FULL ARTICLES

SCIENTISTS SAY THEY FOUND THE ROOT OF SARCASM

Scientists say they found the root of sarcasm. Yeah, right
By Alexandra Frean, Social Affairs Correspondent
The Times of London
May 23, 2005

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1623448,00.html

Scientists in Israel have cracked the complicated cognitive code that determines whether individuals are able to understand sarcasm.

Yeah, right.

No, really. The findings, published today by the American Psychological Association, could provide vital clues to the best way of helping people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, as well as those with some forms of brain damage, to improve their communication skills.

Simone Shamay-Tsoory, the psychologist who led the research, said that the study aimed to determine how people distinguish between a speaker’s words and a speaker’s intention. “Only then can you really understand sarcasm,” she said. Dr Shamay-Tsoory and her colleagues at the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa and the University of Haifa studied the reaction of brain-damaged and healthy people to a series of stories recorded by actors.

Some were sarcastic, such as this: Joe came to work and, instead of beginning to work, he sat down to rest. His boss noticed his behaviour and said: “Joe, don’t work too hard.”

Others were neutral, such as this: Joe came to work and immediately began to work. His boss noticed his behaviour and said: “Joe, don’t work too hard.”

The study included 25 participants with prefrontal-lobe damage, 16 with posterior-lobe damage and 17 healthy subjects. After hearing the stories, the subjects were questioned to ascertain whether they could comprehend the words in the story as well as the speaker’s true meaning. The researchers found that participants with prefrontal-lobe damage were significantly less able to understand sarcasm than those in the two other groups. Within the prefrontal group, people with damage in the right ventro-medial area, on top of the orbits of the eyes, had the most problems comprehending sarcasm. Those with the greatest damage to this area had the most difficulty.

“This study contributes towards our understanding of the relation between language and social cognition,” Dr Shamay-Tsoory said. She added that the findings could provide vital assistance in the rehabilitation of some patients. However, she noted that the research threw little light on the popular national stereotypes of the English as highly sarcastic and the Americans as totally lacking in irony.

“I’m not sure this study implies that people who don’t get sarcasm have brain damage,” she said, tactfully. “Maybe they just have problems understanding other people’s state of mind. It could be down to cultural differences.” As if.

A FINE LINE

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it”
-- Mark Twain

SARCASM: the use of bitter or wounding, especially ironic, remarks

IRONY: an expression of meaning, often humorous or sarcastic, by the use of
language of a different or opposite tendency

(Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

 

ISRAELI COMPANY PRODUCES CLOTHES THAT ADJUST TO BODY TEMPERATURE

Israeli co. produces clothes that adjust to body temperature
Arutz Sheva
May 25, 2005

www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=82644

An Israeli clothing manufacturer has designed a line of clothing using a fabric that automatically adjusts to a wearer’s personal body heat.

According to a report in Globes, Israel’s Bagir is using a high technology wool blend designed to maintain a wearer’s comfort level regardless of the temperature of their surroundings.

The special fabric was created by Bagir’s sister company, Polgat Textiles, which specializes in developing unique fabrics for apparel manufacturers. Polgat combined wool with a technology developed for NASA called “Smart Fabric Technology.” The special technology contains patented micro-encapsulated phase-change materials, called Thermocules, that absorb, store and release heat - maintaining a balance in temperature.

Outlast Technologies, the developer of the Smart Fabric Technology, issued Polgat the exclusive global license on all wool blend fabrication.

Offer Gilboa told Globes that the high-tech capability has been introduced into a collection of classically tailored suits being marketed by men’s haberdashery chain Jos. A. Bank, located throughout the United States.

The suits are being under the “Stays Cool” label and Jos. A. Bank staff report excellent sales on the line so far.

 

ISRAELI SCIENTISTS UNVEIL “BRAIN HELMET”

“Brain helmet” promises higher IQ

Researchers at Bar-Ilan University unveil virtual reality helmet that uses math problems to raise user’s IQ by 20 percent in just three months
By Dudi Goldman
Ynet news
June 6, 2005

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3095570,00.html

The difference between success and failure is sometimes just a matter of a few IQ points, so why not boost your intelligence with a nifty little invention made in Israel?

