Beauty and the brain, women use more than men

WASHINGTON - Beauty is in the brain of the beholder. Go to any museum and there will be men and women admiring paintings and sculpture. But it turns out they are thinking about the sight differently. Men process beauty on the right side of their brains, while women use their whole brain to do the job, researchers report in Tuesday's electronic edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

They even explain it differently.

Novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

Essayist David Hume: "Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."

Researchers were surprised by the finding.

"It is well known that there are differences between brain activity in women and men in cognitive tasks," said researcher Camilo J. Cela-Conde of the University of Baleares in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. "However, why should this kind of difference appear in the case of appreciation of beauty?"

The answer seems to be that when women consider a visual object they link it to language while men concentrate on the spatial aspects of the object, Cela-Conde said in an interview by e-mail.

He noted, however, that this doesn't explain why - and how - the human capacity to appreciate beauty evolved.

"The differences that we have found might relate to the different social roles that, hypothetically, men and women had during human evolution." he said.

The researchers tested 10 men and 10 women, showing them paintings and photos of urban scenes and landscapes, asking them to rate each scene as either "beautiful" or "not beautiful."

At the same time the scientists looked at images of the magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in the brains of the men and women.

For the first 300 milliseconds, there was no difference between male and female brains, and from 300 to 700 milliseconds activity was greater for objects that were rated as beautiful than for those that were not beautiful.

For both sexes the most active region was the parietal lobe that deals with visual perception, spatial orientation and information processing, but it was focused on the right side of the brain in men while both sides participated in women.

While there are differences between people as to what is beautiful and what isn't, Cela-Conde said they did not find identifiable differences related to sex.

"Any person can find beautiful a landscape, a building or a canvas that some others will find awful. But sex has little to do with those differences. Perhaps they relate with other variables, such as age or education." he said.

"It is curious that, using different neural networks, the final result is very similar in women and men. But this seems to be the case," Cela-Conde said.

He added: "Human nature is complex and difficult to study and understand. Nevertheless, thanks to scientific tools we are starting to know a bit more about some very important aspects of our nature."

Napoleon!

Here are some clips from the documentary on Napoleon by request. Enjoy!

Social websites harm children's brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist

Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned.

Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred.

The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favourite websites each day.

But they will strike a chord with parents and teachers who complain that many youngsters lack the ability to communicate or concentrate away from their screens.

More than 150million use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, share photographs and videos and post regular updates of their movements and thoughts.

A further six million have signed up to Twitter, the 'micro-blogging' service that lets users circulate text messages about themselves.

But while the sites are popular - and extremely profitable - a growing number of psychologists and neuroscientists believe they may be doing more harm than good.

Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, believes repeated exposure could effectively 'rewire' the brain.

Computer games and fast-paced TV shows were also a factor, she said.

'We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist,' she told the Mail yesterday.

'My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.'
Professor Susan Greenfield

Her comments echoed those she made during a House of Lords debate earlier this month. Then she argued that exposure to computer games, instant messaging, chat rooms and social networking sites could leave a generation with poor attention spans.

I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf,' she said.

Lady Greenfield told the Lords a teacher of 30 years had told her she had noticed a sharp decline in the ability of her pupils to understand others.

'It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations,' she said.

She pointed out that autistic people, who usually find it hard to communicate, were particularly comfortable using computers.

'Of course, we do not know whether the current increase in autism is due more to increased awareness and diagnosis of autism, or whether it can - if there is a true increase - be in any way linked to an increased prevalence among people of spending time in screen relationships. Surely it is a point worth considering,' she added.

Psychologists have also argued that digital technology is changing the way we think. They point out that students no longer need to plan essays before starting to write - thanks to word processors they can edit as they go along. Satellite navigation systems have negated the need to decipher maps.

A study by the Broadcaster Audience Research Board found teenagers now spend seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen.

Educational psychologist Jane Healy believes children should be kept away from computer games until they are seven. Most games only trigger the 'flight or fight' region of the brain, rather than the vital areas responsible for reasoning.

Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, said: 'We are seeing children's brain development damaged because they don't engage in the activity they have engaged in for millennia.

'I'm not against technology and computers. But before they start social networking, they need to learn to make real relationships with people.'

