Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items tagged tests

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
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.
Lawrence Hrubes

I Had My DNA Picture Taken, With Varying Results - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aken-with-varying-results.html

TOK science DNA biology genetics ethics prediction tests

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Dec 13
     
    "So I decided to read the tea leaves of my DNA. I reasoned that it was worth learning painful information if it might help me avert future illness. Like others, I turned to genetic testing, but I wondered if I could trust the nascent field to give me reliable results. In recent years, a handful of studies have found substantial variations in the risks for common diseases predicted by direct-to-consumer companies. I set out to test the tests: Could three of them agree on me? The answers were eye-opening"
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The blind breast cancer detectors - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31552562

science health medicine statistics probability tests math

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Gerd Gigerenzer's test In 2006 and 2007 Gigerenzer gave a series of statistics workshops to gynaecologists, and kicked off every session with the same question: A 50-year-old woman, no symptoms, participates in routine mammography screening. She tests positive, is alarmed, and wants to know from you whether she has breast cancer for certain or what the chances are. Apart from the screening results, you know nothing else about this woman. How many women who test positive actually have breast cancer? What is the best answer? nine in 10 eight in 10 one in 10 one in 100 Gigerenzer then supplied the doctors with data about Western women of this age. (His figures were based on US studies from the 1990s, rounded up or down for simplicity - recent stats from Britain's National Health Service are slightly different.) The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 1% ("prevalence") If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she tests positive is 90% ("sensitivity") If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is 9% ("false alarm rate") In one session, almost half the gynaecologists said the woman's chance of having cancer was nine in 10. Only 21% said that the figure was one in 10 - which is the correct answer.
Lawrence Hrubes

Louis C.K. Against the Common Core : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...k-against-the-common-core.html

education testing tests prediction standards human sciences TOK maths math

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 May 14 - No Cached
  • “Students who already believe they are not as academically successful as their more affluent peers, will further internalize defeat,” Carol Burris, a principal from Rockville Centre, wrote in the Washington Post last summer, calling on policymakers to “re-examine their belief that college readiness is achieved by attaining a score on a test, and its corollary—that is possible to create college readiness score thresholds for eight year olds.” This week, teachers at International High School at Prospect Heights, which serves a population of recently arrived immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, announced that they would not administer an assessment required by the city. A pre-test in the fall “was a traumatic and demoralizing experience for students,” a statement issued by the teachers said. “Many students, after asking for help that teachers were not allowed to give, simply put their heads down for the duration. Some students even cried.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Walter Mischel, The Marshallow Test, and Self-Control - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...hologist-studying-self-control

TOK psychology psychiatry self-control gratification delay social studies human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 15
     
    "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."
markfrankel18

Let's do some math on Ebola before we start quarantining people - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...e-we-start-quarantining-people

TOK math science

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The magnitude of false positives for medical tests—a positive test for a condition that a patient does not actually have—is something that is not well understood, even by members of the medical community. We should remember this, as the United States prepares to lock away potential scores of individuals who test positive for Ebola. Many observers do not realize just how many people may spend some time in quarantine when they do not have the dreaded disease.
  • The cognitive psychologist Max Gigerenzer once asked 24 physicians the following hypothetical question, and only two got it right: A test for breast cancer is 90% accurate in identifying patients who actually have breast cancer, and 93% accurate in producing negative results for patients without breast cancer. The incidence of breast cancer in the population is 0.8%. What is the probability that a person who tests positive for breast cancer actually has the disease? Think you know the answer? Many of the physicians in Gigerenzer’s study said there was a 90% probability that a now-terrified patient flagged for breast cancer is an actual victim of the disease. However, the correct probability is less than 10%.
markfrankel18

The Knowledge, London's Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS - 2 views

tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/...london-taxi-test-knowledge

TOK knowledge london biology education

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The examination to become a London cabby is possibly the most difficult test in the world — demanding years of study to memorize the labyrinthine city’s 25,000 streets and any business or landmark on them. As GPS and Uber imperil this tradition, is there an argument for learning as an end in itself?
  • Which is where the Knowledge comes in. It is a weird city’s weird solution to the riddle of itself, a municipal training program whose graduates are both transit workers and Gnostics: chauffeurs taught by the government to know the unknowable.
  • The brains of London taxi drivers have attracted scholarly attention. Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, has spent 15 years studying cabbies and Knowledge boys. She has discovered that the posterior hippocampus, the area of the brain known to be important for memory, is bigger in London taxi drivers than in most people, and that a successful Knowledge candidate’s posterior hippocampus enlarges as he progresses through the test.
markfrankel18

Setting Limits for Testing Brains - Atlantic Mobile - 0 views

m.theatlantic.com/...389880

TOK science ethics neuroscience

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • With progress, though, comes a whole new set of ethical questions. Can drugs used to treat conditions like ADHD, for example, also be used to make healthy people into sharper, more focused versions of themselves—and should they? Can a person with Alzheimer’s truly consent to testing that may help scientists better understand their disease? Can brain scans submitted as courtroom evidence reveal anything about a defendant’s intent? Can a person with Alzheimer’s truly consent to testing that may help scientists better understand their disease?To address these questions, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, an independent advisory group, recently released the second volume of a report examining the issues that may arise as neuroscience advances. The commission outlined three areas it deemed particularly fraught: cognitive enhancement, consent, and the use of neuroscience in the legal system.
markfrankel18

