September 27th, 2012Top Story The Most Spectacular Photography From The Paris Motor Show By Raphael Orlove A lot of car people think that new cars are irredeemably ugly and will never look as good as the classics. We disagree. For proof, here are the most stunning photographs we've seen at the Paris Motor Show this year. Even though the European economy is suffering and their car industry is only getting worse, carmakers are still penning amazing designs. The 2014 Volkswagen GTI is cleaner than it's been for years, the McLaren P1 takes road car aerodynamics to the next level, and Peugeot covered their carbon fiber supercar with copper for no reason other than it looked amazing. Photo Credit: Quattroworld Jaguar's V8 F-Type Photo Credit: Quattroworld The Superdiesel Peugeot Onyx Photo Credit: Getty Images Ferrari's Next Enzo Photo Credit: GF Williams The Electric Mercedes SLS AMG Photo Credit: GF Williams McLaren's Aerodynamic Wonder, The P1 Photo Credit: GF Williams The P1 Again, For Good Measure Photo Credit: GF Williams What are your favorite shots? Add them to Kinja below. If they aren't our shots please include a proper photo credit.

The Most Spectacular Photography From The Paris Motor Show The McLaren P1: Making Hyper-Advanced Aerodynamics Gorgeous This Copper Steampunk Supercar Is As Efficient As A Prius But Oh So Much Hotter This Is Ferrari's Enzo-Replacing Hybrid Supercar Mercedes SLS AMG Electric Drive: The Supercar Of The Future Will Be Electric And Awesome 2012 Paris Motor Show Day One — Everything You Need To Know 2014 Golf GTI: Say Guten Tag To A More Powerful Hot Hatch More Stories on Jalopnik »

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September 27th, 2012Top Story Did B.F. Skinner really put babies into boxes? By Charlie Jane Anders When I was a little kid, I had a weird babysitter. She was very pale and thin, with dark hair and a tentative smile. She wore blouses with big trumpet sleeves, out of which poked her bony white wrists and elbows. She seldom made physical contact. She lived just up the street from us, and I heard people say she'd been "raised in a Skinner Box" by her psychologist father. Ever since then, I've wondered: What was the Skinner Box? And were babies really raised in boxes? Top image via Rat Traders Well, sort of. It turns out that there were two very different things that the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner did. On the one hand, he created gray metal boxes with levers and electrified floors, in which he tested rats and other creatures, giving them rewards on an irregular basis to train them to exhibit certain behaviors that weren't natural. He trained pigeons to play ping pong. Some of his students trained a pig to vacuum-clean, and a rabbit to pick up a coin with its mouth. His daughter trained a cat to play the piano. (Really.) He developed his theories of "operant conditioning," in which any behavior can be trained using variable reinforcement. And meanwhile, Skinner also invented the "air crib," which he tested on his daughter Deborah, and which also came to be referred to as a "Skinner Box." As Marc N. Richelle explains in his book B.F. Skinner: A Reappraisal: In 1943, the Skinners decided to have a second child. After his wife had remarked that she somewhat dreaded the constraints of the first year, Skinner decided to do something to alleviate the burden. He analysed the ways babies were cared for and considered possible simplifications, while improving comfort, social interchange and the mother's satisfaction. The solution was the aircrib, or "baby-tender" as he called it. This was a spacious compartment, mounted on a wheeled table, with a large glass window, temperature and air control, in which the baby could stay naked and comfortable, kept in the presence of the mother wherever she was working in the house. A strip of sheeting covered over a canvas, which served as a mattress; this could be moved to a clean section as needed by simple cranking. The baby, rather than suffering from excessive cover or from being wet, or simply from being awake and alone, could move freely, in an optimally stable atmosphere, and in permanent visual contact with the mother at times when the latter was busy and would not be able to pick the baby up.... A few parents adopted the device for their own child, but it never became really popular. It had a period of renewed success — a moderate one, since only a few hundred units were sold — between 1957 and 1967 when they were produced by a small company. Occasionally, a former "box-raised baby" would be in a Skinner audience and would come up to him with a happy smile at the end of the lecture. Skinner wrote about his invention for the Ladies Home Journal's October 1945 edition, and his article was given the unfortunate title "Baby in a Box." (You can read his article in its entirety here.) He describes the temperature-controlled box in which the naked baby sits, and then adds that the box does include some sort of training: A wider range and variety of behavior are also encouraged by the freedom from clothing. For example, our baby acquitted an amusing, almost apelike skill in the use of her feet. We have devised a number of toys, which are occasionally suspended from the ceiling of the compartment. She often plays with these with her feet alone and with her hands and feet in close cooperation. One toy is a ring suspended from a modified music box. A note can be played by pulling the ring downward, and a series of rapid jerks will produce Three Blind Mice. At seven months our baby would grasp the ring in her toes, stretch out her leg and play the tune with a rhythmic movement of her foot. We are not especially interested in developing skills of this sort, but they are valuable for the baby because they arouse and hold her interest. Many babies seem to cry from sheer boredom-their behavior is restrained and they have nothing else to do. In our compartment, the waking hours are invariably active and happy ones. Image via Coco Mault/Flickr. In his October 1945 article, Skinner also responds to the critics who say that in his box, the baby "would be socially starved and robbed of the affection and mother love, which she needs." He