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Contents contributed and discussions participated by summertyler

summertyler

Why we love to lose ourselves in religion - CNN.com - 0 views

  • What's an atheist scientist like me doing writing good things about religion?
  • I was raised Jewish, but when I read the Bible, I was shocked. It hardly seemed to me like a good guide for ethical behavior in modern times, what with all the smiting and stoning and genocide, some of it ordered by God. In college, I read other holy books, and they didn't make me any more positive toward religion.
  • I ignored religion in my studies. We don't need religion to be ethical, I thought. And yet, in almost every human society, religion has been intimately tied to ethics.
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  • "self-transcendent emotions,"
  • I was beginning to see connections between experiences as varied as falling in love, watching a sunset from a hilltop, singing in a church choir, and reading about a virtuous person. In all cases there's a change to the self -- a kind of opening to our higher, nobler possibilities.
  • there was absolutely no scientific research on this emotion
  • religions are often quite skilled at producing such feelings
  • Some religions build awe-inspiring buildings; most tell morally elevating stories.
  • I wanted to shift attention away from that aspect of religion onto the more emotional and social aspects.
  • Whether or not you believe in God, religions accomplish something miraculous: They turn large numbers of people who are not kin into a group that is able to work together, trust each other, and help each other.
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    Religion is good for anyone whether or not you believe in God.
summertyler

Last words? Phone app bids to save dying aboriginal language - CNN.com - 0 views

  • A smartphone app has been launched to help save an Australian indigenous language that is in danger of disappearing.
  • aims to prevent the extinction of the Iwaidja language
  • "People have their phones with them most of the time, the app is incredibly easy to use, and this allows data collection to happen spontaneously, opportunistically,"
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  • "We believe the tools we are developing will exponentially increase the involvement of the Indigenous people whose languages are threatened, without the need for difficult-to-attain levels of computer literacy,"
  • Until now endangered aboriginal languages were recorded in the presence of a linguist and selected native speakers with recording equipment
  • indigenous people whose languages are threatened can record and upload languages at their own pace and at times which suit them, he says, without requiring the presence of a specialist holding a microphone
  • "The ability provided by the tools we are developing to easily create, record and share language, images, and video, at the same time as building sustainable databases for future use, involves and empowers speakers of indigenous languages in a way which has not been possible before."
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    Language is a barrier, and people are trying to break down these barriers.
summertyler

A guide to raising bilingual children - CNN.com - 1 views

  • Simone's mom reads, sings and talks to him in French.
  • The goal? To raise him to be bilingual.
  • If you've ever thought about raising your kid to be multilingual, now's the perfect time to start. "Babies are wired for language,"
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  • "The earlier they're introduced to a second language, the easier it will be for them to pick it up." Knowing a second (or third!) language could one day give your child an edge in an increasingly global workforce.
  • tend to have superior reading and writing skills in both languages, as well as better analytical and academic skills,
  • "Learning a language is a question of repeated high-quality exposure,"
  • "If a family reads a book to their child in Spanish as part of a bedtime routine, that's a lot of reading and a lot of learning over an extended period of time."
  • What you can expect: Results range from recognizing the language when it's spoken to being able to converse casually. The more time the child spends with the nanny or in bilingual daycare, the greater the proficiency. "It all depends on the amount and quality of the child's exposure,"
  • What you can expect: A bilingual tot, in time. Don't worry if he doesn't speak either language as adeptly as his monolingual peers at first. If your child is exposed to both languages the same amount, he will be able to speak both equally well by the time he goes to school.
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    Language can help a child advance in school. This is an example of language not creating barriers, but actually helping a person.
summertyler

Healthy diet may improve memory, says study - CNN.com - 0 views

  • "You are what you eat." But could what we eat also affect how we think?
  • eating a healthy diet could potentially be linked to a lower risk of memory and thinking decline
  • a higher diet quality could have on reducing the risk of memory loss.
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  • eating a balanced diet may be beneficial to reduce your risk of cognitive decline
  • there are many aspects of diet in combination with engaging in a healthy lifestyle that may influence cognitive decline
  • this new study suggests that improving overall diet quality is an important factor for lowering the risk of memory and thinking loss
  • "healthy diet" as one containing lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts, fish, moderate alcohol use and minimal red meat
  • "We just wanted to look at a diverse cohort of people from all around the world and analyze what their risk for cognitive decline would be if they consumed what most organizations would consider a 'healthy diet',"
  • Participants were tested for their thinking and memory skills, at the start of the study, then again after two and five years.
  • participants with the healthiest diets were 24% less likely to experience cognitive decline compared to those with the least healthy diets. These individuals were slightly older in age, more active, less likely to smoke and had a lower BMI.
  • blueberries may boost memory, and that a high intake of saturated and trans fats can have negative effects
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    good diets mean it is less likely for someone to lose their memory.
summertyler

