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David McGavock

Use Tech to Get Organized: The 100 Best Tools, Websites, Apps and More | DailyTekk - 0 views

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    Top 100 tech tools by category. Certainly some of my favorites in these lists. Shows how many options there are. More than I'm familiar with.
David McGavock

How the brain creates the 'buzz' that helps ideas spread - 1 views

  • UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called "buzz."
  • "Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people,"
  • We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that.
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  • The study findings are published in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science, with print publication to follow later this summer.
  • "Now we have mapped the brain regions associated with ideas that are likely to be contagious and are associated with being a good 'idea salesperson.' In the future, we would like to be able to use these brain maps to forecast what ideas are likely to be successful and who is likely to be effective at spreading them."
  • the interns who were especially good at persuading the producers showed significantly more activation in a brain region known as the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ, at the time they were first exposed to the pilot ideas they would later recommend.
  • We found that increased activity in the TPJ was associated with an increased ability to convince others to get on board with their favorite ideas.
  • Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important."
  • The TPJ, located on the outer surface of the brain, is part of what is known as the brain's "mentalizing network," which is involved in thinking about what other people think and feel.
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    Interesting findings. The emphasis here is on identifying activity of the brain that indicates a person's effectiveness with passing on (sharing) information. While that is notable, it would be great to know what activity indicates that the information has merit in and of itself. We have plenty of buzz in our world. What we need are authoritative sources.
David McGavock

The Willpower Instinct - Kelly McGonigal - Google Drive - 0 views

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    Kelly's summary of week's 1, 2 and 3. Nice outline by the author. Thanks Kelly!
David McGavock

Video & Audio | The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama - 0 views

  • The discussions during Mind and Life XVIII primarily focus on the subjective phenomenology, information-processing operations, and neural mechanisms of attention, memory and conscious awareness from both scientific and Buddhist perspectives. Venue: His Holiness's Residence, Dharamsala, India Date: 6-10 April 2009 Duration: 9 sessions (each approx. 2 hours) Languages: English, Tibetan
David McGavock

Q&A: David Eagleman, Director, Initiative on Neuroscience and the Law | SmartPlanet - 1 views

  • David Eagleman is about as close to a rock star that a neuroscientist can be.
  • Eagleman was excited to talk to SmartPlanet about his work at both the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, a national, interdisciplinary organization he founded that’s looking at how to remake the U.S. legal system; and the Laboratory for Perception and Action, at Baylor College of Medicine. The former initiative tackles topics such as how brain imaging and analyses of “Big Data” on crime patterns can help communities better understand and prevent violent behavior in new ways. The latter looks broadly at how individual brains are not at all alike — and how the differences might be significant for how we construct and manage our societies.
  • His work is particularly relevant in policy-related discussions in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Connecticut.
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  • “To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy,” he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  “If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza.”
  • Because we are able now to measure things we have never been able to measure before, this allows us potentially to customize sentencing and rehabilitation. The goal is to have the whole system be more just and have more utility.
  • Our system is built on the assumption that if you’re over 18 and over the IQ of 70, you’re a practical reasoner, free to choose how you act. But modern neuroscience suggests that those are not good assumptions.
  • I have to emphasize, though, that this is not about exculpation. I have to be very clear that this is really about customized sentencing and rehab that works.
  • It’s helpful to be able to talk about science in basic ways that anyone can understand. What I tell my students in my lab is that they need to be able explain their research to an 8th grader.
  • I’m an amateur history buff, and if I want to read about the Roman Empire, I don’t want to read an academic debate, but instead a narrative by a trusted guide who’s done their homework, who will offer the filter of how they understand the Roman Empire, to shepherd me through its history in only 200 pages.
  • Rather than “playful,” I’d say that my approach is simply the opposite of boring. It’s about looking for and then trying to answer questions that are poweful enough to get you out of bed at 5AM.
  • My intuition on this idea: being a good scientist or creative writer is about maintaining the wide-eyed wonder of a child and asking questions all the time. That’s what really makes discovery happen in any field.
  • Science is changing really rapidly. One way is that lots of scientists are moving into Big Data
  • Right now we’re involved with serious crunching to pull out statistical info on recidivism and crime. Our first challenge is visualizing it. So in this sense, creativity and art also relevant. Data visualization is really valuable stuff; you can discover a trend when you see, wow, I didn’t realize that bump would be there. To be able to tie together data in beautiful ways allows us to see and discover patterns.
  • I don’t have any fear about losing the mystery of creativity. If I explain every single chemical piece in the process of why you enjoy the taste of a soy latte, it wouldn’t diminish your enjoyment of a soy latte. It might even enhance it
  • Neuroscientists work on how to understand how brains construct reality in general, but we are in the position of fish trying to understand water. What I mean by that is that we only know one way of seeing the world very well, like a fish only knows water.  Learning about how synesthesia works allows us to get out of our fishbowl,
  • You don’t need to know anything about the brain to understand what shape or style will be appealing. We may come scrambling up behind advertisers and product designers and validate them. If Apple wanted to hire me, sure, I’d say yes immediately and do the best job I could! But honestly, they already know how to do it. They’re the design experts. We neuroscientists would in come with our fancy machines and theories and explain why what they do is already true.
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     "To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy," he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  "If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza."
David McGavock

