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Keiko E

The Power of Round Numbers - Ideas Market - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...the-power-of-round-numbers

bias round numbers test psychology

shared by Keiko E on 24 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Round numbers are psychologically powerful. And that power has been freshly demonstrated in a new study exploring the behavior of pro baseball players and takers of the SAT.
  • For the baseball players, the researchers, Devin Pope, of the University of Chicago, and Uri Simonsohn, of Penn, focused on whether hitters thought the difference between a .299 batting average and a .300 average was more important than the minuscule .001 difference in performance it implies.
  • The study also found that high-school juniors who took the SAT were substantially more likely than their peers to re-take the test if they scored just below a round number
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It’s possible that admissions officers also have a bias toward round numbers. (The students clearly think they do.) But examining the admissions decisions at one elite college, and one business school, the researchers couldn’t spot one.
sissij

The Right Way to Fall - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-right-way-to-fall.html

new york times psychology science

shared by sissij on 27 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • According to paratroopers, stunt professionals, physical therapists and martial arts instructors, there is indeed a “right way” to fall — and it can save you a lot of grief if you know how to do it.
  • The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimates that falls cause more than a third of injury-related emergency room visits, around 7.9 million a year.
  • Moreover, falling straight forward or backward raises the risk of damaging your spine and vital organs.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • You similarly don’t want to come crashing down on your knee so you break your kneecap or do that maneuver where you kind of pedal with your feet to catch yourself, which can lead to broken bones in your foot and ankle.
  • Paratroopers’ goal is to fall sideways in the direction the wind is carrying them — in no way resisting the momentum of the fall. When the balls of their feet barely reach the ground, they immediately distribute the impact in rapid sequence up through the calf to the thigh and buttocks.
  • Accept that you’re falling and go with it, round your body, and don’t stiffen and distribute the energy so you take the fall in the widest area possible,
  • Young children are arguably the best fallers because they have yet to develop fear or embarrassment, so they just tumble and roll without tensing up and trying to catch themselves.
  • sissij on 27 Jan 17
     
    There are techniques and science even in how you choose to fall. After reading this article, I sort of take the advice metaphorically. In the article, it said: "Accept that you're falling and go with it, round your body, and don't stiffen and distribute the energy so you take the fall in the widest area possible." I think it also applies to times when we meet some obstacles and fall in our life. We sometimes just have to accept the grieve and go with it. Although there are many novels depicting heroes going against their fall, as individuals in the reality, I think the better way to deal with our down point is to go with it and let it fade away. Always have your pain and grief at a high concentration will only lead to a broken heart. --Sissi (1/26/2017)
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt: Reasons Do Matter - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...er-when-intuitions-dont-object

moral reasoning Haidt intuition emotion reason philosophers

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • I never said that reason plays no role in judgment. Rather, I urged that we be realistic about reasoning and recognize that reasons persuade others on moral and political issues only under very special circumstances.
  • two basic kinds of cognitive events are “seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.” (These terms correspond roughly to what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and others call “System 1” and “System 2” and that I call the “elephant” and the “rider.”)
  • We effortlessly and intuitively “see that” something is true, and then we work to find justifications, or “reasons why,” which we can give to others.  Both processes are crucial for understanding belief and persuasion. Both are needed for the kind of democratic deliberation that Lynch (and I) want to promote.
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  • According to Margolis, people don’t change their minds unless they move along the horizontal dimension. Intuition is what most matters for belief. Yet a moral argument generally consists of round after round of reasoning. Each person tries to pull the other along the vertical dimension.
  • if your opponent succeeds in defeating your reasons, you are unlikely to change your judgment. You’ve been dragged into the upper-left quadrant, but you still feel, intuitively, that it’s wrong
  • This, I suggest, is how moral arguments proceed when people have strong intuitions anchoring their beliefs. And intuitions are rarely stronger than when they are part of our partisan identities. So I’m not saying that reasons “play no role in moral judgment.” In fact, four of the six links in my Social Intuitionist Model are reasoning links. Most of what’s going on during an argu
  • ment is reasoning
  • I’m saying that reason is far less powerful than intuition, so if you’re arguing (or deliberating) with a partner who lives on the other side of the political spectrum from you, and you approach issues such as abortion, gay marriage or income inequality with powerfully different intuitive reactions, you are unlikely to effect any persuasion no matter how good your arguments and no matter how much time you give your opponent to reflect upon your logic.
  • as an intuitionist, I see hope in an approach to deliberative democracy that uses social psychology to calm the passions and fears that make horizontal movement so difficult.
  • One of the issues I am most passionate about is political civility. I co-run a site at www.CivilPolitics.org where we define civility as “the ability to disagree with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.” We explain our goals like this: “We believe this ability [civility] is best fostered by indirect methods (changing contexts, payoffs and institutions) rather than by direct methods (such as pleading with people to be more civil, or asking people to sign civility pledges).” In other words, we hope to open up space for civil disagreement by creating contexts in which elephants (automatic processes and intuitions) are calmer, rather than by asking riders (controlled processes, including reasoning) to try harder.
  • We are particularly interested in organizations that try to create a sense of community and camaraderie as a precondition for political discussions.
  • if you want to persuade someone, talk to the elephant first. Trigger the right intuitions first.
  • This is why there has been such rapid movement on gay marriage and gay rights. It’s not because good arguments have suddenly appeared, which nobody thought of in the 1990s
  • younger people, who grew up knowing gay people and seeing gay couples on television, have no such disgust. For them, the arguments are much more persuasive.
  • I love Aristotle’s emphasis on habit — and I had a long section on virtue ethics in Chapter 6 that got cut at the last minute, but which I have just now posted online here
  • philosophers have the best norms for good thinking that I have ever encountered. When my work is critiqued by a philosopher I can be certain that he or she has read me carefully, including the footnotes, and will not turn me into a straw man. More than any other subculture I know, the philosophical community embodies the kinds of normative pressures for reason-giving and responsiveness to reasons that Allan Gibbard describes in “Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.”
mcginnisca

