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Emily Freilich

Gut Bacteria Might Guide The Workings Of Our Minds : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...transcript.php

bacteria emotion brain science

shared by Emily Freilich on 23 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Turns out you really can have a gut feeling about something, because evidence has been mounting that those microbes in the body may be important for our emotional health as well as our physical health.
  • PRIA TEWARI: Growing up in India we believe that what you eat influences your thoughts.
  • MAYER: We found that the type of community you have, of microbes you have in your gut, is reflected in some ways in some basic architectural aspects of the brain.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • STEIN: The brain connections of people whose microbes are dominated by one species of bacteria look different than those of people whose microbes are dominated by another species. That suggests that the specific mix of microbes in our guts helps determine what kinds of brains we have, how our brain circuits develop, how they're wired.
  • STEIN: It worked the other way around too. The bold mice became timid when they got the microbes of anxious ones. Aggressive mice also calmed down when the scientists altered their microbes by changing their diet, feeding them probiotics, or dosing them with antibiotics.
  • This could help explain why some people are born with brains that don't work the way they're supposed to, causing problems like autism, anxiety, depression.
  • COLLINS: And this resulted in a change in behavior. The mice became a little bit less anxious, a little bit more gregarious.
  • They did things like replace the gut bacteria of anxious mice with bacteria from fearless mice.
  • STEIN: Finally, these scientists figured out how the microbes in the guts of the mice were communicating with their brains - by sending signals up a big nerve known as the vagus nerve.
  • All this is raising the possibility that scientists could create drugs that mimic these signals. Or just give people the good bacteria - probiotics - to prevent or treat problems involving the brain.
Emily Freilich

Higgs Boson Gets Nobel Prize, But Physicists Still Don't Know What It's Telling Them - ... - 2 views

www.wired.com/...higgs-nobel-physics

physics research theory

shared by Emily Freilich on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • This morning, two physicists who 50 years ago theorized the existence of this particle, which is responsible for conferring mass to all other known particles in the universe, got the Nobel, the highest prize in science.
  • left physicists without a clear roadmap of where to go next
  • No one is sure which of these models, if any, will eventually describe reality
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  • Some of them look at the data and say that we need to throw out speculative ideas such as supersymmetry and the multiverse, models that look elegant mathematically but are unprovable from an experimental perspective. Others look at the exact same data and come to the opposite conclusion.
  • we’ve entered a very deep crisis.
  • hough happy to know the Higgs was there, many scientists had hoped it would turn out to be strange, to defy their predictions in some way and give a hint as to which models beyond the Standard Model were correct.
  • One possibility has been brought up that even physicists don’t like to think about. Maybe the universe is even stranger than they think. Like, so strange that even post-Standard Model models can’t account for it. Some physicists are starting to question whether or not our universe is natural.
  • The multiverse idea has two strikes against it, though. First, physicists would refer to it as an unnatural explanation because it simply happened by chance. And second, no real evidence for it exists and we have no experiment that could currently test for it.
  • physicists are still in the dark. We can see vague outlines ahead of us but no one knows what form they will take when we reach them.
Emily Freilich

People Support Social Welfare When They're Hungry Themselves - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281301

social welfare opinion physiology vs. ideology

shared by Emily Freilich on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Obamacare will, in some form or another, redistribute wealth.
  • Our upbringing, background, and wealth clearly influence whether we support redistributive policies, but interesting new research shows that, when it comes to supporting social welfare programs, not just our ideologies, but our physiologies, play a role.
  • past research has actually shown that Republicans and Democrats have striking similar ideas of how wealth should be distributed.
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  • The social welfare system is the modern system for redistributing resources,”
  • early man regularly experienced hunger, and when times were especially lean, he had to convince other group members to share their bounty.
  •  foundations of social welfare attitudes in an unusual place: among our hunter-gatherer ancestors
  • To the authors, this indicated that the hungrier subjects were, essentially, bigger fans of sharing society’s resources, and they wanted to remind others about the importance of redistribution.
  • That is, the hungrier people liked the idea of encouraging others to share, but they didn’t actually want to be the ones doing the sharing
  • ast studies from the same authors have also shown that people who are in a physically weaker situation tend to support wealth redistribution. Voters were more likely to be supportive of welfare policies if they were asked before lunchtime, as opposed to after, for example. Among rich men, those with smaller biceps were more likely to be open to wealth redistribution. (The opposite was true for poor men).
  • Granted, these studies were small, and they were performed in Denmark, which already has a more generous social welfare net that the U.S. does, so they can’t be applied directly.
Emily Freilich

