Hot Lost Cause: Privacy

When did the fear of Big Brother become the desperation for a double tap on our latest Instagram-post update? Once we feared that technology would be the death of privacy. These days we're live streaming the wake. Ever-shrinking cameras are rapidly eliminating the undocumented life, whether it's vanity-driven social-media broadcasters or politically minded activists determined to monitor overzealous police. Three years ago, Peter Austin Onruang's company Wolfcom was supplying body cams to more than 500 police departments in the U.S. when he noticed something strange. "I began to see a consumer wave of people interested in our technology," Onruang says. "There are roughly 750,000 law-enforcement officers throughout the country, so I'm only tapping into a tiny market." So he altered some software and created a device called the Venture that can be worn as a body cam, put on the dash of a car or used as a baby monitor.

The thinking on privacy has changed quickly. Four years ago, the launch of Xbox One was hamstrung by the Kinect, a microphone and camera array housed in a plastic rectangle designed to sit atop your entertainment center, watching your body movements and listening for voice commands. The Kinect drew protests and was separated from the console. But Apple bought the company that helped develop it, and behind the seamless, buttonless front of the new iPhone X lies a bundle of intelligent cameras capable of face recognition so advanced that it can ID a person even if they put on a hat and sunglasses and grow a beard. It's essentially the same technology found in the Kinect. And this time, no protests. Lines around the block instead. B.C.

Source: Rolling Stone

Study links college students' grades to sleep schedules

Staying up late to cram for an early exam may not be doing college students any good, according to a new study focused on college students and their sleep patterns.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, says college students who did not go to bed or wake up at consistent times every day were more likely to have lower grades.

For the study, 61 students from Harvard College kept online diaries of their sleep schedules for 30 days. Researchers identified two groups: regular sleepers, or those who went to bed and woke up about the same time every day, and irregular sleepers, who had different sleep patterns every day.

There were several differences between regular and irregular sleepers, including significant differences in grade point averages. Using a unique scoring index from zero to 100 to calculate a student's sleep regularity, students with very irregular sleep patterns were given lower scores close to zero, while more regular sleepers were given higher scores close to 100. The researchers found that for every score increase of 10 on the regularity index, the student had an average increase of 0.10 in their GPA.

Andrew Phillips, lead author of the study and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said the findings show that irregular sleepers have a delayed release of the sleep hormone melatonin.

"Our body contains a circadian clock, which helps to keep time for many biological functions," he said. "One of the key markers of the circadian clock is melatonin. Usually, at nighttime, our circadian clock sends a signal that tells us to release melatonin overnight."

Depending on what time melatonin is released, it helps to set both the sleep and wake cycles for our bodies. So with irregular sleepers, melatonin is released later in the night, pushing the circadian clock later as well. Phillips found that the irregular sleepers in his study had much later circadian rhythms -- by almost three hours, on average.

Dr. Charles Czeisler, another study author and chief of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said that can make your body feel like it's in another time zone.

"That means that if the student had an 8 a.m. class, it would actually be happening at 5 a.m. biological time," he said. "It's as if they were traveling from the East Coast time zone to the Pacific time zone."

Irregular sleepers were also found to have less exposure to light during the day but more exposure at night, which also can affect the circadian clock, whether it's sunlight, fluorescent light in a classroom or artificial light from a phone or another electronic device.

"We know the human circadian clock is very sensitive to light. Your patterns of light exposure are also what set the timing of your body's circadian clock," Phillips said.

Kristen Knutson, an associate professor of sleep medicine at Northwestern University and expert in sleep patterns and their relation to health, said the study emphasized an aspect of sleep that people don't usually think about: regularity.

"Much attention has been paid to sleep quantity and quality, which are important as well," said Knutson, who was not involved in the new research. "But the importance of sleep doesn't end there. So, other factors like sleep timing and like sleep regularity are important to provide a more holistic perspective that includes all these dimensions of sleep health."

And the importance of sleep regularity is what Phillips and Czeisler want to emphasize, too.

"When circadian rhythms are disrupted, it degrades many different physiological systems in the body and makes individuals much more vulnerable to adverse health outcomes," Czeisler said. "That could be everything from catching a cold to gaining weight to diabetes, and here in this study, we're showing it can degrade academic performance as well."