8 facts about the Armenian genocide 100 years ago - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Armenia genocide or mass killings language

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Turkish FM: Why we won't recognize Armenian killings as genocide 05:07
  • The mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which began 100 years ago Friday, is said by some scholars and others to have been the first genocide of the 20th century, even though the word "genocide" did not exist at the time.
  • The issue of whether to call the killings a genocide is emotional, both for Armenians, who are descended from those killed, and for Turks, the heirs to the Ottomans. For both groups, the question touches as much on national identity as on historical facts.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Some Turks still view the Armenians as having been a threat to the Ottoman Empire in a time of war, and say many people of various ethnicities -- including Turks -- were killed in the chaos of war.
  • The Ottoman Turks, having recently entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were worried that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire would offer wartime assistance to Russia. Russia had long coveted control of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which controlled access to the Black Sea -- and therefore access to Russia's only year-round seaports.
  • How many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the mass killings?Many historians agree that the number was about 2 million. However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as they marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.
  • on the night of April 23-24, 1915, the authorities in Constantinople, the empire's capital, rounded up about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. Many of them ended up deported or assassinated.
  • Estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million deaths between 1914 and 1923, with not all of the victims in the Ottoman Empire
  • Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt.The victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been loaded into boats, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. Rape, too, was frequently reported.
  • No. Genocide was not even a word at the time, much less a legally defined crime.The word "genocide" was invented in 1944 by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazis' systematic attempt to eradicate Jews from Europe. He formed the word by combining the Greek word for race with the Latin word for killing.
  • Who calls the mass killings of Armenians a genocide?Armenia, the Vatican, the European Parliament, France, Russia and Canada. Germany is expected to join that group on Friday, the 100th anniversary of the start of the killings.
  • Who does not call the mass killings a genocide?Turkey, the United States, the European Commission, the United Kingdom and the United Nations. A U.N. subcommittee called the killings genocide in 1985, but current U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declines to use the word.
  • While Turkey vehemently continues to reject the word "genocide,"
grayton downing

What makes a face go round | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...what-makes-face-go-round

face science brain science knowledge research

shared by grayton downing on 25 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • And these transcriptional enhancers don’t have to be right next to the DNA they are relevant to. Instead, they can act at a distance, sometimes hundreds of kilobases away from the gene. T
  • They ended up with more than 4,000 potential transcriptional enhancers, an eye-popping number. Many of them were located near genes that were already known for their role in craniofacial development.
  • The effects of the enhancers on gene activity might have looked subtle, but when groups of adult mice were examined for facial shape, the results were detectable
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It shows that the little changes provided by many, many transcriptional enhancers can help make the small tweaks that result in an individual facial shape. Of, course, this study was done in mice, but it’s very possible that these effects are present in humans (though hopefully none of them result in a long furry snout). The results could help scientists better understand what gives one person that chiseled jaw, and another that heavy brow. And the next time you look in the mirror, and see your cleft chin or your prominent cheekbones, send out many small thank yous to your many, many transcriptional enhancers.
Javier E

