Links #5

Here are this week’s links on deception and related topics. Mostly sourced from delicious, google news, and google reader (links attributed when remembered).

First article is a short piece on online dating and deception. Quote: 

Joe Tracy, editor of Online Dating Magazine, says (gasp!) people often misrepresent themselves in dating profiles. Men, his site found, lie most often about age, height and income; women are most likely to stretch the truth about weight, physical appearance and age.

A specific case of deception plans, and propaganda campaigns, by pharmaceutical companies. Here is a list of some of the ruses they pulled off.

There have been a couple of posts floating around about Twitter being used a platform for propaganda and deception.  Here are some of the posts:

• Foreign Policy’s ‘Net Effect’ blog on Twitter and Thailand.
• The Seminal on Moldova and Twitter.
• Bruce Schneier on ‘Fake facts on twitter‘.

Also, tangentally related is these series of links via Metafilter on social networks and blogs maintaining the flow of information under the Fijian coup: 

• ABC Radio on Fijian Bloggers.
• Found via one of the blogs linked to on Metafilter was this post by a Fijian blogger. It mentions that the CEO of one of the major Fijian ISPs is politically connected to the coup, and therefore there is a chance that users of said ISP could be under electronic surveillance.

The next two links were via Mind Hacks:

This really interesting article on neuroscientific explanations for magic shows how magic can help science understand trickery and deception. Quote:

Kuhn and his colleagues are tracking down exactly what happens in the incredulous brain as it witnesses an impossible act, what the researchers call the “neurobiology of disbelief.”

In particular, Kuhn is studying how people understand cause and effect relationships. Everyone knows that coins disappear because someone moves them, not because a magician waves his hand over them — and certainly not because Harry Potter mutters a spell.

“What magic is doing is producing disbelief and a sense of wonder,” Kuhn says, “and that’s what we are studying.” 

This Pure Pedantry post on a neuroscience of envy and schadenfreude paper is also very interesting (both these feelings are useful for deceptive purposes; e.g. using them to exploit certain actions, or views in others, so you can carry out another indirect plan). Quote on findings: 

Interestingly, the ACC activation in this task was only increased when the subject could relate to the object of their envy. The authors’ interpreted this finding that when a subject cannot relate to the other person — when they are not “self-relevant” — you don’t feel envy towards them: “That is, if the possession of the target person is superior and the comparison domain is self-relevant, we feel intense envy. When the comparison domain is not self-relevant, we do not feel strong envy, even if the possession is superior. When the comparison target is neither superior nor self-relevant, we are indifferent to the target.”

Tim Lott on the ubiquity of lying in politics and society.

Radio National’s ‘Philosopher’s Zone’ also had a podcast on a similar topic: moralism in politics, and is it an advantage to be moral in politics? It also discusses how ‘moralizing’ has become a bad trait. Quote:

Alan Saunders: But moralising as a vice; as vices go, it’s a fairly new vice isn’t it? I mean people 100 years ago probably wouldn’t have talked about moralizing as being a bad thing.

Tony Coady: It’s a tricky thing to say why this has come about. In the book I speculate that it may well be that it’s come to the fore in a world in which Christianity in the West has lost its central place in a whole range of human social activities and so on. But in which some of its core ideas have remained very strong, and some of those are related to the idea that someone who sits in judgment on others should be extremely careful about judging others when they themselves might be prey to the very same evils that they seem to detect in others.

I think this was one of the things that worried me about all this stuff about ‘axis of evil’ and so on. You know, there’s the projection of immorality into the outside and no sense in how these categories might apply to oneself. And in international affairs, I think this is fairly common, the idea of demonising all sorts of other agents in the international sphere without any sense that you yourself may actually be prone to the same, or similar, or slightly less dramatic versions of the same vice. That’s another problem with the moralizer.

Another Radio National podcast — ‘Big Ideas’ – also had two ex-Intelligence case officers discussing their careers and how it influences their fiction writing.

New Scientist has an article on how poor media reporting damages science.

Marginal Revolution has a post on fake TVs used to deter crime.

Also via Marginal Revolution is this Economist piece on how people judge others on their looks.

There was also an interesting quote by the Iranian president from NROs ‘The Corner’. He stated the following: 

After this I will participate in all international summits to the displeasure of all enemies. . . . If they leave, we will arrange all the summits, but it is such a strange thing that they are not ready to even listen to parts of the crimes they have committed against humanity. How are they going to prepare for the prosecution [awaiting them] . . .?

Thanks to divine wisdom, the criminal heads of state of Western countries will soon be tried for their crimes against humanity. . . . Those arranging the summit had planned everything, they had invested a lot to weaken the Islamic Republic, but as usual they had not counted on one thing, which is the divine cunning from which the Islamic Republic benefitted. . . . [emphasis added]

Threat wire has a post on competitive adaptation between the FBI cybercrime squads and hackers. 

Officer.com has a series of articles dealing with technology in low-light conditions during police patrols called ‘Deception in the Dark’: 

• Article 1
• Article 2
• Article 3

This extensive deception is impressive. Quote: 

The fraud and deception at Satyam Computer Services in India was so in-depth that it included dual accounting books, thousands of forged invoices, thousands of unnecessary employees and dozens of fake bank statements, according to court records analyzed by the New York Times.

Through the deception, managers, auditors and an adviser were able to create a perception that the company was “carrying out huge volumes of business” so it attract potential customers and investors, according to the NYT. All the while, cash was flowing into the hands of those who architected the deception.

WebMD has a list of ways to catch a liar.

That’s it for this week.

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~ by D on April 25, 2009.