So, welcome back to Sunday Linkasaurolophus.

Remember, if it were 700 miles South-South-East from here, it would be Lurkusaurolophus.

First, according to the China Digital Times, Beijing is now filling up with Obama Fried Chicken:

which would probably seem racist if it were not so completely bizarre.

Next, you know that show Lie to Me, where Tim Roth is really creepy and sort of a dick, but is successful and beloved because he can tell when someone is lying by reading their “microexpressions”? The show is somewhat based on the work of psychologist Paul Ekman, who developed the Facial Action Coding System for reading people’s emotions.

The problem, apparently, is that the scientific literature comes down squarely on the side of “That doesn’t work.”

Well, as a part of civilization’s ongoing slide into self-referentiality, researchers at Michigan State performed a study to see whether watching an episode of Lie to Me enhanced people’s ability to tell whether or not people are lying.

Hilariously, the study found that watching Lie to Me actually makes people worse at distinguishing between people who are telling the truth and people who are lying.

You can read more about it over at Mindhacks.

Never one to miss a chance for self promotion, I thought I would use this as an opportunity to resurrect one of the early Darwin Eats Cake strips:

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=3 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/3.jpg

In related news, people who spend all their time sitting on the sofa watching The Biggest Loser do not get any thinner.

Finally, about a week ago, the New York Times published an editorial by self-identified neuromarketing expert Martin Lindstrom, in which he explained how brain-imaging studies prove that we are not addicted to our iPhones, we are in love with our iPhones.

The only problem is that it was a huge pile of crap. It was a misleading (perhaps disingenuous) description of research that was done badly (perhaps disingenuously) in the first place.

The multitudinous flaws in the editorial have been pointed out by a bunch of folks: Here are at least some of them. If you wrote about this, but I missed you, send me an e-mail, or add a link in the comments.

Tal Yarkoni provided, I think, the most detailed point-by-point takedown of the editorial. If you want the nitty gritty of what’s wrong read this.

David Dobbs covered it in a post entitled “fMRI Shows My Bullshit Detector Going Ape Shit Over iPhone Lust.”

Neurocritic’s post is titled “Neuromarketing means never having to say you’re peer reviewed (but here’s your NYT op-ed space).”

Russ Poldrack addresses the editorial in a post called “NYT Op-Ed + fMRI = complete crap.”

Nathan Collins relates the logical error in the editorial to George Bush (Sr.)’s infamous 1988 Willie Horton campaign ad.

Forty prominent neuroscientists wrote a letter to the Times in response to the editorial, which was promptly whittled down. However, you can read the original letter (and see the caliber of the writers) here.

Tal Yarkoni wrapped up the aftermath here, including the weasely non-response response Lindstrom posted in several blog comment threads.

It seems like a sad and embarrassing day for the Times.

On the other hand, when you remember the role that the newspaper of record played in lying to the country in the lead up to the Iraq war, maybe it’s actually a good day for the Times. I mean, misinterpreting fMRI studies hasn’t killed tens to hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Yet.

So, welcome back to Sunday Linkasaurolophus, the weekly feature where I point you towards things that I wish I had written. This week: Kate Harding, Dorothy Parvaz, and Tim Harford.

Kate Harding writes in the wake of the week’s news about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. She eloquently makes the distinction between infidelity and sexual assault and takes the media to task not only for failing to understand this distinction, but for responding to the Strauss-Kahn allegations with a sanctimonious and hypocritical that-would-never-happen-here-in-America attitude. Highlights include:

There are certainly points of overlap between being a cad and being a criminal: An overblown sense of entitlement, an apparent lack of empathy for anyone you might hurt, an erection. But cheating on your wife is not a gateway drug to sexual assault. They are two different things, one of them a crime. If you’re a journalist, please take a moment now to repeat that to yourself a few times.

And then please consider this: A man who’s known for grabbing women’s breasts and asses without their consent (a crime) is not just some amusing, slightly pathetic Pepe Le Pew cartoon until the day someone accuses him of non-consensual penetration. He was actually already a sexual predator! And yet, inevitably, as soon as someone does accuse him of rape, friends who are familiar with his history of non-consensual groping will rush to tell the press that the accusations are absurd, insulting, inconceivable! Sure, everyone knew the lion liked to chase gazelles and pin them down and bat them around a bit for fun, but he would never eat one. That’s just not in his nature.

Do you see the difference? One guy treats women rather shabbily, and he should be ashamed of himself. The other guy treats women like inanimate objects he is entitled to do whatever the fuck he wants to, and he should be ashamed of himself and also held legally responsible for his crimes. The line between the two is really not all that fine or blurry, you guys! It’s actually pretty recognizable!

Dorothy Parvaz, a reporter for Al Jazeera recounted her experiences of being detained and interrogated, first in Syria, then in Iran. She was missing for a total of nineteen days.

One afternoon, the beating we heard was so severe that we could clearly hear the interrogator pummelling his boots and fists into his subject, almost in a trance, yelling questions or accusations rhythmically as the blows landed in what sounded like the prisoner’s midriff.

My roommate shook and wept, reminding me (or perhaps herself) that they didn’t beat women here.

There was a brief break before the beating resumed, and my first impulse was to cover my ears, but then I thought, “If this man is crying, shouldn’t someone hear him?”

Tim Harford has provided a couple of excerpts from his new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, over at Slate. The book is about how critical it is for us to support creative, innovative, and even radical ideas. The first excerpt is about the push for innovation in the Royal Air Force that led to the creation of the Spitfire, the fighter plane that played a critical role in holding off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, thereby saving Britain from invasion and, arguably, saving the world.

