The Left Hand of Obama

Voters in the 2008 Presidential election didn't have a meaningful choice. Whichever box they ticked, they were voting for a lefty.

Yes, Obama and McCain are both sinistral, a rather unlikely occurrence since just 7-10% of adults are left handed. Netherlands-based neuroscientists Casasanto and Jasmin decided to make use of this coincidence to test the hypothesis that people tend to make "good" gestures with their dominant hand and "bad" ones with their off-hand, in a new PLoS paper: Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians.

They analyzed the final televised debates from the '04 and '08 elections, in which the candidates discussed various topics, both positive i.e. their own policies, and negative i.e. their opponent's Vietnam War records, choice of running-mate, and association with dodgy preachers. They also examined the gestures that the speakers made to accompany their positive or negative points, and recorded which hand they used. George W. Bush and John Kerry are both right-handed, by the way.

Here's what they found:
Both lefty candidates tended to use their left hands for good gestures and their right hands for bad ones, while the right-handed showed the opposite pattern. The data also reveal some interesting facts about the overall number of gestures: Obama had a hands-off approach with only 119 gestures in total, while McCain was gesticulating all over the shop (259). Bush and Kerry, however, were essentially equal (192 vs 193). Maybe Kerry's one extra gesture was just one too many for the electorate, thus costing him the Presidency.

Anyway, does this prove that we use our dominant hands to make "good" gestures - supporting the notion that we unconsciously associate positive ideas with our dominant side of space, and negative ideas with our non-dominant side? Well, this study includes a large amount of data: it is, statistically, very likely that Obama really does tend to use his left hand over his right hand for positive gestures, i.e. this is unlikely to be due to random chance.

But does this mean that there's a correlation between handedness and good-gesture-lateralization? We actually only have 4 data points relevant to that question: Obama, McCain, Kerry and Bush. We have a lot of information on each of those people, but there are only 4 independent sets of data.

Suppose that everyone has a hand-they-use-for-good-gestures, and that it's 50/50 whether it's left or right - that is to say, suppose it has nothing to do with your general handedness. Clearly, there's then a 50% chance that any given person's good-gesture-hand will match their handedness, just by coincidence. There's a 1 in 4 chance that, for any two people, both will have a match; it's 1 in 8 for three people and 1 in 16 for four people. Which implies that there's a 1 in 16 chance that these results would have happened purely by chance.

Maybe we need to look back to the Clinton / Dole debates to get some more data...

Daniel Casasanto and Kyle Jasmin1 (2010). Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians: Spontaneous Gestures during Positive and Negative Speech PLoS ONE

The Left Hand of Obama

Voters in the 2008 Presidential election didn't have a meaningful choice. Whichever box they ticked, they were voting for a lefty.

Yes, Obama and McCain are both sinistral, a rather unlikely occurrence since just 7-10% of adults are left handed. Netherlands-based neuroscientists Casasanto and Jasmin decided to make use of this coincidence to test the hypothesis that people tend to make "good" gestures with their dominant hand and "bad" ones with their off-hand, in a new PLoS paper: Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians.

They analyzed the final televised debates from the '04 and '08 elections, in which the candidates discussed various topics, both positive i.e. their own policies, and negative i.e. their opponent's Vietnam War records, choice of running-mate, and association with dodgy preachers. They also examined the gestures that the speakers made to accompany their positive or negative points, and recorded which hand they used. George W. Bush and John Kerry are both right-handed, by the way.

Here's what they found:
Both lefty candidates tended to use their left hands for good gestures and their right hands for bad ones, while the right-handed showed the opposite pattern. The data also reveal some interesting facts about the overall number of gestures: Obama had a hands-off approach with only 119 gestures in total, while McCain was gesticulating all over the shop (259). Bush and Kerry, however, were essentially equal (192 vs 193). Maybe Kerry's one extra gesture was just one too many for the electorate, thus costing him the Presidency.

Anyway, does this prove that we use our dominant hands to make "good" gestures - supporting the notion that we unconsciously associate positive ideas with our dominant side of space, and negative ideas with our non-dominant side? Well, this study includes a large amount of data: it is, statistically, very likely that Obama really does tend to use his left hand over his right hand for positive gestures, i.e. this is unlikely to be due to random chance.

But does this mean that there's a correlation between handedness and good-gesture-lateralization? We actually only have 4 data points relevant to that question: Obama, McCain, Kerry and Bush. We have a lot of information on each of those people, but there are only 4 independent sets of data.

Suppose that everyone has a hand-they-use-for-good-gestures, and that it's 50/50 whether it's left or right - that is to say, suppose it has nothing to do with your general handedness. Clearly, there's then a 50% chance that any given person's good-gesture-hand will match their handedness, just by coincidence. There's a 1 in 4 chance that, for any two people, both will have a match; it's 1 in 8 for three people and 1 in 16 for four people. Which implies that there's a 1 in 16 chance that these results would have happened purely by chance.

