Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items tagged universe

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
markfrankel18

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

www.newyorker.com/...sness-does-an-iphone-have.html

ToK Science technology psychology consciousness

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • 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

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.
Lawrence Hrubes

What is history? A critical review of E. H. Carr | DIBAJ - 0 views

uloom.com/131110501

history bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • E. H. Carr in 1961 delivered a series of six lectures at Cambridge University examining the question “What is history?”
  • He, however, argues that historians are susceptible to bias since every person is born into a society and invariably they are moulded by it through its environment and language as such their interpretation of history will be subjective to meet the criteria of their own culture; hence, Carr describes the historian as “the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the society to which he belongs.” Consequently, it is argued history is perceived through the environment in which the historian lives.
  • However, Carr differs from his predecessors in his definition of what constitutes as historical facts. He claims in his book that facts only become historical facts when the historian selects it to be as such.
markfrankel18

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning - Scientific American - 1 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...-s-theory-of-language-learning

TOK language Chomsky

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Much of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned
  • research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.
  • All of this leads ineluctably to the view that the notion of universal grammar is plain wrong. Of course, scientists never give up on their favorite theory, even in the face of contradictory evidence, until a reasonable alternative appears. Such an alternative, called usage-based linguistics, has now arrived.
markfrankel18

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science - 2 views

www.motherjones.com/106166

TOK science pseudoscience psychology bias reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger [1] (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study [2] in psychology. Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.
  • In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [5]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [6] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Spectacle of the Spectacles - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...he-spectacle-of-the-spectacles

arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Kevin Nguyen, sixteen, set his opened eyeglasses on the floor, neatly perpendicular to a nearby wall. He and T. J. Khayatan, seventeen, then stood back to watch what ensued: viewers observing the glasses with the curiosity and respect befitting a work of art—which, under the circumstances, they were.
  • But consider: an object manufactured to enhance seeing, presented as something to see. By being underfoot, the glasses were divorced from their function
  • Museums edit, for our convenience, the universe of existing things. What they let in and what they keep out shape culture.
markfrankel18

Circle in a circle | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21700611-circle-circle

TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • EVERYONE by nature desires to know,” wrote Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. But are there limits to what human beings can know? This is the question that Marcus du Sautoy, the British mathematician who succeeeded Richard Dawkins as the Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, explores in “What We Cannot Know”, his fascinating book on the limits of scientific knowledge.
  • Eventually, he turns to his own field of mathematics. If people cannot know everything about the physical world, then perhaps they can at least rely on mathematical truth? But even here there are limits.
Lawrence Hrubes

Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ects-consciousness-brains.html

science animals biology consciousness ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots?Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end?Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness.
markfrankel18

Goodnight. Sleep Clean. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...goodnight-sleep-clean.html

sleep science TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • “Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.”
  • Sleep, it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance. As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.
markfrankel18

How To Make Your Face (Digitally) Unforgettable : All Tech Considered : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-face-digitally-unforgettable

perception digital face

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Thanks to new research out of MIT, you might one day be able to subtly manipulate your picture to make it more memorable — meaning that people should be more likely to remember your face. According to the research article: "One ubiquitous fact about people is that we cannot avoid evaluating the faces we see in daily life ... In this flash judgment of a face, an underlying decision is happening in the brain — should I remember this face or not? Even after seeing a picture for only half a second we can often remember it." There are subjective factors affecting how a face sticks in your memory — for example, if you know someone else who looks similar, you might find a new face more familiar. But researchers found that there is also a strong universal component to memorability. Some faces are just consistently more easily remembered.
markfrankel18

The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/...mind-may-just-be-a-fuller-mind

TOK mind psychology human sciences

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases. Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Qwerty keyboards: Time for a rethink? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...0314-qwerty-time-for-a-rethink

music technology TOK arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Q-W-E-R-T-Y. Six letters that define so much of our waking lives.
  • In some ways, these six letters are a triumph of design. They’re wired into our brains, replicated on keyboards, phones and tablets across the world – and have changed very little since Milwaukee port official Christopher Sholes used the layout to stop mechanical levers jamming on a 19th-Century typewriter.
  • Some things simply seem to be too deeply and universally engrained to be susceptible to change, even if there would be numerous advantages in doing so.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Most obviously, the future of interfaces like the Seaboard’s lies in applying its principles to other musical instruments. Beyond this, though, it also seemed to me to represent something far larger: the possibility of everyday computer interfaces able to respond to human hands with something of the incredible sophistication they themselves possess.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - How to learn like a memory champion - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...w-to-learn-like-a-memory-champ

TOK memory learning education technology brain

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind.
  • Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school's iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's understanding of the grammar.Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They're constantly trying to work out whose voice they're hearing,” he says. “So they're giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't be overstated," Birch says.
markfrankel18

The Internet, where languages go to die? | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...nternetdigitaldivideicann.html

TOK language internet

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Forget the triumphant universalism of the Web; 95 percent of languages have almost no presence online
  • What few acknowledge is that the online world — when compared with offline, analog diversity — is very nearly a monoculture, an echo chamber where the planet’s few dominant cultures talk among themselves. English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and just a handful of other languages dominate digital communication. Thanks to their sheer size and to the powerful official and commercial forces behind them, the populations that speak and write these languages can plug in, develop the necessary tools and assume that their languages will follow them into an ever-expanding range of virtual realms.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hy-nothing-is-truly-alive.html

science TOK classification life biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • What is life? Science cannot tell us. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life. To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.
markfrankel18

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hy-nothing-is-truly-alive.html

TOK science models language

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • What is life? Science cannot tell us. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life. To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.
  • Life is a concept, not a reality.
markfrankel18

When are you dead? - 2011 SPRING - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University Sch... - 0 views

stanmed.stanford.edu/...article5.html

ToK psychology Science consciousness death medicine

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery. Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.
markfrankel18

Placebo-philes - Anxious Machine - 1 views

www.anxiousmachine.com/...placibo-philes

TOK placebo perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • It's easy to sneer at the placebo effect, or to feel ashamed of it when you're its victim. And that's precisely why I found Felix Salmon's piece revelatory, because instead of sneering at the placebo effect of fancy wine, its marketing, and its slightly higher prices, he thinks we should take advantage of it. If the placebo effect makes us happy, why not take advantage of that happiness?
  • n a recent article for the Atlantic, David H. Freedman argues that there's virtually no scientific evidence that alternative medicine (anything from chiropractic care to acupuncture) has any curative benefit beyond a placebo effect. And so many scientists are outraged that anyone takes alternative medicine seriously. However, there is one area where alternative medicine often trumps traditional medicine: stress reduction. And stress reduction can, of course, make a huge impact on people's health. The Atlantic article quotes Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “We tend to forget how powerful an organ the brain is in our biology,” Blackburn told me. “It’s the big controller. We’re seeing that the brain pokes its nose into a lot of the processes involved in these chronic diseases. It’s not that you can wish these diseases away, but it seems we can prevent and slow their onset with stress management.” Numerous studies have found that stress impairs the immune system, and a recent study found that relieving stress even seems to be linked to slowing the progression of cancer in some patients. Perhaps not surprisingly, a trip to the chiropractor or the acupuncturist is much more likely to reduce your stress than a trip to the doctor. If anything, a trip to the doctor makes you more anxious.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 122 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page