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Airy Hill Studio | My studio practice through the lens of the sketchbook - 0 views

airyhillstudio.wordpress.com TOK arts art sculpture painting process
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Airy Hill Studio My studio practice through the lens of the sketchbook
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14
     
    Cory Wanamaker is a professional artist and sometimes-international-school teacher, part of the ISP community for several years (2012-2015+). This is his blog on process... and many aspects of the real work of being an artist.
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Meet the anti-Dr. Oz: Ben Goldacre - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...ben-goldacre TOK science medicine pseudoscience
shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Over the years, Goldacre has taken on everyone from sloppy journalists to pharmaceutical executives, vitamin proprietors, and disingenuous academics. He has illuminated the evidence, and lack thereof, behind detox footbaths, homeopathy, and ear candling. And, with every debunking, he has left behind lessons in the scientific method, epidemiology, and evidence-based medicine. His writing has changed policy and informed the public at a time when few in the media stand up for science in health.
  • Giving people a ten-point plan about how to spot bad science isn’t going to help those people because they probably don’t care about science. I don’t think you can reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.
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The Thatcher illusion: Are faces special? | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...her-illusion-are-faces-special TOK perception
shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • y and large, faces are made up of the same, consistent features – two eyes, a nose, a mouth, some ears, and so on. One way in which our brains could process faces is to analyse them as a collection of these separate, individual features. If that were the case though, we might expect to be easier to pick out any discrepancies in an upside-down face. The fact that we don’t suggests that we process and recognise faces in a more holistic manner – in other words, we don’t just process individual features, but also the positions and relationships between those features.
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Many scientific "truths" are, in fact, false - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...tific-truths-are-in-fact-false TOK science psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 25 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Each scientific field must adopt its own methods of ensuring accuracy. But ultimately, this self-reflection is a key part of the scientific process. As Bishop notes, “Science has proved itself to be an incredibly powerful method.” And yet there’s always room for further advancement. “There’s never an end point,” says Bishop. “We’re always groping towards the next thing. Sometimes science does disappear down the wrong path for a bit before it corrects itself.” For Nosek, who led the re-testing of 100 psychology papers, the current focus on reproducibility is simply part of the scientific process. “Science isn’t about truth and falsity, it’s about reducing uncertainty,” he says. “Really this whole project is science on science: Researchers doing what science is supposed to do, which is be skeptical of our own process, procedure, methods, and look for ways to improve.”
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BBC News - Face blindness: Seeing but not seeing - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...health-24385650 TOK perception vision brain neuroscience blindness
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Oct 13
     
    "Imagine that suddenly you cannot recognise your mother, your partner, your child. You can see them but your brain cannot process the information - you don't know whether they are smiling, or understand their emotions."
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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. "
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Retraction Watch - Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process at Retr... - 0 views

retractionwatch.com science ethics errors bias
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 May 15 - No Cached
  • Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 23 May 15
     
    Retraction Watch is a web site dedicated to highlighting scientific errors, fraud and the retraction of published papers. The web site was created by scientists and is not anti-science. 
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Michael Pollan: How Smart Are Plants? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...131223fa_fact_pollan TOK science nature plants cognition neuroscience neurobiology
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Dec 13
     
