Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation.
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The dreams of readers | ROUGH TYPE - 1 views
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We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.” Making sense of what transpires in a book’s imagined reality appears to depend on “making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.”
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The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside people’s heads as they read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”
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When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation.
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we really do enter, so far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its emotional force.
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” A work of literature, particularly narrative literature, takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways.
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there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates
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A 2009 experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities.
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Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question.
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when we open a book, our expectations and attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.”
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The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.
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reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others.
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can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
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Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog. Claiming that printed pages “create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader,” he concluded that, in the internet era, “the book is an outdated means of communicating information.” He declared that “print is where words go to die.”
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Society is growing ever more skeptical of the value of solitude. The status quo treats with suspicion even the briefest of withdrawals into inactivity and apparent purposelessness. We see it in the redefinition of receptive states of mind as passive states of mind.
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the arts of production and consumption, of getting stuff done, to which most of us devote most of our waking hours.
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In a 2003 lecture, Andrew Louth, a theology professor at the University of Durham in England, drew a distinction between “the free arts” and “the servile arts.” The servile arts, he said, are those “to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.”
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free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by “the search for knowledge for its own sake.”
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It may be that readers have to enter a state of languid pleasure, a dream, before they can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose signals the most profound kind of inner activity, the kind that goes unregistered by society’s sensors.
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shared by David McGavock on 07 May 14
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HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION | Edge.org - 0 views
edge.org/...-culture-drove-human-evolution
anthropology evolution culture tools cooperation religion neuroscience
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cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.
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but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.
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you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future
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some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started?
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here's theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.
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Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago
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there's another possibility that it was a different kind of ape that we don't have in the modern world: a communal breeding ape that lives in family units rather than the kind of fission fusion you might see in chimpanzees
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In the Pliocene, we see lots of different kinds of apes in terms of different species of Australopithecus.
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we now have evidence to suggest that humans were communal breeders, so that we lived in family groups maybe somewhat similar to the way gorillas live in family groups, and that this is a much better environment for the evolution of capacities for culture than typical in the chimpanzee model
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idea being that the religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies
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There's an interaction between genes and culture. First you have to get the culturally transmitted knowledge about animal behavior and tracking and spore knowledge and the ability to identify individuals, which is something you need to practice, and only after that can you begin to take advantage of long distance running techniques
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there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony
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but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing.
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if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks,
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more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers. These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor
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rituals seem to be sets of practices engineered by cultural evolution to be effective at transmitting belief and transmitting faith
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Speaking in unison, large congregations saying the same thing, this all taps our capacity for conformist transmission;
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People also engage in what we call credibility-enhancing displays [during rituals]. These are costly things. It might be an animal sacrifice or the giving of a large sum of money or some kind of painful initiation rite
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We think religions are just one element, one way in which culture has figured out ways to expand the sphere of cooperation and allow markets to form and people to exchange and to maintain the substantial division of labor.
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There's a lot of risk in developing specialization because you have to be confident that there's a market there that you can engage with. Whereas if you're a generalist and you do a little bit of farming, a little bit of manufacturing, then you're much less reliant on the market. Markets require a great deal of trust
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In the intellectual tradition that I'm building on, culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning
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We tend to think of cultural transmission, or at least many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language
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, it's quite clear that there is a ton of cultural transmission that is just strictly by observational learning.
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you can learn one thing from one generation, and that begins to accumulate in subsequent generations.
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One of the interesting lines of research that's come out of this recognition is the importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology.
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You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania's actually connected to mainland Australia so it's just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it's at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn
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You can show that this is the kind of thing you'd expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they're learning from the most successful member
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larger islands had much bigger and more complex fishing technologies, and you can even show an effective contact. Some of the islands were in more or less contact with each other,
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rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies
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As an individual inventor or company, you're best off if everybody else shares their ideas but you don't share your ideas because then you get to keep your good ideas, and nobody else gets exposed to them, and you get to use their good ideas, so you get to do more recombination.
