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Cisco Walker

VSauce-Spooky Coincidences - 2 views

www.youtube.com/watch

science math psychology perception

shared by Cisco Walker on 20 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Cisco Walker on 20 Sep 14
     
    Mathematical and psychological explanations for the once in a million and pareidolia.
markfrankel18

Faking Cultural Literacy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faking-cultural-literacy.html

literacy TOK technology social media

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 May 14 - No Cached
  • It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them.
  • Who decides what we know, what opinions we see, what ideas we are repurposing as our own observations? Algorithms, apparently, as Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social media postindustrial complex rely on these complicated mathematical tools to determine what we are actually reading and seeing and buying.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story AdvertisementWe have outsourced our opinions to this loop of data that will allow us to hold steady at a dinner party, though while you and I are ostensibly talking about “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” what we are actually doing, since neither of us has seen it, is comparing social media feeds.
markfrankel18

Why Are Certain Smells So Hard to Identify? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...naming-scents-uneducated-nose

TOK perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities. Last spring, an article in the journal Science reported that we are capable of discriminating more than a trillion different odors. (A biologist at Caltech subsequently disputed the finding, arguing that it contained mathematical errors, though he acknowledged the “richness of human olfactory experience.”) Whence, then, our bumbling translation of scent into speech?
  • That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of inscent?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”
  • But difficulty with talking about smell is not universal. Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the organizer of the A.A.A.S. symposium, studies a group of around a thousand hunter-gatherers in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand who speak a language called Jahai. In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents. At the symposium, Majid presented new research involving around thirty Jahai and thirty Dutch people. In that study, the Jahai named smells in an average of two seconds, whereas the Dutch took thirteen—“and this is just to say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ ” Majid joked onstage.
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  • Olfaction experts each have their pet theories as to why our scent lexicon is so lacking. Jonathan Reinarz blames the lingering effects of the Enlightenment, which, he says, placed a special emphasis on vision. Jay Gottfried, who is something of a nasal prodigy—he once guessed, on the basis of perfume residue, that one of his grad students had gotten back together with an ex-girlfriend—blames physiology. Whereas visual information is subject to elaborate processing in many areas of the brain, his research suggests, odor information is parsed in a much less intricate way, notably by the limbic system, which is associated with emotion and memory formation. This area, Gottfried said, takes “a more crude and unpolished approach to the process of naming,” and the brain’s language centers can have trouble making use of such unrefined input. Meanwhile, Donald A. Wilson, a neuroscientist at New York University School of Medicine, blames biases acquired in childhood.
Lawrence Hrubes

To Pi and Beyond - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...pi-prime-numbers-cybersecurity

math mathematics beauty technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Entertaining the idea of a peculiar long number such as pi puts me in mind of its cousins twice removed, prime numbers, which have so many strange properties. Prime numbers are those numbers, such as 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on, that can be cleanly divided only by one and themselves. Primes and pi suggest a benign infinity, a pleasing order—pi because of its endlessness and its relation to the circle, and primes because no matter how far you travel on the number line you will always encounter a prime, as Euclid proved in 300 B.C. Recently, Yitang Zhang solved a problem involving prime numbers called bounded gaps that had been open for more than a hundred years. Zhang proved that no matter how far you go on the number line, even to the range where the numbers would fill many books, there will, on an infinite number of occasions, be two prime numbers within seventy million places of each other. (Other mathematicians have reduced this gap to two hundred and forty six.) Before, it had not been known whether any such range applied to prime numbers, which seem to behave, especially as they get larger, as if they appear at random.
  • Number theory is a discipline done for no purpose. It is practiced by people who believe that numbers have properties that exemplify an orderliness and beauty in the universe. The story of numbers is a story of creation not directly contained in the Scriptures, but if a divinity didn’t create numbers and their properties, what accounts for them? The necessity of counting doesn’t entirely explain pi or primes. A breakthrough in number theory is called a discovery, not an invention. There isn’t yet any explanation for the properties of pi or for primes. There is only the sense of wonder that the world contains such extravagant mysteries so close at hand.
markfrankel18

