We are as we are depending from which we are (II)

The personality is a set of customs, tendencies and interests related between themselves of a quite vague way, and that depends, in certain moments, on the circumstances and the context. But we are not capable of perceiving that because the people are accustomed to having a lot of control on his environment, which offers an image of false coherence in his personality.

That is to say: someone feels good and he is much entertained in the holidays, and that's why it comes to many or organizes many. The people deduce that she is an entertaining person. But if his friends were observing this person in all the situations in which it does not possess the control (a dark alley, a stressful work), probably the perception would change.

Mischel supports:

When we are a woman who sometimes seems hostile and very jealous of his independence but who others seems rather passive, dependent and feminine, our reduction valve makes us choose between one of two attitudes. This way, we decide that a rule is to the service of other one, or that both are to the service of a third motive. Debit of being a woman much castradora, under a passivity front. Or she is a warm and dependent woman with an exterior aggressiveness image like self-defense way.

More experiments that demonstrate the power of the way at the time of determining how our personality opens were, for example, the realized ones at the beginning of the year 1970 by a group of social scientists of Stanford's University, directed by Philip Zimbardo.

The experiment consisted of creating a false prison in the cellar of the faculty of Psychology. They chose a few males, all normal and healthy ones, as they demonstrated a series of tests psicotécnicas. A half they assumed the prisoners' roll, another half, of prison guards.

The results threw light to the question if the prisons are places as dangerous as the jungle because they are full of delinquents or because the prisons are in himself there are jungles that extract the worst of the delinquents.

To the little of beginning the experiment, for example, some of the prison guards, who even had declared himself a pacifist, fell down in the roll of the typical embittered guard who imposes an iron discipline on the others.

Passed thirty six hours, one of the prisoners began becoming hysterical, and it was necessary to liberate it. Other four more had to go out for “extreme emotional depression, crying, anger and the sharp states of anxiety.

Zimbardo was claiming that the experiment was getting longer two weeks, but it turned out to be forced to cancel it to six days. The conclusion is that, in addition to the education, the genes, the friends that we have met along our life, etc. … there are cases in which someone educated in a good school, born in a happy family and in a wealthy quarter, can change radically only modifying the immediate details of his situation.

As it happened to 11.000 students between 8 and 16 years that they were used in the decade of 1920 in an experiment led by Hugo Harsthorne and Mark A. May, in New York. They submitted them to tests designed to measure his honesty grade.

They were making them solve problems in different contexts: with alertness of the professorship, alone, alone but with the books where the solutions were appearing, in their own domiciles and all kinds of combinations.

Many children cheated, as it is obvious. But on having looked for rules in the tricks, the investigators remained surprised. Far from the obviousnesses of the type that more the biggest they were cheating more than the smallest, or that the girls and the children were cheating equally, there existed neither fixed rules nor coherent groups of trick.

There were children who were cheating when they were solving the problems at home, but they were not doing it in the school and vice versa. There was the one who was cheating in certain types of tests and not in others.

Finally, they repeated the tests six months later under the same circumstances: the trick status was similar, and the same one that then did pitfalls, they did them later. Nevertheless, on having modified some variable, everything was changing, both the tricky ones and the ways of doing pitfall.

Both investigators concluded that a feature as the honesty is not a fundamental feature not unified. But it keeps on turning out to be difficult to imagine a person who is capable of being honest in some things but dishonest in others, or honest with certain persons or in certain places, but very dishonestly with other persons and in other places to us. Because: how enjuiciaríamos then to a person?

Perhaps assuming that we cannot do it easily let's be able to fight some daily problems of a more effective form, like demostraré in the last part of this series of articles.

Route | The tipping point of Malcom Gladwell

We are as we are depending from which we are (and III)

Nevertheless, to assume the power of the context, of which we are as we are, in a very important part, depending where from we are, it would allow to confront better many problems.

Perhaps you do not wonder why in certain northerly countries there is major public-spiritedness valuation and here, in Spain, does the public furniture end up by looking like the stage of a movie posnuclear?

Better education? Other genes? The climate? Then: why do many tourists of these countries seem to get out of control in Spain and stop respecting the public furniture?

A possible investigation line, obtaining it previously exhibited, would be: there they are more civic because rarely the administration allows the damages in the public furniture to last too much time.

That is to say: the people take care of the environment and they are in summed up accounts they is more civic, largely, because the environment is taken care, like a fish that bites the tail.

In an ambience chaos, deterioration and dirt, the persons tend to be more uncivic, more chaotic, and also to commit more actions vandálicas or even criminal: if nobody arranges with urgency my environment, if nobody watches, if nobody worries … we do more "pitfalls", like the children of the experiment of Harsthorne and May.

In fact, it is one of the measures that took to eradicate the worrying level of delinquency of a city like New York, considered in the 80s like one of the most dangerous cities of the world. Instead of increasing the police or punitive presence, for the first time a powerful cleanliness cash was organized in the metro lines of the city, where a graphite lasted less than one hour, where the windows were arranged quickly, etc.

