TOK@ISPrague

The natural sciences often offer themselves as a model to other disciplines. But this time science might look for help to the humanities, and to literary criticism in particular.A major root of the crisis is selective use of data. Scientists, eager to make striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions

Despite the popular belief that anything goes in literary criticism, the field has real standards of scholarly validity.

In his 1960 book “Truth and Method,” the influential German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that an interpreter of a text must first question “the validity — of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.” However, “this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self.” Rather, “the important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias.” To deal with the problem of selective use of data, the scientific community must become self-aware and realize that it has a problem. In literary criticism, the question of how one’s arguments are influenced by one’s prejudgments has been a central methodological issue for decades.

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.

This is why we will go on arguing about what constitutes a classic book for as long as we read books at all: While the label is bestowed by the culture at large and we tend to judge it by an unquantifiable impression we have of how much prestige has accumulated around a particular book, that prestige is still built from the idiosyncratic experiences of individual readers.

It has been jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true. But that is getting harder all the time. With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.

Taking into account the human tendency to see what we want to see, unconscious bias is inevitable. Without any ill intent, a scientist may be nudged toward interpreting the data so it supports the hypothesis, even if just barely.

“I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different, and I wondered why that would be.” What was it about a piece of content—an article, a picture, a video—that took it from simply interesting to interesting and shareable? What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on? The question predates Berger’s interest in it by centuries. In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos.

In an attempt to reduce these figures, substance abuse prevention programs often educate pupils regarding the perils of drug use, teach students social skills to resist peer pressure to experiment, and help young people feel that saying no is socially acceptable. All the approaches seem sensible on the surface, so policy makers, teachers and parents typically assume they work. Yet it turns out that approaches involving social interaction work better than the ones emphasizing education. That finding may explain why the most popular prevention program has been found to be ineffective—and may even heighten the use of some substances among teens.

Cuijpers reported that the most effective ones involve substantial amounts of interaction between instructors and students. They teach students the social skills they need to refuse drugs and give them opportunities to practice these skills with other students—for example, by asking students to play roles on both sides of a conversation about drugs, while instructors coach them about what to say and do. In addition, programs that work take into account the importance of behavioral norms

The movie grew out of a conversation Mr. Jenison had with Penn Jillette in which he casually remarked that he thought he had figured out how the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was able to produce canvases so lifelike that they still mystify painters and art historians alike.

The secret, suggested Mr. Jenison, whose role in inventing the “video toaster” means he is sometimes called “the father of desktop video,” was the canny use of mirror-based optical devices. So he set out to test his hypothesis by painting his own stroke-by-stroke version of Vermeer’s “Music Lesson” in a Texas warehouse, with Teller, the quieter half of the duo, documenting every advance and reverse as Mr. Jenison experimented with the optical equipment he thinks Vermeer used.

It won’t surprise you to learn that the very recent news events are the ones we remember best. The Japanese psychologist Terumasa Kogure found sharp drops in recollection at four years and eight years after an event, but sometimes we’ll remember the details of far older news stories. Indeed, recent psychological research shows that our memory for news is not as straightforward as we might think — and the reasons offer insight into how the mind works.

responding to the widespread social upheaval spreading throughout his country, yemeni artist and activist murad sobay initiated the ’12th hour’ campaign — a series of street art murals, paintings, and graffiti that discuss 12 cultural concerns the country is currently engaged in. the artworks are emblazoned across the walls of the yemeni capital of sana’a, and unfold as an hour-by-hour series, all in pursuit of cultivating awareness of the problems in a peaceful and participatory way. the project is sustained by a massive public response — initiated through a call-to-action on facebook. citizens demonstrate their interest in the creative campaign by taking to the streets with sobay and painting the walls with powerful messages about government and policy. the walls transform into expository stories, which shed light on the consequences of anti-government demonstrations and alternatively encourage a non-violent discourse.