Science

Popular smart TV models made by Samsung and LG can take multiple snapshots of what you are watching every second – even when they are being used as external displays for your laptop or video game console.

Smart TV manufacturers use these frequent screenshots, as well as audio recordings, in their automatic content recognition systems, which track viewing habits in order to target people with specific advertising. But researchers showed this tracking by some of the world’s most popular smart TV brands – Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG…

The hormone and neurotransmitter dopamine is generally believed to be a driving force behind experiencing pain relief with the placebo effect, but it may actually play little or no part in the phenomenon.

The placebo effect occurs when someone’s medical symptoms are lessened through the power of suggestion and expectation, such as by taking a sugar pill. Dopamine, along with opioids and cannabinoids that are produced naturally in our bodies, was thought to be involved in this for pain relief specifically.

To get a clearer picture, Ulrike Bingel at University Hospital Essen in Germany and her colleagues teamed up with the Treatment Expectation research centre, also in Germany. The scientists asked 168 people, aged 18 to 40 and with no known medical conditions, to apply two creams to different parts of their arms, before being touched with a heated rod, which caused mild discomfort.

The creams were identical, but participants were told that one contained an active pain-relieving ingredient and the other was acting as a placebo.

Shortly before, the researchers asked the participants to take medications that suppressed dopamine, encouraged its release or didn’t alter its level.

The participants’ dopamine levels changed as expected, but this didn’t seem to affect how much pain they experienced or how much they anticipated that they would feel, which were both rated on a scale of 0 to 10.

This suggests that dopamine isn’t directly linked to the placebo effect for pain relief, says Bingel. Opioids and cannabinoids probably play a stronger role, she says. Hormones such as oxytocin and noradrenaline (norepinephrine) may also have an effect, which future studies could investigate, says Bingel.

However, it is also possible that dopamine comes into play when people are more motivated to feel pain relief, such as when the discomfort is more intense than it was in this study, she says.

Understanding the placebo effect could lead to therapies that harness its action for better pain management, says Bingel.

Lauren Atlas at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, says that the placebo effect probably involves “verbal instructions and social factors that depend on the context surrounding treatment, and these factors are unlikely to be mediated by dopamine”.

“Stranger churches”—Protestant congregations that welcomed speakers of certain languages other than English—in early modern London had “eyes everywhere” to hear, spread and dispel gossip in multiple languages, according to new research.

The Elizabethan era saw large numbers of migrants coming to England, many of whom were Protestants fleeing religious persecution and violence from countries that spoke French, Dutch, Flemish, Italian and Spanish.

Dr. John Gallagher, Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds, has uncovered evidence that the state was monitoring gossip about them in multiple languages.

His findings are revealed in a new paper titled “Migrant Voices in Multilingual London, 1560–1600,” which is published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

Dr. Gallagher said, “England’s history is much more multilingual than we might imagine, and even the state had to learn multiple languages in the Elizabethan area to have ‘eyes everywhere’ and maintain control.

“The average person would have come across multiple languages every day, and we can hear the voices of regular people because of the extensive records kept by churches at the time. Languages other than English could be heard in the streets and in the public spaces of the city, through the walls of homes and the doors of shops.”

‘Stranger churches’

Known at the time as “strangers,” migrants joined a mostly illiterate but multilingual community that valued the spoken word highly.

Stranger churches for migrant communities were formed with the first Dutch church in London in 1550. They provided services in French, Dutch and Italian, but church elders recognized that this privilege was precarious, and began to monitor scandals across languages to avoid bringing their communities into disrepute.

The archives of consistories—the stranger churches’ all-male governing bodies—show that churches aimed to “have eyes everywhere,” as a minister of the French church in London wrote in 1561.

When suspicions arose over a child’s parentage in the Dutch church, records showed the elders consulted a woman “from overseas,” an “Englishman” and a woman present at the birth of the child to understand the extent of the rumors.

Consistories also made it their mission to do background checks on migrants at church who could have left behind a secret spouse and family at home.

England’s ‘third universitie’

But London’s multilingual exchange wasn’t just for the church, or the literate elites, as everyone would have encountered languages other than English in the street, or even at home.

Dr. Gallagher’s findings include the story of one bookseller, Thomas Harris, who stopped his French neighbor Jehan de Savoye in the street to ask him what had been said in a French-language row he’d overheard.