Digital Skills Can Be Quickly Acquired - NYTimes.com - 0 views

    • David McGavock
       
      Literacy for professionals.
  • In 2007, there were 150 workshops and courses about digital media and technology but none specifically about social media, according to Carmen Scheidel, Mediabistro’s vice president for education and events.
  • “In general, the digital natives are earlier in their careers, and they are not the ones taking these types of classes,” Ms. Scheidel said. “It tends to be people who are very accomplished in their careers but are new to social media. It is an interesting mix.”
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  • To deliver social media training in a more effective way, Ms. Scheidel said that Mediabistro last year introduced a new approach. Instead of offering mostly small workshops with 15 to 20 students, they began offering what she described as an online social media conference.
  • For midcareer executives, particularly in the media and related industries, knowing how to use Twitter, update your timeline on Facebook, pin on Pinterest, check in on Foursquare and upload images on Instagram are among the digital skills that some employers expect people to have to land a job or to flourish in a current role.
  • Pamela Tate, president and chief executive of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, based in Chicago, said digital literacy, including understanding social networking, is now a required skill.
  • To help bridge the gap, major universities, community colleges, online educational businesses from Lynda.com to ed2go.com offer continuing education classes in digital media, including social media skills, Web design, search optimization and Web analytics.
  • The University of San Francisco
  • Harvard’s Extension School
  • Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism
  • It is a place of business. It is a place where your career will be enhanced or degraded, depending on your use of these tools and services.”
  • Professor Sreenivasan and Ernest R. Sotomayor, assistant dean, career services and continuing education, organized a weekend of panels and workshops in late January for 500 people after a similar weekend conference approach drew 300 students last May.
  • For those participants, who wanted one-on-one attention from an experienced social media user, the “social media doctors” were in the house.
  • The idea behind the “doctors” was to give people some individual instruction at a conference setting
  • Educators also say skills classes have to help translate what seems to be a different language — hashtags, mentions, heart.
David McGavock

Brainstorming With Howard Rheingold - WikiBrains blog - 1 views

  • reminding us that the tools we have available to us, for the most part free (given internet access), are fantastic compared to what we had in the early 1990s -a search engine like Google was the stuff of dreams ‘back then.’ The technological progress is happening so fast that many people may not know how to make use of all these great tools that are becoming available.
  • we are humans because we’re social learners
  • He defines the Personal Learning Networks (PLN) as “Not just a network of sources to learn from, but  a network that learns together.”
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  • He  is currently working on a free handbook for peer learners that is in part a collaboration and in part a collection of single-author works, which you can access at peeragogy.org 
David McGavock

