Harry Potter

Why Everyone Should Read Harry Potter

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As the familiar story goes, not long ago there was an orphan who on his 11th birthday discovered he had a gift that set him apart from his preteen peers. Over the years he endured the usual adolescent challenges – maturation, relationships, social conflicts, general teenage neuroses. He also faced the less common challenge of battling a murderous, psychopathic wizard set on establishing a eugenic police state. I’m referring to the young wizard Harry Potter, the bespeckled, morally-upright protagonist in author JK Rowling’s wildly popular fantasy book series; his nemesis is Lord Voldemort, the story’s malevolent antagonist. And, while it might sound far-fetched, new research suggests that Rowling’s world of house-elves, half-giants and three-headed dogs has the potential to make us nicer people.

mudbloods

With over 450 million copies sold, Harry Potter is the best selling book series of all time. But it’s had its reproaches. Various Christian groups in particular took issue with the books, claiming they promoted paganism and witchcraft to children. Washington Post book critic Ron Charles called the fact that adults were also hooked on Potter a “bad case of cultural infantilism,” citing the arguably simplistic “good vs evil” premise. Charles and others also cited a certain artistic vapidity in massively commercial story-telling, while others chided Hogwarts, the wizardry academy attended by Potter, for only rewarding innate talents. Christopher Hitchens on the other hand, despite plenty of criticisms of Rowling’s work, praised her for “unmooring” English children’s literature from “dreams of wealth and class and snobbery…and giving us a world of youthful democracy and diversity, in which the humble leading figure has a name that…could as well belong to an English labor union official.” A growing body of evidence suggests that the pro-Potter camp might be on to something, and that reading Rowling’s work, at least as a youth, might be a good thing.

For decades it’s been known that an effective means of improving negative attitudes and prejudices between differing groups of people is through intergroup contact – particularly through contact between “in-groups,” or a social group to which someone identifies, and “out-groups,” or a group they don’t identify with or perceive as threatening. Even reading short stories about friendship between in- and out-group characters is enough to improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups in children. Anew study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that reading the Harry Potter books in particular has similar effects, likely in part because Potter is continually in contact with stigmatized groups. The “muggles” get no respect in the wizarding world as they lack any magical ability. The “half-bloods,” or “mud-bloods” – wizards and witches descended from only one magical parent – don’t fare much better, while the Lord Voldemort character believes that power should only be held by “pure-blood” wizards. He’s Hitler in a cloak.

The research group, led by professor Loris Vezzali of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, conducted three related studies. In the first, 34 elementary school children were given a questionnaire assessing their attitudes towards immigrants, a group frequently stigmatized in Italy. The children were then divided into two groups that met once a week for six weeks to read Harry Potter passages and discuss it with a research assistant. One group read passages relating to prejudice, like the scene where Draco Malfoy, a shockingly blond pure-blood wizard, calls Harry’s friend Hermione a “filthy little Mud-blood.” The control group read excerpts unrelated to prejudice, including the scene where Harry buys his first magic wand. A week after the last session, the children’s attitudes towards out-groups were assessed again. Among those who identified with the Harry Potter character, attitudes toward immigrants were found to be significantly improved in children who’d read passages dealing with prejudice. The attitudes of those who’d read neutral passages hadn’t changed.

Vezzali and colleagues conducted two follow-up studies with similar results. One found that reading Harry Potter improved attitudes towards homosexuals in Italian high school students. The other linked the books with more compassion towards refugees among English university students. Identification with the Potter character didn’t contribute to attitude changes in this older population – presumably college kids don’t identify as much with the younger character – however strongly not identifying with the evil Voldemort did. As the authors write, this is in line with reigning social cognitive theory: “people form attitudes not only by conforming to positive relevant others, but also by distancing themselves from negative relevant others.”

Of course there are many factors that shape our attitudes toward others: the media, our parents and peers, religious beliefs. But Vezzali’s work supports earlier research suggesting that reading novels as a child — implying literary engagement with life’s social, cultural and psychological complexities — can have a positive impact on personality development and social skills. A study published last year in Science found that reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction, results in keener social perception and increased empathy — empathy being defined more or less as the ability to alternate between different perspectives on a particular person or situation. Literature with complex, developed themes and characters appears to let readers occupy or adopt perspectives they might otherwise not consider; and it seems that Rowling might get at the beautiful, sobering mess of life in a way that could have a meaningful impact on our children’s collective character.

Vezzali told me that fantasy may be especially effective in assuaging negative attitudes because the genre typically doesn’t feature actual populations and thus avoids potential defensiveness and sensitivities around political correctness.

“Unfortunately the news we read on a daily basis tells us we have so much work to do!,” Vezzali said. “But based on our work, fantasy books such as Harry Potter may be of great help to educators and parents in teaching tolerance.” Vezzali’s group plans to continue investigating the impact of literature and other prejudice-reduction interventions in the hopes of one day having a real cultural impact.

For the moment, universal acceptance and international peace seem unlikely. But perhaps a trip to the bookstore — or a few clicks on the Internet — might be a good place to start.