But Knutson, as well as Phillips and Czeisler, notes that the study can't say irregular sleep definitely causes bad grades -- though it's very likely the factors are related.

"It's possible that students who have bad sleep habits also have other bad habits that are the reasons behind their poor grades," Knutson said. "That being said, if it is possible that irregular sleep could impair a student's ability to do well in school, we really need to understand this further."

So what can tired college students -- or those about to start college -- do to improve their sleep regularity?

First, decide on a reasonable sleeping and waking time, and then stick to it. Signing up for classes around the same time every day could help students to be consistent.

"It's so simple to address, that's why I call it a secret weapon," Czeisler said. "Regular sleep and adequate sleep is the best secret to student success."

It could also help to maintain a consistent sleeping schedule on the weekends -- and maybe not sleep in so much.

The study said there was no difference in the number of hours of sleep regular and irregular sleepers got.

Czeisler says that means an early bedtime is not a requirement for making your sleep pattern more regular: "The results of this study are not suggesting everybody has to be a goody-two-shoes. So if you go to bed at 2 and get up at 9, that's fine. You just have to consistently do the same thing."

Source: CNN

Teens: This is how social media affects your brain

Whether you're on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, What's App or Twitter, the way you communicate with friends today is changing.

Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day.

Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain?

Reward circuitry

In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the brain's reward center becoming especially active.

Americans devote more than 10 hours a day to screen time, and growing

"When teens learn that their own pictures have supposedly received a lot of likes, they show significantly greater activation in parts of the brain's reward circuitry," says lead author Lauren Sherman. "This is the same group of regions responding when we see pictures of a person we love or when we win money."

The teenagers were shown more than 140 images where 'likes' were believed to from their peers, but were in fact assigned by the research team.

Scans revealed that the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain's reward circuitry, was especially active when teens saw a large number of likes on their own photos, which could inspire them to use social media more often.

Peer influence

As part of the experiment, participants were also shown a range of "neutral" photos showing things like food and friends, and "risky" photos depicting cigarettes and alcohol. But the type of image had no impact on the number of "likes" given by the teens. they were instead more likely to 'like' the more popular photos, regardless of what they showed. This could lead to both a positive and negative influence from peers online.

Sherman believes these results could have important implications among this age group.

"Reward circuitry is thought to be particularly sensitive in adolescence," says Sherman, "It could be explaining, at least in part, why teens are such avid social media users."

Social learning

Adolescence is a period that is very important for social learning, which could explain why teens are often more tuned in to what's going on in their respective cultures. With the rise of social media, Sherman thinks we may even be learning to read likes and shares instead of facial expressions.

"Before, if you were having a face to face interaction everything is qualitative. You use someone's gestures or facial expressions, that sort of thing, to see how effective your message is," she says.

"Now if you go online, one of the ways that you gauge the effectiveness of your message is in the number of likes, favorites or retweets, and this is something that's really different and unique about online interaction."

However, the study may not be applicable to everyone, according to Dr. Iroise Dumontheil, at Birkbeck University.

"[The study] only has adolescents and so they can't really claim anything specific about whether it's adolescents who react to this differently compared to adults."

Changing the brain

Dumontheil does, however, concur that social media is affecting our brain, particularly its plasticity, which is the way the brain grows and changes after experiencing different things.

"Whenever you learn something new or you experience something, it's encoded in your brain, and it's encoded by subtle changes in the strength of connections between neurons," says Dumontheil.

For example, one study showed that the white matter in an adults' brains changed as they learned how to juggle over a period of several months. "They found that if you scan [the brains of] adults before they learn how to juggle, and then three months later, you can see changes in the brain structure," says Dumontheil.

Time spent on social media could, therefore, also cause the brain to change and grow.

"We might be a bit less good at reading subtle expressions on faces that are moving, but we might be much quicker at monitoring what's going on in a whole group of our friends," says Dumontheil.

So are these new skills a good or a bad thing? Neither, she says. "It's just a way we have of adapting to our environment."

Source: CNN