How Tech Can Turn Doctors Into Clerical Workers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...with-data-driven-medicine.html

medicine health care doctor

shared by Javier E on 18 May 18 - No Cached
  • what I see in my colleague is disillusionment, and it has come too early, and I am seeing too much of it.
  • In America today, the patient in the hospital bed is just the icon, a place holder for the real patient who is not in the bed but in the computer. That virtual entity gets all our attention. Old-fashioned “bedside” rounds conducted by the attending physician too often take place nowhere near the bed but have become “card flip” rounds
  • My young colleague slumping in the chair in my office survived the student years, then three years of internship and residency and is now a full-time practitioner and teacher. The despair I hear comes from being the highest-paid clerical worker in the hospital: For every one hour we spend cumulatively with patients, studies have shown, we spend nearly two hours on our primitive Electronic Health Records, or “E.H.R.s,” and another hour or two during sacred personal time.
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  • The living, breathing source of the data and images we juggle, meanwhile, is in the bed and left wondering: Where is everyone? What are they doing? Hello! It’s my body, you know
  • Our $3.4 trillion health care system is responsible for more than a quarter of a million deaths per year because of medical error, the rough equivalent of, say, a jumbo jet’s crashing every day.
  • I can get cash and account details all over America and beyond. Yet I can’t reliably get a patient record from across town, let alone from a hospital in the same state, even if both places use the same brand of E.H.R
  • the leading E.H.R.s were never built with any understanding of the rituals of care or the user experience of physicians or nurses. A clinician will make roughly 4,000 keyboard clicks during a busy 10-hour emergency-room shift
  • In the process, our daily progress notes have become bloated cut-and-paste monsters that are inaccurate and hard to wade through. A half-page, handwritten progress note of the paper era might in a few lines tell you what a physician really thought
  • so much of the E.H.R., but particularly the physical exam it encodes, is a marvel of fiction, because we humans don’t want to leave a check box empty or leave gaps in a template.
  • For a study, my colleagues and I at Stanford solicited anecdotes from physicians nationwide about patients for whom an oversight in the exam (a “miss”) had resulted in real consequences, like diagnostic delay, radiation exposure, therapeutic or surgical misadventure, even death. They were the sorts of things that would leave no trace in the E.H.R. because the recorded exam always seems complete — and yet the omission would be glaring and memorable to other physicians involved in the subsequent care. We got more than 200 such anecdotes.
  • The reason for these errors? Most of them resulted from exams that simply weren’t done as claimed. “Food poisoning” was diagnosed because the strangulated hernia in the groin was overlooked, or patients were sent to the catheterization lab for chest pain because no one saw the shingles rash on the left chest.
  • I worry that such mistakes come because we’ve gotten trapped in the bunker of machine medicine. It is a preventable kind of failure
  • How we salivated at the idea of searchable records, of being able to graph fever trends, or white blood counts, or share records at a keystroke with another institution — “interoperability”
  • The seriously ill patient has entered another kingdom, an alternate universe, a place and a process that is frightening, infantilizing; that patient’s greatest need is both scientific state-of-the-art knowledge and genuine caring from another human being. Caring is expressed in listening, in the time-honored ritual of the skilled bedside exam — reading the body — in touching and looking at where it hurts and ultimately in localizing the disease for patients not on a screen, not on an image, not on a biopsy report, but on their bodies.
  • What if the computer gave the nurse the big picture of who he was both medically and as a person?
  • a professor at M.I.T. whose current interest in biomedical engineering is “bedside informatics,” marvels at the fact that in an I.C.U., a blizzard of monitors from disparate manufacturers display EKG, heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, temperature and more, and yet none of this is pulled together, summarized and synthesized anywhere for the clinical staff to use
  • What these monitors do exceedingly well is sound alarms, an average of one alarm every eight minutes, or more than 180 per patient per day. What is our most common response to an alarm? We look for the button to silence the nuisance because, unlike those in a Boeing cockpit, say, our alarms are rarely diagnosing genuine danger.
  • By some estimates, more than 50 percent of physicians in the United States have at least one symptom of burnout, defined as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, cynicism and decreased efficacy at work
  • It is on the increase, up by 9 percent from 2011 to 2014 in one national study. This is clearly not an individual problem but a systemic one, a 4,000-key-clicks-a-day problem.
  • The E.H.R. is only part of the issue: Other factors include rapid patient turnover, decreased autonomy, merging hospital systems, an aging population, the increasing medical complexity of patients. Even if the E.H.R. is not the sole cause of what ails us, believe me, it has become the symbol of burnou
  • burnout is one of the largest predictors of physician attrition from the work force. The total cost of recruiting a physician can be nearly $90,000, but the lost revenue per physician who leaves is between $500,000 and $1 million, even more in high-paying specialties.
  • I hold out hope that artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms will transform our experience, particularly if natural-language processing and video technology allow us to capture what is actually said and done in the exam room.
  • as with any lab test, what A.I. will provide is at best a recommendation that a physician using clinical judgment must decide how to apply.
  • True clinical judgment is more than addressing the avalanche of blood work, imaging and lab tests; it is about using human skills to understand where the patient is in the trajectory of a life and the disease, what the nature of the patient’s family and social circumstances is and how much they want done.
  • Much of that is a result of poorly coordinated care, poor communication, patients falling through the cracks, knowledge not being transferred and so on, but some part of it is surely from failing to listen to the story and diminishing skill in reading the body as a text.
  • As he was nearing death, Avedis Donabedian, a guru of health care metrics, was asked by an interviewer about the commercialization of health care. “The secret of quality,” he replied, “is love.”/•/
Javier E

