Quote from: Mr Psychologist on December 14, 2014, 06:04:25 PM

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putting hummus in a man's anus,

What the fuck is it with torturers and shoving things into people's anuses?
I mean seriously, you can't get much more closeted than this.

Did I forget to mention that I've changed my desired career?

"come back in 5 or 6 years when you turn 16"

The Senate Intelligence Committee report released this week found that the CIA tortured terror suspects by, among other things, putting hummus in a man's anus, forcing suspects to stand on broken feet, and blasting detainees with songs such as "Rawhide" at loud volumes on repeat.

Many of the interrogators' actions were shocking and cruel, but some might argue (and some have argued) that torture is a necessary tool for extracting information. This, too, is dubious. The Senate investigation revealed that the CIA learned most of the valuable intelligence it gathered during this period through other means.

Military leaders have known about the pointlessness of torture for centuries. A quote by Napoleon, which was widely shared after the report's release, reads, "The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know." The French leader wrote that in a letter in 1798.*

Still, there will always be terrorists in the world, and we will always need to pump them for information. So if we don't torture, what should we do instead?

Pretend to be their friends.

A study published this year by Jane Goodman-Delahunty, of Australia's Charles Sturt University, interviewed 34 interrogators from Australia, Indonesia, and Norway who had handled 30 international terrorism suspects, including potential members of the Sri Lankan extremist group Tamil Tigers and the Norwegian-based Islamist group Ansar al Ismal. Delahunty asked the interrogators what strategies they used to gain information and what the outcomes of each interrogation session were.

The winning technique, as BPS Research Digest notes, was immediately clear:

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Disclosure was 14 times more likely to occur early in an interrogation when a rapport-building approach was used. Confessions were four times more likely when interrogators struck a neutral and respectful stance. Rates of detainee disclosure were also higher when they were interrogated in comfortable physical settings.

This isn't just theoretical, either. One former U.S. Army interrogator told PRI this week that he was able to break through to an Iraqi insurgent over a shared love of watching the TV show "24" on bootleg DVDs.

"He acknowledged that he was a big fan of Jack Bauer," he told PRI. "We made a connection there that ultimately resulted in him recanting a bunch of information that he had said in the past and actually giving us the accurate information because we had made that connection."

Delahunty notes in the study that even though rapport-building strategies, which included things like humor and expressing concern, were recognized as more effective, interrogators were still more likely to use hardball accusatory strategies when dealing with "high-value" detainees, perhaps because the nature of their crimes were considered too horrendous for buddy-buddy interviewing.

In another study highlighted by BPS, regular people were found to be more supportive of torture if they were told the suspect was a terrorist—but not because they thought the suspect had more information. Their support for torture, in other words, was rooted on a desire for payback, not intelligence.

Torture can either be viewed as a punishment or as a way to gain life-saving intelligence. International conventions prohibit the former. Psychology studies suggest it's ineffective at the latter. Which brings us, once again, back to the question: Why do it?

Danish scientists have solved the quantum mechanics problem that has been teasing them since the 1930s: how to calculate real life behaviour of atoms.

The formula helps them work out how to optimise the transport of information from one atom to another. This will be necessary if we are to one day construct quantum computers.

"The problem has been to calculate when atoms do one thing or another in the real world. We have been able to calculate this in theory, but when we experiment and insert data into existing models, they fall apart,” says co-author Nicolaj Thomas Zinner, associate professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University. “We have finally solved that problem."

The study was recently published in Nature Communications.

Why some iron is magnetic while other is not
The scientists’ discovery is best explained by an example:

Imagine a long row of atoms like beads on a string.

Every atom has what is known as a magnetic moment, that is to say a magnetic direction or 'spin' in either an upward or downward direction. This is a fundamental property of all atoms.

The atoms' overall magnetic moment determines whether the material constituted by the atoms is magnetic or not.

If all the atoms the same direction the material is ferromagnetic
 
If, on the other hand, every other atom points upwards and the other downwards, the material is antiferromagnetic (the atoms arrange themselves in a specific fashion so the material is not magnetic).
In this way, one piece of iron may be magnetic while another is not. The atoms' overall spin determines whether the iron is one type or the other.

Makes new calculations possible
Whether the atoms' magnetic moment points up or down is determined, among other things, by other atoms in the near vicinity.

Let us return to the example of the long string of atoms. In this case each atom's effect on each other determines the spin of neighbouring atoms.

This may for example be that if one atom has an upward spin, its neighbour to the left will have a downward spin. And this is where the scientists' problem arise.

Until now, scientists have been able to calculate how the entire string patterns will look if they turn the magnetic moment of one of the atoms from up to down.

They have been able to calculate how the information regarding the turned atom will spread to all the other assets and how they will then behave and in which direction they would turn -- in which direction all the atoms would turn if the scientists changed the direction of a single atom.

New formula includes the landscape
Performing the calculation is in itself quite some feat, and the formula used in the calculation dates back to Nobel prizewinner Hans Bethe, one of the grand old men of quantum mechanics.

The problem for scientists has been that they were only able to calculate the behaviour of atoms in an ideal world, in which the atoms lie in neat rows and are unaffected by their surroundings.

The surroundings do affect them, however, and it was not until the new Danish formula that scientists were able to include them in their calculations.

"For the first time, we're in a position to calculate the atoms' magnetic moment independently of each other in an atomic landscape. That's to say that our formula includes both local conditions or open 'landscapes' for each individual atom in the calculation. It makes no difference whether the atoms are sitting slightly up or slightly down or a bit closer to the atom to the right. Everything's included in our model," says Zinner.

Can optimise quantum computers
The interesting thing about scientists now being able to include the atoms' landscape in their calculations is that they can relatively easily alter the landscape experimentally, i.e. change the atoms' physical surroundings.

This means that scientists can now calculate how a landscape needs to look for the atoms to behave in a specific manner.

This may be when they want all the magnetic moments to point in one direction or if they want to optimise the transfer of the information passing from one end of the landscape to another when one atom is reversed.

"It's this kind of thing we are interested in being able to do with quantum computers. We'd like to be able to construct quantum mechanical systems in which information about the magnetic moment of atoms spreads rapidly and predictably to other atoms, ultimately ending up with a recipient of some form or other. Our formula shows how we can optimise the process," says Zinner.

Study makes scientists wiser
Anders S. Sørensen, professor of theoretical quantum optics at the Niels Bohr Institute was not involved in the new Danish study but has read it and finds it extremely interesting.

"It's interesting because it enables us to calculate something we’ve never previously been able to calculate. The study has made us wiser, and it solves a problem we have had great difficulty solving," says Sørensen.

He points out that we shouldn't expect the new research to result in new mobile phone technology or anything along those lines just yet.

"In the long run, though, it'll help us understand structure of materials in nature and helpers design new materials when out in the future," says Sørensen.

That bitch ruined this country and fucked up everyone else too

Quote from: Meta Cognition on December 14, 2014, 02:23:24 PM

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2. James VI and I

lol

nigga do you even unify England Scotland and Ireland?

Uh you do realise Caesar was never an Emperor, right?

2. James VI and I

7. Sam Harris