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Embedded in this whole information-sharing thing is a constant cooperative dilemma in which individuals have to be willing to share for the good of the group.
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But in the modern world, of course, monogamy is normative, and people who have too many wives are thought poorly of by the larger society. The question is, how did this ever get in place?
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it does seem to have societal level benefits. It reduces male-male competition. We think there's evidence to say it reduces crime, reduces substance abuse, and it also engages males in ways that cause them to discount the future less and engage in productive activities rather than taking a lot of risks
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especially if you have a society with widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males. Then you're going to have a situation that would normally promote high levels of polygyny
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to get into the mating and marriage market you would have to have a high level of wealth if we were to let nature take it's course
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Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution.
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We now have the neuroscience to say that culture's in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains.
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A good example of this is the placebos. Placebos are something that depend on your cultural beliefs. If you believe that something will work, then when you take it, like you take an aspirin or you take a placebo for an aspirin, it initiates the same pathways as the chemically active substance. Placebos are chemically inert but biologically active, and it's completely dependent on your cultural beliefs.
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One of the large research projects that I run in an effort to understand human sociality is called The Root of Human Sociality Project.
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at the time to something called the Ultimatum Game, and the Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness.
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behavioral economists find that students give about half, sometimes a little bit less than half, and people are inclined to reject offers below about 30 percent
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The older you get, even if you have more wealth and more income, you're especially inclined to only offer half, and you'll reject offers below 40 percent.
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I did it in 1995 and 1996 there, and what I found amongst the Machiguenga was that they were completely unwilling to reject, and they thought it was silly. Why would anyone ever reject?
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they made low offers, the modal offer was 15 percent instead of 50, and the mean comes out to be about 25 percent.
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over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games
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we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.
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able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration.
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there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers.
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large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion.
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did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.
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Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game.
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In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.
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This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative.
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but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances
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large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.
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A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin
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In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.
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People from world religions were willing to give more to the other person in the experiment, the anonymous stranger
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Part of this is your willingness to acquire a norm of impartial roles; that we have a set of rules that governs this system.
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If you want the rule of law to spread or to be maintained, you need conditions in which you're managing risk.
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[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it.
Oakland Teachers Show the Power of Action Research - Living in Dialogue - Education Wee... - 0 views
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Visions of Students Today - 0 views
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Another in Michael Wesch's series of videos. There's a lot of catching up for academia to do now that we have ubiquitous access to self-publishing tools, online repositories of knowledge, clusters of niche networks and are putting our cognitive surplus to better use than watching TV. And we are all perennial, life-long students and teachers.
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E-Readers in Africa: Non-Profit Brings Thousands of Books to Ghanaian Children - 2 views
From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning - 1 views
www.cellphonesinlearning.com
cellphone education technology mobile teaching edtech thinking tools learning culture
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mLearningopedia - 0 views
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shared by Charles van der Haegen on 21 Jun 11
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TEDx Duke Talk is Posted! « Learning Matters! Tony O'Driscoll - 2 views
wadatripp.wordpress.com/...tedx-duke-talk-is-posted
education scenarios children future learning jerk technology O'Driscoll
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Here is the talk I gave at TEDx Duke " Preparing Your Children for a World you can Barely Imagine." Some of the images are a bit pixelated but you can get a copy of the slides in my previous post.
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I viewed this presentation again... Love it so much... Wanted to share my admiration and joy with you... It's all about how we can manage Jerk with MindAmp.
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Mission for week two: Evolution of cooperation questions (ACTION REQUESTED) | Social Me... - 0 views
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a lot of smart people across the region also begin to identify themselves with one of the sides, inevitably getting involved in arguments they don't want to be part of, raising hostility towards each other.
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help people learn how to identify and de-identify with various groups, by allowing them to experience the variety of social contexts.
