Currently, Weber is focusing the majority of her time on two very different, but crucial issues: “… environmental decisions, in particular responses to climate change and climate variability, and financial decisions, for example pension savings.”
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Will the iPad Make You Smarter? | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - 3 views
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"Will the iPad Make You Smarter? * By Brian X. Chen Email Author * July 8, 2010 | * 7:00 am | * Categories: Tablets * A growing chorus of voices argue that the internet is making us dumber. Web-connected laptops, smartphones and videogame consoles have all been cast as distracting brain mushers. But there's reason to believe some of the newest devices might not erode our minds. In fact, some scientists think they could even make us smarter. Could the cleaner and more modern interfaces that we see on iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones better suit the way our minds were meant to work?"
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shared by David McGavock on 18 Dec 11
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Elke Weber - The Earth Institute - Columbia University - 2 views
www.earth.columbia.edu/...2329
information_literacy evaluate critical_thinking crap detection resources choice environment
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Weber is past president of both the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and Society for Mathematical Psychology, and she is the current president of the Society for Neuroeconomics.
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Her areas of expertise include cognitive and affective processes in judgment and choice, cross-cultural issues in management, environmental decision making and policy, medical decision making, and risk management.
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"Working at the intersection of psychology and economics, Weber is an expert on behavioral models of judgment and decision making under risk and uncertainty. Recently, she has been investigating psychologically appropriate ways to measure and model individual and cultural differences in risk taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental issues. She describes her research as follows: "I try to gain an understanding and appreciation of decision making at a broad range of levels of analysis, which is not easy, given that each level requires different theories, methods and tools. So at the micro end of the continuum, I study how basic psychological processes like attention, emotion and memory (and their representation in the brain) influence preference and choice. At the macro end of the continuum, I think about how policy makers may want to present policy initiatives to the public to make them maximally effective. This range of topics and methods is challenging, but at least in my mind the different levels of analysis inform and complement each other." "
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Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And Analysis? - 0 views
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Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.
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Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.
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Science News Share Blog Cite Print Email Bookmark Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And Analysis? ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2009) - As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles. See also: Mind & Brain Intelligence Educational Psychology Computers & Math Video Games Computer Graphics Science & Society Popular Culture Educational Policy Reference Computing power everywhere Webcast Computer-generated imagery Aptitude Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science. Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said. How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as reading and classroom discussion? "No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops." S
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How to Read A Book Video Programs on DVD - 0 views
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shared by David McGavock on 31 May 10
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The Critical Thinking Co. - What is Critical Thinking? - 1 views
www.criticalthinking.com/articles.html
crap detection critical_thinking information thinking critical
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1. Is open-minded and mindful of alternatives 2. Tries to be well-informed 3. Judges well the credibility of sources 4. Identifies conclusions, reasons, and assumptions 5. Judges well the quality of an argument, including the acceptability of its reasons, assumptions, and evidence 6. Can well develop and defend a reasonable position 7. Asks appropriate clarifying questions 8. Formulates plausible hypotheses; plans experiments well 9. Defines terms in a way appropriate for the context 10. Draws conclusions when warranted, but with caution 11. Integrates all items in this list when deciding what to believe or do
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Sherry Turkle - 0 views
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"Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). "
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Digital Introspection and the Importance of Self-Knowledge - James Fallows - Technology... - 4 views
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Digital Introspection and the Importance of Self-Knowledge MAR 18 2011, 11:00 AM ET By Shelley Hayduk As the world changes, for better or worse, we continue to assimilate new experiences and ideas that define who we are. With the advent of new social networking tools, we can join the web of digitized relationships to connect with people and share these views. But in addition to connecting outward we also need to turn inward to reflect on our ideas and the relationships that we hold implicitly in our own minds. The connections we make in our head are unique to every individual. It's a fascinating journey to try and understand what they are. So how do we examine ourselves -- our thoughts and experiences? One method is introspection, and it's going digital. SELF-ANALYSIS THROUGH LANGUAGE Language and writing are key vehicles for introspection. Many people keep diaries of their thoughts and experiences to get to know themselves. Some people even write autobiographies. In fact, a key premise of psychotherapy (in the Freudian sense) is to become explicitly conscious of your feelings and subconscious beliefs by talking through them, i.e capturing your understanding in language. In expressing underlying forces of your life through words you can identify relevant psychological angst and formulate a better way to live. In each case, we capture our feelings and implicit views with words, articulating their meaning through language. Now technology gives us the ability to take this a step further, but before we get to that, a word about mental models. YOUR MENTAL MODEL We are the aggregation of how all our thoughts, feelings and experiences connect. This gestalt forms a perspective of the world as we see it. It's kind of like a miniature version of the world in our heads -- a "mental model" if you will. We use our mental models to store, analyze and decide everything. When we make a decision we check our mental models and use them to try to predict what will happen in the
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Educational Leadership:Creativity Now!:The Case for Curiosity - 2 views
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But what we admire and what we deliberately cultivate aren't the same. When researchers dig deeper, they find that many adults think of curiosity as a trait possessed by some but not others. Or they think that as long as the environment isn't too repressive, children's natural sense of inquiry will surface (Engel, 2011). In fact, when Hilary and I asked teachers to list which qualities were most important without giving them a list to choose from, almost none mentioned curiosity. Many teachers endorse curiosity when they're asked about it, but it isn't uppermost on their minds-or shaping their teaching plans.
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Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong | Video on TED.com - 1 views
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So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right. And second, why it's such a problem. And finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make.
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Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up, it's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome.
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This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly.
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But when it comes down to me, right now, to all the beliefs I hold, here in the present tense, suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window -- and I can't actually think of anything I'm wrong about.
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You know, we're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we feel like we're on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.
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according to this, getting something wrong means there's something wrong with us. So we just insist that we're right, because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe.
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The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.
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when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes.
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And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, "Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong."
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most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong, or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong.
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So by the time you are nine years old, you've already learned, first of all, that people who get stuff wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits -- and second of all, that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes.
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The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. They don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team.
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And the thing is," says Ira Glass, "we need this. We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work." And for the rest of us, audience members, as listeners, as readers, we eat this stuff up. We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong.
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This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. And when we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well that's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or torpedoing the global economy.
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When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots.
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The 9-to-5 doesn't always make sense. How I work: Discipline. Differences. Structures. ... - 1 views
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In all of this, creative and intellectual pursuits require exceptional discipline, or else these individuals can become swallowed by the banal of chasing information and products that yield no results.
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In any given day, I probably only have 5 hours of ‘great’ work time, time when I’m focused on writing and complex problem solving; I regard these hours as fundamentally precious and push everything to the wayside during these times.
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I am a fastidious multi-tasker; in that I do many tasks throughout the day and let some percolate in the back of my mind while focusing most of my energy on the job at present.
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Throughout it all, I set targets and goals and deadlines, knowing the importance of self-discipline above all else–and in the mornings, I write out fresh post-it notes with clear, tangible goals and deadlines.
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A few months ago, I tried to explain to my Granpda why my style of working worked for me, and what it was that I was doing differently than his generation-for better or for worse. I've decided to revisit and revise the essay, here. Let me know what you think-and what style of working has worked for you: how do you work best? Do you think the structure of 9 to 5 is antiquated? Where did the 9-to-5 system come from? How is it helpful, and how is it a hindrance? More importantly, how can we make it better?
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ASCD Express 9.03 - What the Mind Needs to Do to Read Nonfiction - 0 views
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As We May Think - Magazine - The Atlantic - 1 views
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Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome.
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trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
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memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
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It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another.
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It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book
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photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.
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Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
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