The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think - James Somers - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309529

artificial intelligence science technology progression

shared by Emily Freilich on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.
  • “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done
  • Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.
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  • “It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.”
  • Computers are flexible enough to model the strange evolved convolutions of our thought, and yet responsive only to precise instructions. So if the endeavor succeeds, it will be a double victory: we will finally come to know the exact mechanics of our selves—and we’ll have made intelligent machines.
  • Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter.
  • How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?
  • Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.”
  • In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself.
  • But then AI changed, and Hofstadter didn’t change with it, and for that he all but disappeared.
  • By the early 1980s, the pressure was great enough that AI, which had begun as an endeavor to answer yes to Alan Turing’s famous question, “Can machines think?,” started to mature—or mutate, depending on your point of view—into a subfield of software engineering, driven by applications.
  • Take Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that bested the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue won by brute force.
  • Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had from the victory? “Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?”
  • AI started working when it ditched humans as a model, because it ditched them. That’s the thrust of the analogy: Airplanes don’t flap their wings; why should computers think?
  • It’s a compelling point. But it loses some bite when you consider what we want: a Google that knows, in the way a human would know, what you really mean when you search for something
  • Cognition is recognition,” he likes to say. He describes “seeing as” as the essential cognitive act: you see some lines a
  • How do you make a search engine that understands if you don’t know how you understand?
  • s “an A,” you see a hunk of wood as “a table,” you see a meeting as “an emperor-has-no-clothes situation” and a friend’s pouting as “sour grapes”
  • That’s what it means to understand. But how does understanding work?
  • analogy is “the fuel and fire of thinking,” the bread and butter of our daily mental lives.
  • there’s an analogy, a mental leap so stunningly complex that it’s a computational miracle: somehow your brain is able to strip any remark of the irrelevant surface details and extract its gist, its “skeletal essence,” and retrieve, from your own repertoire of ideas and experiences, the story or remark that best relates.
  • in Hofstadter’s telling, the story goes like this: when everybody else in AI started building products, he and his team, as his friend, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, wrote, “patiently, systematically, brilliantly,” way out of the light of day, chipped away at the real problem. “Very few people are interested in how human intelligence works,”
  • For more than 30 years, Hofstadter has worked as a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington
  • The quick unconscious chaos of a mind can be slowed down on the computer, or rewound, paused, even edited
  • project out of IBM called Candide. The idea behind Candide, a machine-translation system, was to start by admitting that the rules-based approach requires too deep an understanding of how language is produced; how semantics, syntax, and morphology work; and how words commingle in sentences and combine into paragraphs—to say nothing of understanding the ideas for which those words are merely conduits.
  • , Hofstadter directs the Fluid Analogies Research Group, affectionately known as FARG.
  • Parts of a program can be selectively isolated to see how it functions without them; parameters can be changed to see how performance improves or degrades. When the computer surprises you—whether by being especially creative or especially dim-witted—you can see exactly why.
  • When you read Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, which describes in detail this architecture and the logic and mechanics of the programs that use it, you wonder whether maybe Hofstadter got famous for the wrong book.
  • ut very few people, even admirers of GEB, know about the book or the programs it describes. And maybe that’s because FARG’s programs are almost ostentatiously impractical. Because they operate in tiny, seemingly childish “microdomains.” Because there is no task they perform better than a human.
  • “The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.”
  • “Nobody is a very reliable guide concerning activities in their mind that are, by definition, subconscious,” he once wrote. “This is what makes vast collections of errors so important. In an isolated error, the mechanisms involved yield only slight traces of themselves; however, in a large collection, vast numbers of such slight traces exist, collectively adding up to strong evidence for (and against) particular mechanisms.
  • So IBM threw that approach out the window. What the developers did instead was brilliant, but so straightforward,
  • The technique is called “machine learning.” The goal is to make a device that takes an English sentence as input and spits out a French sentence
  • What you do is feed the machine English sentences whose French translations you already know. (Candide, for example, used 2.2 million pairs of sentences, mostly from the bilingual proceedings of Canadian parliamentary debates.)
  • By repeating this process with millions of pairs of sentences, you will gradually calibrate your machine, to the point where you’ll be able to enter a sentence whose translation you don’t know and get a reasonable resul
  • Google Translate team can be made up of people who don’t speak most of the languages their application translates. “It’s a bang-for-your-buck argument,” Estelle says. “You probably want to hire more engineers instead” of native speakers.
  • But the need to serve 1 billion customers has a way of forcing the company to trade understanding for expediency. You don’t have to push Google Translate very far to see the compromises its developers have made for coverage, and speed, and ease of engineering. Although Google Translate captures, in its way, the products of human intelligence, it isn’t intelligent itself.
  • “Did we sit down when we built Watson and try to model human cognition?” Dave Ferrucci, who led the Watson team at IBM, pauses for emphasis. “Absolutely not. We just tried to create a machine that could win at Jeopardy.”
  • For Ferrucci, the definition of intelligence is simple: it’s what a program can do. Deep Blue was intelligent because it could beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Watson was intelligent because it could beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.
  • “There’s a limited number of things you can do as an individual, and I think when you dedicate your life to something, you’ve got to ask yourself the question: To what end? And I think at some point I asked myself that question, and what it came out to was, I’m fascinated by how the human mind works, it would be fantastic to understand cognition, I love to read books on it, I love to get a grip on it”—he called Hofstadter’s work inspiring—“but where am I going to go with it? Really what I want to do is build computer systems that do something.
  • Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci almost exactly. “I thought he was tackling a really hard problem,” he told me about Hofstadter’s work. “And I guess I wanted to do an easier problem.”
  • Of course, the folly of being above the fray is that you’re also not a part of it
  • As our machines get faster and ingest more data, we allow ourselves to be dumber. Instead of wrestling with our hardest problems in earnest, we can just plug in billions of examples of them.
  • Hofstadter hasn’t been to an artificial-intelligence conference in 30 years. “There’s no communication between me and these people,” he says of his AI peers. “None. Zero. I don’t want to talk to colleagues that I find very, very intransigent and hard to convince of anything
  • Everything from plate tectonics to evolution—all those ideas, someone had to fight for them, because people didn’t agree with those ideas.
  • Academia is not an environment where you just sit in your bath and have ideas and expect everyone to run around getting excited. It’s possible that in 50 years’ time we’ll say, ‘We really should have listened more to Doug Hofstadter.’ But it’s incumbent on every scientist to at least think about what is needed to get people to understand the ideas.”
Emily Freilich