The Week Ahead: 2/23 - 2/27

Monday (2/23)
Essay 1: Class Work
GOAL: I will want to see everyone's outline and thesis statement by the end of class
HW: Work on Essay 1

Tuesday (2/24)
The Reign of Terror and Napoleon
-The Reign of Terror
--Reading
-Napoleon
--Notes & J/Es
HW: Textbook Reading, TBA

Wednesday (2/25)
-Napoleon
--Notes
--Congress of Vienna - HW
HW: Work on Essay 1

Thursday (2/26)
UNIT Review: 1492: Napoleon
--Handout/Worksheet
HW: FINAL draft of Essay 1

Friday (2/27)
DUE: Essay 1 (100pts), DBQ (10pts), Outline (10pts)
Exam Review
Introduction to writing IDs
--Practice
HW: Study for Exam 1


Eating disorders are a silent epidemic - and the epidemic is spreading.

At one extreme, nearly a third of America is considered to be obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control. As recently as 1990, in no state was more than 15 percent of the population obese. By 2006, at least 20 percent of the population was considered obese in all but four states.

While millions of Americans are eating themselves to death, millions more are starving themselves to death. Anorexia is not just for models and celebrities. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 1 percent of women and adolescent girls have this debilitating, potentially deadly disease. Males account for just 10 percent of all cases, but their numbers are growing.

Bulimia is even more common. Those with bulimia purge their food, abuse laxatives or exercise obsessively to control their weight. Although research suggests that up to 4 percent of college-aged women have bulimia, it is increasingly common among women and men of all ages.

Eating disorders are serious illnesses. If left untreated, an estimated 20 percent of those with anorexia will die from malnutrition and other factors. Obesity, conversely, can double a person's susceptibility to heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

In spite of these startling statistics, surprisingly little has been done to address this epidemic. National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, which begins tomorrow, is a start, but eating disorders are a serious problem 52 weeks a year.

It would be hard to argue that eating disorders have not received their fair share of media attention. The problem is that media portrayals have left the impression that eating disorders mostly affect the rich and famous, and are the result of character deficiency and poor upbringing.

The number of afflicted individuals strongly suggests that these popular beliefs fall far short of explaining eating disorders. More critically, these stereotypes obscure reality and leave us all spectacularly vulnerable to the severe human suffering and excessive societal cost these conditions create.

So how can we do better?

The first step is to increase awareness of the seriousness of eating disorders and to accept, as we do with other major diseases, that there are many types of eating disorders and likely many causes.

We need to be wary of the quick fix. The science of eating turns out to be a complex subject involving the interplay of genetics, biochemistry, nutrition and psychology. There will be no "one size fits all" solution.

Lack of research funding is a major problem. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, research funding works out to $1.20 a year for each person with an eating disorder, compared with $159 for each person with schizophrenia.

As adults, we need to model healthy attitudes and habits, ignore fad diets and educate our children better. Most people can maintain a healthy weight through nutrition and exercise. It's not just about willpower, though. Some need professional assistance.

Insurers are uncertain about how best to cover eating disorders. They cover some eating disorders as mental health problems, others as medical problems and still others as both. Regardless of how eating disorders are covered, they pose a challenge, because the medical impact is so costly.

The good news is that with proper treatment, many people fully recover. If we begin to recognize eating disorders as the national epidemic that they are, a far greater percentage of patients can recover fully and enjoy happy and healthier lives.

Stuart Koman is president and CEO of Walden Behavioral Care Inc. of Waltham and Northampton.

HAPPY FRIDAY

Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning — which includes discussion of a "Terminator"-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters — is part of a hefty report funded by and prepared for the U.S. Navy's high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans.

Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.

"There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do," Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. "Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when ... programs could be written and understood by a single person."

The reality, Dr. Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program.

Accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field — an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

Stanford Prison Experiment

We were talking about this study in third block World History today. Here are a few clips of what the experiment was about. There are clear connections to world history in how people place themselves into roles that can influence their behavior in dramatic and unexpected ways.

Watch these below clips and post your reaction here! What is significant about Zimbardo's findings with respect to society and history?

Introduction to the study:

The Week Ahead

Tuesday (2/17)
The Enlightenment
--Work on Utopias
HW: FINISH Utopias

Wednesday (2/18)
The Enlightenment
--Present Utopias
The French Revolution
--Notes
HW: Textbook reading with questions

Thursday (2/19)
The French Revolution
--Discuss HW
--The 5 Paragraph History Essay
--DBQ: Causes of The French Revolution
HW: NONE!

Friday (2/20)
The French Revolution
--Essay work
--Current Events!
HW: Work on Essay: Outline due Monday

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

The science of romance: Brains have a love circuit

WASHINGTON - Like any young woman in love, Bianca Acevedo has exchanged valentine hearts with her fiance.