GOP Bill Would Allow Genetic Testing Demands By Employers | Fortune.com - 0 views

fortune.com/...esting-workplace-wellness-bill

TOK ethics science

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • It Might Soon Be Legal for Employers to Force You Into a Genetic Test
  • Say your employer wants you to get a genetic test. You politely decline because you consider it a gross infringement of privacy. Well, too bad—your monthly health insurance payments just spiked 30%.
markfrankel18

A Push for Diesel Leaves London Gasping Amid Record Pollution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...london-smog-air-pollution.html

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The current problem is, in part, an unintended consequence of previous efforts to aid the environment.The British government provided financial incentives to encourage a shift to diesel engines because laboratory tests suggested that would cut harmful emissions and combat climate change. Yet, it turned out that diesel cars emit on average five times as much emissions in real-world driving conditions as in the tests, according to a British Department for Transport study.
markfrankel18

The Problem With History Classes - Atlantic Mobile - 1 views

m.theatlantic.com/...387823

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same. Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses. And rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.
  • History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.
  • Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal. The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason—how they construct an argument, what sources animate that approach, and how their position responds to other historians. When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details. By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.  
Andrea Barlien

The Truth Wears Off - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-truth-wears-off

shared by Andrea Barlien on 13 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 13 Nov 14
     
    On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.
  • Andrea Barlien on 13 Nov 14
     
    On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.
markfrankel18

Ethics Questions Arise as Genetic Testing of Embryos Increases - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...ting-of-embryos-increases.html

TOK ethics genetics science biology

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Genetic testing of embryos has been around for more than a decade, but its use has soared in recent years as methods have improved and more disease-causing genes have been discovered.
  • But the procedure also raises unsettling ethical questions that trouble advocates for the disabled and have left some doctors struggling with what they should tell their patients. When are prospective parents justified in discarding embryos? Is it acceptable, for example, for diseases like GSS, that develop in adulthood? What if a gene only increases the risk of a disease? And should people be able to use it to pick whether they have a boy or girl?
markfrankel18

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

TOK bias reason intuition

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.
  • Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

rationalism reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are.
  • If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
Lawrence Hrubes

Lights Out: A New Reckoning for Brain Death : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...reckoning-for-brain-death.html

TOK science medicine death brain ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Jan 14
     
    "But brain death is not quite as certain as these bioethicists might like. A doctor can't always determine whether the brain is truly dead. The diagnosis is made the old-fashioned way: by careful observation. A doctor checks to see whether the eyes are responsive to light or touch; she pricks the nailbeds to discern whether the pain registers; she tests muscle reflexes; she determines whether the buildup of carbon dioxide triggers spontaneous breathing if the ventilator is shut off; and she may use an electroencephalograph to detect electrical activity in the brain. (However, even a dead brain may produce some voltage.) If all the findings are negative, then the declaration is made. Even then, the doctor can be wrong. "
Lawrence Hrubes

Can Writing on a College Entrance Exam Be Properly Assessed? - Room for Debate - NYTime... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ance-exam-be-properly-assessed

literature SAT testing writing assessment subjectivity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • n revamping its SAT test for college admission, the College Board is making the essay portion optional. The written assessment was controversial since it was introduced in 2005, with some college officials expressing little confidence in what it demonstrated or how it was scored. But since an increasing number of college students are taking remedial reading and writing classes, shouldn’t the essay be mandatory? Is the bigger question, how can, or should, writing be judged?
Lawrence Hrubes

James Flynn: Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents' | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...her_than_our_grandparents.html

TOK IQ intelligence abstraction cognition morality politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Sep 13
     
    "It's called the "Flynn effect" -- the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it. Are we actually getting smarter, or just thinking differently? In this fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences. James Flynn challenges our fundamental assumptions about intelligence."
Lawrence Hrubes

Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-try-reading-literary-fiction

TOK arts literature fiction EQ emotions thoughts social intelligence SocialScience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Oct 13
     
    "Your ability to "read" the thoughts and feelings of others could be affected by the kind of fiction you read. That's the conclusion of a study in the journal Science that gave tests of social perception to people who were randomly assigned to read excerpts from literary fiction, popular fiction or nonfiction."
Lawrence Hrubes

Dr. Bunsen / Coffee Experiments - 0 views

www.drbunsen.org/coffee-experiments

TOK perception taste gustation flavour science experiment

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Oct 13
     
    "A few years ago, I started using house guests as subjects in an experiment.1 My experiment was designed to test what variables in the coffee brewing process produce a perceptible improvement in coffee flavor. A frequent assertion is that numerous variables must be carefully considered to brew a good cup of coffee. I wanted to know if this premise was true as humans are really good at creating their own reality distortion fields. "
1 - 20 of 69 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page