But before it fell, the wall did something that most people never think of: It created a massive laboratory for studying human society.Imagine this: If you were a researcher trying to determine how a political system affects people’s values, beliefs, and behavior, you would ideally want to take two identical populations, separate them for a generation or two, and subject them each to two totally different kinds of government. Then you’d want to measure the results, the same way a medical researcher might give two sets of patients two different pills and then track their progress.Ethically, such a study would be unthinkable even to propose. But when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it created what London School of Economics associate professor Daniel Sturm calls a “perfect experiment.”
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The scant science behind anything that claims to boost your brainpower - Quartz - 0 views
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The team of researchers, led by Madhav Goyal of Johns Hopkins University, examined over eighteen thousand studies that assessed the effects of various types of meditation.
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Aggregating the results of the 47 studies that met the researchers’ methodological requirements, they measured meditation impact on a litany of stress-related criteria: anxiety, depression, stress and distress, positive mood, mental health-related quality of life, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, pain, and weight. Mantra-based programs showed no benefits over and above placebos. + Does that mean that meditation doesn’t work? Not necessarily. Placebo effects are both real and beneficial, and the relaxation that stems from chanting mantras may be therapeutic in and of itself.
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Furthermore, mindfulness meditation—a variant that stems from the Buddhist tradition and involves fostering a nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment—was found by Goyal’s group to decrease anxiety and depression.
The Timekeeper: Behind the Scenes of Humanity's Most Accurate Atomic Clocks, Which Dict... - 0 views
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In this fascinating micro-documentary, Dr. Demetrios Matsakis, chief scientist for Time Services at the U.S. Naval Observatory — the same federal agency that hired astronomer Maria Mitchell as the first woman employed by the government — takes us on a tour of the USNO’s 100 atomic clocks, where the time on your iPhone originates. Dr. Matsakis explains how these atomic clocks — which won’t fall behind or race forward by a single second in 300 million years, rendering them the most accurate measuring devices ever created by humanity — also synchronize GPS, coordinate military operations, dictate financial transactions, and orchestrate internet communication. He then peers into the future to imagine the time-accuracy that is to come, as well as the dark side of such precision.
Want to spin your data? Five Ways to Lie with Charts - 0 views
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In the right (or wrong) hands, bar graphs and pie charts can become powerful agents of deception, tricking you into inferring trends that don’t exist, mistaking less for more, and missing alarming facts. The best measure of a chart’s honesty is the amount of time it takes to interpret it, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology perceptual scientist Ruth Rosenholtz: “A bad chart requires more cognitive processes and more reasoning about what you’ve seen.”
We Know How You Feel - 0 views
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Today, machines seem to get better every day at digesting vast gulps of information—and they remain as emotionally inert as ever. But since the nineteen-nineties a small number of researchers have been working to give computers the capacity to read our feelings and react, in ways that have come to seem startlingly human. Experts on the voice have trained computers to identify deep patterns in vocal pitch, rhythm, and intensity; their software can scan a conversation between a woman and a child and determine if the woman is a mother, whether she is looking the child in the eye, whether she is angry or frustrated or joyful. Other machines can measure sentiment by assessing the arrangement of our words, or by reading our gestures. Still others can do so from facial expressions. Our faces are organs of emotional communication; by some estimates, we transmit more data with our expressions than with what we say, and a few pioneers dedicated to decoding this information have made tremendous progress. Perhaps the most successful is an Egyptian scientist living near Boston, Rana el Kaliouby. Her company, Affectiva, formed in 2009, has been ranked by the business press as one of the country’s fastest-growing startups, and Kaliouby, thirty-six, has been called a “rock star.” There is good money in emotionally responsive machines, it turns out. For Kaliouby, this is no surprise: soon, she is certain, they will be ubiquitous.
The Power of Touch - The New Yorker - 0 views
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At a home in the Romanian city of Iași, Carlson measured cortisol levels in a group of children ranging from two months to three years old. The caregiver-to-child ratio was twenty to one, and most of the children had experienced severe neglect and sensory deprivation. Multiple times a day, Carlson took saliva samples, tracking how cortisol levels fluctuated in response to stressful events. The children, she found, were hormonally off kilter. Under normal conditions, cortisol peaks just before we wake up and then tapers off; in the leagăne infants, it peaked in the afternoon and remained elevated. Those levels, in turn, correlated with faltering performance on numerous cognitive and physical assessments. Then Carlson tried an intervention modelled on the work of Joseph Sparling, a child-development specialist, and the outcomes changed. When half of the orphans received more touching from more caregivers—an increase in hugs, holding, and the making of small adjustments to clothes and hair—their performance markedly improved. They grew bigger, stronger, and more responsive, both cognitively and emotionally, and they reacted better to stress.