A color-coded map of the world's most and least emotional countries - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-and-least-emotional-countries

emotion world culture

shared by Emily Freilich on 06 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Gallup polling firm has surveyed people in 150 countries and territories on, among other things, their daily emotional experience. Their survey asks five questions, meant to gauge whether the respondent felt significant positive or negative emotions the day prior to the survey.
  • The more times that people answer "yes" to questions such as "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?", the more emotional they're deemed to be.
  • Singapore is the least emotional country in the world
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • citing a culture in which schools "discourage students from thinking of themselves as individuals.
  • low work satisfaction, competitiveness, and the urban experience: "Staying emotionally neutral could be a way of coping with the stress of urban life
  • The Philippines is the world's most emotional country.
  • Post-Soviet countries are consistently among the most stoic.
  • . They are also the greatest consumers of cigarettes and alcohol. This could be what you call and chicken-or-egg problem: if the two trends are related, which one came first?
  • urope appears almost like a gradient here, with emotions increasing as you move West. 
  • English- and Spanish-speaking societies tend to be highly emotional and happy.
  • it's not clear if Spain's emotional depth has anything to do with Latin America's.
  • Africans are generally stoic, with some significant exceptions. The continent is among the world's least emotional, though there is wide variation, which serves as a non-definitive but interesting reminder of Africa's cultural diversity.
  • The Middle East is not happy
  • leading the world in negative daily experiences
  • Still, that doesn't quite fully explain the high emotions in the Levant and on the Arabian peninsula, compared to the lower emotions in Libya, Algeria, and Morocco.
Emily Freilich

