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markfrankel18

Why the One Appealing Part of Creationism Is Wrong : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...t-of-creationism-is-wrong.html

TOK science creationism prediction

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • In the first place, science doesn’t involve merely telling stories about history. If it did, scientific explanations might not have any claim to a higher level of veracity than religious stories. The stories that science does tell have empirical consequences, and make physical predictions that can be tested. In this sense, all science is historical science. We make observations about past events, based on everything from data gathered in the laboratory yesterday to remnants of phenomena, like meteor impacts or stellar explosions, which may have happened billions of years ago. We then use them to make predictions about the future, about experiments or observations that have not yet taken place. To quibble about how long ago the original data was generated is to miss the point
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 prisoner's dilemma, in real life - 0 views

kottke.org/...prisoners-dilemma-in-real-life

ToK Science prisoner dilemma psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The prisoner's dilemma, in real life  SARAH PAVIS  ·  AUG 08 2013 You might have hear of the prisoner's dilemma, a classic example in game theory showing why individuals might not cooperate. But what you probably don't know is the name comes from a thought experiment. No one had ever actually tested it on real prisoners. Until now
markfrankel18

On the Face of It: How We Vote : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-the-psychology-of-voting.html

ToK psychology human sciences voting

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - Cached
  • In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.
  • Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.
markfrankel18

How Many of Your Memories Are Fake? - Erika Hayasaki - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281558

ToK Memory psychology human sciences history

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory—those who can remember what they ate for breakfast on a specific day 10 years ago—are tested for accuracy, researchers find what goes into false memories.
markfrankel18

How politics makes us stupid - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...d-how-politics-makes-us-stupid

TOK reason bias science

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • In April and May of 2013, Yale Law professor Dan Kahan — working with coauthors Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic — set out to test a question that continuously puzzles scientists: why isn’t good evidence more effective in resolving political debates? For instance, why doesn’t the mounting proof that climate change is a real threat persuade more skeptics?
  • The leading theory, Kahan and his coauthors wrote, is the Science Comprehension Thesis, which says the problem is that the public doesn’t know enough about science to judge the debate. It’s a version of the More Information Hypothesis: a smarter, better educated citizenry wouldn’t have all these problems reading the science and accepting its clear conclusion on climate change. But Kahan and his team had an alternative hypothesis. Perhaps people aren’t held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don’t typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth — purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe. If this hypothesis proved true, then a smarter, better-educated citizenry wouldn’t put an end to these disagreements. It would just mean the participants are better equipped to argue for their own side.
  • Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Kahan’s studies, depressing as they are, are also the source of his optimism: he thinks that if researchers can just develop a more evidence-based model of how people treat questions of science as questions of identity then scientists could craft a communications strategy that would avoid those pitfalls. "My hypothesis is we can use reason to identify the sources of the threats to our reason and then we can use our reason to devise methods to manage and control those processes," he says.
Lawrence Hrubes

The New and Improved SAT : The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-new-and-improved-sat.html

education testing SAT technology language slang TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Apr 14
     
    satirical version of the 'new SAT'
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The difficult task of reading the brain - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-27221632

science technology brain neuroscience psychology tests TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 May 14 - No Cached
  • Neuroscience is a fast growing and popular field, but despite advances, when an area of the brain 'lights up" it does not tell us as much as we'd like about the inner workings of the mind. Many of us have seen the pictures and read the stories. A beautiful picture of the brain where an area is highlighted and found to be fundamental for processes like fear, disgust or impaired social ability. There are so many stories it can be easy to be swayed into thinking that much more of the brain's mystery has been solved than is the case.
Lawrence Hrubes

Most People Can’t Multitask, But a Few Are Exceptional. : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...multitask-masters.html

