The bright side of death: Awareness of mortality can result in positive behaviors

ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) ? Contemplating death doesn't necessarily lead to morose despondency, fear, aggression or other negative behaviors, as previous research has suggested. Following a review of dozens of studies, University of Missouri researchers found that thoughts of mortality can lead to decreased militaristic attitudes, better health decisions, increased altruism and helpfulness, and reduced divorce rates.

"According to terror management theory, people deal with their awareness of mortality by upholding cultural beliefs and seeking to become part of something larger and more enduring than themselves, such as nations or religions," said Jamie Arndt, study co-author and professor of psychological sciences. "Depending on how that manifests itself, positive outcomes can be the result."

For example, in one study American test subjects were reminded of death or a control topic and then either imagined a local catastrophe or were reminded of the global threat of climate change. Their militaristic attitudes toward Iran were then evaluated. After being reminded of death, people who were reminded of climate change were more likely to express lower levels of militarism than those who imagined a local disaster.

"The differences seen in this study resulted from the size of the group with which the test subjects identified," said Ken Vail, lead author and psychology doctoral student. "In both cases, they responded to the awareness of mortality by seeking to protect the relevant groups. When the threat was localized, subjects aggressively defended their local group; but when the threat was globalized, subjects associated themselves with humanity as a whole and became more peaceful and cooperative."

After real catastrophes, such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, people's heightened fear and awareness of death had both positive and negative effects.

"Both the news media and researchers tended to focus on the negative reaction to these acts of terrorism, such as violence and discrimination against Muslims, but studies also found that people expressed higher degrees of gratitude, hope, kindness and leadership after 9/11." Vail said. "In another example, after the Oklahoma City bombing, divorce rates went down in surrounding counties. After some stimuli escalates one's awareness of death, the positive reaction is to try to reaffirm that the world has positive aspects as well."

In their personal lives, people also were influenced to make positive choices after their awareness of death was increased. Studies found that conscious thoughts of death can inspire intentions to exercise more. Other studies found that keeping mortality in mind can reduce smoking and increase sunscreen use.

Even subconscious awareness of death can more influenced behavior. In one experiment, passers-by who had recently overheard conversations mentioning the value of helping were more likely to help strangers if they were walking within sight of cemeteries.

"Once we started developing this study we were surprised how much research showed positive outcomes from awareness of mortality," said Arndt. "It seems that people may be just as capable of doing the opposite and 'looking on the bright side of death,' as the Monty Python song says."

The paper "When Death is Good for Life: Considering the Positive Trajectories of Terror Management" was published online on April 5, 2012, in Personality and Social Psychology Review, a journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP).

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. K. E. Vail, J. Juhl, J. Arndt, M. Vess, C. Routledge, B. T. Rutjens. When Death is Good for Life: Considering the Positive Trajectories of Terror Management. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2012; DOI: 10.1177/1088868312440046

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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Cyanogenmod 9 struts its stuff on HTC's One X

Cyanogenmod 9 struts its stuff on HTC's One X

So you've procured yourself HTC's new super slim, 4.7-inch halo phone: the One X. By now, you probably have the device set up just the way you like it: applications configured, widgets in place and Adele ringtone set. But there's just something else left to do, isn't there? If (like some of us) you're a smartphone user who just can't leave well enough alone, you'll be excited to learn that a build of Cyanogenmod 9 for the Uno Equis has been made available via the MoDaCo forums. The ROM will deliver that stock Android experience, and all those CM9 accoutrements, to those that don't fancy the panache of Sense 4.0. The forum post does caution that the One's camera, and hotspot functionality, aren't currently working, so interested parties best proceed with caution. If all that doesn't phase you, grab a cup of coffee, get the Android SDK all warmed up and take this ROM for a spin!

Cyanogenmod 9 struts its stuff on HTC's One X originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Romney says he would have ordered bin Laden killed

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NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, loads it with dual Kepler GPUs, charges $1k

ImageWould you look at that? NVIDIA hinted it would be coming today, and it looks like the tease is living up to the hype. The company stormed into the weekend at its Shanghai Game Festival by unleashing its latest offering, the GeForce GTX 690 -- and oh yeah, it's packing two 28nm Kepler GPUs! Trumping the recently released GTX 680 as the "worlds fastest graphics card," it's loaded with a whopping 3,072 Cuda cores. The outer frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, while you'll find thixomolded magnesium alloy around the fan for vibration reduction and added cooling. Aiding in cooling even further, the unit also sports a dual vapor chamber and center-mounted fan. It'll cost you a spendy $1,000 to pick up one of these puppies come May 3rd, and you'll likely be tempted to double up -- two can run together in SLI as an effective quad-core card. With that said, NVIDIA claims that a single 690 runs 4dB quieter and handles about twice the framerate as a duo of GTX 680s in SLI -- impressive, but we'll reserve judgement until we see it for ourselves. Check out the press release after the break if you'd like more information in the meantime (...and yes, it runs Crysis -- 2 Ultra to be exact -- at 57.8fps, according to NVIDIA).

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, loads it with dual Kepler GPUs, charges $1k

NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, loads it with dual Kepler GPUs, charges $1k originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Graduation year drives Facebook connections for college grads

Monday, April 30, 2012

Are you connected to college friends on Facebook? Research from North Carolina State University shows that these social networks tend to form around graduation year or university housing ? rather than other interests.

