Group items tagged

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs. • Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete. • Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it. • Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign. • The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea. • Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume? • Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one? • The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful. • Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

The results confirmed the widely held view that love can lead to a smaller support network, with typically one family member and one friend being pushed out to accommodate the new lover.

Q. But critics of the current system say that 10 to 15 percent of medical costs are due to medical malpractice. A. That’s wildly exaggerated. According to the actuarial consulting firm Towers Perrin, medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, the last year for which data are available. We have a more than a $2 trillion health care system. That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. That’s a rounding error. Liability isn’t even the tail on the cost dog. It’s the hair on the end of the tail.

Q. What about Senator John Kerry’s assertion that it’s “doable” to rid the system of frivolous lawsuits? A. I guess it’s doable because there aren’t very many frivolous suits.

To me, the speech’s impact diluted among its many disconnected insights. I didn’t come away with a clear new model for how to structure my research career, so I ignored Hamming’s advice, responding politely, but somewhat dismissively, as readers continued to point me toward the talk as a potential source of wisdom. Now that I’m over a decade into my training as a professional scientist, however, I’m finally beginning to notice the elegance behind Hamming’s words. With this talk, I came to realize, he’s capturing a crucial truth: in many fields, including research science, the path to becoming excellent is messy and ambiguous.

This rule reduces achievement to quantity: the secret to becoming great is to do a great amount of work. What Hamming emphasizes, however, is that quantity alone is not sufficient. (“I’ve often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn’t have so much to show for it,” he asks at one point in his speech.) Those 10,000 hours have to be invested in the right things, and as the disjointed nature of Hamming’s talk underscores, the question of what are the right things is slippery and near impossible to nail down with confidence.

Embrace Ambiguity

Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions.

in a new study published in Science, scientists studying groups of people from different societies have suggested that our sense of fairness may depend on the type of society we live in.

Lead researcher Joseph Henrich observed that members of smaller groups were unwilling to punish selfish behavior and were willing to keep much of the money for themselves. This may be because smaller communities lack the social norms or informal institutions like markets and religion, causing them to have narrower concepts of fairness.

Today's youth are generally not the self-centered, antisocial slackers that previous research has made them out to be, according to a provocative new study co-authored by a Michigan State University psychologist.

-Today's youth are more cynical and less trusting of institutions than previous generations. But Donnellan said this is generally true of the broader population. -The current generation is less fearful of social problems such as race relations, hunger, poverty and energy shortages. -Today's youth have higher educational expectations.

"Kids today are like they were 30 years ago – they're trying to find their place in the world, they're trying to carve out an identity, and it can be difficult," Donnellan said. "But lots of research shows that the stereotypes of all groups are much more overdrawn than the reality."

Armed with a sense that life may not be arbitrary, counterfactual thinkers are more motivated and analytical in organizational settings, the study suggests.

it is actually very functional in terms of helping people establish relationships and make sense of cause and effect

In 1995 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a review of 23 comparatively rigorous studies conducted between 1982 and 1994. These were your classic controlled double-blind affairs: two groups of kids, one fed a bunch of sugar, the other given a placebo (i.e., artificial sweetener), everyone kept sufficiently in the dark as to who'd gotten what, etc. The results? No discernible relationship between sugar ingested and how the kids acted. It didn't matter how old they were, how much sugar they got, what their diets were like otherwise — nothing. The JAMA authors stopped shy of drawing any definitive conclusions, but if there were a legitimate sugar-high effect out there, you'd like to see it turn up in the lab every so often.

I should stress we're not talking here about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which is its own freestanding issue; studies have suggested there's some correlation between ADHD and diet, so maybe every so often you'll get a kid whose condition really is exacerbated by sugar. And there are plenty of other good reasons to limit children's consumption of sugar-laden food. But when a parent freaks out because a swig of soda has allegedly made his kid uncontrollable, it's quite possible he's not just seeing the behavior he expects to see, he's helping create it.

a 2007 study by the Minerals Management Service (or MMS, the division of the Interior Department responsible for offshore drilling) found that this procedure was implicated in 18 out of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over the 14 years it studied—more than any other factor. Cementing, which was handled by Halliburton, had just been completed prior to the recent explosion. The Journal notes that Halliburton was also the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea off Australia.

The first difficulty we must confront is trying to entangle what is meant by "reason."

Rand claims that "The method which reason employs in this process is logic—and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification." This description entails the additional difficulties involved in trying to figure out what on earth Rand could possibly mean by suggesting that logic is the "art of non-contradictory identification."

Polls consistently show that we think those who disagree with us politically are simply bad people, on a personal level.

Now take a look at this study, which compared a person's average political knowledge with their primary source of news. The results were surprising: The most knowledgeable groups were viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hot on their heels? Fans of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

A typical Objectivist assurance that rational debate is welcome and encouraged. So how did it measure up? Well, let's find out.

One, while arguing that abortion is permissible in the third trimester, added this classic Objectivist line to his argument: A is A. A is A entails that abortion is moral? Call the press! The pro-lifers have been officially refuted. And absolutely hilarious was the debate between a Randroid and an ideological anarchist (Editor: did the anarchist call the Randroid a "statist"?? They really hate that!). If only we had a dogmatic libertarian, we could have had the cultist right trifecta!

And another remarkable statement: Mr. Biddle told several students that morally we would be justified in overthrowing our government because it is more powerful than the one the Founders overthrew (he does not advocate it because it would be unpractical - but then what happened to Rand's claim that the moral is the practical?)

The guns that flow southward along with the cash, according to the narrative, are largely responsible for Mexico’s violence. As one looks at other countries lying to the south of Mexico along the smuggling routes from South America to the United States, they too seem to suffer from the same maladies.

While the desert regions along the border do provide a bit of a buffer between the two countries — and between the Mexican core and its northern territories — there is no geological obstacle separating the two countries. Even the Rio Grande is not so grand, as the constant flow of illicit goods over it testifies.

the conscious mind often seeks to rationalize what emerges from the unconscious.

Not only do we run alien subroutines [i.e., unconscious processes]; we also justify them. We have ways of retrospectively telling stories about our actions as though the actions were always our [i.e., our conscious mind's] idea.... We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood.

The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzinga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events.

why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?

As Hayek made clear 66 years ago, the problem we face when try to “construct” an economic order is how to best make use of all of this knowledge, which is dispersed, contextual, and often tacit. 

A new international study, which involved Douglas Mental Health University Institute researcher Jens Pruessner, is the first to show that two distinct brain regions that regulate emotion and stress are affected by city living.

"These findings suggest that different brain regions are sensitive to the experience of city living during different times across the lifespan," says Pruessner. "Future studies need to clarify the link between psychopathology and these affects in individuals with mental disorders.These findings contribute to our understanding of urban environmental risk for mental disorders and health in general. They further point to a new approach to interface social sciences, neurosciences and public policy to respond to the major health challenge of urbanization."