Month: January 2017

There are two types of people in this world: those who abhor potty mouths, and those who have turned the use of four-letter words into an art form. If you lean toward the latter side, you’re probably not afraid to admit it—and now, thanks to a little help from science, we know why. As Medical Daily reports, a new, two-part study conducted by a team of international researchers from Stanford, University of Cambridge, Maastricht University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology suggests that people who can easily let loose with a string of obscenities are likely more honest as well.

For the first part of the study, the team conducted interviews with 276 subjects from across the U.S., recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk, to get to the bottom of both their swearing habits—namely, their favorite curse words and how often they use them—and just how honest they are by asking them about blame-placing, game-playing, and other activities that help determine trustworthiness.

For the second part, the team analyzed the status updates of nearly 75,000 Facebook users, looking for linguistic indicators of deception, such as the use of third-person pronouns and more negative words, as determined by a 2003 report published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. [PDF]

“The consistent findings across the studies suggest that the positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust, and that the relationship found at the individual level indeed translates to the society level,” the study [PDF] concluded.

While swearing may sound uncouth to some, the researchers see it more as an honest form of expression—not anger or malice—and determined that the more curse words that come out of a person’s mouth, the more truthful he or she is likely to be, as swearing itself is a form of candid talk.

“You might think if someone is swearing a lot, this is a negative social behavior,” study co-author David Stillwell told the Daily Mail. “On the other hand, they are not filtering their language so they are probably also not putting their stories about what is going on through similar filters which might turn them into untruths.”

It’s not the first time researchers have delved into dirty talk: A 2016 study published in Language Sciences [PDF] determined that people who swear a lot may possess a higher verbal intelligence, while a 2014 study showed that swearing can actually provide pain relief.

F*ck yeah!

[h/t: Medical Daily]

Border control agencies are already using self-service kiosks to manage the crowds of international travelers entering their countries, but a high-tech type of kiosk in development can do more than just scan passports. The AVATAR—which stands for Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time—can detect travelers trying to lie their way through customs, according to Vocativ.

The self-service kiosks, created by the National Center for Border Security and Immigration at the University of Arizona in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security [PDF], scan travelers’ passports and ask the kinds of questions posed by human agents, such as “Do you have any fruits or vegetables?” Sensors can identify body cues like facial expression, vocal tics, pupil dilation—and even cues that human agents can’t see, like cardiorespiratory data—which could indicate that the person is lying and should be subject to additional screening. They can even see that you’re curling your toes, according to a press statement from AVATAR researcher Aaron Elkins of San Diego State University, a professor who studies deception.

The kiosks can be programmed to display several virtual agents, choosing from a woman or a man and a stern or a friendly face. They can be configured to interview in several languages.

AVATAR has been tested in a number of experiments in the European Union and North America, including a pilot program in Nogales, Arizona, in which it screened passengers in the Trusted Traveler program for suspicious or unusual behavior.

“AVATAR has been tested in labs, in airports, and at border crossing stations,” Elkins said in the press release. “The system is fully ready for implementation to help stem the flow of contraband, thwart fleeing criminals, and detect potential terrorists and many other applications in the effort to secure international borders.” However, not all machines built to detect lies are accurate—polygraph tests are largely useless at sussing out dishonesty, according to many psychologists—so there are plenty of reasons to proceed cautiously with this kind of technology.

[h/t Vocativ]

With the inauguration of President-Elect Donald Trump looming on January 20, it’s a good time to remember that Fox’s seminal animated sitcom, The Simpsons, has had an impressive track record for predicting future events: In March 2000, the show presented an alternate reality where Trump was in the Oval Office. Take a look at 10 other times Matt Groening’s dysfunctional family peered into their crystal ball—with surprisingly accurate results.

1. THE SIEGFRIED AND ROY TIGER ATTACK

Vegas stage magicians Siegfried and Roy had spent decades performing with their stable of tigers without serious incident. In 1993, The Simpsons used stand-ins Gunter and Ernst—clear parodies of the European duo—to express the writing staff’s doubts that their track record would hold up: One of their tigers attacks them while performing in Mr. Burns’s ill-fated Springfield casino. In 2003, Roy Horn was mauled by a tiger while on stage, severing an artery and leaving him with partial paralysis. Horn maintains the tiger bore him no ill will.

2. THE DON MATTINGLY HAIR SCANDAL

In a 1992 episode featuring Mr. Burns trying to sandbag competing softball teams by hiring professional baseball players, New York Yankee Don Mattingly is seen being kicked off the squad by the nuclear power czar over his long hair. (The animated Mattingly had only neat sideburns.) A month after recording his part, the real Mattingly was fined $250 by the real Yankees for refusing to cut his hair.

