Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items tagged net

Rss Feed Group items tagged

artuscaer

Does Language Influence our View of the World? | TOKTalk.net - 0 views

  •  
    A very interesting topic that we have already talked about a bit in our class before but it is still interesting to see a deeper analysis
markfrankel18

How Birds and Babies Learn to Talk : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Few things are harder to study than human language. The brains of living humans can only be studied indirectly, and language, unlike vision, has no analogue in the animal world. Vision scientists can study sight in monkeys using techniques like single-neuron recording. But monkeys don’t talk. However, in an article published today in Nature, a group of researchers, including myself, detail a discovery in birdsong that may help lead to a revised understanding of an important aspect of human language development. Almost five years ago, I sent a piece of fan mail to Ofer Tchernichovski, who had just published an article showing that, in just three or four generations, songbirds raised in isolation often developed songs typical of their species. He invited me to visit his lab, a cramped space stuffed with several hundred birds residing in souped-up climate-controlled refrigerators. Dina Lipkind, at the time Tchernichovski’s post-doctoral student, explained a method she had developed for teaching zebra finches two songs. (Ordinarily, a zebra finch learns only one song in its lifetime.) She had discovered that by switching the song of a tutor bird at precisely the right moment, a juvenile bird could learn a second, new song after it had mastered the first one. Thinking about bilingualism and some puzzles I had encountered in my own lab, I suggested that Lipkind’s method could be useful in casting light on the question of how a creature—any creature—learns to put linguistic elements together.
markfrankel18

How Much Consciousness Does an iPhone Have? : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • What has more consciousness: a puppy or a baby? An iPhone 5 or an octopus? For a long time, the question seemed impossible to address. But recently, Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, argued that consciousness can be measured—captured in a single value that he calls Φ, the Greek letter phi. The intuition behind Tononi’s idea, known as the Integrated Information Theory, is that we experience consciousness when we integrate different sensory inputs. According to Tononi, when you eat ice cream, you cannot separate the taste of the sugar on your tongue from the sensation of the melting liquid coating the inside your mouth. Phi is a measure of the extent to which a given system—for example, a brain circuit—is capable of fusing these distinctive bits of information. The more distinctive the information, and the more specialized and integrated a system is, the higher its phi. To Tononi, phi directly measures consciousness; the higher your phi, the more conscious you are.
markfrankel18

And the Word of the Year Is... Selfie! : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Hold on to your monocles, friends—the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is “selfie.” It’s an informal noun (plural: selfies) defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” It was first used in 2002, in an Australian online forum (compare the Australian diminutives “barbie” for barbecue and “firie” for firefighter), and it first appeared as a hashtag, #selfie, on Flickr, in 2004.
  • The word “selfie” is not yet in the O.E.D., but it is currently being considered for future inclusion; whether the word makes it into the history books is truly for the teens to decide. As Ben Zimmer wrote at Language Log, “Youth slang is the obvious source for much of our lexical innovation, like it or not.” And despite its cloying tone, that Oxford Dictionaries blog post from August does allude to the increasingly important distinction between “acronym“ and “initialism”—either of which may describe the expression “LOL,” depending if you pronounce it “lawl” or “ell-oh-ell.” The kids are going to be all right. Not “alright.” But all right.
artuscaer

What are Ethical Dilemmas? | TOKTalk.net - 2 views

  •  
    This is also related to psychology through an idea of cognitive dissonance.
markfrankel18

Meet the anti-Dr. Oz: Ben Goldacre - Vox - 0 views

  • Over the years, Goldacre has taken on everyone from sloppy journalists to pharmaceutical executives, vitamin proprietors, and disingenuous academics. He has illuminated the evidence, and lack thereof, behind detox footbaths, homeopathy, and ear candling. And, with every debunking, he has left behind lessons in the scientific method, epidemiology, and evidence-based medicine. His writing has changed policy and informed the public at a time when few in the media stand up for science in health.
  • Giving people a ten-point plan about how to spot bad science isn’t going to help those people because they probably don’t care about science. I don’t think you can reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.
Lawrence Hrubes

Modern psychology's God problem | GarethCook - 7 views

  •  
    "Modern psychology has a serious God problem. America is a deeply spiritual country. More than half of Americans say religion is "very important" to them, and more than 90 percent profess a belief in a higher power. Yet psychology, as a scientific endeavor, has done almost nothing to understand how spiritual beliefs shape psychological problems, or affect treatment. "
Lawrence Hrubes