Seeing Isn't Believing | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

  • Much of the early research on motion perception was performed on insects,1 but similar results have been found for a huge range of species, from fishes to birds to mammals
  • Correspondingly, prey animals would find color vision of little use, but they are extremely good at seeing the motion of an approaching predator.
  • Ambiguous illusions that can be interpreted in two different ways, but not both ways at the same time, can also shed light on how we perceive the world around us
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  • But as good as animals are at detecting motion, they can also be fooled.
  • Visual movement can be thought of as a change in brightness, or luminance, over space and time
  • Why does the visual system treat this jumping dot as a single object in motion, instead of seeing one spot disappear while an unrelated spot appears nearby at the same instant? First, the brain usually treats “suspicious coincidences” as being more than coincidences: it is more likely that this is a single spot in motion rather than two separate events. Second, the visual system is tolerant of brief gaps in stimuli, filling in those gaps when necessary. This perception of apparent motion is, of course, the basis of the entire movie and TV industries, as viewers see a smooth motion picture when in reality they are simply watching a series of stationary stills.
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    The perception of illusions
summertyler

Forget what you think you know about how memory works | Genetic Literacy Project - 0 views

  • Where do memories come from?
  • For quite some time the science of memories seemed focused on one pathway, but now there is new research indicating that this is only part of a larger story
  • There’s a kind of fashion about memory – like many mental models constructed for difficult concepts, the signs of the times inform how the current models approach the inquiry.
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  • movement in the nervous system created memories
  • memories are the encoding of experiences on webs of neurons in the brain
  • memory involved molecular changes via neurotransmitters in the brain
  • the neuron cell bodies themselves have some connection to the memory and control over the development and sustainment of synapses.
  • “Long-term memory is not stored at the synapse,”
  • part of memory is stored within the cells (neurons) themselves, and that they are using this memory storage to determine how many synapses to form and where.
  • Long-term memory is a function of the growth of new synaptic connections caused by the serotonin
  • As long-term memories are formed, the brain creates new proteins that are involved in making new synapses. If that process is disrupted — for example by a concussion or other injury — the proteins may not be synthesized and long-term memories cannot form. This is why people cannot remember what happened moments before a concussion.
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    How memory works.
summertyler

Why Facebook's News Experiment Matters to Readers - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Facebook’s new plan to host news publications’ stories directly is not only about page views, advertising revenue or the number of seconds it takes for an article to load. It is about who owns the relationship with readers.
  • Tech companies have always stepped on one another’s toes to try to become people’s gateway to the digital world — the only place people need to go to get what they want.
  • all kinds of companies are now becoming tech companies
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  • Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)
  • The front page of a newspaper and the cover of a magazine lost their dominance long ago. Web home pages are following suit. Increasingly, the articles, videos, photographs and graphics that media organizations publish are stand-alone fragments that readers happen upon one at a time, often on social media.
  • “In digital, every story becomes unbundled from each other, so if you’re not thinking of each story as living on its own, it’s tying yourself back to an analog era,”
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    Should we trust social media with the news?
summertyler

Is It Ordinary Memory Loss, or Alzheimer's Disease? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • worried about her memory, wondering if she could have the beginnings of dementia
  • no more difficulty than the rest of us her age in remembering events, names and places, her physician suggested that, given her level of concern, she should have things checked out
  • two days of tests of her cognitive abilities
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  • The result: reassurance and relief. Everything was in the normal range for her age, and she registered as superior on the ability to perform tasks and solve problems.
  • Simple tests done in eight to 12 minutes in a doctor’s office can determine whether memory issues are normal for one’s age or are problematic and warrant a more thorough evaluation.
  • more than half of older adults with signs of memory loss never see a doctor about it
  • “Early evaluation and identification of people with dementia may help them receive care earlier,”
  • “It can help families make plans for care, help with day-to-day tasks, including medication administration, and watch for future problems that can occur.”
  • Both tests measure orientation to time, date and place; attention and concentration; ability to calculate; memory; language; and conceptual thinking.
  • its score can be skewed by a person’s level of education, cultural background, a learning or speech disorder, and language fluency
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    Memory loss is difficult to understand because of the many factors that affect it.
summertyler