But the New York neuroscientist knows better. The source of love is in the head, not the heart.

She is one of the researchers in a relatively new field focused on explaining the biology of romantic love. And the unpoetic explanation is that love mostly can be understood through brain images, hormones and genetics.

That seems to be the case for the newly in love, the long in love and the brokenhearted.

"It has a biological basis. We know some of the key players," said Larry Young of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. There, he studies the brains of an unusual monogamous rodent to get a better clue about what goes on in the minds of people in love.

In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers say form a circuit of love. Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

The hot spot is the teardrop-shaped VTA. When people newly in love were put in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and shown pictures of their beloved, the VTA lit up. Same for people still madly in love after 20 years.

The VTA is part of a key reward system in the brain.

"These are cells that make dopamine and send it to different brain regions," said Helen Fisher, a researcher and professor at Rutgers University. "This part of the system becomes activated because you're trying to win life's greatest prize - a mating partner."

One of the research findings isn't so complimentary: Love works chemically in the brain like a drug addiction.

"Romantic love is an addiction; a wonderful addiction when it is going well, a horrible one when it is going poorly," Fisher said. "People kill for love. They die for love."

The connection to addiction "sounds terrible," Acevedo acknowledged. "Love is supposed to be something wonderful and grand, but it has its reasons. The reason I think is to keep us together."

But sometimes love does not keep us together. So the scientists studied the brains of the recently heartbroken and found additional activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is even more strongly associated with addiction.

"The brokenhearted show more evidence of what I'll call craving," said Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist also at Einstein medical college. "Similar to craving the drug cocaine."

The team's most recent brain scans were aimed at people married about 20 years who say they are still holding hands, lovey-dovey as newlyweds, a group that is a minority of married people. In these men and women, two more areas of the brain lit up, along with the VTA: the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

The ventral pallidum is associated with attachment and hormones that decrease stress; the raphe nucleus pumps out serotonin, which "gives you a sense of calm," Fisher said.

Those areas produce "a feeling of nothing wrong. It's a lower-level happiness and it's certainly rewarding," Brown said.

The scientists say they study the brain in love just to understand how it works, as well as for more potentially practical uses.

The research could eventually lead to pills based on the brain hormones which, with therapy, might help troubled relationships, although there are ethical issues, Young said. His bonding research is primarily part of a larger effort aimed at understanding and possibly treating social-interaction conditions such as autism. And Fisher is studying brain chemistry that could explain why certain people are attracted to each other. She's using it as part of a popular Internet matchmaking service for which she is the scientific adviser.

While the recent brain research is promising, University of Hawaii psychology professor Elaine Hatfield cautions that too much can be made of these studies alone. She said they need to be meshed with other work from traditional psychologists.

Brain researchers are limited because there is only so much they can do to humans without hurting them. That's where the prairie vole - a chubby, short-tailed mouselike creature - comes in handy. Only 5 percent of mammals more or less bond for life, but prairie voles do, Young said.

Scientists studied voles to figure out what makes bonding possible. In females, the key bonding hormone is oxytocin, also produced in both voles and humans during childbirth, Young said. When scientists blocked oxytocin receptors, the female prairie voles didn't bond.

In males, it's vasopressin. Young put vasopressin receptors into the brains of meadow voles - a promiscuous cousin of the prairie voles - and "those guys who should never, ever bond with a female, bonded with a female."

Researchers also uncovered a genetic variation in a few male prairie voles that are not monogamous - and found it in some human males, too.

Those men with the variation ranked lower on an emotional bonding scale, reported more marital problems, and their wives had more concerns about their level of attachment, said Hasse Walum, a biology researcher in Sweden. It was a small but noticeable difference, Walum said.

Scientists figure they now know better how to keep those love circuits lit and the chemicals flowing.

Young said that romantic love theoretically can be simulated with chemicals, but "if you really want, you know, to get the relationship spark back, then engage in the behavior that stimulates the release of these molecules and allow them to stimulate the emotions," he said. That would be hugging, kissing, intimate contact.

"My wife tells me that flowers work as well. I don't know for sure," Young said. "As a scientist it's hard to see how it stimulates the circuits, but I do know they seem to have an effect. And the absence of them seems to have an effect as well."

Diet could cut risk of dementia

A new study suggests a diet laden with fish, olive oil, vegetables and other foods common in Mediterranean-style cuisine may help ward off mild cognitive impairment, sometimes called borderline dementia. The study also suggests that such a diet reduces the chance of the transition from mild cognitive decline to Alzheimer's disease.