Maybe we need to look back to the Clinton / Dole debates to get some more data...

Daniel Casasanto and Kyle Jasmin1 (2010). Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians: Spontaneous Gestures during Positive and Negative Speech PLoS ONE

A VIDA!!!

MINHA AUÊNCIA FOI DEVIDO A FALTA DA INTERNET.
ESTAMOS COM UM PQUENEO PROBLEMA POR AQUI.

AS VEZES RECEBEMOS MENSAGEM QUE MEXEM MUITO CONOSCO.
QUERO COMPARTILHAR ESTA COM VOCÊ!!!
NÃO IMPORTA NOSSO CREDO. O MAIS IMPORTANTE É QUE DEUS FAZ PARTE DA NOSSA VIDA.
ELE SIM É O NOSSO GRANDE MENTOR: NOS CRIOU E NOS FEZ SER, COM VIDA E BELEZA. COM UM GRANDE CORAÇÃO CAPAZ DE AMAR E PERDOAR.

A GRANDE VIAGEM DO ESPIRÍTO:

A VIDA!

Reflexões ...
Vale a Pena Viver... e Aprender!
A vida não espera.

Por onde você for, o
tempo não pára.
O que ficou, ficou...
O que se foi,
passou...

É a vida em
movimento. Somos
viajantes eternos em
suas trilhas.

Parece que somos passageiros na eternidade, mas
a verdade é que somos eternos dentro do
temporário. Ou seja, somos o eterno no
movimento da vida que segue.

Na natureza, tudo passa!
O traço característico da existência é a
impermanência.
As coisas mudam...

Pessoas e situações vão e vêm em nossas
vidas, entram e saem na esfera de ação
do nosso viver.

Há um tempo para tudo: o amanhecer, o meio-
dia e o anoitecer. Da mesma forma, há um tempo
para semear e colher; nascer, viver, partir,
renascer e seguir...

Tudo passa!
O que marca é a
experiência
adquirida.

As culpas e as mágoas também passam!
No rio da vida, as águas do tempo curam tudo,
pois diluem no eterno as coisas passageiras.

As coisas estranhas que
aconteceram, os dramas e as
palavras que feriram também
passam... Se você permitir. Sim,
se você se permitir notar que o
tempo leva tudo, e que a vida
segue...

Aquele ressentimento antigo ou aquelas emoções
apagadas que, vez por outra, bloqueiam a sua
alegria fazem parte do que é temporário, mas você
é eterno.Essas emoções passam por você,
mas que tal superá-las?
Que tal passar por elas, sem se deter, apenas
ficando a experiência e seguindo a vida?

Sim, tudo passa mesmo! As estações se sucedem no tempo
certo: primavera, verão, outono e inverno.
Isso é natural! Como é natural o espírito imperecível
entrar e sair dos corpos perecíveis. Como é natural seguir
em frente, pois o tempo não pára e a vida segue...

E, do centro da Consciência Cósmica, o Grande
Arquiteto do Universo, o Supremo Comandante de
todas as vidas e de todos os tempos nos abençoa
sempre.As experiências vão, mas o aprendizado fica.
A evolução é inevitável!

Todos estão destinados à Consciência Cósmica,
mesmo que não entendam isso agora. Porém, se o
desentendimento é passageiro, a felicidade
advinda do processo de evoluir continuamente será
imperecível.

Tudo a seu tempo!
Enquanto evoluem e aprendem a arte de viver,
sejam felizes...
E não se detenham até alcançar a meta!
O que vale é o Amor !

Que a luz do discernimento e dos sentimentos mais elevados
possa iluminar nossos corações!
Que cada dia leve consigo a maravilha do momento, que
sempre passa...
Existir é um privilégio. E viver é maravilhoso!
Paz e Luz!

" ... Esta mensagem dedico especialmente a você... leia com muita calma e medite .
Ela nos traz grandes ensinamentos para a vida... ter fé... acreditar que Deus e que Ele está te preparando um futuro melhor, para todos nós. Não podemos desanimar... confie... É melhor ter um pouco de paciência hoje do que ter que voltar e fazer o mesmo caminho de novo em situações ainda piores. Que Deus que te conceda muita paciência, compreensão, generosidade e CARIDADE que é:
Benevolência para com todos - Indulgência para com as imperfeições dos outros e Perdão das ofensas. PERDOE SEMPRE PERDOE... PERDOE..
Nós temos muita dificuldade de perdoar, mas é dele que precisamos nos utilizar para que tenhamos fortaleza para continuar.Com a mudança dos nossos paradigmas é que ele acontece. Não revide, simplesmente perdoe. É dificil, mas não é impossivel.