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines - Nicholas ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309516

automation knowledge technology psychology

shared by Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?
  • On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York.
  • The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity.
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  • The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened.
  • aptain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.
  • Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes.
  • We humans have been handing off chores, both physical and mental, to tools since the invention of the lever, the wheel, and the counting bead.
  • And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes,
  • No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,”
  • “We’re forgetting how to fly.”
  • The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it. The implications go well beyond safety. Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.
  • What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.
  • Automation is different now. Computers can be programmed to perform complex activities in which a succession of tightly coordinated tasks is carried out through an evaluation of many variables. Many software programs take on intellectual work—observing and sensing, analyzing and judging, even making decisions—that until recently was considered the preserve of humans.
  • That may leave the person operating the computer to play the role of a high-tech clerk—entering data, monitoring outputs, and watching for failures. Rather than opening new frontiers of thought and action, software ends up narrowing our focus.
  • A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part.
  • when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift.
  • Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears
  • Examples of complacency and bias have been well documented in high-risk situations—on flight decks and battlefields, in factory control rooms—but recent studies suggest that the problems can bedevil anyone working with a computer
  • Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise.
  • Since the late 1970s, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the “generation effect.” It was first observed in studies of vocabulary, which revealed that people remember words much better when they actively call them to mind—when they generate them—than when they simply read them.
  • When you engage actively in a task, you set off intricate mental processes that allow you to retain more knowledge. You learn more and remember more. When you repeat the same task over a long period, your brain constructs specialized neural circuits dedicated to the activit
  • What looks like instinct is hard-won skill, skill that requires exactly the kind of struggle that modern software seeks to alleviate.
  • In many businesses, managers and other professionals have come to depend on decision-support systems to analyze information and suggest courses of action. Accountants, for example, use the systems in corporate audits. The applications speed the work, but some signs suggest that as the software becomes more capable, the accountants become less so.
  • What’s most astonishing, and unsettling, about computer automation is that it’s still in its early stages.
  • Experts used to assume that there were limits to the ability of programmers to automate complicated tasks, particularly those involving sensory perception, pattern recognition, and conceptual knowledge
  • Who needs humans, anyway? That question, in one rhetorical form or another, comes up frequently in discussions of automation. If computers’ abilities are expanding so quickly and if people, by comparison, seem slow, clumsy, and error-prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation?
  • The cure for imperfect automation is total automation.
  • That idea is seductive, but no machine is infallible. Sooner or later, even the most advanced technology will break down, misfire, or, in the case of a computerized system, encounter circumstances that its designers never anticipated. As automation technologies become more complex, relying on interdependencies among algorithms, databases, sensors, and mechanical parts, the potential sources of failure multiply. They also become harder to detect.
  • conundrum of computer automation.
  • Because many system designers assume that human operators are “unreliable and inefficient,” at least when compared with a computer, they strive to give the operators as small a role as possible.
  • People end up functioning as mere monitors, passive watchers of screens. That’s a job that humans, with our notoriously wandering minds, are especially bad at
  • people have trouble maintaining their attention on a stable display of information for more than half an hour. “This means,” Bainbridge observed, “that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities.”
  • a person’s skills “deteriorate when they are not used,” even an experienced operator will eventually begin to act like an inexperienced one if restricted to just watching.
  • You can program software to shift control back to human operators at frequent but irregular intervals; knowing that they may need to take command at any moment keeps people engaged, promoting situational awareness and learning.
  • You can put limits on the scope of automation, making sure that people working with computers perform challenging tasks rather than merely observing.
  • most software applications don’t foster learning and engagement. In fact, they have the opposite effect. That’s because taking the steps necessary to promote the development and maintenance of expertise almost always entails a sacrifice of speed and productivity.
  • Learning requires inefficiency. Businesses, which seek to maximize productivity and profit, would rarely accept such a trade-off. Individuals, too, almost always seek efficiency and convenience.
  • Abstract concerns about the fate of human talent can’t compete with the allure of saving time and money.
  • The small island of Igloolik, off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, is a bewildering place in the winter.
  • , Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit’s extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they long eschewed maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.
  • The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around. Adoption of GPS technology has been particularly strong among younger Inuit, and it’s not hard to understand why.
  • But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn’t developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails.
  • The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid.
  • An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as he devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it
  • A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.
  • Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?
  • Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13
     