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Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the human infant, and it remains perhaps the most emotionally central throughout our lives. While many researchers have appreciated its power, others have been more circumspect. Writing in 1928, John B. Watson, one of the originators of the behaviorist school of psychology, urged parents to maintain a physical boundary between themselves and their children: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job on a difficult task.” Watson acknowledged that children must be bathed, clothed, and cared for, but he believed that excessive touching—that is, caressing—would create “mawkish” adults. An untouched child, he argued, “enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.” Now we know that, to attain that result, he should have suggested the opposite: touch, as frequent and as caring as possible
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And yet touch is rarely purely physical. Field’s more recent work has shown that the brain is very good at distinguishing an emotional touch from a similar, but non-emotional, one. A massage chair is not a masseuse. Certain touch receptors exist solely to convey emotion to the brain, rather than sensory information about the external environment. A recent study shows that we can identify other people’s basic emotions based on how they touch us, even when they are separated from us by a curtain. And the emotions that are communicated by touch can go on to shape our behavior. One recent review found that, even if we have no conscious memory of a touch—a hand on the shoulder, say—we may be more likely to agree to a request, respond more (or less) positively to a person or product, or form closer bonds with someone.
BBC News - Are humans getting cleverer? - 0 views
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The researchers - Peera Wongupparaj, Veena Kumari and Robin Morris at Kings College London - did not themselves ask anyone to sit an IQ test, but they analysed data from 405 previous studies. Altogether, they harvested IQ test data from more than 200,000 participants, captured over 64 years and from 48 countries. Focusing on one part of the IQ test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, they found that on average intelligence has risen the equivalent of 20 IQ points since 1950. IQ tests are designed to ensure that the average result is always 100, so this is a significant jump.
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The new research is further confirmation of a trend that scientists have been aware of for some time. In 1982, James Flynn, a philosopher and psychologist based at the University of Otago in New Zealand, was looking through old American test manuals for IQ tests. He noticed that when tests were revised every 25 years or so, the test-setters would get a panel to sit both the old test and the new one. "And I noticed in all the test manuals, in every instance, those who took the old test got a higher score than they did on the new test," says Flynn. In other words, the tests were becoming harder. This became known as the Flynn Effect, though Flynn stresses he was not the first to notice the pattern, and did not come up with the name. But if the tests were getting harder, and the average score was steady at 100, people must have been getting better at them. It would seem they were getting more intelligent. If Americans today took the tests from a century ago, Flynn says, they would have an extraordinarily high average IQ of 130. And if the Americans of 100 years ago took today's tests, they would have an average IQ of 70 - the recognised cut-off for people with intellectual disabilities. To put it another way, IQ has been rising at roughly three points per decade.
Underhill: Rubber Time - 1 views
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We soon realized we were dealing with differing concepts of time. In our culture, time has substance. It is not to be wasted. It is a container to be filled. We maintain calendars and make schedules to manage separate blocks of time. We measure accomplishment by how well the allotted segments are used. We take appointments seriously, and see promptness as a virtue. Our language is full of adages urging us to use time wisely, "to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run." Our approach to time, which developed after the invention of the mechanical clock, is probably one of the reasons why Europe, a stagnant and peripheral backwater in the year 1000, became the predominant culture by 1500. Our own industrial and scientific preeminence and material wealth is also rooted in efficient use of time. But we have paid a price. We think that with schedules we can control the future, but often find instead that we have become the prisoners of schedules. We are compulsive about filling blocks of time with useful activity and hurry like the Mad Hatter from appointment to appointment. We are frustrated when a task takes longer than the time we had planned. We interrupt work we have almost finished and stop activities we're enjoying because we're "running behind schedule." From this can come stress and alienation. Seeing reality as a series of segmented time compartments can blind us to the wholeness of life.
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"Wasting time" for the Indonesian is a meaningless concept. Time is seen as a gentle river carrying everything along. Little effort is made to "manage" the flow. "Morning," "noon," "afternoon," "evening," divide the day adequately. Indonesians explain to Westerners that they live in "rubber time." Appointments, when made, are vague, provisional indications of intention. Harmonious interaction with other people in a flexible, spontaneous, unstructured context is the norm they seek. Interpersonal skills are valued and highly developed. This approach to time is reflected in their language. Verbs in Indonesian have no tense. A time indicator is used, if necessary, at the beginning of a thought, but the verb remains the same for the past, present, future, and pluperfect subjunctive.
Walter Mischel, The Marshallow Test, and Self-Control - The New Yorker - 1 views
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Mischel’s story isn’t surprising—nicotine is addictive, and quitting is difficult—except for one thing: Mischel is the creator of the marshmallow test, one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, which is often cited as evidence of the importance of self-control. In the original test, which was administered at the Bing Nursery School, at Stanford, in the nineteen-sixties, Mischel’s team would present a child with a treat (marshmallows were just one option) and tell her that she could either eat the one treat immediately or wait alone in the room for several minutes until the researcher returned, at which point she could have two treats. The promised treats were always visible and the child knew that all she had to do to stop the agonizing wait was ring a bell to call the experimenter back—although in that case, she wouldn’t get the second treat. The longer a child delayed gratification, Mischel found—that is, the longer she was able to wait—the better she would fare later in life at numerous measures of what we now call executive function. She would perform better academically, earn more money, and be healthier and happier. She would also be more likely to avoid a number of negative outcomes, including jail time, obesity, and drug use.