Five months on, what scientists now know about the coronavirus | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...now-know-about-the-coronavirus

Covid-19 theory results research science Knowledge

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The Sars-CoV-2 virus almost certainly originated in bats, which have evolved fierce immune responses to viruses, researchers have discovered. These defences drive viruses to replicate faster so that they can get past bats’ immune defences. In turn, that transforms the bat into a reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses
  • “This virus probably jumped from a bat into another animal, and that other animal was probably near a human, maybe in a market,
  • Virus-ridden particles are inhaled by others and come into contact with cells lining the throat and larynx. These cells have large numbers of receptors – known as Ace-2 receptors – on their surfaces. (Cell receptors play a key role in passing chemicals into cells and in triggering signals between cells.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • “This virus has a surface protein that is primed to lock on that receptor and slip its RNA into the cell,”
  • Once inside, that RNA inserts itself into the cell’s own replication machinery and makes multiple copies of the virus. These burst out of the cell, and the infection spreads. Antibodies generated by the body’s immune system eventually target the virus and in most cases halt its progress.
  • “A Covid-19 infection is generally mild, and that really is the secret of the virus’s success,” adds Ball. “Many people don’t even notice they have got an infection and so go around their work, homes and supermarkets infecting others.”
  • the virus can cause severe problems. This happens when it moves down the respiratory tract and infects the lungs, which are even richer in cells with Ace-2 receptors. Many of these cells are destroyed, and lungs become congested with bits of broken cell. In these cases, patients will require treatment in intensive care.
  • Even worse, in some cases, a person’s immune system goes into overdrive, attracting cells to the lungs in order to attack the virus, resulting in inflammation
  • This process can run out of control, more immune cells pour in, and the inflammation gets worse. This is known as a cytokine storm.
  • Just why cytokine storms occur in some patients but not in the vast majority is unclear
  • Doctors examining patients recovering from a Covid-19 infection are finding fairly high levels of neutralising antibodies in their blood. These antibodies are made by the immune system, and they coat an invading virus at specific points, blocking its ability to break into cells.
  • Instead, most virologists believe that immunity against Covid-19 will last only a year or two. “That is in line with other coronaviruses that infect humans,
  • “It is clear that immune responses are being mounted against Covid-19 in infected people,” says virologist Mike Skinner of Imperial College London. “And the antibodies created by that response will provide protection against future infections – but we should note that it is unlikely this protection will be for life.”
  • “That means that even if most people do eventually become exposed to the virus, it is still likely to become endemic – which means we would see seasonal peaks of infection of this disease. We will have reached a steady state with regard to Covid-19.”
  • Skinner is doubtful. “We have got to consider this pandemic from the virus’s position,” he says. “It is spreading round the world very nicely. It is doing OK. Change brings it no benefit.”
  • In the end, it will be the development and roll-out of an effective vaccine that will free us from the threat of Covid-19,
  • the journal Nature reported that 78 vaccine projects had been launched round the globe – with a further 37 in development.
  • vaccines require large-scale safety and efficacy studies. Thousands of people would receive either the vaccine itself or a placebo to determine if the former were effective at preventing infection from the virus which they would have encountered naturally. That, inevitably, is a lengthy process.
  • some scientists have proposed a way to speed up the process – by deliberately exposing volunteers to the virus to determine a vaccine’s efficacy.
  • Volunteers would have to be young and healthy, he stresses: “Their health would also be closely monitored, and they would have access to intensive care and any available medicines.”
  • The result could be a vaccine that would save millions of lives by being ready for use in a much shorter time than one that went through standard phase three trials.
  • phase-three trials are still some way off, so we have time to consider the idea carefully.”
margogramiak