Female Scientists Turn to Data to Fight Lack of Representation on Panels - The New York... - 0 views

  • Among the defenders of the project, however, is Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies how people make decisions. In 2001, she started Anne’s List, a directory of 170 women in computational neuroscience, intended to silence claims that no good female scientists existed in that field.Her research suggests that someone you recently had lunch with or someone from your hometown might spring to mind when selecting a speaker, even though neither has anything to do with science.“It doesn’t feel like irrelevant information influences our judgment, but it does,” Dr. Churchland said.
Niousha Jafari

How to do a TOK presentation - 1 views

  •  
    This is a pretty good prezi explaining how to do a TOK presentation. This link also discusses how to extract a Knowledge issue out of a Real life example (stem cells), making it a TOK presentation and not a science one: http://www.toktalk.net/2009/10/31/what-are-knowledge-issues-or-problems-of-knowledge/
markfrankel18

Time-shifting man predicts the future › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (A... - 0 views

  • "Time" is something that both philosophers and physicists have been wondering for about, well, a long time. And now, the neuroscientists have joined in. They have found a man who, when he looks at you, hears what you are saying to him before your lips move.
  • Now you might not realise this, but in terms of vision you are always living 0.3 second (or 300 milliseconds) behind reality. That's how long it takes between when the incoming light lands on the cells in your retina, and you get that full magnificent wraparound 3D colour sensation that we call vision.
  • We don't notice this delay in reality because we have evolved to be able to deal with this. We can anticipate actions or patterns through experience.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • So how come we normally see the lips moving at the same time as we hear the voice? Almost certainly, it's because our brain deliberately inserts a delay of about 200 milliseconds on the audio circuit. Now sure, there would be an advantage in being able to hear dangerous things, such as the killer kangaroo bearing down upon you that extra 200 milliseconds earlier. But all of us are a product of an evolutionary pathway that decided it was more important for us to be able to easily communicate with our fellow humans, than to hear the killer kangaroo that 200 milliseconds sooner. After all, we humans are quite pathetic as a hunting animal. We can't run very quickly, our eyes are not very sharp, and neither is our sense of smell. Our claws are silly little fingernails, and our teeth are not very good at ripping and tearing. But thanks to our amazing brain, we can organise ourselves into groups and so we have become masters of the planet. So, getting back to Mr PH, if the sound of the outside world was deliberately electronically delayed by 200 milliseconds, suddenly audio and vision were in sync for him again. And when the neuroscientists did an MRI scan on his brain, they found damage in areas that were well-placed to disrupt audition and/or timing.
Lawrence Hrubes

Brain Games are Bogus | GarethCook - 0 views

  •  
    " A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research-twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world-and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence."
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Japan Surrendered | GarethCook - 1 views

  •  
    "In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan's surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion."
Lawrence Hrubes

Do Plants Think? | GarethCook - 0 views

  •  
    "How aware are plants? A plant can see, smell and feel. It can mount a defense when under siege, and warn its neighbors of trouble on the way. A plant can even be said to have a memory. But does this mean that plants think? "
Lawrence Hrubes

The Nocebo Effect: How We Worry Ourselves Sick | GarethCook - 0 views

  •  
    "With placebos ("I will please" in Latin), the mere expectation that treatment will help brings a diminution of symptoms, even if the patient is given a sugar pill. With nocebos ("I will harm"), dark expectations breed dark realities."
markfrankel18

Lesser-Known Trolley Problem Variations. - 0 views

  •  
    funny
markfrankel18

Stanley Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 Moon landing? | Dangerous Minds - 1 views