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It was not until one day in the late nineteen-sixties, when he saw a man with metastasized lung cancer in the halls of Stanford’s medical school—chest exposed, head shaved, little green “x” marks all over his body, marking the points where radiation would go—that Mischel realized he was fooling himself. Finally, something clicked. From then on, each time he wanted a cigarette (approximately every three minutes, by his count) he would create a picture in his mind of the man in the hallway. As he described it to me, “I changed the objective value of the cigarette. It went from something I craved to something disgusting.” He hasn’t had a smoke since.
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"Mischel, who is now eighty-four years old, has just published his first popular book, "The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control." It is part memoir, part scientific analysis, and part self-help guide. In the book, he describes the original impetus for the marshmallow study. At the time, his daughters, Judith, Rebecca, and Linda, were three, four, and five years old, respectively. "I began to see this fascinating phenomenon where they morphed from being highly impulsive, immediate creatures who couldn't delay anything," he told me. "There were these amazingly rapid changes-everything around them was the same, but something inside them had changed. I realized I didn't have a clue what was going on in their heads." He wondered what was it that had enabled them to go from deciding that they wanted to wait to actually being able to do so. He found the answer among their classmates at the Bing preschool."
The Wrong Way to Teach Math - The New York Times - 0 views
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HERE’S an apparent paradox: Most Americans have taken high school mathematics, including geometry and algebra, yet a national survey found that 82 percent of adults could not compute the cost of a carpet when told its dimensions and square-yard price.
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In fact, what’s needed is a different kind of proficiency, one that is hardly taught at all. The Mathematical Association of America calls it “quantitative literacy.” I prefer the O.E.C.D.’s “numeracy,” suggesting an affinity with reading and writing.
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Many students fall by the wayside. It’s not just the difficulty of the classes. They can’t see how such formulas connect with the lives they’ll be leading.
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What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 1 views
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Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.
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As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’
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As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
Do all cultures measure Happiness the same way in the world? 2010_12 UN World Happiness... - 2 views
Picasso = Genius: This algorithm can judge "creativity" in art as well as the experts - 1 views
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Art is seen as unquantifiable. Great paintings are creative forces that transcend their brush strokes, colors, and compositions. They can't be reduced to mere data, analyzed, and ranked by their creativity. Two computer scientists at Rutgers University respectfully disagree. Ahmed Elgammal and Babak Saleh created an algorithm that they say measures the originality and influence of artworks by using...
Do 'Fast and Furious' Movies Cause a Rise in Speeding? - The New York Times - 1 views
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Does bad behavior in movies or other media lead people to behave badly? There’s plenty of research on the link between onscreen media and risky behaviors like unprotected sex, binge drinking, fast driving and even violence. One large meta-analysis of such studies concluded that exposure to risk-glorifying media is associated with risky behaviors by people who consume that media. But causality issues plague most studies in this area: People who engage in risky behaviors may prefer to consume risk-glorifying media. These studies also tend to measure attitudes in controlled lab settings rather than in real life.
Why People Mistake Good Deals for Rip-Offs : The New Yorker - 5 views
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Last Saturday, an elderly man set up a stall near Central Park and sold eight spray-painted canvases for less than one five-hundredth of their true value. The art works were worth more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, but the man walked away with just four hundred and twenty dollars. Each canvas was an original by the enigmatic British artist Banksy, who was approaching the midpoint of a monthlong residency in New York City. Banksy had asked the man to sell the works on his behalf. For several hours, hundreds of oblivious locals and tourists ignored the quiet salesman, along with the treasure he was hiding in plain sight. The day ended with thirty paintings left unsold. One Banksy aficionado, certain she could distinguish a fake from the real thing, quietly scolded the man for knocking off the artist’s work.
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What makes Banksy’s subversive stunt so compelling is that it forces us to acknowledge how incoherently humans derive value. How can a person be willing to pay five hundred times more than another for the same art work born in the same artist’s studio?
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Some concepts are easy to evaluate without a reference standard. You don’t need a yardstick, for example, when deciding whether you’re well-rested or exhausted, or hot or cold, because those states are “inherently evaluable”—they’re easy to measure in absolute terms because we have sensitive biological mechanisms that respond when our bodies demand rest, or when the temperature rises far above or falls far below seventy-two degrees. Everyone agrees that three days is too long a period without sleep, but art works satisfy far too abstract a need to attract a universal valuation. When you learn that your favorite abstract art work was actually painted by a child, its value declines precipitously (unless the child happens to be your prodigious four-year-old).
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