    Automation increases efficiency and speed of tasks, but decreases the individual's knowledge of a task and decrease's a human's ability to learn. 
Emily Freilich

The Loophole in Russia's Anti-Gay Law | Jay Michaelson - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...as-anti-gay-law_b_3716826.html

russia anti-gay law tradition language

shared by Emily Freilich on 30 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Russia's new anti-gay law has a loophole: The law, which has led to numerous arrests, beatings, and bans against LGBT people, specifically prohibits the "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations," but homosexuality is as traditionally Russian as vodka and caviar.
  • Where does one begin the list of prominent LGBT Russians? Peter Tchaikovsky, one of Russia's foremost composers; Nikolai Gogol, one of its leading writers; from the world of dance, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Nureyev
  • not to mention members of Russia's ruling classes
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • What could be more "traditional" than this list?
  • fact, what is nontraditional is the suppression of sexual diversity, not its expression. Following the Russian Revolution, the regime under Lenin formally legalized homosexual acts (along with divorce and abortion), but Stalin criminalized them in 1933.
  • The reality is that, as everywhere, sexual diversity in Russia is entirely traditional and entirely natural.
  • Which of these legal regimes is "traditional" and which is "nontraditional"? Is Stalin more traditional than Lenin?
  • Of course, contemporary labels -- "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "transgender" -- are culturally specific and of relatively late vintage. But the existence of same-sex relationships goes back as far as Russian history itself.
  • Vitaly Milonov, the most vocal of the anti-gay bill's sponsors, had homosexuality in mind when he introduced the bill.
  • a literal reading of the bill's actual language, coupled with even a passing glance at Russian history, does not agree.
  • it's unlikely that a Russian jurist will really read the law so cleverly
  • important reminder that although homosexuality goes by different names in different places and at different times, it is a traditional part of every culture that the human race has ever created.
  • Emily Freilich on 30 Oct 13
     
    Interesting perspective on the Russian anti-gay laws. Article deals with the importance of remembering history and the idea that we forget what was considered normal or strange in the past. What is seen as "traditional" now was not always traditional 
Emily Freilich

Scientists Explain their Processes with a little too much honesty - 0 views

twentytwowords.com/...e-too-much-honesty-17-pictures

evidence science

shared by Emily Freilich on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Emily Freilich on 23 Oct 13
     
    Satirical view of how scientists work; we think scientists use through methods all the time, but can we really know they do? Follows the idea presented in the article about Kuhn's theories that scientists do not actually follow the method they lay out in research papers. Additionally, this slideshow asks how much the evidence scientists present is tested and verified.
  • Emily Freilich on 23 Oct 13
     
    Satirical view of how scientists work; we think scientists use through methods all the time, but can we really know they do? Follows the idea presented in the article about Kuhn's theories that scientists do not actually follow the method they lay out in research papers. Additionally, this slideshow asks how much the evidence scientists present is tested and verified.
Emily Freilich