TOK psychology neuroscience cognition exceptions assumptions

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 May 14 - No Cached
  • In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone. Over the course of a decade, he and his colleagues had demonstrated that drivers using cell phones—even hands-free devices—were at just as high a risk of accidents as intoxicated ones. Reaction time slowed, attention decreased to the point where they’d miss more than half the things they’d otherwise see—a billboard or a child by the road, it mattered not.
  • What, then, was going on here in the London lab? The woman he was looking at—let’s call her Cassie—was an exception to what twenty-five years of research had taught him. As she took on more and more tasks, she didn’t get worse. She got better. There she was, driving, doing complex math, responding to barking prompts through a cell phone, and she wasn’t breaking a sweat. She was, in other words, what Strayer would ultimately decide to call a supertasker.
  • Cassie in particular was the best multitasker he had ever seen. “It’s a really, really hard test,” Strayer recalls. “Some people come out woozy—I have a headache, that really kind of hurts, that sort of thing. But she solved everything.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Their task was simple: keep your eyes on the road; keep a safe difference; brake as required. If they failed to do so, they’d eventually collide with their pace car. Then came the multitasking additions. They would have to not only drive the car but follow audio instructions from a cell phone. Specifically, they would hear a series of words, ranging from two to five at a time, and be asked to recall them in the right order. And there was a twist. Interspersed with the words were math problems. If they heard one of those, the drivers had to answer “true,” if the problem was solved correctly, or “false,” if it wasn’t. They would, for instance, hear “cat” and immediately after, “is three divided by one, minus one, equal to two?” followed by “box,” another problem, and so on. Intermittently, they would hear a prompt to “recall,” at which point, they’d have to repeat back all the words they’d heard since the last prompt. The agony lasted about an hour and a half.
Lawrence Hrubes

Germanwings 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...logy-and-the-question-of-trust

technology decision making emotion trust

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • hortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of “The Second Machine Age,” a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, about the coming automation of many professions previously thought of as impervious to technological change, such as those of drivers, doctors, market researchers, and soldiers. With the advances being made in robotics, data analysis, and artificial intelligence, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, we are on the cusp of a third industrial revolution.
  • The U.S. military appears to be moving in the direction of eliminating pilots, albeit tentatively. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have long operated unmanned drones, including the Predator, which are used for reconnaissance and bombing missions. In 2013, the U.S Air Force successfully tested the QF-16 fighter-bomber, which is practically identical to the F-16, except that it doesn’t have a pilot onboard. The plane is flown remotely. Earlier this year, Boeing, the manufacturer of the QF-16, delivered the first of what will be more than a hundred QF-16s to the Air Force. Initially, the planes will be used as flying targets for F-16 pilots to engage during training missions. But at least some military observers expect the QF-16 to end up being used in attack missions.
  • Until now, most executives in the airline industry have assumed that few people would be willing to book themselves and their families on unmanned flights—and they haven’t seriously considered turning commercial aircraft into drones or self-operating vehicles. By placing experienced fliers in the cockpit, the airlines signal to potential customers that their safety is of paramount importance—and not only because the crew members are skilled; their safety is at stake, too. In the language of game theory, this makes the aircraft’s commitment to safety more credible. Without a human flight crew, how could airlines send the same signal?
Lawrence Hrubes

FDA Ponders Putting Homeopathy To A Tougher Test : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...whether-homeopathy-is-medicine

science medicine health pseudo-science placebo

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • In 1988, the Food and Drug Administration decided not to require homeopathic remedies to go through the same drug-approval process as standard medical treatments. Now the FDA is revisiting that decision. It will hold two days of hearings this week to decide if homeopathic remedies should have to be proven safe and effective.
Andrea Barlien

The Two Faces of Science - 0 views

www.npr.org/...the-two-faces-of-science

science

shared by Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13
     
    "Science is unabashedly radical, willing to toss aside established wisdom and ideas to embrace mind-warping new concepts (if the data backs them up). Science is relentlessly conservative, deeply suspicious of new claims and determined to hold firm to cherished truths that have stood the test of time. As strange as it may seem, both these contradictory statements have held true throughout the 450-year history of "modern" science. In fact, they are what have given science the stability and creativity that root its cultural power."
markfrankel18

Why Police Lineups Will Never Be Perfect - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...381046

TOK perception memory psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Eyewitness testimony is hugely influential in criminal cases. And yet, brain research has shown again and again that human memory is unreliable: Every time a memory is recalled it becomes vulnerable to change. Confirming feedback—such as a detective telling a witness she “did great”—seems to distort memories, making them feel more accurate with each recollection. Since the start of the Innocence Project 318 cases have been overturned thanks to DNA testing. Eyewitness mistakes played a part in nearly three-quarters of them.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Save a Language? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-save-a-language.html

TOK language culture diversity indigenous knowledge systems

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Certainly, experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think. Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.This is cool stuff. But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.
  • Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community. Few would deny, for example, that American Jews who still speak Yiddish in the home are a tighter-knit community, less assimilated into Anglophone American life and less at odds with questions about Jewish identity, than Jews who speak only English.
  • For example, whether or not it says anything about how its speakers think, the fact that there is a language in New Guinea that uses the same word for eat, drink and smoke is remarkable in itself. Another New Guinea language is Yeli Dnye, which not only has 90 sounds to English’s 44, but also has 11 different ways to say “on” depending on whether something is horizontal, vertical, on a point, scattered, attached and more. And there is Berik, where you have to change the verb to indicate what time of day something happened. As with any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”
Lawrence Hrubes