    "Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables-light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants-that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant's behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals."
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Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...ilingual-advantage-aging-brain TOK language human sciences social studies bias
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Many modern language researchers agree with that premise. Not only does speaking multiple languages help us to communicate but bilingualism (or multilingualism) may actually confer distinct advantages to the developing brain. Because a bilingual child switches between languages, the theory goes, she develops enhanced executive control, or the ability to effectively manage what are called higher cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, memory, and thought. She becomes better able to inhibit some responses, promote others, and generally emerges with a more flexible and agile mind. It’s a phenomenon that researchers call the bilingual advantage.
  • For the first half of the twentieth century, researchers actually thought that bilingualism put a child at a disadvantage, something that hurt her I.Q. and verbal development. But, in recent years, the notion of a bilingual advantage has emerged from research to the contrary, research that has seemed both far-reaching and compelling, much of it coming from the careful work of the psychologist Ellen Bialystok. For many tasks, including ones that involve working memory, bilingual speakers seem to have an edge. In a 2012 review of the evidence, Bialystok showed that bilinguals did indeed show enhanced executive control, a quality that has been linked, among other things, to better academic performance. And when it comes to qualities like sustained attention and switching between tasks effectively, bilinguals often come out ahead. It seems fairly evident then that, given a choice, you should raise your child to speak more than one language.
  • Systematically, de Bruin combed through conference abstracts from a hundred and sixty-nine conferences, between 1999 and 2012, that had to do with bilingualism and executive control. The rationale was straightforward: conferences are places where people present in-progress research. They report on studies that they are running, initial results, initial thoughts. If there were a systematic bias in the field against reporting negative results—that is, results that show no effects of bilingualism—then there should be many more findings of that sort presented at conferences than actually become published. That’s precisely what de Bruin found. At conferences, about half the presented results provided either complete or partial support for the bilingual advantage on certain tasks, while half provided partial or complete refutation. When it came to the publications that appeared after the preliminary presentation, though, the split was decidedly different. Sixty-eight per cent of the studies that demonstrated a bilingual advantage found a home in a scientific journal, compared to just twenty-nine per cent of those that found either no difference or a monolingual edge. “Our overview,” de Bruin concluded, “shows that there is a distorted image of the actual study outcomes on bilingualism, with researchers (and media) believing that the positive effect of bilingualism on nonlinguistic cognitive processes is strong and unchallenged.”
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Why Are Certain Smells So Hard to Identify? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...naming-scents-uneducated-nose TOK perception
shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities. Last spring, an article in the journal Science reported that we are capable of discriminating more than a trillion different odors. (A biologist at Caltech subsequently disputed the finding, arguing that it contained mathematical errors, though he acknowledged the “richness of human olfactory experience.”) Whence, then, our bumbling translation of scent into speech?
  • That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of inscent?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”
  • But difficulty with talking about smell is not universal. Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the organizer of the A.A.A.S. symposium, studies a group of around a thousand hunter-gatherers in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand who speak a language called Jahai. In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents. At the symposium, Majid presented new research involving around thirty Jahai and thirty Dutch people. In that study, the Jahai named smells in an average of two seconds, whereas the Dutch took thirteen—“and this is just to say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ ” Majid joked onstage.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Olfaction experts each have their pet theories as to why our scent lexicon is so lacking. Jonathan Reinarz blames the lingering effects of the Enlightenment, which, he says, placed a special emphasis on vision. Jay Gottfried, who is something of a nasal prodigy—he once guessed, on the basis of perfume residue, that one of his grad students had gotten back together with an ex-girlfriend—blames physiology. Whereas visual information is subject to elaborate processing in many areas of the brain, his research suggests, odor information is parsed in a much less intricate way, notably by the limbic system, which is associated with emotion and memory formation. This area, Gottfried said, takes “a more crude and unpolished approach to the process of naming,” and the brain’s language centers can have trouble making use of such unrefined input. Meanwhile, Donald A. Wilson, a neuroscientist at New York University School of Medicine, blames biases acquired in childhood.
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Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...121224fa_fact_foer TOK language linguistic determinism
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Feb 14
     
    "Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like "knight." No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. "Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal," John Quijada told me. Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be. In his preface, Quijada wrote that his "greater goal" was "to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language." Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. "
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What If We Lost the Sky? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-if-we-lost-the-sky science human sciences emotion beauty imagination global warming
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • What is the sky worth? This sounds like a philosophical question, but it might become a more concrete one. A report released last week by the National Research Council called for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. Such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. If albedo modification were actually implemented, Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers, told Joel Achenbach at The Washington Post: “You’d get whiter skies. People wouldn’t have blue skies anymore.” And, he added, “astronomers wouldn’t be happy, because you’d have a cloud up there permanently. It’d be hard to see the Milky Way anymore.”
  • Losing the night sky would have big consequences, said Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent work looks at the health effects of the emotion of awe. In a study published in January in the journal Emotion, he and his team found that people who experienced a great deal of awe had lower levels of a marker of inflammation that has been linked to physical and mental ailments. One major source of awe is the natural world. “When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger,” said Dr. Keltner, “there’s clearly a neurophysiological basis for that.” And, he added, looking up at a starry sky provides “almost a prototypical awe experience,” an opportunity to feel “that you are small and modest and part of something vast.”
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What We Really Taste When We Drink Wine : The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...-taste-when-we-drink-wine.html TOK perception taste wine
shared by markfrankel18 on 15 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Salzman first became interested in wine when he was a graduate student at Stanford University studying neuroscience (Ph.D.) and psychiatry (M.D.). “I was corrupted by some people who were very serious about wine,” he told me. Together, they would host wine tastings and travel to vineyards. Over time, as his interest in wine grew, he began to think about the connections between his tastings and the work he was doing on the ways in which emotion colors the way our brains process information. “We study how cognitive and emotional processes can affect perception,” he said. “And in the case of something like wine, you have the perfect example: even before you open a bottle to experience the wine itself, you already have an arbitrary visual stimulus—the bottle and the label—that comes with non-arbitrary emotional associations, good and bad.” And those emotional associations will, in turn, affect what we taste.
  • In one recent study, the Caltech neuroscientist Hilke Plassman found that people’s expectations of a wine’s price affected their enjoyment on a neural level: not only did they report greater subjective enjoyment but they showed increased activity in an area of the brain that has frequently been associated with the experience of pleasantness. The same goes for the color and shape of a wine’s label: some labels make us think that a wine is more valuable (and, hence, more tasty), while others don’t. Even your ability to pronounce a winery’s name can influence your appreciation of its product—the more difficult the name is to pronounce, the more you’ll like the wine.
  • For experts, though, the story is different. In 1990, Gregg Solomon, a Harvard psychologist who wrote “Great Expectorations: The Psychology of Expert Wine Talk,” found that amateurs can’t really distinguish different wines at all, but he also found that experts can indeed rank wines for sweetness, balance, and tannin at rates that far exceeded chance. Part of the reason isn’t just in the added experience. It’s in the ability to phrase and label that experience more precisely, a more developed sensory vocabulary that helps you to identify and remember what you experience. Indeed, when novices are trained, their discrimination ability improves.
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This Bizarre Illusion Makes Dots In Plain View Disappear | IFLScience - 1 views