  •  
    "believe"
Lawrence Hrubes

Maya Angelou and the Internet's Stamp of Approval - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • his week, the United States Postal Service came in for a full news cycle’s worth of ridicule after it was&nbsp;pointed out, by the Washington&nbsp;Post, that the agency’s new Maya Angelou stamp featured a quotation that the late poet and memoirist didn’t write. The line—“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”—has been widely attributed to Angelou. And it seems like something she might have written, perhaps as a shorthand explanation for the title of her most famous book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” But the line, in a slightly different form, was originally published in a poetry collection from 1967 called “A Cup of Sun,” by Joan Walsh Anglund. The&nbsp;Post&nbsp;reported this on Monday. By Tuesday, when such luminaries as First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey stood onstage in front of a giant reproduction of the Angelou stamp at the official unveiling, everyone knew that the words behind them belonged to someone else. According to the U.S.P.S., more than&nbsp;eighty million Angelou stamps were produced, and there are no plans to retract them. <!doctype html>div,ul,li{margin:0;padding:0;}.abgc{height:15px;position:absolute;right:16px;text-rendering:geometricPrecision;top:0;width:15px;z-index:9010;}.abgb{height:100%;}.abgc img{display:block;}.abgc svg{display:block;}.abgs{display:none;height:100%;}.abgl{text-decoration:none;}.cbc{background-image: url('http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/images/x_button_blue2.png');background-position: right top;background-repeat: no-repeat;cursor:pointer;height:15px;right:0;top:0;margin:0;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:16px;z-index:9010;}.cbc.cbc-hover {background-image: url('http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/images/x_button_dark.png');}.cbc > .cb-x{height: 15px;position:absolute;width: 16px;right:0;top:0;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg{background-color: lightgray;position:absolute;}.cbc.cbc-hover > .cb-x > .cb-x-svg{background-color: #58585a;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-path{fill : #00aecd;}.cbc.cbc-hover > .cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-path{fill : white;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-s-path{fill : white;} .ddmc{background:#ccc;color:#000;padding:0;position:absolute;z-index:9020;max-width:100%;box-shadow:2px 2px 3px #aaaaaa;}.ddmc.left{margin-right:0;left:0px;}.ddmc.right{margin-left:0;right:0px;}.ddmc.top{bottom:20px;}.ddmc.bottom{top:20px;}.ddmc .tip{border-left:4px solid transparent;border-right:4px solid transparent;height:0;position:absolute;width:0;font-size:0;line-height:0;}.ddmc.bottom .tip{border-bottom:4px solid #ccc;top:-4px;}.ddmc.top .tip{border-top:4px solid #ccc;bottom:-4px;}.ddmc.right .tip{right:3px;}.ddmc.left .tip{left:3px;}.ddmc .dropdown-content{display:block;}.dropdown-content{display:none;border-collapse:collapse;}.dropdown-item{font:12px Arial,sans-serif;cursor:pointer;padding:3px 7px;vertical-align:middle;}.dropdown-item-hover{background:#58585a;color:#fff;}.dropdown-content > table{border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:0;}.dropdown-content > table > tbody > tr > td{padding:0;}Ad covers the pageStop seeing this ad.feedback_container {width: 100%;height: 100%;position: absolute;top:0;left:0;display: none;z-index: 9020;background-color: white;}.feedback_page {font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;;font-size: 13px;margin: 16px 16px 16px 16px;}.feedback_title {font-weight: bold;color: #000000;}.feedback_page a {font-weight: normal;color: #3366cc;}.feedback_description {color: #666666;line-height: 16px;margin: 12px 0 12px 0;}.feedback_closing {color: #0367ff;line-height: 16px;margin: 12px 0 12px 0;}.feedback_logo {position: absolute;right: 0;bottom: 0;margin: 0 12px 9px 0;}.feedback_logo img {height: 15px;}.survey_description {color: #666666;line-height: 17px;margin: 12px 0 10px 0;}.survey {color: #666666;line-height: 20px;}.survey_option input {margin: 0;vertical-align: middle;}.survey_option_text {margin: 0 0 0 5px;line-height: 17px;vertical-align: bottom;}.survey_option:hover {background-color: lightblue;cursor: default;}It&amp;#39;s gone. UndoWhat was wrong with this ad?InappropriateRepetitiveIrrelevantThanks for the feedback! BackWe’ll review this ad to improve your
markfrankel18

The Emerging Global Web - 0 views

  • This slideshow on The Emerging Global Web shows how people in the rest of the world, particularly in countries with emerging economies, use the internet. Talks about things like selling sheep on Instagram, mobile-only internet use, online marketplaces in China like Tmall, a Chinese eBay for services, lifestyle bloggers as retailers, and mobile-only banking and payments.
markfrankel18

You knew it was crap, but you bought it anyway. This is why. - Boing Boing - 0 views

  • David McRaney explores the sunk cost fallacy, a strangely twisted bit of logic that seems to pop into the human mind once a person has experienced the pain of loss or the ickiness of waste on his or her way toward a concrete goal. It’s illogical, irrational, unreasonable - and as a perfectly normal human being, you act under its influence all the time.
markfrankel18

Welcome to the best resource on the Internet for the IB Diploma Theory of Knowledge course - 1 views

  •  
    "5. Memory and history "
1 - 20 of 29 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page