eyespy: July 2005
Computers will be marking essays within a few years,
claims a computing lecturer from Aberdeen. James Christie has already
electronically marked first year undergraduate essays in subjects including
history and geography. The software works best with "content rich,
factual essays" and examiners will still have to grade a small number
of essays to show the computer how. Eyespy is enlisting the help of her
hacker friends to crack the code (www.guardian.co.uk).
Straight men produce better sperm when presented with
pornography featuring men and women rather than pornography showing women
alone. Although this is contrary to what most straight men would have
Eyespy believe, this is consistent with theories of sperm competition.
Competition from other men stimulates production of higher quality semen,
increasing the chances of procreation. Sarah Kilgallon and Leigh Simmons of
the University of Western Australia, Perth, recruited 52 men. The men
viewed explicit pictures that featured either two men and a woman or three
women and collected a sperm sample. Although the number was the same, men
who had viewed the images featuring both sexes had more motile sperm (Biology Letters 2005, doi:
10.1098/rsbl.2005.0324).
Eyespy had heard of "happy
slapping"—assaults, usually a slap around the face, videoed by
mobile telephone as a trophy—but she hadn't realised the extent
of the problem. A survey has found that 20% of young people have been
bullied using a mobile phone or the internet. The children's charity
NCH and Tesco Mobile asked 770 teenagers about the phenomenon and found
that 14% had been threatened or harassed by text message. One in 20 people
had been bullied in internet chatrooms and 4% via email. The charity is
launching a website—www.stoptextbully.com—to give advice and
support (http://news.bbc.co.uk).
If we watch someone getting hurt, we often experience a
strong emotional empathetic response. But according to scientists writing
in Nature Neuroscience (www.nature.com/natureneuroscience 5 Jun 2005; doi:
10.1038/nn1481), it's also a physical thing. When transcranial
magnetic stimulation was used to record changes in hand muscles, volunteers
who watched a pin being stuck into another person's hand or foot and
who rated the pain's intensity as high had a reduction of muscle
excitability in the muscle that they saw being pricked.
Eyespy used to be embarrassed to admit her love of
EastEnders, pop music, and Playstation. But no more, after reading Steven
Johnson's book: Everything Bad is Good
for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Many parents think that their children should be reading
classics rather than watching television. But Johnson asserts that popular
culture enriches our minds. He says that computer games should be judged
not by their lousy plots but by the problem solving skills that they teach.
And he claims that the densely plotted script of modern television comedy
demand far more emotional intelligence than the shows of the past. Eyespy
wants to know whether Dirty Den is returning from the grave—again
(www.economist.com).
Eyespy warns you to beware of strange odours or
mysterious vapours in the boardroom—or, indeed, the bedroom. Swiss
researchers have found that a hormone, oxytocin, encourages us to trust
strangers more. The researchers got 178 male volunteers to play an
investment game. Some of the participants were given oxytocin and others a
placebo. People who had been given oxytocin invested more money and also
trusted their financial partners more. Generally people do not trust others
with their money until they have evidence that they are trustworthy. But
volunteers who had taken the oxytocin trusted their partners almost
immediately. Oxytocin is produced in childbirth and lactation and
encourages mammals to mate. The research might lead to a breakthrough into
correcting psychiatric disorders associated with a lack of trust and social
problems experienced by people with autism (www.medicalnewstoday.com).
Condoms are being delivered with the daily milk in
Andhra Pradesh in southern India. Officials hope they will reach 80% of the
population. This is an official policy to help stop the spread of AIDS in a
population in which only 19% of people use condoms and the risk of HIV
infection is high. The government might also try distributing the
contraceptives with newspapers. Eyespy's milkman always has a glint
in his eye—but he'd never be as bold as that
(www.rainbownetwork.com).
A vaccine for smoking has been tested on a group of
long term smokers. Addiction to nicotine occurs because the drug stimulates
a neural response that smokers identify as pleasure. The idea of a vaccine,
which is also being developed for cocaine, is to stop the drug ever
reaching the brain. Volunteers were vaccinated with nicotine bound to a
bulky mass of protein, and all produced antibodies. After six months,
people were divided into three groups depending upon the concentration of
antibodies in their blood. Two thirds (57%) of people with the highest
concentration were still quit compared with one third (31%) of people with
the lowest concentrations (www.economist.com).
How we perceive colours is probably universal, despite
different cultures and languages. Scientists had thought that different
languages would influence colour categories—different cultures would
see life through a different colour palette. Paul Kay, of the International
Computer Science Institute in California, and colleagues asked people from
110 societies to name the colours on 330 different coloured chips.
Regardless of the language spoken or the society they lived in, they all
grouped the colours into an average of six basic groups that clustered
around the colours that English speakers identify as black, white, red,
yellow, green and blue ( Proceedings of the
National Academies of Sciences 2005;102:
8386-91).
studentBMJ 2005;13:265-308 July ISSN 0966-6494