Integrating Design Theory & the Scientific Process - Blog - Mills-Scofield LL... - 0 views

mills-scofield.com/...ry-the-scientific-process.html

design theory scientific method interdisciplinary

shared by Emily Freilich on 21 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • I am sitting across the table from my thesis advisor. We stare at one another in silence, our faces reflecting equal levels of frustration. After a 15-minute debate on the differences between a parameter and a constraint, it has become apparent my advisor is an engineer, and I am not. My advisor and I meet weekly to discuss my research. Each week we inevitably hit a wall; expressing the same words, but interpreting them in entirely different ways. With a background in biology and design, my definition of details often do not align with an engineer’s. However, we both know the objectives of my thesis, and both want to work towards that goal (and diploma)  So why are we having such a difficult time communicating?
  • ealization that our different disciplines do not speak the same language.
  • There was never room for another subject like art, no space for speaking two languages fluently. My educational system created silos between the different disciplines. Once I chose one path, essentially my language, other subjects became foreign.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Connections are missing between these disciplines, and in particular between the arts and sciences. On almost every project I have worked on thus far, my analytical and creative teammates have struggled to connect.
  • it would be extremely naïve to think that type of interdisciplinary education can be implemented everywhere - and nor should it be. We still need the classically trained “quant jocks” as well as the “edgy creatives”. Without them, a melting pot of full-fledged hybrids such as myself would lose any sort of concrete base for reference.
  • So where do we go from here? I believe each individual, no matter how much of a purist they may be in their respective field, should be responsible for entertaining interdisciplinary ideas.
  • n an era where buzzwords like “collaboration” and “innovation” land you a job, its time to actually start flexing both sides of our brains. At the end of this journey, behind our various languages, it is surprising how similar my analytical and creative peers are.
  • The proof can be found just looking at the scientific process alongside design theory.
  • Although one approach may rely more on quantifiable data and the other on a more “human” means of communication, step by step the two share striking similarities. Combining these two theories helps me personally make sense of my own analytical and creative brain. When they come together as one scientific and artistic critical thinking tool, the result is a deeper understanding of defining problems and finding solutions.
Emily Freilich

Israel's Netanyahu Says He'd 'Consider' A Meeting With New Iranian Leader : The Two-Way... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...transcript.php

israel iran netanyahu language paradox

shared by Emily Freilich on 11 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Iran's President Rouhani denies his country wants nuclear weapons, as Iran has denied for years. Netanyahu doesn't believe it. He notes that Iran's president used to be Iran's nuclear negotiator, and acknowledged his country continued its nuclear progress even as he was talking with the West. Reaching a deal now with Iran might take some give and take, some level of trust, some risk.
  • don't think anybody should take a leap of faith with a regime that systematically defies Security Council resolutions, that's cheated twice, whose chief negotiator said this is my strategy: cheating. He wrote a book about it. It's called "National Security and Nuclear Diplomacy."
  • We got the book. We actually read it. He's an open book. He's an honest deceiver. He says this is what this book is about. I am honestly telling you how I deceived the West.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I understand from your statements that you do not trust this man. You point out correctly that he's been part of the regime for a long time - President Rouhani. At the same time, I was in Iran at the time of their election, and he was elected by a substantial majority of the Iranian people on a platform where he explicitly said I want to improve relations with the world.
  • It's true that his election reflected the tremendous disaffection of the Iranian people with this regime. But, you know, he was - you know what the regime did, what Khamenei did: He took 700 candidates, eliminated 99 percent, left 1 percent - some democracy. And out of that 1 percent, the Iranian people chose the least-bad that they could get, which was Rouhani.
  • But he is a servant of the regime
  • Would you meet Rouhani, if you had an opportunity to do that somewhere in the world? NETANYAHU: Yeah, I don't care about the meeting. I mean, I don't even - I don't have a problem with the diplomatic process. I have the problem - my question... INSKEEP: You're saying you would meet him? NETANYAHU: I haven't been offered, and I don't - you know, if I'm offered, I'll consider it. But it's not an issue, because I don't think - you know, if I meet with these people, I would stick this question in their face: Are you prepared to dismantle your program completely?
  • Why can't we have nuclear weapons, since Israel has them? What is a reasonable answer to that question? NETANYAHU: Well, I'm not going to say what Israel has or doesn't have. But I will say Israel has no designs to destroy anyone. We've not called for the destruction of a people, the annihilation of Iran or any other country. But that's exactly what Iran's doctrinaire, messianic apocalyptic regime - it's a terrorist regime.
  • NETANYAHU: Well, Israel - I think Israel is not the issue. And, in general, in the Middle East, the issue is not those who signed the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty... INSKEEP: People also asked why Israel hasn't signed Non-Proliferation... NETANYAHU: Well, you should look at those who signed it. See, the signing of it is meaningless, because Syria signed it. It was developing, you know, facilities for nuclear weapons. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, signed it. It was developing nuclear weapons - twice, actually - from the 1970s on. And Iran signed it, and it's developing these nuclear weapons,
Emily Freilich