3. TWO WORDS: HORSE MEAT

In 1994’s “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song,” Principal Skinner is ousted from his seat after angering the superintendent. Unnoticed by his inspection: the fact that Lunchlady Doris prefers to prepare school lunches using giant tubs of horse parts. In 2013, several food producers in France, Sweden, and the UK were found to have distributed frozen burgers and other products that contained horse meat, an unwelcome additive they did not disclose on package labeling.

4. THEY NAMED THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IN ECONOMICS SIX YEARS EARLY

In a fall 2010 episode, Milhouse tries to impress longtime crush Lisa by contributing to a prediction sheet over who would win the Nobel Prize for Economics. His pick: Bengt Holmstrom of MIT. In 2016, Holmstrom was named a joint winner of the prize. (The episode’s recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Krusty the Clown, has yet to be honored by the committee.)

5. THE FIFA CORRUPTION SCANDAL

In a 2014 episode, Homer is petitioned by the head of an unnamed football (a.k.a. soccer) league to help foster a better image after allegations of corruption emerge; he’s quickly carried away in handcuffs. In 2015, FIFA, the world’s leading governing body of soccer, made headlines for a widespread scandal involving the arrest of seven FIFA executives for abusing their positions for financial gain.

6. THE LEMON TREE THIEF

During a 1995 rivalry with the residents of Shelbyville, Bart and his friends are puzzled by the disappearance of a lemon tree from within Springfield’s town limits. In 2013, a woman in Houston was similarly confused by the disappearance of her own lemon tree, which had been excavated from the ground and carted off. The victim, Kae Bruney, told local reporters that the thief was apparently too stupid to realize it was too late in the season to plant elsewhere.

7. A BABY TRANSLATOR

Homer’s down-and-out half-brother, Herb, reversed his fortunes in a 1992 episode when his handheld baby-babble translating device became a sensation. In 2015, an app called the Infant Cries Translator purported to convert your child’s incoherent cries into something resembling speech. The app’s developers claim they analyzed the mewling of 100 newborns to help identify their particular diaper-related needs.

8. A SNAKE MURDER SPREE

In the 1993 episode “Whacking Day,” Lisa Simpson is dismayed to see the town caught up in the annual tradition of hunting and killing overpopulated snakes. In 2013 and 2016, Florida’s Everglades region sanctioned a real whack-a-reptile contest in an attempt to curb the area’s dangerous abundance of invasive Burmese pythons. Organizers used the less-sensational name “Florida Python Challenge.”

9. COOKING GREASE HEISTS

In 2008, The New York Times declared “fryer grease has become gold” for its application as engine fuel after undergoing conversion and detailed a criminal who had siphoned nearly 2500 gallons of the stuff from a Northern California Burger King and other outlets. In 1999, Homer and Bart attempted a similar heist at the grade school’s cafeteria, before being stopped by Groundskeeper Willie.

10. THE THREE-EYED FISH

Tri-eyed fish Blinky was pulled out of the water by Bart in a 1990 episode, a nod to the polluted environment surrounding Springfield’s nuclear power plant. In 2011, fishermen in Argentina caught a three-eyed specimen in a reservoir being fed water from a nearby nuclear power station.

The wife of the president was just that—until a gun-toting geologist named Lou Hoover moved into the East Wing.

In the spring of 1929, the White House was busy preparing for a tea party. This wasn’t some run-of-the-mill White House tea party: It was a top secret shindig, with staffers and the Secret Service under strict orders not to speak of it.

All the fuss was because one of the 15 invitees on the guest list, Jessie DePriest, the wife of Illinois representative Oscar DePriest, was African-American. Not since Theodore Roosevelt had Booker T. Washington over for dinner three decades prior had a black person paid a social visit to the White House. But now, in the height of the Jim Crow era, Lou Hoover, wife of Herbert, was undeterred. She wanted DePriest to come, and her office had drafted and redrafted the guest list to include people who would accept her at the table.

Despite efforts to keep the party under wraps, the press found out, and, sure enough, a furor ensued. Newspapers lambasted the first lady for “defiling” the White House; the state legislatures of Texas, Georgia, and Florida passed resolutions rebuking her. Lou didn’t apologize. Although the reaction bothered her, she refused to acknowledge the controversy publicly. After all, this was nothing compared to the stress she had coolly handled while living in China, where she laughed off death threats during the Boxer Rebellion.

In many ways, Lou Hoover was the first truly modern first lady. She was one of the first first ladies to drive her own car (to the chagrin of the Secret Service), give radio addresses, and create a separate policy agenda for the East Wing. Usually, it’s Eleanor Roosevelt who comes to mind when people think of first ladies who made their own mark. But it was Lou who set an undeniable precedent for Eleanor herself, as well as future first ladies.

Lou was independent from the start. She enrolled at Stanford in 1894 and was the first female to graduate with a degree in geology, becoming one of only a handful of female geologists in the country. It was at Stanford that she met Herbert—at a dinner party where geology professor John Casper Branner (a mentor to both Herbert and Lou) and his wife had played matchmaker and seated the two together. They bonded immediately over a mutual interest—rocks.