Monkeys, like humans, persist at tasks they've already invested in: Studying this pheno... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201218112531.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • If you've ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you're not alone.
  • If you've ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you're not alone.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I've definitely been there before. I assume it's part of "human nature" which we've talked about in class before.
  • It's called the "sunk costs" phenomenon, where the more resources we sink into an endeavor, the likelier we are to continue -- even if we sense it's futile.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      A perfect example of the stubbornness of humans... yet another example of human nature.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • deep, evolutionarily ancient mechanism that helps us balance overall cost and benefit.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's interesting. I've never thought about this, but it makes sense that human's would have that built in.
  • Second, it may be influenced by uncertainty about the outcome (you never know, it might work out, so why not keep trying?)
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I've definitely had this mindset before.
  • have shown that both capuchin monkeys and rhesus macaques are susceptible to the same behavior and that it occurs more often when the monkeys are uncertain about the outcome.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Wow! That's interesting.
  • That helps when you're foraging for food, hunting prey, waiting for eggs to hatch, seeking a mate, or building a nest or enclosure.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Survival instinct aspect.
  • "They're like my second set of kids," she said.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Glad to hear that though they are used for research, they are loved and taken care of.
  • "Most rounds lasted only 1 second. So if you didn't get a reward after that, it was actually better to quit and start a new round. That would likely get you a treat sooner than if you had kept going."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I can see how this would be a good test of resilience in the context of the test.
  • "They persisted 5 to 7 times longer than was optimal," said Brosnan, "and the longer they had already tried, the more likely they were to complete the entire task."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think that's definitely proof of similarity!
  • t suggests that this behavior is likely driven by evolution and deeply embedded across species.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Interesting how something so simple can tie back into something so complex like evolution.
  • "Monkeys have really quick reaction times on these games," said Brosnan, "so one second to them is actually a long time."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Wow, I never knew that about monkeys.
  • it shows that human capacities like rationalization, or human concerns like not giving up on something we have publicly committed to, are probably not the main drivers of the sunk cost phenomenon.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      It's not just a human thing.
  • reminds us that there is sometimes a good reason to give up.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think there are times when I could use this reminder!
Grace Carey

News at Tipitaka Network - 0 views

www.tipitaka.net/...news.php

dogmatism falsification religion ignorance bias faith dual-causation logic Quantum-Physics measurement Reality Heisenberg uncertainty 5-senses perception

shared by Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13
     
    Finding some interesting and very much TOK articles while I'm working on my religious investigation about the science behind Buddhist beliefs. I found this one particularly intriguing as it discusses why the theory of reincarnation is scientifically sound and why scientists are often narrow-minded and overly trusted. "I was once told by a Buddhist G.P. that, on his first day at a medical school in Sydney, the famous Professor, head of the Medical School, began his welcoming address by stating "Half of what we are going to teach you in the next few years is wrong. Our problem is that we do not know which half it is!" Those were the words of a real scientist." "Logic is only as reliable as the assumptions on which it is based." "Objective experience is that which is free from all bias. In Buddhism, the three types of bias are desire, ill-will and skeptical doubt. Desire makes one see only what one wants to see, it bends the truth to fit one's preferences." "Reality, according to pure science, does not consist of well ordered matter with precise massed, energies and positions in space, all just waiting to be measured. Reality is the broadest of smudges of all possibilities, only some being more probable than others." "At a recent seminar on Science and Religion, at which I was a speaker, a Catholic in the audience bravely announced that whenever she looks through a telescope at the stars, she feels uncomfortable because her religion is threatened. I commented that whenever a scientist looks the other way round through a telescope, to observe the one who is watching, then they feel uncomfortable because their science is threatened by what is doing the seeing! "
Sean Kirkpatrick

The Church and Science - 0 views

www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/...tiffney4.html

science knowledge

shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Nov 12
     
    I thought this article was very interesting and related well to what we are learning about in the natural sciences unit. We talked in class about the Greeks and their relationship to what we call "science." The author of this article states, "the Greeks might have invented science as we know it today. But they never really got to creating a standardized protocol of experimentation that assumed an orderly world." This statement could go against what I learned in the Steven Hawkings movie, as the narrator stated that the Greeks were the first to create the theory that the world is round using the shadow experiment.
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
proudsa

When Correctional Officers Carry Shotguns, The Result is Death And Mayhem - The Huffing... - 0 views

highline.huffingtonpost.com/...the-shooting-gallery

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Guards inside prisons shouldn't have guns. That's pretty much an accepted fact. Except in Nevada—and the results are mayhem and death.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 08 Jan 16
       
      Graphic image disclaimer, but really important read
  • “Neither could affect an effective offensive,” McNeill recalled. “It was like some awkward and quirky dance, then 'BOOM.'”
  • the same tiny pellets that sport shooters use to blow apart clay pigeons and that hunters use to kill birds and rabbits.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 08 Jan 16
       
      treatment of inmates as animals
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Ramos fired a warning shot, but the prisoners kept scuffling. Then he fired three live rounds. When he stopped, the left side of Arevalo's body was loaded with shots. Perez lay motionless and bleeding on the floor, near a shower bag and a towel. He had at least 30 pellets in his face, 30 in his neck and as many as 200 in his chest and arms.
  • while he tried to reload his gun.
  • “extensive” shots to the “left face, left neck, left arm, left chest, left flank.”
  • lowest ratio of guards to prisoners of any correctional system in the country—only about one security staffer for every 12 inmates, according to the Association of State Correctional Administrators.
  • The state defines this method as a “non-deadly” use of force, but a shotgun loaded with pellets can easily draw blood from as far as 50 yards away.
sissij