Researchers examined the first 100 colleges and universities to have students, faculty or staff join Facebook when the site exclusively contained .edu email addresses. As students, faculty and staff joined Facebook, social networks were formed. Each university, in essence, formed its own network ? ranging in size from 762 to 50,000.

"We wanted to see what defining characteristics grouped people together within these networks," says Amanda Traud, a Ph.D. student in biomathematics at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the study. The social networks studied in this case included all of the users and their Facebook friends from these schools in September 2005. The data was given to the researchers by Adam D'Angelo of Facebook.

The researchers used community detection techniques to identify groups within each network. A community was defined as a group in which individuals were more connected to each other than to the rest of the network. The researchers then used statistical tools to determine what characteristics dominated each group.

"We found that most groups were largely composed of people with the same graduation year, though some groups were composed of people who lived in the same university housing," Traud says. "I found it interesting that the subject people majored in and where people went to high school played little to no role in the social structure."

The university networks that had groups dominated by housing also tended to have smaller residence halls, or halls in which students lived for more than one year.

"This indicates that universities can contribute to creating a strong sense of community among students by manipulating their student housing efforts," Traud says. "In the absence of these efforts, graduation year seems to be the default."

###

The paper, "Social structure of Facebook networks," was co-authored by Dr. Peter Mucha at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Dr. Mason Porter of the University of Oxford. The paper is published online in the journal Physica A.

North Carolina State University: http://www.ncsu.edu

Thanks to North Carolina State University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Optical Clocks—Already Ridiculously Accurate—Get Synchronized

A grandfather clock?s swinging pendulum marks time in seconds. A quartz watch?s oscillating crystal can segment time better: into thousandths of a second. Then there are super-powerful optical clocks, which can slice time into quadrillionths (one million times smaller than a billionth) of a second.

But there?s a problem with the precision of these new optical clocks: They are actually more precise than the technology that exists to take advantage of them. But a new advancement, detailed recently in the journal Science, presents a solution and opens up wide new possibilities for what ultra-accurate clocks can do.

The Problem


The clocks familiar to most people use oscillations like those from a pendulum or crystal as a reference point for telling time. Atomic clocks monitor atoms jumping between energy states, and for the last decade or so, scientists have been working on developing atomic clocks that use frequencies in the optical range?the kind of radiation we see as visible light?to make extremely stable clocks. "These are the best clocks we know how to make," says Bruce Warrington of the National Measurement Institute in Australia.

The problem is that these clocks are so accurate that you can?t compare one to another. If you try to send a signal from one optical clock to another optical clock in a different lab, you encounter noise from the radio or satellite transmission you?re using to send the signal. This noise distorts the signal. A regular clock isn?t precise enough in the first place to be impaired as a result of this, but an optical clock is. "We hit a limit," says Warrington. "We can?t compare the clocks at the level of their own performance."

The Solution


A team from Germany connected two optical clocks in different cities using an optical fiber?a hair-thin glass wire that transmits signals with light. Optical fibers allow you to send signals long distances with little distortion. The German team was able to send a clear signal from an optical clock at one lab in Garching, Germany, to another in Braunschweig, Germany, across a distance of 572 miles.

"This is really spectacular work," says Scott Diddams, a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo. There are still obstacles to overcome?how to transmit these signals overseas, for example, which could require advances in satellite technology or running an optical cable under the ocean, a huge undertaking. But the achievement opens the door for future technologies to take advantage of optical clocks? extraordinary precision.

"An optical clock is so sensitive, it?s like having a super-powerful microscope," Diddams says. "You just have to find some physical aspect that the frequency of the clock depends on." To put it another way, you need to find a physical phenomenon for which the optical clocks? incredible accuracy provides a useful measurement. Once you find that, you need to be able to compare two clocks in order to measure the phenomenon: one to take readings, and a reference clock to compare those measurements with.

What to Do With Optical Clocks


Optical clocks are now one instance of a technology going ahead of any particular use for it. That is, now that scientists can synch up these extremely accurate clocks, they need to figure out what they can do with them.

One possible use is in measuring Earth?s gravitational field, which is tricky to do in full detail because it requires adjusting for the theory of relativity, since gravity can affect time. "If you take a clock and shift it from the bottom of a mountain to the top, it ticks a little faster at the top, because time is passing differently," Warrington says. Scientists already do this with GPS satellites, which adjust for relativity to match corresponding clocks on the ground. Super-accurate synced clocks could allow researchers to create more precise maps of the planet?s gravitational field, which could clue us in to the locations of underground features such as mineral deposits and the water table.

Other possible applications could emerge in radio astronomy and financial markets. In radio astronomy, readings from many earthbound radio telescopes separated by vast distances could be combined using synchronized optical clocks to make more accurate observations of the universe. "It will allow us to look much more sensitively and deeper into space than anything so far," Warrington says.

In the current financial market, computers do a lot of the trading. So, as the speed of computing continues to increase, so does the speed of the trading. "What that does is set tighter and tighter requirements on the clocks that are time-stamping the transactions," Warrington says. "It might start to matter what happens from microsecond to microsecond, or even finer." Optical clocks that can be accurately synced will be able to handle these rapid-fire transactions.

Scientists say the most exciting uses for optical clocks probably are things we haven?t come up with yet. When less sensitive atomic clocks were first built in the 1950s, there were not yet any real-world applications for them. "Then, GPS was created," Warrington says. "The history of clocks is one where the applications always follow the invention."

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RIM's Secret Weapon for Reviving BlackBerry: HTML5

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