London’s Royal Exchange, finished in 1568, was an important space where linguistic diversity helped news, gossip and slander spread through the city. The space was used for international and multilingual trade, but it was also a space where people had a ready audience for arrests, arguments and accusations in multiple languages.

A commentator described London at the time as England’s “third universitie,” where you could learn Chaldean, Syriac and Arabic, as well as Polish, Persian and Russian.

Dr. Gallagher added, “It wasn’t necessary to speak or understand another language to be part of this multilingual urban culture: your rowing neighbors might switch languages to ensure the cause of the trouble was made clear, or the offender might show up on your doorstep in the presence of an elder of their church to explain and apologize.”

These findings will form part of Dr. Gallagher’s upcoming book “Strangers: Migration and Multilingualism in Early Modern London.”

Modern crowdfunding has grown from relatively modest beginnings in the late 1990s to a multi-billion-dollar financing market for all kinds of early-stage innovations. The platform Kickstarter alone went from $276 million pledged in 2012 to $7.8 billion in 2024. There are even professional project designers to help craft that winning proposal.

With stakes like those, getting the pitch right is everything.

Enter machine learning to assist. Researchers from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management put four different types of this artificial intelligence application to the test, including Deep Learning. Machine learning proved not only superior to conventional statistical methods for predicting whether a crowdfunding campaign would reach its goal, it also identified which elements helped most, and how.

The findings are published in the Journal of Business Venturing Design.

“Running a crowdfunding campaign is costly and could fail,” says Ramy Elitzur, a professor of accounting at the Rotman School. “Our analysis shows project creators ways to improve their chances of success, or, alternatively, whether they should pursue a different project funding strategy.”

Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform, meaning that project creators don’t receive any money unless they meet their fundraising goal. Analyzing more than 100,000 Kickstarter projects, Prof. Elitzur, Prof. David Soberman, who is the Canadian National Chair of Strategic Marketing, and other researchers found that the size of the campaign’s monetary goal accounted for more than half of a project’s success. The creator’s social capital, the number of reward options offered, and the campaign’s duration were also top factors.

Machine learning also got into the nitty-gritty of how much and how long. A project’s chances of success remained pretty much the same up to a fundraising goal of $100,000, then began to drop beyond that, with a sharper drop-off over $133,300. Conventional standard regression models, however, predict that the chance of success consistently drops as the monetary goal increases. That’s because these models lean towards identifying “linear” relationships where influencing factors and outcomes move in only one direction.

Crowdfunding, like many things, is more complex, with multiple variables acting on each other as well as the outcome.

“One of the things machine learning does is model all possible interactions among variables,” says Prof. Elitzur. “It gives us the direct effect on the outcome of each variable and the total effect of the interaction with other variables.”

While standard regression showed success increased with greater social capital—measured through the number of comments a project earned—machine learning revealed that success actually increased up to about 750 comments, then leveled off.

Its results also suggested the sweet spot for campaign duration was 10 to 15 days and that the number of project reward options has a moderate positive effect on success up to about 15 reward options, then slightly negative effects between 15 and 20 options, followed by a positive effect in waves between 20 and 50 reward options, finally plateauing after 50 options.

When machine learning’s text analysis capabilities were deployed—something numerically based standard methods can’t do—they could reach beyond Kickstarter’s 15 main project classifications to identify “gadgets” as the least successful project type.

It turns out that creators looking for that winning proposal should steer clear of flyable Second World War aircraft. In that case, “the deck is stacked against you and you would have a lower likelihood of success than any other domain,” says Prof. Elitzur, who is currently applying the same methods to predicting high-tech start-up success.

In addition, the text analysis capabilities of the models illustrate that as with real estate, the location of the project counts.

The research was also co-written with Noam Katz of Ben Gurion University in Israel and Perri Mutath of The Israel Innovation Authority.

War has become a regular part of life for many children. Millions are victims and witnesses to the horrors of war. Recent estimates by researchers at the Peace Research Institute Oslo show that one in six children globally lives in a conflict zone, and Africa has the highest number of conflict-affected children.

Many children are forced to become child soldiers. In other cases, such as during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, violence is aimed at children.

In recent years, researchers from various fields have been studying the impact on children of growing up in war zones. Psychologists, for example, have been researching how conflict affects children’s mental health and behavior. Economists have examined, among other issues, how growing up in these environments can limit future earning capabilities. Other scholars have investigated how war shapes the long-term (political) attitudes of these children.

Despite this growing body of research, we—a group of researchers who look into the causes and consequences of armed conflict for children—spotted two key gaps.