retorts: This has simply not been true. The compartment does not ostracize the baby. The large window is no more of a social barrier than the bars of a crib. The baby follows what is going on in the room, smiles at passers-by, plays "peek-a- boo" games, and obviously delights in company. And she is handled, talked to, and played with whenever she is changed or fed, and each afternoon during a play period, which is becoming longer as she grows older. The fact is that a baby will probably get more love and affection when it is easily cared for. You can decide for yourself whether this set-up would be good for a baby — as compared, say, with the current vogue for "baby bjorn" style papooses and things. It definitely feels very 1950s and possibly a bit too sterile and mechanistic — even if it's not true that the babies were being trained or experimented on in the same way that Skinner's rats were. In any case, rumors spread like wildfire that Skinner had kept his daughter in a box and done experiments on her, and that she'd turned psychotic as a result. Or even, that she'd committed suicide. In his 1983 autobiography, Skinner complains about a whisper campaign, which he feels "fostered by clinical psychologists who found it useful in criticizing behavior therapy." His healthy, happy daughter was constantly surprised to hear that she was dead or insane. And Skinner reports that his phone rang just as he was falling asleep, with a young man's voice asking him, "Professor Skinner, is it true you kept your daughter in a cage?" In fact, Deborah is fine — she lives in London, where she's an artist. And by all accounts, she and her father got along well until his death in 1990. Beyond Freedom and Dignity So what's going on here? Skinner was a polarizing figure, and people seized on the "baby in a box" thing as an easy way of discrediting him, in a nutshell. As Lauren Slater documents in her book Opening Skinner's Box, Skinner's actual research illuminated something basic about behavior: that we respond better to variable reinforcement than to regular rewards. If we only get the reward every once in a while, we will continue to exhibit the behavior that leads to the reward for way longer, and we'll be way more addicted to it. Skinner also seemed to show that all sorts of behaviors — not just involuntary ones like salivating, like Pavlov's dogs — could be triggered in response to rewards or stimuli. In other words, Skinner showed that creatures (possibly including people) are not separable from environments. We behave in certain ways in response to the rewards we receive, and — as anybody who's ever has a compulsive behavior like playing a game all night will attest — we're capable of behaviors that we don't entirely control. This, in itself, is a threat to many of us who want to believe that humans are ultimately masters of our destiny rather than products of our circumstances. But then Skinner went further, in a couple of ways. First, the "air crib" was just one of the ways that he publicly advocated for a more scientific approach to life. When that same daughter, Deborah, went to school, Skinner decided that old-fashioned education methods were too inefficient — children who gave the right answer weren't rewarded fast enough to reinforce the lesson. So he came up with a plan for "programmed instruction," where flesh-and-blood teachers could be supplemented by, in essence, teaching machines. As Alexandra Rutherford explains in Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner's Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s: Programmed instruction was an approach in which students were exposed to course material in small incremental steps via frames presented in a box-like apparatus. They were required to generate a response to a question about the material, and could then immediately compare their response to the right answer. The presentation of the material was finely tuned to ensure very few mistakes, on the principal that getting the right answer — right away — was maximally reinforcing. In other words, the kids would be steered to the right answer about the material they'd just read, and then would be "rewarded" by realizing they'd gotten it right, thus encouraging them to keep getting right answers. Some people worried that by trying to shape students' answers and reward them for responding the right way, Skinner's devices would encourage conformity and discourage independent thought. But Skinner didn't just advocate for more "scientific" methods of child-rearing — he also wrote some far-reaching works of philosophy that argued for a utopian vision of a world controlled by behavioral scientists rather than politicians. He wrote a number of books, notably Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which argued that to solve problems like pollution, overpopulation and the threat of nuclear war, we need to adjust human behavior. It's like one half Asimov's psychohistory, one half benign totalitarianism. Here's Skinner, from Beyond Freedom and Dignity: What we need is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly enough if we could adjust the growth of the world's population as precisely as we adjust the course of a spaceship, or improve agriculture and industry with some of the confidence with which we accelerate high-energy particles, or move toward a peaceful world with something like the steady progress with which physics has approached absolute zero (although both remain presumably out of reach.) But a behavioral technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology is lacking, and those who do not find the very possibility ridiculous are more likely to be frightened than reassured. This is how far we are from "understanding human issues" in the sense in which physics and biology understand their fields, and how far we are from preventing the catastrophe toward which the world seems to be inexorably moving. There's something irreducibly Space Age about Skinner and his preoccupation with finding scientific ways to run everything. He contributed more than most people realize to our understanding of behavior — and his focus on rewards rather than punishments as a means of shaping behavior was actually quite benign. Some people are even trying to bring back the "Air Crib" for their babies nowadays, in fact. But still, you can kind of see why some of Skinner's ideas creeped people out. Sources: Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner's Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s by Alexandra Rutherford B.F. Skinner: A Reappraisal by Marc N. Richelle Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater "The Ultimate Challenge: Prove B. F. Skinner Wrong" by Paul Chance, Behav Anal. 2007 Fall; 30(2): 153–160. The Psychology of B F Skinner by Kyle E. Ferguson and William O'Donohue

