Liming’s Micromusing

Why do people unwrap Christmas presents? If we could come up with an answer to this question, it is entirely possible that we could stop all wars, erase all famines, and bring an end to global warming.

Professor Walter Guff of Maine’s Malarkey College and his team spent seven years investigating the extraordinary phenomenon of mass unwrap, placing electrodes on the heads and toes of a family of four, videotaping them while they unwrapped up to 1,200 presents a day, and analyzing the results in a controlled environment using a coding system that has over 200 separate categories of advanced becs, or bovine excrement calibrators.

I met Professor Guff—a short, stout man with peg-like limbs and snakily inquisitive eyebrows—at his local Starbucks. “What my research taught me,” he told me, “is that there is a part of everyone’s brain that is tremendously adept at dealing with what those of us in my field call the cauo, or, in layman’s terms, the ‘completely and utterly obvious.’ ”

I remember I told myself not to read Gladwell again. But I somehow just ended up reading his "What the Dog Saw", ironically just a collection of his old works form The New Yorker. After reading the above satire, I finally realized why and I couldn't stop laughing when the style popped up everywhere in the book. I promise I won't read Gladwell again but I just have to finish this one...

What if depression sometimes turns out to be a useful adaptation, rather than a malfunction?  When people are depressed, they spend more time thinking, and less time engaged in physical activity. Paul W. Andrews, a researcher with at Virginia Commonwealth University, believes that “depression is an evolved emotional response to complex problems, and its function is to promote changes in body systems that promote analysis of those problems.”

Depression’s function is to “minimize disruption and sustain analysis of those problems by… reducing the desire to engage in distracting activities (anhedonia), and producing psychomotor changes that reduce exposure to distracting stimuli.”...

Faced with a difficult math problem, “feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it,” ....They claim to have found evidence that “people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test.”.....

Certain symptoms of depression — social isolation, an inability to derive pleasure from pleasurable acts (like sex), and a loss of appetite — combine to maximize the brain’s ability to focus and process information.

Andrews, P., & Thomson, J. (2009). The bright side of being blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems. Psychological Review, 116 (3), 620-654 DOI: 10.1037/a0016242

I can attest to that! When I feel blue or depressed, I am a very productive on research.. So for the benefits of research productivity, stop making the work place so pleasant. :-P

This led to a discussion regarding the Respondent's apparent position, set forth in its last footnote on its brief, which Chief Justice Roberts was troubled about, that if the method is simply tied to a calculator or a computer, then it would be patentable, and this seemed to place form over substance.....

Both Justices Kennedy and Stevens were curious with respect to what was "transformed" by the State Street computer program, indicating that it appeared to be merely a new process on an old machine. The Respondent did not have a ready answer....

So it begins. And judging from the above quotes, I like the direction it's heading. :-)
About the "machine-or-transformation" test, I am frustrated when people who defend software patents carelessly rely on the fact that a program runs on a computer (machine) or could be embedded in a special-purpose machine "in theory". It is good to know the Justices realize this.

Having said this, I do realize there might be ideas worth patenting in the software world, but perhaps not the majority of the 200,000 software patents now.

the participants spent thirty seconds shifting their eyes horizontally back and forth. This exercise is thought to help increase inter-hemispheric communication.

The key finding is that people who performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity

NO ONE who got the decaf noticed that it didn't actually contain caffeine, and the volunteer's ratings of their alertness and mood didn't differ between the caffeine and placebo groups.

Placebo coffee has been studied many times before. But this new paper goes into more details. Your feeling of alertness after drinking coffee could be all in your mind.
I need someone to "secretly" replace my coffee with decaf.

Incidentally, I was listening to an audio book on placebo effect this morning. One interesting fact is that the placebo effect of medicine has increased over the years as people have stronger belief in modern medicines. It is nowadays harder for pharmaceutical companies to produce medicines that beat the placebo effect.

Your normal doctor (not those in alternative medicines) may also routinely prescribe placebos for you (not sugar pill with fake labelling but non-harmful medicines containing very little or irrelevant active ingredients). And there is even a standardized acting script for your pharmacist to play along with it.

Knowing all this isn't good for myself. I am already starting to develop resistance to placebo effects. :-)