Psychologists Find a Surprising Thing Happens to Kids Who Read Harry Potter .

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Psychologists Find a Surprising Thing Happens to Kids Who Read Harry Potter

The news: Harry Potter’s greatest feat might not have been defeating Voldemort, but teaching young people around the world to battle prejudice. At least that’s the finding of a new paper in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, which claims reading the Harry Potter series significantly improved young peoples’ perception of stigmatized groups like immigrants, homosexuals or refugees.

The studies: The Pacific Standard broke down the three studies used in this paper.

The first took 34 Italian fifth-graders and plunged them into a six-week course on Potter. The researchers began by having the students fill out a questionnaire on immigrants, and then split them into two groups which read selected passages from the series. The students in the first group discussed prejudice and bigotry as themes in the books, while the others didn’t, serving as a control group. The students in the first group showed “improved attitudes towards immigrants,” but only if they identified with Potter.

A second study with 117 Italian high school students found that a reader’s emotional identification with Harry was associated with more positive perceptions of LGBT people in general. A third, which surveyed U.K. college students, ultimately found no association between an emotional bond with Harry and perceptions of refugees. But it did indicate that students who had less of an emotional identification with Voldemort had “improved attitudes toward refugees.”

In all three studies, the researchers credited the books with improving the readers’ ability to assume the perspective of marginalized groups. They also claimed that young children, with the help of a teacher, were able to understand that Harry’s frequent support of “mudbloods” was an allegory towards bigotry in real-life society.

Why you should care: It’s impossible to rule out that there were inevitably other factors at work beyond the scope of the study, but if you’re a Harry Potter fan, this is wonderful news. It provides some experimental backing for J.K. Rowling’s opinion that, “The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry.”

More importantly, it shows that conveying messages of tolerance through literature actually works. Potter’s journey of self-discovery, then, might some day be immortalized in projects that aim to teach tolerance to young children.

New invisibility cloak type designed

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A new “broadband” invisibility cloak which hides objects over a wide range of frequencies has been devised.

Despite the hype about Harry Potter-style cloaks, our best current designs can only conceal objects at specific wavelengths of light or microwaves.

At other frequencies, invisibility cloaks actually make things more visible, not less, US physicists found.

Their solution is a new ultrathin, electronic system, which they describe in Physical Review Letters.

“Start Quote

If you want to make an object transparent at all angles and over broad bandwidths, this is a good solution”

Andrea Alu University of Texas

“Our active cloak is a completely new concept and design, aimed at beating the limits of [current cloaks] and we show that it indeed does,” said Prof Andrea Alu, from the University of Texas at Austin.

“If you want to make an object transparent at all angles and over broad bandwidths, this is a good solution.

“We are looking into realising this technology at the moment, but we are still at the early stages.”

Passive vs Active

While the popular image of an invisibility cloak is the magical robe worn by Harry Potter, there is another kind which is not so far-fetched.

The first working model – which concealed a small copper cylinder by bending microwaves around it – was first demonstrated in 2006.

Left: uncloaked sphere. Right: Same sphere covered with a plasmonic cloak
The sphere on the right is “cloaked” but actually scatters more radiation than when bare (left)

It was built with a thin shell of metamaterials – artificial composites whose structures allow properties which do not exist in nature.

Cloaking materials could have applications in the military, microscopy, biomedical sensing, and energy harvesting devices.

The trouble with current designs is they only work at limited bandwidths. Even this “perfect” 3D cloak demonstrated last year could only hide objects from microwaves.

At other frequencies the cloak acts as a beacon – making the hidden object more obvious – as Prof Alu and his team have now demonstrated in a new study in Physical Review X.

They looked at three popular types of “passive” cloaks – which do not require electricity – a plasmonic cloak, a mantle cloak, and a transformation-optics cloak.

Other ways to disappear

optical camouflage, keio university
  • Optical camouflage technology: A modified background image is projected onto a cloak of retro-reflective material (the kind used to make projector screens); the wearer becomes invisible to anyone standing at the projection source
  • The “mirage effect”: Electric current is passed through submerged carbon nanotubes to create very high local temperatures, this causes light to bounce off them, hiding objects behind
  • Adaptive heat cloaking: A camera records background temperatures, these are displayed by sheets of hexagonal pixels which change temperature very quickly, camouflaging even moving vehicles from heat-sensitive cameras
  • Calcite crystal prism: Calcite crystals send the two polarisations of light in different directions. By gluing prism-shaped crystals together in a specific geometry, polarised light can be directed around small objects, effectively cloaking them

All three types scattered more waves than the bare object they were trying to hide – when tested over the whole range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

“If you suppress scattering in one range, you need to pay the price, with interest, in some other range,” Prof Alu told BBC News.

“For example, you might make a cloak that makes an object invisible to red light. But if you were illuminated by white light (containing all colours) you would actually look bright blue, and therefore stand out more.”

A cloak that allows complete invisibility is “impossible” with current passive designs, the study concluded.

“When you add material around an object to cloak it, you can’t avoid the fact that you are adding matter, and that this matter still responds to electromagnetic waves,” Prof Alu explained.