Dr. David Passig , futurist and head of Bar-Ilan University’s virtual reality lab, is the man behind the helmet, which he says can improve the intelligence of the user.

The helmet has a visor that fits over the eyes of users, putting them in a virtual reality world where they solve mathematical problems and learn to assemble and take apart three-dimensional objects.

Helmet improves IQ of hearing impaired children

Passig says that, if the users wear the helmet 10 to 20 minutes a day for three months, their IQ can improve by as much as 20 percent.

“We did a study with hearing impaired children, who usually achieve relatively low scores in IQ tests compared to children who can hear, and after using the helmet they achieved identical scores,” he said.

Passig also says that the helmet allows men to develop what, until now, only women had: a connection between the left and right lobe of the brain. Using the helmet increases the blood flow between the two halves of the brain, he says

The innovative “brain helmet” will be presented to the public for the first time this coming Thursday in the Cinema City movie theater complex in Glilot, near Tel Aviv, in the framework of “Digital City” event organized by Microsoft Israel.

 

THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE

The evolution of intelligence: Natural genius?
The Economist
June 2, 2005

www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4032638

The high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be a result of their persecuted past

The idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran, a noted scientific iconoclast, is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution. He helped popularise the idea that some diseases not previously thought to have a bacterial cause were actually infections, which ruffled many scientific feathers when it was first suggested. And more controversially still, he has suggested that homosexuality is caused by an infection.

Even he, however, might tremble at the thought of what he is about to do. Together with Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending, of the University of Utah, he is publishing, in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Biosocial Science, a paper which not only suggests that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about. The group in question are Ashkenazi Jews. The process is natural selection.

History before science

Ashkenazim generally do well in IQ tests, scoring 12-15 points above the mean value of 100, and have contributed disproportionately to the intellectual and cultural life of the West, as the careers of Freud, Einstein and Mahler, pictured above, affirm. They also suffer more often than most people from a number of nasty genetic diseases, such as Tay-Sachs and breast cancer. These facts, however, have previously been thought unrelated. The former has been put down to social effects, such as a strong tradition of valuing education. The latter was seen as a consequence of genetic isolation. Even now, Ashkenazim tend to marry among themselves. In the past they did so almost exclusively.

Dr Cochran, however, suspects that the intelligence and the diseases are intimately linked. His argument is that the unusual history of the Ashkenazim has subjected them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this paradoxical state of affairs.

Ashkenazi history begins with the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in the first century AD. When this was crushed, Jewish refugees fled in all directions. The descendants of those who fled to Europe became known as Ashkenazim.

In the Middle Ages, European Jews were subjected to legal discrimination, one effect of which was to drive them into money-related professions such as banking and tax farming which were often disdained by, or forbidden to, Christians. This, along with the low level of intermarriage with their gentile neighbours (which modern genetic analysis confirms was the case), is Dr Cochran’s starting point.

He argues that the professions occupied by European Jews were all ones that put a premium on intelligence. Of course, it is hard to prove that this intelligence premium existed in the Middle Ages, but it is certainly true that it exists in the modern versions of those occupations. Several studies have shown that intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is highly correlated with income in jobs such as banking.

What can, however, be shown from the historical records is that European Jews at the top of their professions in the Middle Ages raised more children to adulthood than those at the bottom. Of course, that was true of successful gentiles as well. But in the Middle Ages, success in Christian society tended to be violently aristocratic (warfare and land), rather than peacefully meritocratic (banking and trade).

Put these two things together—a correlation of intelligence and success, and a correlation of success and fecundity—and you have circumstances that favour the spread of genes that enhance intelligence. The questions are, do such genes exist, and what are they if they do? Dr Cochran thinks they do exist, and that they are exactly the genes that cause the inherited diseases which afflict Ashkenazi society.