Maryam Mirzakhani: 'The more I spent time on maths, the more excited I got' | Science |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lds-medal-winner-mathematician

TOK math

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Of course, the most rewarding part is the "Aha" moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new – the feeling of being on top of a hill and having a clear view. But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.
Lawrence Hrubes

Mathematicians and Blue Crabs - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ematicians-and-blue-crabs.html

math science ecology models prediction environment statistics animals

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 May 15 - No Cached
  • The math behind these formulas may be elegant, but applying them is more complicated.
  • Although a definitive cause has yet to be identified, one thing is clear: Mathematical models failed to predict it.
  • For instance, it was long believed that a blue crab’s maximum life expectancy was eight years. This estimate was used, indirectly, to calculate crab mortality from fishing. Derided by watermen, the life expectancy turned out to be much too high; this had resulted in too many crab deaths being attributed to harvesting, thereby supporting charges of overfishing.
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  • Randomness is built into biological processes, so predicting a population is never going to be like calculating the interest on a bank account. The best we can do is use available science to make educated guesses about various outcomes. “The models we use are not universally predictive in the sense that Newton’s laws are; they are more like the weather forecast,” says Dr. Miller.
markfrankel18

We are more rational than those who nudge us - Steven Poole - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...tional-than-those-who-nudge-us

TOK economics bias rational reason Kahneman

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Sep 14 - Cached
  • We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?
  • A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.
  • Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias.
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  • The thorny question is whether these widespread departures from the economic definition of ‘rationality’ should be taken to show that we are irrational, or whether they merely show that the economic definition of rationality is defective.
  • During the development of game theory and decision theory in the mid-20th century, a ‘rational’ person in economic terms became defined as a lone individual whose decisions were calculated to maximise self-interest, and whose preferences were (logically or mathematically) consistent in combination and over time. It turns out that people are not in fact ‘rational’ in this homo economicus way,
  • There has been some controversy over the correct statistical interpretations of some studies, and several experiments that ostensibly demonstrate ‘priming’ effects, in particular, have notoriously proven difficult to replicate. But more fundamentally, the extent to which such findings can show that we are acting irrationally often depends on what we agree should count as ‘rational’ in the first place.
  • if we want to understand others, we can always ask what is making their behaviour ‘rational’ from their point of view. If, on the other hand, we just assume they are irrational, no further conversation can take place.
  • And so there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable. The dissenting critiques of the cognitive-bias literature argue that people are not, in fact, as individually irrational as the present cultural climate assumes. And proponents of debiasing argue that we can each become more rational with practice. But even if we each acted as irrationally as often as the most pessimistic picture implies, that would be no cause to flatten democratic deliberation into the weighted engineering of consumer choices, as nudge politics seeks to do. On the contrary, public reason is our best hope for survival.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Languages: Why we must save dying tongues - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...y-we-must-save-dying-languages

TOK language indigenous knowledge systems culture diver

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Just as ecosystems provide a wealth of services for humanity – some known, others unacknowledged or yet to be discovered – languages, too, are ripe with possibility. They contain an accumulated body of knowledge, including about geography, zoology, mathematics, navigation, astronomy, pharmacology, botany, meteorology and more. In the case of Cherokee, that language was born of thousands of years spent inhabiting the southern Appalachia Mountains. Cherokee words exist for every last berry, stem, frond and toadstool in the region, and those names also convey what kind of properties that object might have – whether it’s edible, poisonous or has some medicinal value. “No culture has a monopoly on human genius, and we never know where the next brilliant idea may come from,” Harrison says. “We lose ancient knowledge if we lose languages.”
markfrankel18

What Is Economics Good For? - NYTimes.com - 2 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-is-economics-good-for

ToK economics Human Sciences Science

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • It’s easy to understand why economics might be mistaken for science. It uses quantitative expression in mathematics and the succinct statement of its theories in axioms and derived “theorems,” so economics looks a lot like the models of science we are familiar with from physics.
  • But economics has never been able to show the record of improvement in predictive successes that physical science has shown through its use of harmless idealizations. In fact, when it comes to economic theory’s track record, there isn’t much predictive success to speak of at all.
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