Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-5-2009

[andrewducker]

• Tax in the UK
  Looking at how tax affects people in different income brackets - unsurprisingly the poor pay the highest percentage of their income in tax.
  (tags: tax UK economics politics)
• Brain difference in psychopaths identified
  They found a significant reduction in the integrity of the small particles that make up the structure of the uncinate fasciculus of psychopaths, compared to control groups of people with the same age and IQ. Also, the degree of abnormality was significantly related to the degree of psychopathy.
  (tags: brain psychology crime)
• Autism hits body language skill
  They were shown a number of dots on a computer screen and asked which way they were moving. A proportion of dots moved noticeably to the left or right, while the others moved randomly.
  
  The performance of the autism group was significantly below that of the others in both tests, leading researchers to speculate that there may be serious differences between the ability to process visual information.
  (tags: health vision autism)
• The Lovely Bones Trailer
  In which Peter Jackson goes back to Heavenly Creatures rather than all his elvish nonsense.
  (tags: cinema movies trailer PeterJackson)
• Toy Story/Toy Story 2 coming in 3D
  I'll be going to see that then!
  (tags: movies pixar 3d video trailer)
• The Album Is Dead, Long Live the App
  As the dying music industry thrashes wildly in all directions, looking for a way to rake in the profits, the lawyers circle, ready to drink the last of its lifeblood.
  (tags: iphone music albums business apps media)
• China finds the cure for net addiction!
  Beat addicts to death. It's the only way to be sure!
  (tags: internet china addiction EpicFail)
• You don't know chickens
  A very short piece on what chickens are like in their natural habitat. Well worth a minute of your time.
  (tags: animals birds nature)

Comments

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

On the autism thing - I wonder did they test with genuine body language or acting? It would make a hell of a difference. I am not autistic, nor even (so far as I know) particularly AS, but I have always had a great deal of trouble when people's words/own perceptions/explanations of their emotions/mood/thoughts are mismatched with what their body says. It made me doubt for a very long time that I could read people at all... which type of thing would make it so much harder if it was going on. I have a vauge muttering in the back of my head - I wonder do autistic people do well or badly with reading the emotions/intentions of animals?

Incidentally, I'll go with body language every single time now, observing people as you would wildlife and ignoring the chatter seems to work pretty well for me(there have been some good experiments on that too as I recall).

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I know they used dots - but they got the dot patterns representing the body language from somewhere. I can't make the videos out properly on the BBC site.

The difference in the random shift/ shift to right-left perception does argue for a perceptual issue though. Anyone got any better writeup?

[drplokta]

The tax link is incomplete. The difference between benefits and negative taxes is purely semantic (you could just rename "Child Benefit" as "Children's VAT Rebate", for example) , so you have to look at benefits as well as taxes in determining whether or not we have progressive taxation. According to the figures in the link, the poorest quintile end up with a net after-tax-and-benefit income that's over three times their before-tax-and-benefit income (including benefits in kind such as health care and education), while the richest quintile have an after-tax-and-benefit income of around 70% of their before-tax-and-benefit income. So effective tax rates go from -200% to +30%, which looks pretty progressive to me.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Good links today. Also eeeeeeee @ Rachel Weisz. I get a happy little skip every time I see her. She's fab.