The meter, culture medium of violent acts in the decade of 1980, began being then a much more kind place. The “syndrome of the broken windows” was fought also in other areas and of similar forms. And now New York is one of the surest cities of the world without there having been a substantial change in the laws, the police presence or the education in the schools.

Because to a great extent we are as we are depending from which we are.

Route | The Tipping Point de Malcom Gladwell.

The price of the beauty: the high heels

To be to the last one, to seem spectacular or to seem higher has his side effects. In case of going high heels, the women pay a high price. Because, as most of beads or reinforcements for attracting attention, are contrary to nature and harmful to the health. As the tail of a peacock.

Today we will speak about the high heels.

The high heels modify the natural points of rest of the body, since they provoke that the corporal weight is displeased ahead. To correct the position to compensate this imbalance involves alterations in all the joints and, consequently, inconveniences and pains in the feet, the knees and the back.

Due to the tightness of the heel there can appear problems of instability of the ankle and pain in the later part of the leg, since there falters the tension of the later musculature of the leg, being shy the length of the same one.

There increases the risk of lordosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine.

It takes place also hallux valgus (fingers of hammer): due to the transfer of the force ahead, the first finger can turn aside, and the rest of the fingers, bend down inwards.

Also distortions, scratches and hardnesses appear in the friction areas.

Undoubtedly, after reading of ballad everything it is ready of sufferings and anatomical modifications, after sees who the ready one is that, from the kilometric height of his heels, deslegitima that someone surrenders to a face-lift operation for considering her to be contrary to nature.

Route | The Nobleman's Sun

Torrent Til Death S04E20 The New Neighbors online

Finally we can read the theory of the relativity on his original pages

We have heard all speaking about the theory of the relativity of Albert Einstein, but the true thing is that earlier we could never have read 46 original pages in German, written in Berlin, in that the physicist formulated in 1915 his famous thesis.

This has stopped being like that thanks to the exhibition realized last Sunday in the Academy of Sciences and Humanities education of Israel, in Jerusalem. The original manuscript was donated by the same Einstein to the University of Jerusalem concerning his opening in 1925.

The person in charge of the exhibition, Hanoch Gutfreund, announced that the aspects of the conservation of the manuscript, such as the light, temperature, moisture and the visitors' quantity, were taken into consideration on having erected the exhibition.

“The room is supported with a stable temperature of 18 grades, a moisture of 50 and also we limit the light of the room: there is no ultraviolet light and we support constants 50 lux”, tells the Conservative and restorer of role, Timna Elper, of Spanish origin.

The text, which the big bang describes and predicts the discovery of the black holes, supposed one of the biggest revolutions of the modern science. “To today, everything what he predicts and tells that this document is valid and current”, says Gutfreund on the pages that enunciate the fundamental beginning of the equivalence, the widespread covariance and the curvature of the space - time that, he explains, “the bases sat for the cosmology and the sciences that study the development of the universe”.

And he adds: "to see his corrections and equations, what it erases and what he adds, shows the basic ideas of Einstein, the obstacles which it faced and the transcendency of what can be considered to be the big intellectual achievement produced by the brain of a human being”

His importance has practical implications, such as the determination of the exact location of the Earth in terms of the device GPS and the monitoring of spaceships in the space.

The exhibition will be visited by groups of fans of the science, soldiers and students of higher education in the whole country. It will be opened until March 25, 2010.

Route | rtve.es

The interior of our body seen by Kahn

Fritz Kahn was an illustrator of the beginning of the XXth century to which, possibly, the infantile educational series is debit One Was once the life …

His hundreds of schematic drawings have served to spread of a very visual form (and also deceitful, if we are just) all kinds of scientific topics, from the functioning of the metabolism up to the cycles and biomoles of the nature.

His most famous schemes, with everything, are the faced ones to explain the human body. From Kahn's look, of that time, does our body acquire the aspect of a factory working to any rag thanks to the laborious dedication of tiny beings who, activating mechanisms and connections, represent diverse functions of our organism (you take now that thing about One Was once the life …?)

The illustrations, of an undeniable artistic value, can be checked in a recent edition: Fritz Kahn Man Machine. Nevertheless: until point his works are valid to make to come the science to the people?

From my point of view, these illustrations, as series since One Was once the life, can be useful to do understandably abstruse scientific explanations: it turns decipherable and very visually what otherwise would be impossible to imagine for a citizen without solid scientific formation.

But also it is true that these drawings can spoil the reality and obstruct a deeper knowledge on how the things work. Perhaps has not hurt very much the classic schematic drawing of the atom, composed by a nucleus and two or three electrons orbiting it as if the atom was a solar system luck?

