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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - The greatest mistranslations ever - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-greatest-mistranslations-ever

TOK language translation history culture politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15
     
    "Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "
Lawrence Hrubes

Maps reveal schizophrenia 'hotspots' in England - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/health-39082595

maps science medicine psychology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Feb 17
     
    "The lowest rate of schizophrenia prescriptions was in East Dorset. However, explaining the pattern across England is complicated and the research team says the maps pose a lot of questions. They were developed using anonymous prescription records that are collected from doctors' surgeries in England. They record only prescriptions given out by GPs - not the number of patients treated - so hospital treatment is missed in the analysis."
Lawrence Hrubes

The Trouble with Snooze Buttons (and with Modern Sleep) : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...ouble-with-snooze-buttons.html

TOK science neuroscience psychology sleep biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Dec 13
     
    Research into sleep patterns, wake times, the effects of light and dark, and how these affect cognitive abilities
markfrankel18

What Emotions Are (and Aren't) - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...at-emotions-are-and-arent.html

TOK emotions psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Analogously, emotion words like “anger,” “happiness” and “fear” each name a population of diverse biological states that vary depending on the context. When you’re angry with your co-worker, sometimes your heart rate will increase, other times it will decrease and still other times it will stay the same. You might scowl, or you might smile as you plot your revenge. You might shout or be silent. Variation is the norm.
  • The ease with which we experience emotions, and the effortlessness with which we see emotions in others, doesn’t mean that each emotion has a distinct pattern in the face, body or brain. Instead of asking where emotions are or what bodily patterns define them, we would do better to abandon such essentialism and ask the more revealing question, “How does the brain construct these incredible experiences?”
markfrankel18

BBC News - How random is random on your music player? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...technology-31302312

TOK math perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • "Our brain is an excellent pattern-matching device," said Babar Zafar, a lead developer at Spotify, in an interview for Tech Tent on the BBC World Service. "It will find patterns where there aren't any."
  • "The problem is that, to humans, truly random does not feel random," said Mattias Johansson, a Spotify software engineer, in a response on the question-and-answer site Quora.
markfrankel18

Fake news and gut instincts: Why millions of Americans believe things that aren't true ... - 2 views

qz.com/...believe-things-that-arent-true

TOK bias intuition science

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 10 Nov 17
     
    "There are many individual qualities that seem like they should promote accuracy, but don't. Valuing evidence, however, appears to be an exception. The bigger the role evidence plays in shaping a person's beliefs, the more accurate that person tends to be. We aren't the only ones who have observed a pattern like this. Another recent study shows that people who exhibit higher scientific curiosity also tend to adopt more accurate beliefs about politically charged science topics, such as fracking and global warming."
Lawrence Hrubes

The Serial-Killer Detector | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-serial-killer-detector

SocialScience human sciences violence crime technology data big data algorithm criminology patterns police

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • A former journalist, equipped with an algorithm and the largest collection of murder records in the country, finds patterns in crime.
markfrankel18

BBC News - Pareidolia: Why we see faces in hills, the Moon and toasties - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-22686500

ToK Science psychology consciousness reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 May 13 - No Cached
  • People have long seen faces in the Moon, in oddly-shaped vegetables and even burnt toast, but a Berlin-based group is scouring the planet via satellite imagery for human-like features. What's behind our desire to see faces in our surroundings, asks Lauren Everitt. Most people have never heard of pareidolia. But nearly everyone has experienced it. Anyone who has looked at the Moon and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth has felt the pull of pareidolia. It's "the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist", according to the World English Dictionary. It's picking a face out of a knotted tree trunk or finding zoo animals in the clouds.
markfrankel18

Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-mysterious-hot-hand.html

TOK bias science psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue, as if propelled by their own momentum. Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.
  • A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.
  • Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science — a growing number of papers that cannot be confirmed by other laboratories.
markfrankel18

4 | The Golden Ratio: Design's Biggest Myth | Co.Design | business + design - 0 views

www.fastcodesign.com/...den-ratio-designs-biggest-myth

TOK arts psychology math design

shared by markfrankel18 on 15 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The golden ratio's aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don't use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There's also no science to really back it up.
  • "Strictly speaking, it's impossible for anything in the real-world to fall into the golden ratio, because it's an irrational number," says Keith Devlin, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
  • You Don't Really Prefer The Golden Ratio In the real world, people don't necessarily prefer the golden ratio.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "We're creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning," he says. It's not in our DNA to be comfortable with arbitrary things like aesthetics, so we try to back them up with our often limited grasp of math. But most people don't really understand math, or how even a simple formula like the golden ratio applies to complex system, so we can't error-check ourselves.
markfrankel18

Big Ideas in Social Science: An Interview With Steven Pinker on Violence and Human Nature - 1 views

psmag.com/-and-human-nature-999bf5958eb0

TOK science history violence

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • I think most philosophers of science would say that all scientific generalizations are probabilistic rather than logically certain, more so for the social sciences because the systems you are studying are more complex than, say, molecules, and because there are fewer opportunities to intervene experimentally and to control every variable. But the exis­tence of the social sciences, including psychology, to the extent that they have discovered anything, shows that, despite the uncontrollability of human behavior, you can make some progress: you can do your best to control the nuisance variables that are not literally in your control; you can have analogues in a laboratory that simulate what you’re interested in and impose an experimental manipulation. You can be clever about squeezing the last drop of causal information out of a correlational data set, and you can use converging evi­dence, the qualitative narratives of traditional history in combination with quantitative data sets and regression analyses that try to find patterns in them. But I also go to traditional historical narratives, partly as a sanity check. If you’re just manipulating numbers, you never know whether you’ve wan­dered into some preposterous conclusion by taking numbers too seriously that couldn’t possibly reflect reality. Also, it’s the narrative history that provides hypotheses that can then be tested. Very often a historian comes up with some plausible causal story, and that gives the social scientists something to do in squeezing a story out of the numbers.
Lawrence Hrubes