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September 27th, 2012Top Story Man Loses Xbox Account To Thief, Gives Thief Virtual Smackdown By Jason Schreier On Sunday night, Eric Graff put his son to bed. He flipped on his 360 and got ready for a session of Borderlands 2 with some friends. But when he tried to log onto his Xbox Live account, the password wouldn't work. His account had been hacked. And then Graff did something usually reserved for daydreams and bad romantic comedies: he tracked down the hacker and found him/her on an Internet forum, trying to pawn off Graff's account for $110. Graff, who has used Microsoft's online service since it was first introduced almost a decade ago, has seen his accounts hacked before: last year, he lost an account named Fiend in a similar situation. So when Fiend II wouldn't work Sunday, Graff had some nasty immediate thoughts: "Shit! Did this really happen again?" "First thing I did was call my 1800-4MY-XBOX customer support line to report this," Graff told me in an e-mail. "I knew that this process usually took days and was not looking forward to that. I thought maybe since I had noticed this only an hour or so after it happened (had checked my email not long before and it had worked) that maybe they could help me a bit easier. NOPE. Same ole same ole report email being sent to the Unauthorized Access department, might get to hear something in a few days. That was deflating, but not unexpected since I had been through this process before." So Monday, he got up and started searching the Internet for stories of Xbox hackings. Some googling let him to a Kotaku article about how scammers steal accounts (and what victims can do to protect themselves). He read about Forum Korner, a black-market website where people buy and sell other peoples' account information. "I couldn't believe that a site like that could operate out in the open like that, it just blew my mind," Graff said. "Anyway, my brain just kind of filed that away and I gave up searching." Later, he logged onto Xbox Live using a different account to look for Fiend II and see if anyone was using it. Someone was. The location and name had been changed—the location now said "FK" and the name said "Forum Korner." "That is when something in my brain clicked," Graff said. "Now this was hours after I had read that article so it didn't really click at first, but eventually I said to myself 'that name sounds familiar, where have I heard that before?'" Then it hit him: ForumKorner.com. He immediately went to the website and entered FIEND in the search bar. This thread came up: Legit 10 Year Tenure! PROOF Selling legit 10 year Tenure account. You can add me as a friend aswell. Current Bid: $110 "My jaw dropped," Graff said. "I could not believe what I was seeing. Honestly I could not believe that I actually FOUND the person that stole my XBL account and was selling it on a website! That has to be a one in a million shot right?" Graff was virtual face to virtual face with the person who had hacked him, someone going by the handle InsaneYo. Scrolling through the forum thread in rage, Graff found that people were very, very interested in buying his account. "oh wow, that is a sexy account..." one poster wrote. "Jesus, wish I had my money right now," said another. So Graff made an account on ForumKorner, calling himself You Are Busted and fingering the culprit: Hey asshole. I found you. This is my gamertag that you stole last night. You are busted BITCH! I now have screen shots of all 4 pages of this thread and you are all going down. I have Microsoft looking at this page right now and everyone is IP logged. Sucks for you guys. You fucked with the wrong guy!!! Some people believed him. Others didn't. He continued posting on the forum: Thanks. Fiend II isnt my original account. I was actually an XBOX LIVE! beta tester and my original GT was just Fiend. Too bad some other dipshit stolen that one last year. They probably sold that one on this site too. I have many friends that work for Microsoft, so this guy is soooo busted. I think he might have just changed the GT, but I have screen shots of everything so he can do whatever he wants. Hear that knock at your door yet son?? InsaneYo wrote back: If you have SO many friends working at Microsoft why haven't you got your original tag back? Kid just leave this site. Graff: So how did you steal it, just curious? InsaneYo: C'mon Eric, I thought you and your MS buddies would have known by now. I work for Xbawkz and I dun hecked ur account. This went on for a little while, and InsaneYo eventually admitted to stealing Graff's info. "It only took me about 5 minutes to take this," the hacker wrote. "Wasn't really hoping to sell this anyways as I know I wouldn't have had it for long, I just did it for the lulz." Eventually a ForumKorner moderator closed the thread and banned InsaneYo from the forum. Graff says a moderator also sent him a private message saying "Don't tell Microsoft please." "Yea buddy, I'll keep your secret safe," Graff snarked later in an e-mail to me. But Graff still hasn't gotten his account back, even after furiously calling and e-mailing Microsoft representatives several times to share his story. He says he has no ill will for the Xbox makers; he just wishes their security process was more transparent. "Sure this whole experience has sucked, Graff said, "but I hope that sharing this story will make more people and Microsoft aware of all the stuff that is going on at ForumKorner and other sites like it and get it shut down."

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