If there’s one political idea most of us can agree on, it’s that we’re currently living through an age of immense ideological polarisation. Inspired by the hyperpartisan political climate in the US, the experimental social psychologist Peter Ditto at the University of California, Irvine set out to investigate how differing views of morality shape political judgments. Working from what’s known as ‘moral foundations theory’, which uses five categories – harm, fairness, loyalty, tradition and purity – as a framework for moral reasoning, Ditto created a survey website to learn to what extent different moral frameworks shape outlooks on political questions, and indeed the greater world. His findings were compelling, but likely unsurprising if you’ve ever had an irreconcilable political squabble at the dinner table: it’s our moral filters, not facts or rational thinking, that mould our ideological outlooks. You can read more about Ditto’s work at the University of California website.
2 October 2019
Aeon: An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have
A red wood ant colony remembers its trail system leading to the same trees, year after year, although no single ant does. In the forests of Europe, they forage in high trees to feed on the excretions of aphids that in turn feed on the tree. Their nests are enormous mounds of pine needles situated in the same place for decades, occupied by many generations of colonies. Each ant tends to take the same trail day after day to the same tree. During the long winter, the ants huddle together under the snow. The Finnish myrmecologist Rainer Rosengren showed that when the ants emerge in the spring, an older ant goes out with a young one along the older ant’s habitual trail. The older ant dies and the younger ant adopts that trail as its own, thus leading the colony to remember, or reproduce, the previous year’s trails. [...]
From day to day, the colony’s behaviour changes, and what happens on one day affects the next. I conducted a series of perturbation experiments. I put out toothpicks that the workers had to move away, or blocked the trails so that foragers had to work harder, or created a disturbance that the patrollers tried to repel. Each experiment affected only one group of workers directly, but the activity of other groups of workers changed, because workers of one task decide whether to be active depending on their rate of brief encounters with workers of other tasks. After just a few days repeating the experiment, the colonies continued to behave as they did while they were disturbed, even after the perturbations stopped. Ants had switched tasks and positions in the nest, and so the patterns of encounter took a while to shift back to the undisturbed state. No individual ant remembered anything but, in some sense, the colony did. [...]
Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. It is likely that colony behaviour matures because colony size changes the rates of interaction among ants. In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic. Perhaps colonies remember a past disturbance because it shifted the location of ants, leading to new patterns of interaction, which might even reinforce the new behaviour overnight while the colony is inactive, just as our own memories are consolidated during sleep. Changes in colony behaviour due to past events are not the simple sum of ant memories, just as changes in what we remember, and what we say or do, are not a simple set of transformations, neuron by neuron. Instead, your memories are like an ant colony’s: no particular neuron remembers anything although your brain does.
The Calvert Journal: Bucharest modernism
Many of the houses in Anghel’s collection are designed by Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dadaist art movement. Janco and his Romanian contemporaries trained in Zurich, Paris, and Vienna before bringing International Style back home to Bucharest. Their repertoire is simple: flat roofs, layered cuboid shapes, porthole windows, glass brick, rounded corners. Some of the houses incorporate more traditional or art deco features. But generally speaking, their clean contours turn their back to the flourishes of Art-Nouveau; their stripped down lightness contrasts with the heavy neo-Romanian and neo-gothic style of the buildings that nestle side by side on central Bucharest’s streets.
Much of the modernist architecture in Bucharest, however, differs from the other, similar movements sweeping Europe at the same time. In Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt, the International Style was not purely an aesthetic concern, but a political project. Many of the era’s leading architects were motivated by the idea that beautiful housing should be open to the working classes as well as the rich. Aesthetics and politics were inextricably linked. They built functional, affordable, bright, large-scale social housing. In contrast, Romanian architects mostly served private clients. Janco and others returned from Western Europe to find Bucharest a fertile ground for their aesthetic projects: the capital’s educated urban elite were infatuated with modernism and commissioned the architects to design small residential blocks and private villas. [...]
Their opaque legal status explains the buildings’ wounds and exposed brickwork: many of the structures are now crumbling. Anghel says he doesn’t know anyone who lives in these houses due to their architectural merit. The people who care about these modernist structures can’t afford to buy them. Even listing these homes as architecturally valuable (as many already are) can’t save them, as it makes restoration an expensive business. There are those among Bucharest’s political and business elite who are simply waiting for these buildings to collapse, so that they can use the valuable land beneath to build bigger, more lucrative apartment blocks, Anghel tells me.
The Economist: Why are some languages spoken faster than others?
WERE THIS article written in Japanese, it would be longer. A Thai translation, meanwhile, would be shorter. And yet those reading it aloud, in either language or in its original English, would finish at roughly the same time. This peculiar phenomenon is the subject of new research which finds that languages face a trade-off between complexity and speed. Those packed with information are spoken slower, while simpler ones are spoken faster. As a result, most languages are equally efficient at conveying information. [...]
The results suggest that there is an optimal range of speeds within which the brain can process information most efficiently. Speakers of simple languages pick up the pace to keep conversations brief. Speakers of complex languages exert more effort planning sentences and articulating syllables, causing discussions to drag on. Yet in both cases, information is conveyed at about the same pace. “It is like bird wings,” says Dr Coupé, one of the authors, “you may have big ones that need few beats per second or you have to really flap the little ones you got, but the result is pretty much the same in terms of flying.”
World Economic Forum: This machine read 3.5 million books then told us what it thought about men and women
Researchers trawled through an enormous quantity of books in an effort to find out whether there is a difference between the types of words that describe men and women in literature. Using a new computer model, the researchers analyzed a dataset of 3.5 million books, all published in English between 1900 to 2008. The books include a mix of fiction and non-fiction literature. [...]
Their analysis demonstrates that negative verbs associated with body and appearance appear five times as often for female figures as male ones. The analysis also demonstrates that positive and neutral adjectives relating to the body and appearance occur approximately twice as often in descriptions of female figures, while male ones are most frequently described using adjectives that refer to their behavior and personal qualities.[...]
The researchers point out that the analysis has its limitations, in that it does not take into account who wrote the individual passages and the differences in the degrees of bias depending on whether the books were published during an earlier or later period within the data set timeline. Furthermore, it does not distinguish between genres—e.g. between romance novels and non-fiction. The researchers are currently following up on several of these items.
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