Earning a Degree, and Her Daughters' Admiration - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cases-fund-college-degree.html

new york times education psychology

shared by sissij on 23 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Now Ms. Hopewell, 37, is ebullient, and full of smiles, hugs and laughs. After spending the last three and a half years studying forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Midtown, it was official: She was a college graduate, the first in her family.
  • “But at the end of the day I know it’s beneficial for my family and I want bigger and better things, and I have to do it.”
  • I want to leave a legacy for my kids when I leave this earth, and living paycheck to paycheck is not going to get it.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The straight-A student said she hoped to study neuroscience at Harvard one day.
  • She hopes they see from her experiences that education is the best way to avoid repeating her struggles.
  • “This experience showed me that I’m raising well-rounded young ladies who can adapt to any situation and make the best of it,” Ms. Hopewell said. “Their capabilities are endless.”
  • sissij on 23 Jan 17
     
    This article is very inspiring. This is an example of how education can get someone to a higher and better place. Education is something that's worth investing. I really like one thing that she said: "I want to leave a legacy for my kids when I leave this earth, and living paycheck to paycheck is not going to get it." Although for many of us here, attending to college is a must-to-do thing, for many other people, attending colleges a dream, an ultimate goal. Many of us go to college and just waste another four years there. But for Ms. Hopewell, the college education polished her and made her a complete new person. I just think it's interesting that why we get completely different outcomes from having college education?  I think it's because we never put much effort in getting a college education as Ms. Hopewell did, so the force effect doesn't give us the pride of commitment. --Sissi (1/23/2017)
kirkpatrickry

Second Wave Positive Psychology - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-positive-psyc_b_10218316.html

psychology positive

shared by kirkpatrickry on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • I think it’s recognising that things that we might deem to be negative can still serve flourishing and adaptation and wellbeing, so it can perhaps expand our way, expand our horizons and concern in the field.”
  • the second wave is an important and exciting development for the field of positive psychology, which can help it to become a more mature and well-rounded discipline. By focusing research on both the positive and the negative as ways for people to flourish, this allows for a broader scope of interventions for people to use, in order to thrive and be successful.
Javier E

In This Snapchat Campaign, Election News Is Big and Then It's Gone - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...at-election-campaign-news.html

campaign election news journalism social media bias memory

shared by Javier E on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Every modern presidential election is at least in part defined by the cool new media breakthrough of its moment.
  • In 2000, there was email, and by golly was that a big change from the fax. The campaigns could get their messages in front of print and cable news reporters — who could still dominate the campaign narrative — at will,
  • Then 2008: Facebook made it that much easier for campaigns to reach millions of people directly,
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The 2004 campaign was the year of the “Web log,” or blog, when mainstream reporters and campaigns officially began losing any control they may have had over political new
  • Marco Rubio’s campaign marched into the election season ready to fight the usual news-cycle-by-news-cycle skirmishes. It was surprised to learn that, lo and behold, “There was no news cycle — everything was one big fire hose,” Alex Conant, a senior Rubio strategist, told me. “News was constantly breaking and at the end of the day hardly anything mattered. Things would happen; 24 hours later, everyone was talking about something else.”
  • Snapchat represents a change to something else: the longevity of news, how durably it keeps in our brain cells and our servers.
  • Snapchat is recording the here and the now, playing for today. Tomorrow will bring something new that renders today obsolete. It’s a digital Tibetan sand painting made in the image of the millennial mind.
  • Snapchat executives say they set up the app this way because this is what their tens of millions of younger users want; it’s how they live.
  • They can’t possibly have enough bandwidth to process all the incoming information and still dwell on what already was, can they?
  • Experienced strategists and their candidates, who could always work through their election plans methodically — promoting their candidacies one foot in front of the other, adjusting here and there for the unexpected — suddenly found that they couldn’t operate the way they always did.
  • The question this year has been whether 2016 will be the “Snapchat election,
  • Then there was Jeb Bush, expecting to press ahead by presenting what he saw as leading-edge policy proposals that would set off a prolonged back-and-forth. When Mr. Bush rolled out a fairly sweeping plan to upend the college loan system, the poor guy thought this was going to become a big thing.
  • It drew only modest coverage and was quickly buried by the latest bit from Donald Trump.
  • In this “hit refresh” political culture, damaging news does not have to stick around for long, either. The next development, good or bad, replaces it almost immediately.
  • Mr. Miller pointed to a recent episode in which Mr. Trump said a protester at a rally had “ties to ISIS,” after that protester charged the stage. No such ties existed. “He says ‘ISIS is attacking me’; this was debunked in eight minutes by Twitter,” Mr. Miller said. “Cable talked about it for three hours and it went away.”
  • “Hillary Clinton said that she was under sniper fire in Bosnia” — she wasn’t — “and that has stuck with her for 20 years,”
  • Mr. Trump has mastered this era of short attention spans in politics by realizing that if you’re the one regularly feeding the stream, you can forever move past your latest trouble, and hasten the mass amnesia.
  • It was with this in mind that The Washington Post ran an editorial late last week reminding its readers of some of Mr. Trump’s more outlandish statements and policy positions
  • The Post urged its readers to “remember” more than two dozen items from Mr. Trump’s record, including that he promised “to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and deport them,” and “lied about President Obama’s birth certificate.”
  • as the media habits of the young drive everybody else’s, I’m reminded of that old saw about those who forget history. Now, what was I saying?
Javier E