What Faces Can't Tell Us - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • CAN you detect someone’s emotional state just by looking at his face?
  • seems like it
  • Hundreds of scientific studies support the idea that the face is a kind of emotional beacon, clearly and universally signaling the full array of human sentiments
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  • software to identify consumers’ moods
  • this assumption is wrong
  • human facial expressions, viewed on their own, are not universally understood
  • look at photographs of facial expressions (smiling, scowling and so on) and match them to a limited set of emotion words (happiness, anger and so on) or to stories with phrases like “Her husband recently died.” Most subjects, even those from faraway cultures with little contact with Western civilization, were extremely good at this task, successfully matching the photos most of the time.
  • this research method was flawed
  • with a preselected set of emotion words, these experiments had inadvertently “primed” the subjects — in effect, hinting at the answers — and thus skewed the results
  • asked to freely describe the emotion on a face (or to view two faces and answer yes or no as to whether they expressed the same emotion). The subjects’ performance plummeted
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    Detecting emotions
summertyler

Multiple Colors Can Trick the Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • I heard that people can’t look at a color in one room and then pick it out of a set of similar colors in the next room. But there are people with perfect pitch, so are there people with “perfect hue”?
  • “The short answer is no,”
  • “Color is almost always judged relative to other colors,”
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  • the human ability to remember colors over any period of time, or even from room to room, is extremely poor.
  • “Based on memory alone, we can probably reliably identify tens of colors, with some people perhaps able to study hard and get up to a hundred or so,
  • Almost everyone can distinguish tones when they are compared in close succession, he said, but only a very small percentage of people have what is called perfect pitch or absolute pitch: the ability to recall and identify tones after a considerable period of time, without a reference tone for comparison.
  • we don’t speak of anyone as having perfect hue.”
  • “we can identify the tones in a chord, but we cannot identify the wavelength makeup of a color.”
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    Memory of colors is way different than the memory of sounds.
summertyler

The Chemistry (Literally) of Social Interaction - 0 views

  • experimental psychologist
  • research on how social interactions affect biology in humans and animals.
  • t women living together in a Wellesley College dormitory tended to menstruate at the same time.
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  • chemical communication between humans in laboratory experiments
  • Whether pheromones play a role in human life outside the lab remains unknown. In animals pheromones affect the whole panoply of behavior - mating, aggression and fear.
  • rats that fear change have shorter lives than their more flexible counterparts, and that social isolation can also affect the longevity of rodents
  • the social and psychological world changes the fundamental mechanisms of biology, and vice versa
  • I've tried to situate biology in a rich social and psychological context and make it simple.
  • the chemosignal. Molecules produced by a person or animal that can change behaviors of others, even though they are not detected as an odor.
  • for two months, we exposed nonlactating women to this breast-feeding compound, which is found naturally in nursing mothers and infants. Women with regular sex partners reported a 24 percent increase in sexual desire; those without partners increased their sexual fantasies by 17 percent
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    Research on how social interactions affect biology in humans and animals
summertyler

Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All - 1 views

  • raised a camera atop a 16-foot tripod to film down into Bryant Park
  • They hit record, then milled about nearby pretending they had nothing to do with the rig, as it semi-surreptitiously filmed the comings and goings of hundreds of New Yorkers.
  • groundbreaking granular studies of the city’s public spaces, spending hours filming and photographing and taking notes about how people behave in public
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  • the sociologist William H. Whyte
  • The Street Life Project, as it was called, was revolutionary in urban planning, changing not only the way we think about public spaces but also what can be learned in this kind of close observational research of human interaction.
  • affected people’s enjoyment of a public space
  • We could make people happier.
  • Are we really talking to one another? Is modernity making us lonely?
  • Project for Public Spaces
  • time-lapse films of four major urban nodes — Bryant Park; the front steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; a corner of Chestnut Street in Center City Philadelphia; and Downtown Crossing in Boston — in order to better understand how people used the spaces and how they might be improved.
  • studies how digital technology changes our lives
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    Human behavior, or sociology, in major areas was filmed and studied in order to get a better understanding of how people used the spaces and how the could be improved.
summertyler

