperatures forecast to be in the low 70s—perfect conditions for Bike to Work Day. On the corner of a park downtown, tables serving fresh fruit, yogurt, bagels, cream cheese, coffee, tea, and juice were set up and tended by volunteers from Saratoga’s Healthy Transportation Network (HTN), and more than 100 riders turned out, with prizes (made from bike parts) awarded to businesses with the highest percentage of cyclists. Spirits were high, the enthusiasm was infectious, and many of the participants made a resolution to ride to work at least once a week from then on.
One of the cyclists was a little shorter and younger than the others. Just 12 years old, Adam Marino was a student at Maple Avenue Middle School—but since his parents always told him that school was his job, he’d announced that he wanted to bike to school that day. This wasn’t terribly surprising, as all the Marinos are avid cyclists. The family had twice pedaled the 363-mile length of the Erie Canal from Buffalo to Albany, as well as the one-day, 40-mile Five Boro Bike Tour in New York City. So when Adam declared his desire to ride to school, his mother, Janette, thought it was great, partly because it demonstrated his continuing resolve to overcome certain medical challenges. Two years earlier, Adam had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and as an infant, he had been classified as legally blind. The rods and cones in Adam’s eyes were underdeveloped at birth but, thanks to early intervention and therapy, he now has corrected vision of 20-200—he plays soccer, medals in Nordic ski races, is an honor-roll student, plays trumpet in the school jazz band, and has been riding a bike since age three. “He may or may not be able to drive someday,” Janette says. “He can’t read road signs from a distance, but functionally he does very well.”
MORE.
###
I try to be good. I know it’s wrong to covet my neighbour’s ox and so I make a serious effort not to, even though my neighbour’s ox is bloody lovely. My neighbour’s chips, however, are an entirely different matter. Coveting them is something I’ve been doing for a very long time. For here is an unarguable truth: food always tastes better when it’s come off somebody else’s plate. At play here is a paranoia that anybody with an overly developed interest in their lunch will recognise. At any one time, someone, somewhere is eating better than you. And the person you always focus upon is the one sitting opposite you.
It’s a curious business. The chips on your own plate are simply a mass. You measure the journey towards scarfing the lot in nothing more sophisticated than forkfuls. But every now and then you glance at that plate of chips across the table, the one your companion has. And not just at the plate, but at that specific chip on the side of over there, the one that is especially crisp and golden. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t escape the notion that it will be better than any of the 30 chips served to you.
Or it’s a more perfect lamb chop, the eye that little bit plumper, the outside that little bit more burnished, the fat that little bit crisper than anything you’ve got. Or it’s a pristine cos lettuce leaf in a properly made Caesar salad that has managed to gather unto it the mother lode of dressing, fresh parmesan and crouton. You know exactly how that leaf or chop or chip would taste, how it would feel in your mouth and it takes the restraint of a shoe fetishist in a branch of Russell & Bromley not to dive in.
MORE.
###
The War Spreads To The Caribbean
On March 30th the U.S. Coast Guard captured its 30th cocaine smuggling submarine, in the Caribbean. This is the fifth such capture in the Caribbean, with the other 25 captured in the Pacific. It’s currently estimated that 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States leaves South America via these submarines or semi-submersible boats. Most of these craft are “semi-submersibles.” They are 10-20 meter (31-62 foot) fiberglass boats, powered by a diesel engine, with a very low freeboard, and a small “conning tower” providing the crew (of 4-5), and engine, with fresh air and permitting the crew to navigate. A boat of this type was, since they first appeared in the early 1990s, thought to be the only practical kind of submarine for drug smuggling. But in the last decade the drug gangs have developed real submarines, capable of carrying five tons of cocaine that cost a lot more and don’t require a highly trained crew. These subs borrow a lot of technology and ideas from the growing number of recreational submarines being built.
MORE.
###