Let human analogies exist for almost all the things of the nature it can improve his publication in the first instance, but undoubtedly it corrupts his comprehension later. Perhaps that's why it is not a good idea to say too many times that the heart is a bomb, the eye is a camera, the genes are recipes, the brain is done of cables and switches or the immune system is an agency of counterespionage. Although they it seem.

Because, then, Kahn's drawings might make to believe the general population, of on foot, that the human body is something like robot that any day will rebel against us, to the Skynet. Kahn, One Was once the life or the understandable analogies are useful, but also they stimulate the most elementary and common magic imagination.

Official place | FRITZ KAHN – MAN MACHINE

Really does the homeopathy work?

Due to the controversy that has raised specially the homeopathic practice in the article 5 alternative medicines … more alternatives, today we are going to study in depth a little more the mesenteries of this medicine (or pseudomedicine).

The homeopathy was born in the XIXth century and it supports that if there are provoked in the organism the same symptoms that are suffered, this one reacts and ends up by recovering. And so, unlike the current or allopathic medicine, the homeopathy fights the symptoms imitating them, is based on the similarity and not on the opposite.

The homeopathic medicines are substances diluted so many times that take in infinitesimal quantities, since it is supposed that these dilutions keep the memory of the substance but not his toxicity.

From here there is no unanimity. The last scientific attack to the homeopathy took place in Great Britain, in February, 2010, when an experts' commission signed a report in which it reproaches the Government for destining public money to the homeopathy for considering it to be “a bad medicine”. They ask that there should be eliminated the state funds dedicated to homeopathic treatments.

In August, 2005, the magazine The Lancet was published by a work where he was making sure that the homeopathy is not much more effective than the placebo.

Nevertheless, every time there are more courses ruled in the university that give classes on homeopathy. Tens Spanish university centers offer master's degrees and posgrados to medical and veterinary. Approximately 8.000 doctors have prescribed one day a homeopathic medicine.

In Spain, it has passed in only 7 years of 15 % of patients that talks each other with this alternative medicine 30 %.

But the detractors affirm that scientific evidences do not exist yet on the results offered by the homeopathic medicine. It works, but it seems to work as a placebo does it. Also, the treatments are usually individualized, from an extensive clinical record, which complicates especially the scientific demonstration.

The juridical regulation is also a big problem. The only attempt of regulation till now in Spain, in 2007, was suspended cautelarmente and finally knocked down by the courts two years later. From the Ministry of Health they support that hardly it will be solved in the question in the present term, since the regularization has to establish who can and who cannot exercise this type of therapies and what knowledge it is necessary to have to do it. Which turns out to be still complex.

My humble point of view, after having read some books on the topic, as well as the results in diverse experiments of blind double (neither the doctor nor the patient know if they treat with a placebo or with a medicine), it is that the homeopathy is one of so many swindles that are so psychologically comfortable. What do you think?

Route | The Avant-garde

Military anthropology: to study cultures for the war

That the science and the skill have advanced fundamentally thanks to the warlike conflicts (in search of new ways of killing or of defending themselves) it is always a fact. And in disciplines so seemingly removed from the war how there are the anthropology, it happens the same.

For example, at the beginning of the XXth century, the United States financed tens expeditions to the Far East and to the South Pacific Ocean with seemingly anthropological ends. And for the anthropologists who there sent it was like that: for them no secret end existed.

But the military strategists in fact were using his knowledge on the indigenous peoples for his targets. The work of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, for example, centred on the traditions and values of the native people of New Guinea and Bali, it turned out to be fundamental for the military intelligence when the South Sea Islands were conquered by the Japanese during the Second World war.

Thanks to the anthropological studies, the local assent was obtained for the military bases establishment and one convinced the native ones so that they were contributing information about the nearby peoples that were working for the enemy.

Douglas Rushkoff counts another famous example:

Although Franklin Roosevelt went so far as to raise the murder of the emperor of Japan to force the capitulation of the nation, thanks to an anthropological investigation his advisers discovered that with a similar action the shot would go out for them for the butt. Without emperor, there would be no person with authority to give up. Also, an attack would infuriate the emperor so much to the Japanese who would keep on fighting while the only one of his men was remaining in foot. Only a tremendous humiliation (since that of Hiroshima) was considered to be sufficient to force the emperor of Japan to admit the defeat.

Another example is led by the brigadier general of the Air Force Edward G. Lansdale. In the decade of 1950, inside the campaign carried out against the rebels Huk de Filipinas, Lansdale it directed a study on the local superstitions. It discovered that the Huk believed that the battlefield was inhabited by an asuang, a vampire's species.

They exploited this mythological weakness practising two pricks in the neck on a dead soldier, in order that it was found by the Huk. And the Huk moved back terrified from the battlefield.

In the decade of 1980, all these and other psychological warfare skills were compiled in a volume of the CIA under the name of Counter Intelligence Study Manual, using principally in the conflicts of Central America.

Route | Coercion of Douglas Rushkoff