"We know from previous research that a healthy diet like this is protective for cardiovascular risk factors like cholesterol, hypertension and diabetes. Now this current study shows it may help brain function, too," says Nikolaos Scarmeas, assistant professor of clinical neurology at the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center.

Scarmeas and other researchers at Columbia examined, interviewed and screened 1,393 people with healthy brains and 482 patients with mild cognitive impairment. Study participants were questioned about their eating habits.

The study, which is published in this month's Archives of Neurology, reports that over an average of 4 1/2 years of follow-up, 275 of the 1,393 study participants who did not have mild cognitive impairment developed the condition. Those who had the highest adherence to a Mediterranean diet -- a menu rich in vegetables, legumes and fish, low in fat, meat and dairy, and high in monounsaturated fats like those in olive oil -- had a 28% lower risk of developing mild cognitive impairment than the one-third of participants who had the lowest scores for Mediterranean diet adherence. The middle one-third group had a 17% lower risk of developing mild cognitive impairment than those who ate the fewest Mediterranean foods.

Of the 482 study participants who had mild cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, 106 developed Alzheimer's disease roughly four years later. The one-third of participants with the highest scores for Mediterranean diet adherence had a 48% less risk of developing Alzheimer's than the one-third with the lowest diet scores.

The Week Ahead

Monday (2/9)
Journal Entry - What is reality?
Scientific Revolution
-Discuss HW
The Enlightenment
-Lecture & Notes
HW: Read pages 195-200 w/Handout

Tuesday (2/10)
The Enlightenment
-Journal Entry: The Sleep of Reason
-Lecture
-Debate/Discussion
-Reading: Locke
HW: NONE

Wednesday (2/11)
The Enlightenment
-Document Analysis: French and American revolutionary documents
-Utopia
HW: Read pages 202-205 in textbook and take notes on influences of the Enlightenment

Thursday (2/12)
The Enlightenment
-Discuss HW
-Utopia Project
HW: Read pages 206-211 in textbook and take notes on influences of the Enlightenment

Friday (2/13)
The Enlightenment
-Utopias
-Current Events
HW: NONE!

EXTRA CREDIT OPTION

Are you bias?

We have been talking about race in class. What is the psychology of racism? Are only some people racist? Are we ALL racist in some way? Visit the below links and participate in the demonstrations. Post your findings here! The deadline is Sunday at Midnight!

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect/

Psychologist looks to monks for keys to happiness

Feb. 6--Evolution has given the human brain a vast prefrontal cortex, a ball of neural tissue that enables us to engage in abstract reasoning, reflect on the past, and make predictions about the future.

It also allows us to wander a mental landscape filled with emotional minefields, says Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin.

"It allows us to screw up our emotions far more than other animals," he said during a visit to the University of Utah this week. "It allows us to persist in emotional responses beyond which they are still useful."

The answer to that disordered brain function may lie in mental training perfected by Buddhist monks over the centuries in Tibet, Davidson told a crowd of at least 600 who overflowed the Utah Museum of Fine Arts auditorium Wednesday for the Tanner Lecture on Human Values.

Davidson has become famous for using high-tech imaging to document the startling control the monks demonstrate over their emotional states. His resulting ideas about "neuroplasticity" -- the notion that we can enhance brain function through purposeful mental training -- threaten to upend conventional psychotherapy, which has little scientific basis.

"We were all taught that the brain is different from other organs in the way it changes over time. We thought the process was one of irrevocable death," Davidson said. "We now know that view is definitively wrong. The brain is capable of generating 7,000

to 9,000 cells a day."

Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, allows researchers like Davidson to observe brain function with unprecedented precision, bringing new scientific rigor to social science, experts said Thursday morning at a follow-up panel discussion. Davidson's findings hold potential for developing mental training techniques to improve people's health and quality of life, said psychiatrist Daniel Siegel.

"These are not just weird ideas. These are research-based interventions that can be applied in the real world," said Siegel, an expert in the field of interpersonal neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "When you teach these reflective skills to kids, they not only do better emotionally and socially, they also do better academically."

Davidson's work with monks was triggered by a visit with the Dalai Lama. The exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhism recruited masters of the faith, monks who had spent an average of 34,000 hours in intense meditation, for Davidson's studies.