Got Twitter? What's Your Influence Score - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...26rosenbloom.html

social media culture economic benefit costs

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • IMAGINE a world in which we are assigned a number that indicates how influential we are. This number would help determine whether you receive a job, a hotel-room upgrade or free samples at the supermarket. If your influence score is low, you don’t get the promotion, the suite or the complimentary cookies.
  • If you have a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account, you are already being judged — or will be soon. Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence — or in the lingo, rating “influencers.” Yet the companies are not simply looking at the number of followers or friends you’ve amassed. Rather, they are beginning to measure influence in more nuanced ways, and posting their judgments — in the form of a score — online.
  • “Now you are being assigned a number in a very public way, whether you want it or not,”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “It’s going to be publicly accessible to the people you date, the people you work for. It’s fast becoming mainstream.”
  • Audi would begin offering promotions to Facebook users based on their Klout score. Last year, Virgin America used the company to offer highly rated influencers in Toronto free round-trip flights to San Francisco or Los Angeles.
  • it’s not enough to attract Twitter followers — you must inspire those followers to take action.
  • focus your digital presence on one or two areas of interest. Don’t be a generalist. Most importantly: be passionate, knowledgeable and trustworthy.
  • As for influence in the offline world — it doesn’t count.
  • Klout “lacks sentiment analysis” — so a user who generates a lot of digital chatter might receive a high score even though what’s being said about the user is negative.
  • we are moving closer to creating “social media caste systems,” where people with high scores get preferential treatment by retailers, prospective employers, even prospective dates.
kushnerha

When Was America Greatest? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...when-was-america-greatest.html

new york times politics memory bias greatness patriotism research

shared by kushnerha on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The slogan evokes a time when America was stronger and more prosperous. But Mr. Trump doesn’t specify whether he’s expressing nostalgia for the 1950s — or 10 years ago. That vagueness is reflected by his voters, according to the results of a new survey, conducted online by the digital media and polling company Morning Consult.
  • Trump supporters offered a wide range of answers, with no distinct pattern. The most popular choice was the year 2000. But 1955, 1960, 1970 and 1985 were also popular. More than 2 percent of Trump’s supporters picked 2015, when Mr. Trump’s campaign began.
  • Political science research suggests that Americans’ optimism can be influenced by whether their political party is in the White House. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Democrats feel better than Republicans about current circumstances.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In March, Pew asked people whether life was better for people like them 50 years ago — and a majority of Republicans answered yes. Trump supporters were the most emphatic, with 75 percent saying things were better in the mid-1960s.Democrats, though, were less enthusiastic about the past. Forty-eight percent said life was better now than it was 50 years ago, while 17 percent of Democrats said it was the same, and only 28 percent said it was worse.
  • In the Morning Consult survey, 44 percent of people over all said America’s greatest years were ahead of it, while 36 percent said those years had already passed. But in an election when America’s past greatness has played such a starring role, we wanted to see more details about just how voters saw the past and the future.
  • So, when was the greatest year?Over all, 2000 was the most popular choice, a preference that cut across political party, candidate preference, gender and age. The year’s popularity may partly reflect people’s fondness for round numbers. But many voters explained their choice by referring to a greater sense of security. The Sept. 11 attacks occurred the following year. (An election year also has something for all partisans to grab onto. Bill Clinton was president that year, but George W. Bush won the election to replace him.)
  • Some people, of course, reached farther back into history. The year the Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776, got a few votes. One person chose 1789, the year the Constitution took effect. One person chose 1800. One chose 1860, the year Southern states began to secede from the Union. But most answers were of a more recent vintage.
  • partisan patterns in views of America’s greatness. Republicans, over all, recall the late 1950s and the mid-1980s most fondly. Sample explanations: “Reagan.” “Economy was booming.” “No wars!” “Life was simpler.” “Strong family values.” The distribution of Trump supporters’ greatest years is somewhat similar to the Republican trend, but more widely dispersed over the last 70 years.
  • Democrats seem to think America’s greatest days were more recent; they were more likely to pick a year in the 1990s, or since 2000. After 2000, their second-most-popular answer was 2016. Sample explanations: “We’re getting better.” “Improving social justice.” “Technology.” Even 2008, a year of financial collapse, was pretty popular, perhaps because President Obama was also elected that year.
dicindioha