Instead, he said, a much more promising avenue is “active” cloaking technology – designs which rely on electrical power to make objects “vanish”.

Active cloaks can be thinner and less conspicuous than passive cloaks.

Alu’s team have proposed a new design which uses amplifiers to coat the surface of the object in an electric current.

This ultrathin cloak would hide an object from detection at a frequency range “orders of magnitude broader” than any available passive cloaking technology, they wrote.

Nothing’s perfect

Prof David Smith of Duke University, one of the team who created the first cloak in 2006, said the new design was one of the most detailed he had yet seen.

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This does not necessarily preclude the Harry Potter cloak”

Professor David Smith Duke University

“It’s an interesting implementation but as presented is probably a bit limited to certain types of objects,” he told BBC News.

“There are limitations even on active materials. It will be interesting to see if it can be experimentally realised.”

Prof Smith points out that even an “imperfect” invisibility cloak might be perfectly sufficient to build useful devices with real-world applications.

For example, a radio-frequency cloak could improve wireless communications – by helping them bypass obstacles and reducing interference from neighbouring antennas.

“To most people, making an object ‘invisible’ means making it transparent to visible wavelengths. And the visible spectrum is a tiny, tiny sliver of the overall electromagnetic spectrum,” he told BBC News.

“So, this finding does not necessarily preclude the Harry Potter cloak, nor does it preclude any other narrow bandwidth application of cloaking.”

Video Analytics Could Flag Crimes Before They Happen.

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Boston-Video-AnalyticsSoon after the investigation into Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings began, law enforcement urged the public to e-mail any video, images or other information that might lead them to the guilty party. “No piece of information or detail is too small,” states the F.B.I.’s Web site. Picking through all of this footage in search of clues has been no small task for investigators, given the size of the camera-carrying crowd that had assembled to watch the race, not to mention the video surveillance already put in place by the city and local merchants.

Law enforcement now say they have found video images of two separate suspects carrying black bags at each explosion site and are planning to release the images Thursday so that the public can help identify the men, the Boston Globe reports.

Whereas software for analyzing such video can identify and flag objects, colors and even patterns of behavior after the fact, the hope is that someday soon intelligent video camera setups will be able to detect suspicious activity and issue immediate warnings in time to prevent future tragedies.

A team of New York University researchers is working toward that goal, having developed software they say can measure the “sentiment” of people in a crowd. So far, the technology has primarily been tested as a marketing tool at sporting events (gauging what advertisements capture an audience’s attention, for example), but the researchers are eyeing homeland security applications as well. The U.S. military, which is funding much of the N.Y.U. research, is interested in knowing whether this software could detect when someone is approaching a checkpoint or base with a weapon or explosives concealed under their clothing.

“So far, we can detect if they’re eating or using their cell phones or clapping,” says N.Y.U. computer science professor Chris Bregler. It’s not an exact science, but monitoring crowd behavior helps marketers understand what creates a positive crowd response—whether they are high-fiving action on the field, responding to a call for “the wave” or laughing at an advertisement on the scoreboard. The software is programmed to detect only positive sentiment at this time. Negative sentiments—booing and impolite gestures–are next on the researchers’ agenda.

The key to analyzing video in real time is programming the accompanying analytical software to look for certain cues–a rigid object under soft, flowing clothing, for example–and issue immediate alerts. First, the software must be “trained,” Bregler says. This is done with the help of Internet services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk digital labor marketplace, where participants are paid to analyze and tag video footage based on what’s on the screen. Bregler and his team load these results into a computer neural network—a cluster of microprocessors that essentially analyzes relationships among data—so that the software can eventually identify this activity on its own.

One challenge for the researchers is developing its analytical software so that it can examine a variety of different types of video footage, whether it’s professional-quality camerawork on the nightly news or someone recording an event with a shaky cell phone camera. “The U.S. military wants us to look at, say, Arab Spring footage and large demonstrations for early signs that they will turn violent,” Bregler says.

Bregler’s earlier research to identify specific movement signatures (see video below) used the same motion-capture technology used for special effects in the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies. Bregler’s motion-analysis research attracted the attention of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2000 as a possible means of identifying security threats. Following 9/11 his researched ramped up thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Law enforcement and counterterrorism organizations already had facial-recognition technology but were looking for additional ways to better make sense of countless hours of surveillance footage.

Given that people don’t normally walk around in tight-fitting motion-capture suits laden with reflective markers, the N.Y.U. team developed their technology to focus more on scanning a camera’s surroundings and identifying spots that are unique, such as the way light reflects off a shirt’s button differently than it does off the shirt’s fabric. The researchers’ goal is for their software to be able to identify a person’s emotional state and other attributes based on movement.

Without such advanced video analytics, investigators must essentially reverse-engineer the action depicted in the video they receive, Bregler says. In the case of the Boston Marathon, the researchers have been analyzing video of the explosions and then working backward to see who was in the area prior to the bombing. “Most likely the data needed to figure out what happened exists,” he adds. “Investigators just need to find it, which is difficult given the volume of the video coming in.”

Source: Scientific American