First, much of the literature treats children’s experiences as if they were the same across different contexts. Few studies have considered the distinct experiences of girls as soldiers or how these differ from boys’ experiences.

Second, while some research does explore these gender differences, it often focuses only on what happens during the conflict. It doesn’t consider how these experiences affect social relationships when the conflict ends. This is despite scholars and policymakers highlighting that girls’ experiences in war are fundamentally different from those of boys due to their different status and role in society.

To address these gaps, we conducted an exploratory study from 2018 to 2019 on the experiences of boys and girls during conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We studied how these gendered experiences might have affected their social relationships after the war. We interviewed 315 children aged between 12 and 18, with different levels of exposure to conflict. This included 186 respondents who had been involved in armed groups.

Our recently published analysis revealed, as expected, that many children had witnessed or experienced various conflict-related events during their life-time. Most children reported seeing homes and property destroyed, and many had witnessed people being beaten or tortured by armed forces. Fewer children reported being sexually assaulted or raped or injured by weapons such as gunshots or stabbings, though sadly these were not rare occurrences either.

We found that boys were generally more exposed to conflict than girls. This difference is largely due to boys being more involved with armed groups and more likely to perpetrate violence.

These experiences of conflict can have lasting effects on children’s relationships with their families, friends, teachers and other important social groups. These connections are crucial for a child’s development and well-being.

The differences between how boys and girls are affected are important considerations in building appropriate and effective psychosocial support programs, with tools that address gender-specific needs in conflict or post-conflict situations.

The study

We gathered information from 315 structured interviews with Congolese children. Some of these boys and girls had been actively involved with armed groups in the eastern provinces of the DRC, while others had less direct exposure to the conflict.

Conflict and human rights violations are widespread in the DRC. World Vision has called the decades-long conflict in the country “one of the worst child protection crises in the world“. Further, in a recent UN report on children and armed conflict, 3,377 verified grave violations against children in the DRC were identified. Of these, 46% involved the recruitment of children—some as young as five—by armed forces or groups.

To examine how the armed conflict has affected Congolese boys and girls, we collected data between 2018 and 2019 in the South Kivu province of eastern DRC. We selected our participants with the help and consent of five local child protective organizations.

Our analysis first explored what the boys and girls had experienced during conflict. Then we associated these gendered experiences with differences in social behavior. We looked at whether there were gender differences in the children’s key relationships with family, friends (and other social groups) and their teachers.

First, we found that war disrupted the family’s ability to provide safety and security, and both children and their caregivers might suffer from the emotional and psychological toll of the conflict. Our study found that girls tended to have a stronger relationship with their family and caretakers compared to boys after conflict. This aligns with previous research suggesting boys may face more challenges in maintaining family relationships. This is particularly the case for those that were active as child soldiers.

Second, our analysis found that boys tended to have more diverse friendship networks than girls, even when comparing former boy soldiers to girl soldiers. Friendships are vital for a child’s well-being. Strong and diverse friendships are linked to better mental health, tolerance and understanding.

Lastly, we looked at how gender and war experiences might affect relationships between students and teachers. Armed conflict can have devastating effects on the educational attainment of children. Education, however, supports war-affected children and adolescents in several important ways. Structured school rules, regulations and activities establish a sense of normality, which is crucial to the healing process and well-being of children. Overall, the children interviewed had a very positive view of their schools or training programs. They felt safe, enjoyed spending time with their classmates and viewed their teachers as helpful and caring. However, girls—especially former girl soldiers—were significantly more likely than boys to report that their teachers were sympathetic and supportive.

Why the findings matter

Our research is one of the first to highlight significant differences in how boys and girls experience war, and how these experiences shape their social relationships.

Addressing the differences in the needs of boys and girls after conflict not only improves their well-being, but is also likely to positively affect entire households, post-conflict regions and post-conflict countries. While our study sheds light on these differences, more research is needed to understand them in greater depth and, most importantly, to explain why they occur.

Are these differences the result of psychological trauma, behavioral changes, or specific events that happened before or during the conflict? Moreover, we know very little about the long-term effects of war exposure—do these differences fade over time, or do they persist? And how can communities play a role in helping children to overcome these challenges? Do we also observe these differences in other conflicts at other periods?

Understanding these differences is key for policymakers working to develop effective support programs. Developing and increasing the availability of gender-responsive approaches can help strengthen the resilience of children after conflict. It may also work to strengthen their agency and resilience before conflict.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.