Kim Peek, The Real Rain Man | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Kim Peek, who lent inspiration to the fictional character Raymond Babbitt—played by Dustin Hoffman—in the movie Rain Man, was a remarkable savant.
  • He could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye
  • He would retain 98 percent of the information he read.
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  • Unlike many individuals with savant syndrome, Kim Peek was not afflicted with autistic spectrum disorder. Though he was strongly introverted, he did not have difficulties with social understanding and communication.
  • The main cause of his remarkable abilities seems to have been the lack of connections between his brain's two hemispheres. An MRI scan revealed an absence of the corpus callosum, the anterior commissure and the hippocampal commissure, the parts of the neurological system that transfer information between hemispheres. In some sense Kim was a natural born split-brain patient.
  • Michael Gazzaniga and Roger W. Sperry, the first to study split brains in humans, found that several patients who had undergone a complete calloscotomy suffered from split-brain syndrome.
  • the left hemisphere gives orders that reflect the person’s rational goal, whereas the right hemisphere issues conflicting demands that reveal hidden preferences.
  • Despite his brilliant mind, his IQ was 87, significantly below normal. It was also difficult for him to follow directions of certain kinds.
  • Kim Peek may have developed additional subcortical connections for information transfer.
  • Peek's ability to retain large amounts of information may have had something to do with another condition he was afflicted with called macrocephaly. This brain abnormality consists in an excessively large head and a correspondingly huge brain.
  • As a baby the real rain man was diagnosed with mental retardation and the physicians told his parents that he never would be able to read or talk.
  • Despite the recommendation, Kim’s parents chose to raise him at home.
David McGavock

The Hidden Savant in You | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Savants can perform extraordinary cognitive feats much like trained experts, but unlike experts they usually cannot describe what makes them so talented, seemingly relying on intuition rather than conscious deliberation to quickly make choices.
  • he consensus among many researchers is that intuitions are judgments made by unconscious processes in the brain.
  • Studies have shown that inhibiting activity in certain areas of the brain can facilitate solving geometric puzzles.
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  • Allan Snyder has used transcranial direct current stimulation (DCS) to alter the activity both in the left and right hemispheres.
  • DCS was applied for only ten minutes, specifically to decrease activity in the left hemisphere and increase activity in the right hemisphere, 40 percent of subjects were able to solve the puzzle.
  • Tasks like solving the nine-dots puzzle are notoriously difficult because of our brains are structured in such a way as to limit creativity.
  • The left hemisphere is thought to govern the role that right-brain activity may play in cognition. Inhibiting activity in the left hemisphere of the brain is thought to remove the predisposition to interpret random elements in meaningful ways, allowing for more creative solutions generated in the right brain to make it into consciousness.
  • Savants thus may have a greater degree of conscious access to judgments of unconscious processes than non-savants.
  • As we become more skilled at manipulating brain processes through psychoactive drugs or electronic devices, we may be able to invoke savant-like skills in neurotypical people. 
Charles van der Haegen

Turing's Cathedral. Author George Dyson in Conversation with John Hollar - YouTube - 0 views

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    "Publiée le 19 mars 2012 par ComputerHistory [Recorded: March 7, 2012] I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers. John von Neumann, 1946 The most powerful technology of the last century was not the atomic bomb, but software-and both were invented by the same folks. Even as they were inventing it, the original geniuses imagined almost everything software has become since. At long last, George Dyson delivers the untold story of software's creation. It is an amazing tale brilliantly deciphered. Kevin Kelly, cofounder of WIRED magazine, author of What Technology Wants Legendary historian George Dyson vividly re-creates the scenes of focused experimentation, incredible mathematical insight, and pure creative genius that gave us computers, digital television, modern genetics, models of stellar evolution-in other words, computer code. In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses-led by John von Neumann-gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization of the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. This group of brilliant engineers worked in isolation, almost entirely independent from industry and the traditional academic community. But because they relied exclusively on government funding, the government wanted its share of the results: the computer that they built also led directly to the hydrogen bomb. George Dyson has uncovered a wealth of new material about this project, and in bringing the story of these men and women and their ideas to life, he shows how the crucial advancements that dominated twentieth-century technology emerged from one computer in one laboratory, where the digital universe as we know it was born. Join John Hollar for a captivating conversation with Dyson about John von Neumann and the beginnings of the digital universe. This event is part of ou
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