The Fake-Tongue Illusion - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...butchers-tongue-illusion

TOK human sciences perception senses sensory perception taste gustation illusions psychology ethics brain mind neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Michel and his co-authors put their magic tongue to use in a simple but provocative experiment, carried out late last year and described in the current issue of the scientific journal Perception. Although the involvement of a stretchy pink latex tongue makes it easy to mistake the experiment for a cheap gag, it’s actually an important addition to a distinguished tradition of psychological research that studies illusions for what they can reveal about how the brain constructs reality.
  • “A lot of my colleagues don’t want to think about the mouth and flavor,” he said. “They all want to study hearing and vision.” Spence’s work, by contrast, is concerned with how the brain combines input from multiple senses to create perception, and he regularly finds himself arguing for the importance of touch, taste, and smell in the construction of our day-to-day experiences. And, while the hand is limited to two senses, the tongue offers the possibility of testing four sensory modes: touch, sight, taste, and smell (through a process called retronasal olfaction).
Lawrence Hrubes

How Headlines Change the Way We Think - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...headlines-change-way-think

TOK psychology media language memory

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • As a result of these shifts in perception, problems arise when a headline is ever so slightly misleading. “Air pollution now leading cause of lung cancer,” ran a headline last year in the U.K. paper Daily Express. The article, however, said no such thing, or, rather, not exactly. Instead, it reported that pollution was a leading “environmental” cause; other causes, like smoking, are still the main culprits. It is easy to understand a decision to run that sort of opening. Caveats don’t fit in single columns, and, once people are intrigued enough to read the story, they’ll get to the nuances just the same. But, as it turns out, reading the piece may not be enough to correct the headline’s misdirection. It’s these sorts of misleading maneuvers that Ullrich Ecker, a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, was pondering when he decided to test how slight—and slightly misleading—shifts in headlines can affect reading. In Ecker’s prior work, he had looked at explicit misinformation: when information that’s biased influences you, no matter what you’re subsequently told. This time around, he wanted to see how nuance and slight misdirection would work.
markfrankel18

The Irrationality Myth | Big Think | Praxis - 0 views

bigthink.com/...rationality-test

TOK reason Kahneman irrationality psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • There is indeed ample data that institutions and individuals can wreak havoc when they deviate from certain principles of logic and objectivity. There is also a good deal of dispiriting evidence about the rationality of voters that spurs questions about the effectiveness—and even the legitimacy—of democratic government. Yet much of the work of cognitive scientists—even fascinating Nobel Prize-winning research by Daniel Kahneman—leaves me edified but not alarmed. The human capacity for reason may be fragile and partial but it is not belied by studies in which large percentages of subjects answer a few tricky questions incorrectly.
  • My hypothesis is that while we love reading about humanity’s tendency toward the irrational, we take offense when light is thrown on our own individual incompetencies. 
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - A Point of View: The upside of losing one's memory - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31849855

memory memory loss wisdom cognition neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Reading the scientific research, I learn that the brain starts deteriorating from the mid-20s onwards. By our 40s and 50s, it's well under way. The changes include a drop in brain volume, loss of myelin integrity, cortical thinning, impaired receptor binding and signalling, and altered concentrations of various brain metabolites. The accumulation of neuro-fibrillary tangles, something we associate with Alzheimer's, also happens in normal ageing.
  • You may be asking what I am worrying about. I'm not yet 50, after all. I don't have Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or any reason to be worried about those diseases. My favourite novelist, Penelope Fitzgerald, was nearly 80 when her last and best book, The Blue Flower, was published. The philosopher Mary Midgley is still sharp as a razor, and she'll be 96 next birthday. She didn't even write a book till she was past 50. The psychoanalyst Hedda Bolgar was still seeing patients at the age of 102.
  • Last week, my colleague listened to his father, behind a drawn hospital curtain, doing an Alzheimer's diagnostic test. He said that the trickiest part was when they read out a list of words but instead of asking you to repeat them they moved on to some numerical questions before asking you to list the words a moment later. He was petrified to find that he couldn't do it himself.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • If I was looking for advice about anything other than which smart phone to buy, I'd generally ask someone aged 80- rather than an 18-year-old. It's like when you take a photograph - there's the shutter speed to consider, but there's also the depth of field. Perspective matters.
Lawrence Hrubes

Eleven Atlanta teachers in mass cheating scandal - BBC News - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-32156570

ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Eleven former school teachers have been convicted for their involvement in a scheme to falsify student test scores.They changed wrong answers to demonstrate student progress, and some received performance-related bonuses.
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