When we invest money now in the hope of payoffs later, we think in terms of a return on our investment—a few percent in a savings account, perhaps, or a higher but riskier reward from the stock market. What was the return on Henry Cave-Browne-Cave’s investment of 10,000 pounds? Four hundred and thirty thousand people saved from the gas chambers, and denying Adolf Hitler the atomic bomb. The most calculating economist would hesitate to put a price on that.

Return on investment is simply not a useful way of thinking about new ideas and new technologies. It is impossible to estimate a percentage return on blue-sky research, and it is delusional even to try. Most new technologies fail completely. Most original ideas turn out either to be not original after all, or original for the very good reason that they are useless. And when an original idea does work, the returns can be too high to be sensibly measured. . . .

. . . . It would be reassuring to think of new technology as something we can plan. And sometimes, it’s true, we can: the Manhattan Project did successfully build the atomic bomb; John F. Kennedy promised to put a man on the Moon inside a decade, and his promise was kept. But these examples are memorable in part because they are unusual. It is comforting to hear a research scientist, corporation, or government technocrat tell us that our energy problems will soon be solved by some specific new technology: a new generation of hydrogen-powered cars, maybe, or biofuels from algae, or cheap solar panels made from new plastics. But the idea that we can actually predict which technologies will flourish flies in the face of all the evidence. The truth is far messier and more difficult to manage.

The second excerpt is about risk-taking in science, where he notes the importance of funding both safe, incremental research AND risky, blue-sky research. The problem is that the bureaucratic nature of agencies like the NIH and NSF means that they excel at the former, but fail at the latter.

Here’s the thing about failure in innovation: It’s a price worth paying. We don’t expect every lottery ticket to pay a prize, but if we want any chance of winning that prize, then we buy a ticket. In the statistical jargon, the pattern of innovative returns is heavily skewed to the upside; that means a lot of small failures and a few gigantic successes. The NIH’s more risk-averse approach misses out on many ideas that matter. . . .

. . . . We need bureaucrats to model themselves on the chief of Britain’s air staff in the 1930s: “firms are reluctant to risk their money on highly speculative ventures of novel design. If we are to get serious attempts at novel types … we shall have to provide the incentive.” That is the sort of attitude that produces new ideas that matter.

And here’s what you missed at Darwin Eats Cake this week. Eleonora and Handy Andy discussed the implications of new research showing parallels between neurological disorders and economic instability in The Economic Brain. And, Todd presented a guide to whether or not you should be reading the webcomic Darwin Eats Cake, based on your opinions on Tom the Dancing Bug, xkcd, and the Onion in Who should read Darwin Eats Cake?

So, here’s the newest Lost in Transcription feature: Sunday Linkasaurolophus. What’s a Linkasaurolophus, you ask? It’s like a Linkasaurus Rex, but more hipster.

Which is to say, this is going to be a weekly feature where I provide a round-up of things that I wanted to write about, but about which I subsequently found that I had nothing interesting to add.

At Science Not Fiction, Kyle Munkittrick exposes the hidden message in Pixar’s films, which lays the groundwork for social justice in the future:

The message hidden inside Pixar’s magnificent films is this: humanity does not have a monopoly on personhood. In whatever form non- or super-human intelligence takes, it will need brave souls on both sides to defend what is right. If we can live up to this burden, humanity and the world we live in will be better for it.

At The Nation, William Deresiewicz writes about the crises facing higher education, from exploitation of graduate students to the double-edged nature of tenure to the defunding of the liberal arts:

A system of higher education that ignores the liberal arts, as Jonathan Cole points out in The Great American University (2009), is what they have in China, where they don’t want people to think about other ways to arrange society or other meanings than the authorized ones. A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the world.

Yet of course it is precisely China—and Singapore, another great democracy—that the Obama administration holds up as the model to emulate in our new Sputnik moment. It’s funny; after the original Sputnik, we didn’t decide to become more like the Soviet Union. But we don’t possess that kind of confidence anymore.

At Jezebel, Anna North wrote about a controversy in which the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, Lazar Greenfield, tackily referenced 2002 study claiming that semen has antidepressant properties. Greenfield resigned as a result of the ensuing controversy, but Gordon Gallup, the author of the original study, has stepped forward to defend him. The story features comments by Kate Clancy, as well as this take-home:

Basically, there are a lot of questions scientists would have to answer before they could really conclude that semen is an antidepressant. Clancy also reminded me that Gallup and his co-authors were clear in their initial paper that their research was by no means the last word on the subject, and that it’s a shame that much other scientific literature (other than the Mota study) has cited it uncritically. It’s also a shame that Greenfield thought it was a good idea to present the semen-antidepressant link essentially as fact in his editorial, and then make a tasteless joke about it. His resignation isn’t a case of politics silencing science, as Gallup alleges. It’s a case of science poorly and offensively reported. If Gallup’s research were followed up in appropriate ways and appropriate venues, we might all learn something about sexual and mental health — and yes, even about semen.

Dan Adler, Democratic candidate in the upcoming special election for California’s 36th congressional district, has produced a sequence of videos, some of which have gone viral. The most viral, and the one you’ve probably seen, is Stick Together, but also check out Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!, which features his real-life campaign manager Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee) and Patty Duke getting s**t done with Dan, which features, well, Patty Duke, who once played identical cousins. For the whole series, check out his YouTube channel.

Finally, over at Darwin Eats Cake, this week’s episodes were: Base 10 and Welcome to our OOL.