www.iflscience.com/...e-you-motion-induced-blindness TOK perception illusion
shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • the reason you are not seeing the yellow dots is due to a phenomenon called sensory overload. As the grid around the green dot rotates, and the yellow dots remain unmoving and unchanging, the brain processes the yellow dots as unnecessary information and blanks them out. The brain, after all, does not automatically process all information, visual or otherwise, that the body’s sensory systems encounter. If it did, it would overload, so it tends to filter out information that it has repeatedly encountered without change. The Yale study suggests something else. Instead of the brain automatically removing pieces of unchanging information from view due to sensory overload, the mind is in fact perceiving the objects as contrary to the logic of real-life perceptions. The brain simply does not accept that the object can logically exist based on what information it has. Thus, they disappear from view – they become perceptual scotomas.
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Science Is Not Religion | Jeff Schweitzer - 3 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...is-not-religion_b_3870282.html TOK science religion
shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Author Christine Ma-Kellams recently told HuffPost Science that, "In many ways, science seems like a 21st Century religion. It's a belief system that many wholeheartedly defend and evolve their lives around, sometimes as much as the devoutest of religious folk." Nothing could be further from the truth. Science is not a "belief system" but a process and methodology for seeking an objective reality. Of course because scientific exploration is a human endeavor it comes with all the flaws of humanity: ego, short-sightedness, corruption and greed. But unlike a "belief system" such as religion untethered to an objective truth, science is over time self-policing; competing scientists have a strong incentive to corroborate and build on the findings of others; but equally, to prove other scientists wrong by means that can be duplicated by others.
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It's not just climate-change deniers-conservatives and liberals distrust science equall... - 1 views

qz.com/...erals-distrust-science-equally TOK bias reason science
shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • we not only discount or dismiss scientific information inconsistent with our ideology; we may also distrust and attack its source(s).
  • Furthermore, and contrary to popular belief, this biased processing is most likely to occur among people who have greater cognitive and reasoning capabilities–not less. Where the two sets of explanations for ideological divides on science differ is on how motivated reasoning leads to bias.
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Passing My Disability On to My Children - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ability-on-to-my-children.html ethics biology health genetics family disability
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Occasionally, I come across the term “designer baby,” and I am reminded that some parents now have the option to screen or modify the genes of their unborn children to ensure or avoid certain traits. It always gives me a feeling of unease. Obviously, I did not take this route — partly because, at least with my son, I never had to actually make the decision. My third child, Eliza, was a late midlife accident. I chose to have her despite the possibility she would have XLH, but would I have made the same decision in a planned pregnancy or if given a choice much earlier in the process? I can’t help suspecting that because of advances in genetic mapping, genetic testing, the sheer range of prenatal choices, chances are that in a generation or two, there will be no one in the world who has XLH, no one who looks like me or my children — at least not in the so-called developed world — and I don’t know how to feel about that.
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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.
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BBC - Future - The power and beauty of data visualisation in science - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-images-that-changed-our-world maps data science visualization TOK models
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • An exhibition at the British Library in London reveals the importance that visualising data has had on the scientific process – from 19th Century ship logs that still influence climate science, to models used to forecast the 2009 influenza pandemic.These images not only aid scientific progress, but also help to change the world.
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Theory of mind and the belief in God. - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/...e_god_its_me_brain.single.html TOK mind god belief science
shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Sep 13 - Cached
  • As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the importance of our theory-of-mind skills in that process, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving—or misbehaving—people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our incompetent computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states—indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intent—but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.
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