Using scans that track brain function, the psychologist recorded high levels of activity in the parts of the monks' brains associated with emotional well-being. In further studies on other people, Davidson documented measurable changes in brain activity after two-week periods of mental training.

"The brain is the only organ designed to change in response to experience. Musical training changes the structure of the brain and when it begins earlier in life the greater the influence," he said.

Need a Creative Boost? Find the Blue Room.

Trying to improve your performance at work or write that novel? Maybe it’s time to consider the color of your walls or your computer screen.

If a new study is any guide, the color red can make people’s work more accurate, and blue can make people more creative.

In the study, published Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science, researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted tests with 600 people to determine whether cognitive performance varied when people saw red or blue. Participants performed tasks with words or images displayed against red, blue or neutral backgrounds on computer screens.

Red groups did better on tests of recall and attention to detail, like remembering words or checking spelling and punctuation. Blue groups did better on tests requiring imagination, like inventing creative uses for a brick or creating toys from shapes.

“If you’re talking about wanting enhanced memory for something like proofreading skills, then a red color should be used,” said Juliet Zhu, an assistant professor of marketing at the business school at the University of British Columbia, who conducted the study with Ravi Mehta, a doctoral student.

But for “a brainstorming session for a new product or coming up with a new solution to fight child obesity or teenage smoking,” Dr. Zhu said, “then you should get people into a blue room.”

The question of whether color can color performance or emotions has fascinated scientists, not to mention advertisers, sports teams and restaurateurs.

In a study on Olympic uniforms, anthropologists at Durham University in England found that evenly matched athletes in the 2004 Games who wore red in boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling defeated those wearing blue 60 percent of the time. The researchers suggested that red, for athletes as for animals, subconsciously symbolizes dominance.

Effects that were perhaps similarly primal were revealed in a 2008 study led by Andrew Elliot of the University of Rochester. Men considered women shown in photographs with red backgrounds or wearing red shirts more attractive than women with other colors, although not necessarily more likeable or intelligent.

Then there was the cocktail party study, in which a group of interior designers, architects and corporate color scientists built model rooms decorated as bars in red, blue or yellow. They found that more people chose the yellow and red rooms, but that partygoers in the blue room stayed longer. Red and yellow guests were more social and active. And while red guests reported feeling hungrier and thirstier than others, yellow guests ate twice as much.

Experts say colors may affect cognitive performance because of the moods they engender.

“When you feel that the situation you are in is problematic,” said Norbert Schwarz, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, “you are more likely to pay attention to detail, which helps you with processing tasks but interferes with creative types of things.”

By contrast, Dr. Schwarz said, “people in a happy mood are more creative and less analytic.”

Many people link red to problematic things, like emergencies or X’s on failing tests, experts say. Such “associations to red — stop, fire, alarm, warning — can be activated without a person’s awareness, and then influence what they are thinking about or doing,” said John A. Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale University. “Blue seems a weaker effect than red, but blue skies, blue water are calm and positive, and so that effect makes sense too.”

Still, Dr. Schwarz cautioned, color effects may be unreliable or inconsequential. “In some contexts red is a dangerous thing, and in some contexts red is a nice thing,” he said. “If you’re walking across a frozen river, blue is a dangerous thing.”

Indeed, Dr. Elliot of the University of Rochester said blue’s positive emotional associations were considered less consistent than red’s negative ones.

It might also matter whether the color dominates someone’s view, as on a computer screen, or is only part of what is seen. Dr. Elliot said that in the Science study, brightness or intensity of color — not just the color itself — might have had an effect.

Some previous cognitive studies found no effect from color, although some used mostly pastels or less distinctive tasks. One found that students taking tests did better on blue paper than on red, but Dr. Schwarz said the study used depressing blue and upbeat red.

The Science study’s conclusion that red makes people more cautious and detail-oriented coincides with Dr. Elliot’s finding that people shown red test covers before I.Q. tests did worse than those shown green or neutral colors. And on a different test, people with red covers also chose easier questions. I.Q. tests require more problem-solving than Dr. Zhu’s memory and proofreading questions.

When Dr. Zhu’s subjects were asked what red or blue made them think of, most said that red represented caution, danger or mistakes, and that blue symbolized peace and openness. Subjects were quicker to unscramble anagrams of “avoidance related” words like “danger” when the anagrams were on red backgrounds, and quicker with anagrams of positive, “approach related” words like “adventure” when they were on blue backgrounds.