Cada um de nós tem os seus dias e momentos. As vezes é preciso ouvir e meditar. Deus é a nossa PRESENÇA. Nosso AMOR.. PAZ, ALEGRIA, CARINHO. A cada manhecer uma nova chance de estar aqui e VIVER.

MUITAS VEZES PRECISAMOS DESSAS MENSAGENS. PRECISAMOS FAZER A MANUTANÇÃO E REACORDAR PARA A VIDA. BUSCAR A PAZ, QUE VEZES FICA ADORMECIDA DENTRO DE NÓS.
REACENDER AS CHAMAS..
ELAS FAZEM A GRANDE DIFERENÇA EM NOSSA VIDA.

(Todas as imagens aqui usadas, foram pesquisadas na net, para fazer as ilustrações).

Maxine Cartoons About Aging

Owen Tropatino cumple dos años

Owen celebrates his second birthday with his pet sisters, Honey and a tortoiseshell kitten Tarantino Yorkie, and his family human.

Owen is a fun and rebellious poodle, born on July 26, 2008, in Maracay, Aragua, Venezuela and adopted by Marie, his human.

In the photo: Honey and Mariela.

Photos: TROPATINO

currently resides in Santiago, Chile. internet is known in this family as the Troop Tino, being Tarantino veteran group.

Pictured: Owen and Tarantino.

Their blogs:
http://www.fotolog.com/tropatino
http://www.fotolog.com/tarantino_yorkie
http://tarantino-yorkie.blogspot.com/

CONGRATULATIONS FRIENDS!

Inception for Dummies

If you haven't watched Inception yet, don't read this post. It's great and I don't want to spoil it for you. So stop. You didn't though, did you, you're still reading this right now. Well, I warned you.

Inception as everyone knows is about people who can hack into other people's dreams to access their subconcious. The plot concerns their attempts to achieve, well, inception - putting an idea into someone's mind, which makes what they usually do, stealing secret ideas, seem easy by comparison.

The problem is that it's easy to plant an idea, but the victim always knows that it's an external imposition - they don't really believe it. Leonardo DiCaprio comes up with the plan of going into the victim's subconcious's subconcious, and planting an emotional idea about his father, in order to lead him to conclude, on his own, that he should break up his father's business empire. I'm not sure what Freud would have thought of this plan.

Could you actually do this? Well. Hacking into people's dreams is high fantasy: we have absolutely no idea how you'd do that, and in the movie the only explanation we get is that it involves fancy machines and unspecified drugs. It's safe to say no-one will be gatecrashing your dream party any time soon.

But here's one way to achieve the same kind of effect, inspired by two recent papers: this one that I wrote about in my last post, finding that electrical stimulation of the hippocampus produces temporary amnesia, and this one covered at Neurophilosophy, finding that stimulating a mouse's lateral amygdala at the same time as playing it a noise makes it fear that noise.

Simple fear conditioning happens in the amygdala, not the hippocampus (although conditioned fear to some partiuclarly complex stimuli, like places, does.) So assuming you were a neurosurgeon with a desire to do some inception and no ethical scruples whatsoever, here's what you might decide to do.

Knock your victim out with a sedative. Keep them unconscious while you implant electrodes in their hippocampus and their amygdala. Wake them up, but make sure that you constantly stimulate their hippocampus to disrupt it, from the moment they awake. This will leave them fully aware, but will mean they'll have no subsequent concious memory of what you do, because such concious declarative memories depend upon the hippocampus.

Now, you condition them to fear something, by showing it to them whilst stimulating their lateral amygdala. (To be honest, you could just give them a slap in the face and it would probably be just as effective - but that would be a bit unrefined. This is a high-tech evil medical procedure, not a common punch-up.) Maybe you could make them scared of the face of a business rival who you don't want them to cut a deal with. Or you could make a terrorist leader abhor the symbols of his own ideology. The possibilities are endless.

Once you're done, sedate them again and return them to their house. Yeah, you'd have to do this all in the course of one night, but no-one said Inception was going to be easy. With any luck, they'll wake up with no concious recollection of anything, but with the emotional conditioning still intact.

The lack of memory is of course crucial: if they remembered what had happened, they'd realize that the conditioning was an external imposition, and wouldn't be swayed by it. And they'd bust you to the cops, obviously. But without that concious knowledge as to the true source of the feelings, they'd have no alternative interpretation of the fear they now feel - they'd take it as their own, and really start to dislike whatever it was you'd made them afraid of, constructing elaborate rationalizations along the way. The dream is real...

Inception for Dummies

If you haven't watched Inception yet, don't read this post. It's great and I don't want to spoil it for you. So stop. You didn't though, did you, you're still reading this right now. Well, I warned you.