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The notion of indirect reciprocity could be important here: doing things for those groups without expecting to get a return, but setting an example
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reject the notion of tribes or of people being permanently and essentially bad and extremist, and to be welcoming and kind
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know how to build trust and create cooperation, we should know something about breaking bad patterns
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little can be done at the level of the individual, other than being aware that our appreciation of ideas, and our tendency to engage in counterproductive behavior may be due to forces other than the ideas themselves.
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it is possible to gather individuals into a super organism that is less vulnerable to being victimized by false or misleading information,
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My cultural answer is to displace the ubiquitous narrative of competition by this narrative of cooperative
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empowers the common man to act at multiple levels, assuming responsibility for all the nested groups to which he would belong.
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Discrimination starts with stereotypes that turn into prejudice, and the individual becomes a member of a group that is dehmanised and stripped of human qualities.
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transferring an ultimate level of governance and common legislation to structures above nation states
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only possible escape route is to get a glimpse of life on the outside, to see that there are different ways to live one's life, to understand that there are choices.
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only through the glimpse can the child even begin to contemplate the notion of breaking the "pre-wiring"
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same forces producing the 'dark' forms of social cooperation mentioned above - compliance, conformance, solidarity - are perhaps the same forces behind 'good' cooperation.
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might include: cultural traits and norms based on morality (i.e. religion), integration of market economies, promoting greater free-flow of people/ideas, promoting denser urban centers, open access to information, monogamy??, anti-nepotism norms, cooperative higher institutions (with ability to manage laws/reputations/punishment).
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redefining the boundaries of the group to include more people is the best opportunity for change
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Once you include everyone in the group, you find ways to encourage interactions among both sub-groups,
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narcos manage to stay loyal and cooperate within their cartel when competing against other cartels with equally loyal members.
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Assurance game, because one narco will only fight if the other fights, and will defect if the other defects
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shared by David McGavock on 24 Jul 14
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Multitasking, social media and distraction: Research review Journalist's Resource: Rese... - 0 views
journalistsresource.org/...raction-what-does-research-say
multitasking research Infotention learning culture
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researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.
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Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”
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The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”
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Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.
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same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience
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The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”
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survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.
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said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
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The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”
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Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.
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Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: "The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking." - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/multitasking-social-media-distraction-what-does-research-say#sthash.I21dv2wV.dpuf
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http://www.ach.lit.ulaval.ca/Gratis/Evans_Electronic.pdf - 0 views
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What is the effect of online availability ofjournal issues? It is possible that by makingmore research more available, online searchingcould conceivably broaden the work cited andlead researchers, as a collective, away from the“core”journals of their fields and to dispersedbut individually relevant work. I will show,however, that even as deeper journal back is-sues became available online, scientists andscholars cited more recent articles; even asmore total journals became available online,fewer were cited
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Figure 1 shows the speed of the shift toward commercial and free electronic provision of articles, and how deepening backfiles have made more early science readily available in recent years.
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Panel regression models were used to explore the relation between online article availability and citation activity—average historical depth of citations, number of distinct articles and journals cited, and Herfindahl concentration of citations to particular articles and journals—over time (details on methods are in the Supporting Online Material)
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The graphs in Fig. 2 trace the influence of online access, estimated from the entire sample of articles, and illustrated for journals and subfields with the mean number of citations. Figure 2A shows the simultaneous effect of commercial and free online availability on the average age of citations
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The first question was whether depth of citation—years between articles and the work they reference—is predicted by the depth of journal issues online—how many years back issues were electronically available during the previous year when scientists presumably drafted them into their papers.
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Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journal archives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely, citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim. If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Research on the extreme inequality of Internet hyperlinks (14), scientific citations (15, 16), and other forms of “preferential attachment” (17, 18) suggests that near-random differences in quality amplify when agents become aware of each other’s choices. Agents view others’ choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—and factor them into their own reading and citation selections. By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly .
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This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals— likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles (19)
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As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.
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