An intensely private person, Lou waited until her graduation, three years after Bert’s, to tell anyone she planned to marry him. Even the Branners didn’t know how successful their matchmaking had been: “I thought they were just pals,” Mrs. Branner is quoted as saying in Nancy Beck Young’s Lou Henry Hoover: Activist First Lady. Bert’s proposal arrived via telegram: “Going to China via San Francisco. Will you go with me?” Three months later, he showed up in California. Within two weeks, they were married. Twenty-four hours after that, they were on the S.S. Coptic, headed to the Pacific.

It was nearly impossible for a woman, no matter how qualified, to land a geology job at the time. So while Bert worked as a consulting engineer to the Chinese government for a lucrative $20,000 salary, Lou busied herself learning Chinese. She did, however, sometimes follow Bert underground to inspect the mines, often to the shock of the miners.

By the summer of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion—a grassroots movement aimed at quashing foreign influences—had consumed the country. That June, the Empress Dowager Cixi declared war on all foreigners. But that didn’t bother Lou. She patrolled her garden with a .38 caliber pistol, rode her bike around town until a bullet blew out one of her tires, and calmly played solitaire as shells fell at her front door. As the danger grew, Bert tried to convince Lou to leave. She refused to go until he did too.

That August, the couple left China. A year later they landed in London, where Bert’s company was based, and after a couple of years they began raising two boys. Kids in tow, Lou accompanied Bert to Burma, Egypt, India, Russia, and Australia. Though neither of them had grown up rich, mining was lucrative, and the Hoovers were on their way to becoming millionaires by the end of their twenties. Wealth liberated Lou from housework, allowing her to take advantage of the freedoms available to women of her class: traveling, domestic help, and the luxury of time‚ which she spent collecting rock samples and sending them to Branner. It was during this period that Lou, who would eventually become fluent in five languages, published an award-winning Latin-to-English translation of a 1565 guide to mining and metallurgy.

After World War I began, Lou moved her sons to California and then returned to Europe to help Bert coordinate food and financial aid in neutral Belgium. (She was decorated by King Albert I for her work there.) When the U.S. entered the war, she moved to Washington, D.C. and started a couple of boardinghouses, including one for female employees of the Food Administration, which Bert was now heading. After the war, her husband’s political prospects blossomed—in 1920, his name was floated as a possible presidential candidate, and in 1921, he became Commerce Secretary. When he ran for president seven years later, he snagged 444 electoral votes.

Before moving into the White House, Lou knew she could reinvent the role of first lady. Instead of setting fashion trends like her predecessor, Grace Coolidge, Lou used her husband’s professional standing to do work for the causes she considered most important. She continued to teach women to respond to crises and disasters as she had during World War I and advocated for their right to participate in sporting events such as the Olympics.

Soon Lou was helping address another crisis. Just eight months after Hoover took office, the market crashed. People in need flooded the first lady with a stream of letters. Usually, they pleaded for money or clothes, though one old man simply asked that she send a plant to his wife. (Lou sent two: an ivy and a begonia.)

As the mailbox overflowed, Lou began to organize. She hired a staff to handle the letters and implemented a system. When the problem could be handled by a government agency, Lou’s office forwarded it. Cases dear to her heart were sent to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, while others were delivered to the offices of the Girl Scouts. (As national president from 1922 to 1925, she helped grow the small club into a thriving organization.) Her office coordinated with more than 40 federal, state, local, and private groups to provide relief. In situations where Lou knew none of the organizations could help, she would forward a letter to a personal friend of hers, asking for help on this one case—and then quietly send whatever money was needed too.

The quasi-governmental organization Lou created was unlike anything a first lady had done before. It acted as an informal clearinghouse, coordinating aid, independent of the president’s office. It helped, but not nearly enough—and neither did the Hoover administration’s policies. After one disastrous term in the White House, Lou and Bert left D.C.—and the Roosevelts moved in. Eleanor Roosevelt picked up where Lou left off. Her early relief efforts mirrored the system Lou had set up.

Before the Hoovers moved out, Eleanor came by the White House for a tour. Lou took her from room to room, pointing out which pieces of furniture would stay. In one of the oval-shaped parlors, Eleanor mentioned she liked the curtains. Lou offered to leave them behind. That’s the kind of woman she was—quietly generous.

America wasn’t as generous with the Hoovers: With the country still in dire financial straits, Americans rushed to disown anything having to do with them. The couple did little to argue their own defense. Lou remained characteristically tight-lipped about her work, even keeping secrets about her charities from her husband. When she died of a heart attack in 1944, Bert found, to his surprise, a stash of checks in her desk—hundreds of them. They were from cash-strapped people she had helped over the years, looking to repay her. Lou had refused to cash them.