Inception as everyone knows is about people who can hack into other people's dreams to access their subconcious. The plot concerns their attempts to achieve, well, inception - putting an idea into someone's mind, which makes what they usually do, stealing secret ideas, seem easy by comparison.

The problem is that it's easy to plant an idea, but the victim always knows that it's an external imposition - they don't really believe it. Leonardo DiCaprio comes up with the plan of going into the victim's subconcious's subconcious, and planting an emotional idea about his father, in order to lead him to conclude, on his own, that he should break up his father's business empire. I'm not sure what Freud would have thought of this plan.

Could you actually do this? Well. Hacking into people's dreams is high fantasy: we have absolutely no idea how you'd do that, and in the movie the only explanation we get is that it involves fancy machines and unspecified drugs. It's safe to say no-one will be gatecrashing your dream party any time soon.

But here's one way to achieve the same kind of effect, inspired by two recent papers: this one that I wrote about in my last post, finding that electrical stimulation of the hippocampus produces temporary amnesia, and this one covered at Neurophilosophy, finding that stimulating a mouse's lateral amygdala at the same time as playing it a noise makes it fear that noise.

Simple fear conditioning happens in the amygdala, not the hippocampus (although conditioned fear to some partiuclarly complex stimuli, like places, does.) So assuming you were a neurosurgeon with a desire to do some inception and no ethical scruples whatsoever, here's what you might decide to do.

Knock your victim out with a sedative. Keep them unconscious while you implant electrodes in their hippocampus and their amygdala. Wake them up, but make sure that you constantly stimulate their hippocampus to disrupt it, from the moment they awake. This will leave them fully aware, but will mean they'll have no subsequent concious memory of what you do, because such concious declarative memories depend upon the hippocampus.

Now, you condition them to fear something, by showing it to them whilst stimulating their lateral amygdala. (To be honest, you could just give them a slap in the face and it would probably be just as effective - but that would be a bit unrefined. This is a high-tech evil medical procedure, not a common punch-up.) Maybe you could make them scared of the face of a business rival who you don't want them to cut a deal with. Or you could make a terrorist leader abhor the symbols of his own ideology. The possibilities are endless.

Once you're done, sedate them again and return them to their house. Yeah, you'd have to do this all in the course of one night, but no-one said Inception was going to be easy. With any luck, they'll wake up with no concious recollection of anything, but with the emotional conditioning still intact.

The lack of memory is of course crucial: if they remembered what had happened, they'd realize that the conditioning was an external imposition, and wouldn't be swayed by it. And they'd bust you to the cops, obviously. But without that concious knowledge as to the true source of the feelings, they'd have no alternative interpretation of the fear they now feel - they'd take it as their own, and really start to dislike whatever it was you'd made them afraid of, constructing elaborate rationalizations along the way. The dream is real...

PARABÉNS JARAGUÁ DO SUL...

(imagen da google)

JARAGUÁ DO SUL, COMEMORANDO 134 ANOS.
PARABÉNS A TODOS NÓS JARAGUAENSE.
POIS ME CONSIDERO PARTE DESTA TERRA.
ESTOU AQUI A 20 ANOS. FAÇO PARTE DESSA TERRA. AQUI CONSTRUIR MAIS UM POUQUINHO DE MINHA HISTÓRIA DE VIDA.
VAMOS ESCREVENDO POR ESTE CAMPOS MIL.

Jaraguá do Sul

Características

Um dos principais parques fabris de Santa Catarina, grande produtor de malhas e sede de importantes indústrias metal-mecânicas e alimentícias, Jaraguá do Sul também é rica em cultura e belezas naturais. É sede de uma das únicas fábricas de parapente das Américas.

Data de fundação - 25 de julho de 1876.
Data festiva - 25 de julho (aniversário da cidade).
Principais atividades econômicas - Jaraguá do Sul é um dos principais parques fabris de Santa Catarina, com sólida economia baseada na indústria. Produz malhas, confecções, chapéus e gêneros alimentícios, motores elétricos, geradores, máquinas, componentes eletroeletrônicos de informática e parapentes.
População - 129.970 habitantes (IBGE/2007).
Colonização - Alemã, italiana, húngara, negra e polonesa.
Principais etnias - Alemã, italiana e húngara.
Localização - Região norte, no Caminho dos Príncipes, a 40km de Joinville e a 182km de Florianópolis.
Área - 532,59km2.
Clima - Subtropical úmido, com temperatura média de 22ºC.
Altitude - 29,97m acima do nível do mar.
Cidades próximas - Joinville, Blumenau, São Bento do Sul, Rio Negrinho, Pomerode e Corupá.
(fonte pesqeuisa Net textos e imagens)

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