BBC - Future - The tricks being played on you by UK roads - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...eing-played-on-you-by-uk-roads

shared by dicindioha on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • When you walk or drive in the UK, you’re being nudged by dozens of hidden messages embedded in the roads and pavements.
  • He suffers from a rare inherited condition that leaves him only able to make out vague colour contrasts around him. Yet he is able to safely pick his way through the hectic city streets, thanks to dozens of hidden messages embedded in our roads and pavements that few of us even notice are there.
  • This subtle form of communication is not just confined to the pavement, either: increasingly, motorists and cyclists are also unknowingly being told what to do.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • A horizontal pattern of raised lines going across the pavement tells blind pedestrians they are on the footpath side; raised lines running along the direction of travel indicate the side designated for cycles. A wide, raised line divides the two.
  • Because the raised bumps are unpleasant to ride across, cyclists instinctively are drawn toward the tramline pattern which runs in the same direction as they are traveling.
  • Elsewhere, it is possible to find raised, rounded ribs running across pavement, creating a corduroy pattern. They look like they might be there to provide additional grip; in fact, they are sending a warning to anyone who stands on them about what is ahead.
  • The idea is to guide people through busy areas and around objects by drawing them along these raised lines.
  • They found that uncertainty about the layout of the road ahead is a powerful way of getting drivers to slow down.
  • triangles painted along the edge of each road – create an impression of a narrower road for example, and make drivers more cautious.
  • They have been painting boxes onto the road that use a clever combination of white and dark paint to create the illusion of a speed hump.
  • In India, they have taken things even further by painting deliberate optical illusions to give the impression that obstacles are in the road ahead.
  • dicindioha on 08 Feb 17
     
    This article talks about basically human perception and pattern recognition, and how this helps people who do not have all senses, like being blind. Bumps and grooves in the roads we walk on tell us, without us realizing it, what side we should be on and where there are stairs or platforms. It is interesting that there are patterns with these, as mentioned in the article, but everyday pedestrians do not really notice these patterns, and yet they are there to help us. Another interesting thing was the use of perception, and creating illusions of speed bumps or things in the road to get drivers to slow down. Here they play with perception to create an illusion of a speed bump and make traffic safer. sometimes what we think of as our perception incapabilities actually help us without realizing it.
Javier E

Which Language and Grammar Rules to Flout - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...age-and-grammar-rules-to-flout

language grammar rules debate descriptivism prescriptivism

shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Welcome to another round of the Language Wars. By now we know the battle lines: As a “descriptivist,” I try to describe language as it is used. As a “prescriptivist,” you focus on how language should be used.
  • Your excellent guide, “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” shows you to be, in your words, a “descriptive prescriber.” You give not just “right” or “wrong” rulings on usage, but often a 1-5 score, in which a given usage may be a 1 (definitely a mistake), 3 (common, but …) or 5 (perfectly acceptable). This notion of correctness as a scale, not a binary state, makes you different from many prescriptivists.
  • “There is a set of standard conventions everyone needs for formal writing and speaking. Except under unusual circumstances, you should use the grammar and vocabulary of standard written English for these purposes.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • One could defensibly call me a descriptivist. I just describe something that dogmatic egalitarians don’t want described: the linguistic choices of a fully informed, highly literate but never uptight user of language. It’s a rational construct — rather like the law’s “reasonable person” — and a highly useful one at that
  • But that’s all that the reputable usage experts were ever doing.
  • descriptivists have moderated the indefensible positions they once took. The linguists have switched their position — without, of course, acknowledging that this is what they’ve done.
  • The fact that you and other linguists are now embracing the prescriptive tradition is cause for celebration.
Javier E

Stern-Mackenzie One-Round War - NYTimes.com - 0 views

wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/...war

math proof games

shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • a special note to math lovers everywhere: Dana Mackenzie’s “The Universe in Zero Words: The Story of Mathematics as Told through Equations,” which Nature calls “a celebration of the succinct and the singular in human expression,” is now available in paperback.
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