Same but Different - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...breakthroughs-in-epigenetics

science biology genetics nature DNA ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Why are identical twins alike? In the late nineteen-seventies, a team of scientists in Minnesota set out to determine how much these similarities arose from genes, rather than environments—from “nature,” rather than “nurture.” Scouring thousands of adoption records and news clips, the researchers gleaned a rare cohort of fifty-six identical twins who had been separated at birth. Reared in different families and different cities, often in vastly dissimilar circumstances, these twins shared only their genomes. Yet on tests designed to measure personality, attitudes, temperaments, and anxieties, they converged astonishingly. Social and political attitudes were powerfully correlated: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. The same went for religiosity (or its absence), even for the ability to be transported by an aesthetic experience. Two brothers, separated by geographic and economic continents, might be brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne, as if responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes.
  • It’s one thing to study epigenetic changes across the life of a single organism, or down a line of cells. The more tantalizing question is whether epigenetic messages can, like genes, cross from parents to their offspring.
  • The most suggestive evidence for such transgenerational transmission may come from a macabre human experiment. In September, 1944, amid the most vengeful phase of the Second World War, German troops occupying the Netherlands banned the export of food and coal to its northern parts. Acute famine followed, called the Hongerwinter—the hunger winter. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children died of malnourishment; millions suffered it and survived. Not surprisingly, the children who endured the Hongerwinter experienced chronic health issues. In the nineteen-eighties, however, a curious pattern emerged: when the children born to women who were pregnant during the famine grew up, they had higher rates of morbidity as well—including obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. (Malnourishment in utero can cause the body to sequester higher amounts of fat in order to protect itself from caloric loss.) Methylation alterations were also seen in regions of their DNA associated with growth and development. But the oddest result didn’t emerge for another generation. A decade ago, when the grandchildren of men and women exposed to the famine were studied, they, too, were reported to have had higher rates of illness. (These findings have been challenged, and research into this cohort continues.) “Genes cannot change in an entire population in just two generations,” Allis said. “But some memory of metabolic stress could have become heritable.”
markfrankel18

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

www.abc.net.au/...3834436.htm

ToK psychology perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • "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

How do you memorise an entire symphony? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-32428022

arts memory

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Memorised music performance has interested scientists since as far back as the 1800s. One type of memory that musicians use is commonly called "muscle memory", but the memories are not actually stored in the muscles. Muscle memory instead refers to a type of "procedural" memory called motor learning, in which memories for movement patterns are acquired through repetition. Procedural memory is separate from other types of memory, such as our memory for events (autobiographical memory) or general knowledge about the world (semantic memory).
Lawrence Hrubes

The Middle of Things: Advice for Young Writers - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hings-advice-for-young-writers

literature arts language writing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • the writer’s job is to say those things that appear unsayable, to cloak with language those volatile experiences that seem barely able to endure it.
  • Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent. Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones—indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place.
Lawrence Hrubes

We Know How You Feel - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...know-feel

TOK emotion technology psychology ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • 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.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Are humans getting cleverer? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31556802

human sciences IQ intelligence quantification measurement psychology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
markfrankel18

Twitter histories of events are vanishing - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/...corded_on_twitter_is_vanishing

twitter ToK History

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 May 13 - Cached
  • Nowadays, we’re very good at telling history in real time. Live-tweeting, livestreaming, Instagraming, link sharing, instant commenting — everyday lives and major events are recorded and narrated from every angle as they happen. A new study has found, however, that these minutes-old histories may not be built to last.
  • As the Technology Review reported:A significant proportion of the websites that this social media [around the Arab Spring] points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising. In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.
  • So it seems that social media sites like Twitter do not remain as fecund a resource over time as they do in real time. But no historian has ever worked on the assumption that all, or even most, information about an event is preserved, let alone even recorded. Not even Twitter has changed that.
markfrankel18

The Suburbs Made Us Fat - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...375888

TOK science architecture cities health

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • People in dense cities are thinner and have healthier hearts than people in sprawling subdivisions. New research says the secret is in the patterns of the streets.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Pentagon's 'Terminator Conundrum': Robots That Could Kill on Their Own - The New Yo... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...l-intelligence-terminator.html

ethics technology robots war military

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Just as the Industrial Revolution spurred the creation of powerful and destructive machines like airplanes and tanks that diminished the role of individual soldiers, artificial intelligence technology is enabling the Pentagon to reorder the places of man and machine on the battlefield the same way it is transforming ordinary life with computers that can see, hear and speak and cars that can drive themselves.
  • The debate within the military is no longer about whether to build autonomous weapons but how much independence to give them. Gen. Paul J. Selva of the Air Force, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recently that the United States was about a decade away from having the technology to build a fully independent robot that could decide on its own whom and when to kill, though it had no intention of building one.
  • Armed with a variation of human and facial recognition software used by American intelligence agencies, the drone adroitly tracked moving cars and picked out enemies hiding along walls. It even correctly figured out that no threat was posed by a photographer who was crouching, camera raised to eye level and pointed at the drone, a situation that has confused human soldiers with fatal results.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Today’s software has its limits, though. Computers spot patterns far faster than any human can. But the ability to handle uncertainty and unpredictability remain uniquely human virtues, for now.
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