That small, reproductively isolated groups of people are susceptible to genetic disease is well known. Constant mating with even distant relatives reduces genetic diversity, and some disease genes will thus, randomly, become more common. But the very randomness of this process means there should be no discernible pattern about which disease genes increase in frequency. In the case of Ashkenazim, Dr Cochran argues, this is not the case. Most of the dozen or so disease genes that are common in them belong to one of two types: they are involved either in the storage in nerve cells of special fats called sphingolipids, which form part of the insulating outer sheaths that allow nerve cells to transmit electrical signals, or in DNA repair. The former genes cause neurological diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher’s and Niemann-Pick. The latter cause cancer.

That does not look random. And what is even less random is that in several cases the genes for particular diseases come in different varieties, each the result of an independent original mutation. This really does suggest the mutated genes are being preserved by natural selection. But it does not answer the question of how evolution can favour genetic diseases. However, in certain circumstances, evolution can.

West Africans, and people of West African descent, are susceptible to a disease called sickle-cell anaemia that is virtually unknown elsewhere. The anaemia develops in those whose red blood cells contain a particular type of haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen. But the disease occurs only in those who have two copies of the gene for the disease-causing haemoglobin (one copy from each parent). Those who have only one copy have no symptoms. They are, however, protected against malaria, one of the biggest killers in that part of the world. Thus, the theory goes, the pressure to keep the sickle-cell gene in the population because of its malaria-protective effects balances the pressure to drive it out because of its anaemia-causing effects. It therefore persists without becoming ubiquitous.

Dr Cochran argues that something similar happened to the Ashkenazim. Genes that promote intelligence in an individual when present as a single copy create disease when present as a double copy. His thesis is not as strong as the sickle-cell/malaria theory, because he has not proved that any of his disease genes do actually affect intelligence. But the area of operation of some of them suggests that they might.

The sphingolipid-storage diseases, Tay-Sachs, Gaucher’s and Niemann-Pick, all involve extra growth and branching of the protuberances that connect nerve cells together. Too much of this (as caused in those with double copies) is clearly pathological. But it may be that those with single copies experience a more limited, but still enhanced, protuberance growth. That would yield better linkage between brain cells, and might thus lead to increased intelligence. Indeed, in the case of Gaucher’s disease, the only one of the three in which people routinely live to adulthood, there is evidence that those with full symptoms are more intelligent than the average. An Israeli clinic devoted to treating people with Gaucher’s has vastly more engineers, scientists, accountants and lawyers on its books than would be expected by chance.

Why a failure of the DNA-repair system should boost intelligence is unclear – and is, perhaps, the weakest part of the thesis, although evidence is emerging that one of the genes in question is involved in regulating the early growth of the brain. But the thesis also has a strong point: it makes a clear and testable prediction. This is that people with a single copy of the gene for Tay-Sachs, or that for Gaucher’s, or that for Niemann-Pick should be more intelligent than average. Dr Cochran and his colleagues predict they will be so by about five IQ points. If that turns out to be the case, it will strengthen the idea that, albeit unwillingly, Ashkenazi Jews have been part of an accidental experiment in eugenics. It has brought them some advantages. But, like the deliberate eugenics experiments of the 20th century, it has also exacted a terrible price.

 

NETANYAHU’S TOO HOT TO HANDLE IN RADIO RAP

Netanyahu’s too hot to handle in radio rap
News Wire Services
New York Daily News
May 30, 2005

www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/story/314248p-268788c.html

Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu was on fire yesterday - literally.

In the middle of an interview on Israeli Army Radio, the reporter suddenly asked the minister, “Can’t you smell the smoke?”

“What do you mean?” Netanyahu shot back.

“Your cigar is on fire. The one inside your suit jacket. Minister Netanyahu, you are burning up!” the reporter said urgently.

“Eh?” said a flustered Netanyahu as another minister, Isaac Herzog, came to the rescue.

“Bibi, throw it on the floor! Throw it,” Herzog said.

The reporter then asked Netanyahu why he put a lit cigar in his jacket pocket.

“Smoking is forbidden here,” Netanyahu said.

“But why a lit cigar?” the reporter insisted.

“I didn’t know it was lit,” Netanyahu said.