The study also tested responses to advertising, finding that advertisements listing product details or emphasizing “avoidance” actions like cavity prevention held greater appeal on red backgrounds, while ones using creative designs or emphasizing positive actions like “tooth whitening” held more appeal on blue.

When the participants were asked if they believed red or blue would improve performance, most said blue for both detail-oriented and creative tasks. Maybe, Dr. Zhu said, that is because more people prefer blue.

The study did not involve different cultures, like China, where red symbolizes prosperity and luck. And it said nothing about mixing red and blue to make purple.

MySpace Turns Over 90,000 Names of Registered Sex Offenders

MySpace provided two state attorneys general the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders it had banned from its site in response to a subpoena.

The figure is 40,000 more than the amount previously acknowledged by MySpace, according to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who along with Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina are among officials pressing social networking sites to adopt more stringent safety measures.

“Almost 100,000 convicted sex offenders mixing with children on MySpace — shown by our subpoena — is absolutely appalling and totally unacceptable,” Mr. Blumenthal said in a statement. “For every one of them, there may be hundreds of others using false names and ages.”

Last year, MySpace, owned by News Corporation, and Facebook.com agreed to set security standards after the Web sites were criticized for not doing enough to protect minors from sexual predators lurking on social networking sites.

Facebook, a privately held company based in Palo Alto, Calif., said the company was still working with Mr. Blumenthal to respond to a similar subpoena.

The disclosure renews the debate of whether social networking sites are a haven for sex offenders. “This is just the tip of the iceberg on MySpace,” said John A. Phillips, chief executive of Aristotle, a company that supplies identity and age verification technologies for companies like the New York State Lottery, breweries and film studios. “These are just the convicted sex offenders” who used their real names.

MySpace’s disclosure follows a report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a panel created by 49 attorneys general, that said the issue is overblown. It concluded the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, was far more serious than sexual solicitation of minors by adults online.

Mr. Phillips, who served as a member of that task force, has been critical of the report. Ernest Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said the figure was “disturbing” but that there is no way to know how large the presence of online predators really is.

“We don’t know if that’s 80 percent of the population targeting kids on the Internet or 1 percent,” Mr. Allen said.

He commended MySpace for removing convicted sex offenders from its site. “This clearly reinforces the fact that there are a significant number of people who seek access to kids online,” Mr. Allen said.

Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for MySpace, said the company had spent the last two years purging problem members from its site.

“The reality is there are 700,000-plus sex offenders living in the streets of America,” Mr. Nigam said. “What we did was build cutting-edge technology to figure out where they might be living on the Internet and remove them from our site.”

MySpace reported that its community grows 10 percent year over year but has also reported a 36 percent drop in the number of registered sex offenders trying to create profiles.

John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, the company that makes the software MySpace uses to find the sex offenders, said that Facebook had become a haven for convicted offenders blocked from creating accounts on MySpace. Mr. Cardillo, who has approached Facebook about using his technology, said he could find 8,000 offenders on Facebook.

Barry Schnitt, a spokesman for Facebook, said that Mr. Cardillo’s figures were inflated. He also said the company actively monitors its Web site and users for suspicious activities.

“When you search for people on Facebook, you don’t get much information — a name and a thumbnail,” Mr. Schnitt said.

Welcome to World History: 1500 to the Present

And welcome to the class blog! Be sure to check out the blog multiple times a week for articles and other postings to comment on for participation points! Also, check in for news postings to prep you for our weekly current events game. (I will also be posting information for my IB Psychology students who are testing in the subject this spring -- you can ignore those posts of course!)

Every Sunday night I will post the "Week Ahead". I will attempt to update it as plans change throughout the week, but let's be clear, what I post on the agenda in the classroom is the most up-to-date agenda, not this blog!

The Week Ahead
Monday (2/2)
Introduction: the Course
--You and I
--Syllabus: web site, blog, etc.
--Participation Grade
--Survival Game Activity
HW: Obtain a notebook for your class journal

Tuesday (2/3)
Introduction: geography
--Mapping the world Group, then Class discussions [G,C]
-What is History
--The importance of primary sources
HW: NONE

Wednesday (2/4)
The World at 1500
-1492 - Video Clip
--Lecture/Notes
---Journal Entry 1: "America"
HW: Columbus' Journal Reading & Questions [R&Q]

Thursday (2/5)
--Discuss Columbus reading
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
-Lecture/Notes
-Interview a Picture
HW: Equiano's Journey [R&Q]

Friday (2/6)
-Discuss HW/Equiano
Current Events!
HW: Reading from Textbook: TBA