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markfrankel18

In Defense of Psychology : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views

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    "There's a natural back and forth: we think about things a particular way, which motivates experiments, which in turn provide data, which leads us to refine and revise the way we conceptualize phenomena and theoretical entities. This dance between theory and experimentation is common to all science. In the case of psychology, it is a particularly young field. It's early days for the empirical study of many core psychological phenomena, including happiness."
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

Debate Erupts in California Over Curriculum on India's History - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Victors are said to write history. But in California, history is being written by a committee that is at the center of a raging debate over how to tell the story of South Asia as it tries to update textbooks and revise curriculums for Grades 6 and 7.The dispute centers on whether the region that includes modern-day India, Pakistan and Nepal should be referred to as India or as South Asia, to represent the plurality of cultures there — particularly because India was not a nation-state until 1947. It also touches on how the culture of the region is portrayed, including women’s role in society and the vestiges of the caste system.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Japan Surrendered | GarethCook - 1 views

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    "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

BBC News - Are humans getting cleverer? - 0 views

  • 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.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Interpreter - The New Yorker - 2 views

  • Everett, who this past fall became the chairman of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Cultures at Illinois State University, has been publishing academic books and papers on the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) for more than twenty-five years. But his work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability. Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, calls Everett’s paper “a bomb thrown into the party.”
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    Piraha tribe in Brazil studied by linguists and anthropologists
markfrankel18

Everyone's Trying Really Hard Not to Call the Germanwings Co-Pilot a Terrorist - Mic - 3 views

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    The Breivek analogy in this article has some resonance to the notion of media reporting to a certain audience--in this case, western/white, though first impressions necessarily need revision. At this time, we don't know enough about Lubitz, a curiosity in this instant-access age of information. Even his now inaccessible facebook information reduces our impression to a seemingly relaxed tourist enjoying the backdrop of the Golden Gate bridge. To the point of the article, we crave to have more 'backdrop', more cues to connect any dots. Some crave to have preconceptions confirmed, others to reverse common assumptions. For my part, I jotted first impressions via poetry, which doesn't purport veracity but should still, as John Keats reminds in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', probe to know beauty and truth, the former of which defies understanding in this event. Thus, my first impressions: http://lostmenagerie.blogspot.cz/2015/03/meanwhile-tuesday.html
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Pluto Is a Planet, and Eris Is Too - 0 views

  • The International Astronomical Union (IAU) got it wrong. Our solar system has 10 planets. As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft glides its way to the cold outer reaches of our solar system to take the first-ever up-close look at Pluto, the time is right to revise the International Astronomical Union (IAU)'s 2006 definition of a planet, which resulted in Pluto's "demotion" from planet to ambiguous dwarf-planet status.
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