The Arab American News - Obama offers no evidence Assad was behind chemical a... - 0 views

www.arabamericannews.com/...index.php

Evidence Syria obama

shared by Emily Freilich on 13 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • the president tellingly didn’t make a single effort to present hard, compelling evidence to prove that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been behind the alleged Sarin Aug. 21 attack on residents of a suburb of Damascus.Not one piece of evidence.Instead, he continued the talking point of the past week, focusing on the admitted horror of seeing young children “writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor.”
  • “We know the Assad regime was responsible” for the gas attack.Except that we don’t. As I have written (but as the corporate media have blacked out throughout this latest crisis), a group of 12 veteran intelligence officers has written to the president telling him that the intelligence does not point to Assad, but to the rebel forces as the source of the gas attack.
  • world is decidedly not a better place because of America’s endless, unilateral and criminal wars and depredations, and Syria will fare no better following an American assault.
Emily Freilich

Rights group's report offers compelling evidence of Syria chemical attack - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...dence-of-syria-chemical-attack

evidence syria report

shared by Emily Freilich on 13 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, the group Human Rights Watch issued a report that said evidence strongly implies that Syrian government troops' firing of rockets containing a nerve agent into a Damascus suburb on August 21 that the U.S. said killed over 1,400 people.
  • While the report doesn't furnish conclusive proof that the Syrian government carried out the attack with chemical weapons, it does present the most coherent circumstantial evidence I've seen so far to support the case.
  • The report does not rely on ambiguous intercepted phone calls. It cites no shadowy intelligence gathering
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • HRW's experts take a close look at witness statements and photographs and video of the victims and -- above all -- the remains of the weapons that appear to have been used.
  • The report provides another map that shows that there were several military bases around Zamalka and Moadimiyeh on August 21st, that were within the correct firing distanc
Emily Freilich

'Memory Pinball' And Other Reasons You Need A Nap - 0 views

www.npr.org/...d-other-reasons-you-need-a-nap

memory sleep science

shared by Emily Freilich on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Research on learning suggests "sleep is critical at almost all stages of memory formation, memory processing and long-term memory retention," he says.
  • So what happens if you don't sleep? "A whole constellation of different brain and body functions start to deteriorate," he says. Our brains are less effective at absorbing new information without sleep. Plus, our ability to retain recently learned information is impaired,
  • Aside from memorization, sleep deprivation makes it harder for the brain to regulate emotions.
Emily Freilich

How Do Experiences Become Memories? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...transcript.php

memories brain science

shared by Emily Freilich on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • So if memory is reconstructed as Scott Fraser says, then do we really know what memory is?
  • And it was absolutely glorious music. And at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound.
  • He had had the experience, he had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing. Because he was left with a memory, the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, how have you been feeling lately?
  • one thing that is very difficult is to have a very clear memory and to realize that it is absolutely untrue. Normally, some memories really have the appeal of a visual perception. You know, when I see things, I normally don't doubt them. Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.
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