Writing on the body is as old as time. But perhaps because it was adopted by popular culture first – every sailor had a tattoo – it hasn’t been classed as art
BBC News - How random is random on your music player? - 0 views
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"Our brain is an excellent pattern-matching device," said Babar Zafar, a lead developer at Spotify, in an interview for Tech Tent on the BBC World Service. "It will find patterns where there aren't any."
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"The problem is that, to humans, truly random does not feel random," said Mattias Johansson, a Spotify software engineer, in a response on the question-and-answer site Quora.
How 17 Equations Changed the World | Brain Pickings - 0 views
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A good many times I have been presented at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: ‘Have you ever read a work of Shakespeare’s?’
What If We Lost the Sky? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.”
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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.”
What Can Be Done about Pseudoskepticism? - Scientific American - 0 views
If Your Teacher Likes You, You Might Get A Better Grade : NPR Ed : NPR - 2 views
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A newly published paper suggests that personality similarity affects teachers' estimation of student achievement. That is, how much you are like your teacher contributes to his or her feelings about you — and your abilities. "Astonishingly, little is known about the formation of teacher judgments and therefore about the biases in judgments," says Tobias Rausch, an author of the study and a research scientist at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. "However, research tells us that teacher judgments often are not accurate."
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For example, a recent study from Israel showed that teachers gave girls lower grades on math tests when they knew their gender. And lots of researchers have looked at the importance of having teachers who share the racial and socioeconomic backgrounds of their students.
Problems Too Disgusting to Solve - The New Yorker - 0 views
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last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
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In the first series of studies, the group asked adults in five cities about their backgrounds, their political and personal views, and, most important, their view on the concept of “recycled water.” On average, everyone was uncomfortable with the idea—even when they were told that treated, recycled water is actually safer to drink than unfiltered tap water. That discomfort, Rozin found, was all about disgust. Twenty-six per cent of participants were so disgusted by the idea of toilet-to-tap that they even agreed with the statement, “It is impossible for recycled water to be treated to a high enough quality that I would want to use it.” They didn’t care what the safety data said. Their guts told them that the water would never be drinkable. It’s a phenomenon known as contagion, or, as Rozin describes it, “once in contact, always in contact.” By touching something we find disgusting, a previously neutral or even well-liked item can acquire—permanently—its properties of grossness.
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eelings of disgust are often immune to rationality. And with good reason: evolutionarily, disgust is an incredibly adaptive, life-saving reaction. We find certain things instinctively gross because they really can harm us. Human secretions pass on disease. Noxious odors signal that your surroundings may be unsafe. If something feels slimy and sludgy, it’s likely a moisture-rich environment where pathogens may proliferate. Disgust is powerful, in short, because it often signals something important. It’s easy, though, to be disgusted by things that aren’t actually dangerous. In a prior study, Rozin found that people were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a “fully sterilized” cockroach had been dipped. Intellectually, they knew that the drink was safe, but they couldn’t get over the hump of disgust. In another experiment, students wouldn’t eat chocolate that had been molded to look like poop: they knew that it was safe—tasty, even—but its appearance was too much to handle. Their response makes no logical sense. When it comes to recycled water, for instance, Rozin points out that, on some level, all water comes from sewage: “Rain is water that used to be in someone’s toilet, and nobody seems to mind.” The problem, he says, has to do with making the hidden visible. “If it’s obvious—take shit water, put it through a filter—then people are upset.”
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BBC News - The blind breast cancer detectors - 0 views
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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.
Tiananmen Square 'Negatives': An Art Book or a Protest? - NYTimes.com - 3 views
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“This is an art book,” said Mr. Xu, 60, who has more than 20 photography books to his name. “I have no interest in discussing what they mean.”But the simple act of publishing images of the protests that convulsed Beijing in the spring of 1989 is likely to be viewed as a provocation by the hard-liners who currently rule China. In the ensuing years they have tried, with much success, to impose a collective amnesia on the nation by censoring photos and news accounts that are part of the historical record in the rest of the world.
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But the simple act of publishing images of the protests that convulsed Beijing in the spring of 1989 is likely to be viewed as a provocation by the hard-liners who currently rule China. In the ensuing years they have tried, with much success, to impose a collective amnesia on the nation by censoring photos and news accounts that are part of the historical record in the rest of the world.
Facebook psychology: How social media changes the way we mourn. - 0 views
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Facebook allows us to be public about our sorrows, but to be heard they must sound some joyous note. Research suggests that social media is uncommonly good at making us miserable. The irony may be that Facebook itself is also making us more reluctant to voice that misery.
JMDewaele31.PDF - Dewael31.pdf - 0 views
In a Case of Religious Dress, Justices Explore the Obligations of Employers - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Wednesday warned that “this is going to sound like a joke,” and then posed an unusual question about four hypothetical job applicants. If a Sikh man wears a turban, a Hasidic man wears a hat, a Muslim woman wears a hijab and a Catholic nun wears a habit, must employers recognize that their garb connotes faith — or should they assume, Justice Alito asked, that it is “a fashion statement”?
The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress | WIRED - 1 views
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So what does this say about any eyewitness testimony that could convict them by placing a suspect at the scene of a crime based on the colour of what they are wearing? Why is that not being brought up in any of the discussions, I wonder?
Banksy Releases New Works on Gaza - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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The graffiti artist Banksy unveiled his latest politically charged creation online on Thursday, posting on Instagram a photograph of a weeping figure, which the artist tagged with the hashtags “Banksy” and “Gaza.” A two-minute movie was also posted on his website, with short clips of Palestinian citizens standing amid rubble and what appear to be armed Israeli soldiers. The clip is peppered with captions, like “the locals like it so much they never leave…. (Because they’re not allowed to).”
Chinese speakers use more of their brain than English speakers - Quartz - 2 views
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But Mandarin speakers also saw activation in the right hemisphere, specifically in a region important for processing music, via pitch and tone, that has long been seen as largely unrelated to language comprehension.
Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being - 0 views
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Feeling sad, mad, critical or otherwise awful? Surprise: negative emotions are essential for mental health. In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment. "Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being," says psychologist Jonathan M. Adler of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
The ethical blindness of algorithms - Quartz - 1 views
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Can an algorithm be racist? It’s a question that should be of concern for all data-driven organizations.
BBC - Future - The invisible downside of cheating in life - 1 views
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The implication is that people in Chance's experiment – people very much like you and me – had tricked themselves into believing they were smarter than they were. There may be benefits from doing this – confidence, satisfaction, or more easily gaining the trust of others – but there are also certainly disadvantages. Whenever circumstances change and you need to accurately predict how well you'll do, it can cost to believe you're better than you are.
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