What Makes a Positive College Experience? - 0 views

  • sociologist at Hamilton College
  • believes he knows what most determines how students feel about their time at college
  • dorm design, friends and extracurricular involvement more than what happens in the classroom
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  • What’s the most important element in shaping the college experience?
  • who meets whom, and when
  • So what should students do to get more out of college?
  • As a freshman, live in one of the old-fashioned dorms with the long hallways, multiple roommates and communal bathroom, where you’ll have to bump into a lot of different people every day.
  • In choosing classes, pick the teacher over the topic.
  • Try to get to know a lot of people your first year, when everyone is looking for friends.
  • It helps to join a large high-contact activity, like a sports team or choir
  • it only takes two or three close friends and one or two great professors to have a fulfilling college experience
  • should students take as many small classes as they can get into?
  • Small classes are great. But most colleges also have some wonderful very large classes
  • What should colleges do to make students’ experiences better?
  • things that give the biggest payoff for the least effort
  • What do colleges do that doesn’t improve the experience?
  • Strategic plans.
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    A sociologist believes he knows what determines how students feel about their time at college. Sociology is the study of social problems.
summertyler

A Disconnect in Money, Logic and Emotion - 0 views

  • A Disconnect in Money, Logic and Emotion
  • Stop for a minute and think about how we show the value of money. It’s in nice, neat columns on our financial statements. It’s in specific dollars and cents. The value of money appears to be a very clear-cut and logical part of our lives, at least on paper.
  • Why don’t the conversations we have about money always stay cool and rational?
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  • Why do our money conversations swing from the expected — logical — to the unexpected — emotional?
  • Money conversations are rarely about the actual numbers.
  • We aren’t really talking about the numbers. We’re talking about the fact that money lined up so neatly on a page is supposed to represent our dreams and goals. Dreams and goals aren’t meant to fit on a spreadsheet, so conversations involving what matters to us are not about logic. They are most definitely about how we feel.
  • For better or worse, there’s often emotion behind those numbers. But because we aren’t expecting it, the emotion trips us up, causing all sorts of issues.
  • The goal was to track the relationship between financial worries and physical health.
  • potential connection between money and health. If money were really about the numbers, then we would be able to logically process stock market dips or cuts to our paychecks.
  • We react. We feel stress. I doubt we spend much time comforting ourselves with how neatly the numbers line up in our statements or paychecks.
  • we may spend a lot of time talking about other people’s money
  • we still aren’t comfortable talking about our money
  • adage that we shouldn’t talk about money at all. It’s rude in some way. But again, if it really is about numbers, then what’s the problem?
  • If money conversations aren’t about the numbers, then they are about how money makes us feel.
  • arguing about money is a “top predictor” of divorce.
  • It seems like it should be easy to talk about money with someone we love and trust. But if we’re honest, it’s rarely easy to have those money conversations with our partners, especially if we don’t acknowledge what’s driving those discussions.
  • what would happen to our money conversations if we acknowledged the role of emotion from the beginning? How would our conversations change if we recognized the disconnect between money, logic and emotion?
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    Are conversations about money based on logic or emotion?
summertyler

TV VIEW - When Reality Begins to Look a Little Unreal - 0 views

  • When Reality Begins to Look a Little Unreal
  • Television's reality formats include everything from the nightly news to talk shows to ''based on fact'' movies to the Summer Olympics to Phil, Oprah and Geraldo. The only productions definitely not admitted under the reality umbrella are sitcoms and action-adventures.
  • Fox Broadcasting, already happy about its ''America's Most Wanted,'' a package that adds up to an excuse for the detailed re-creation of violent crimes, is now pushing ''Beyond Tomorrow,'' a magazine about technology developments. The premiere featured a reporter in a sushi restaurant in Japan ''accidentally'' spilling sauce on his $35 polo shirt, which was then cleaned to spotless perfection by high-frequency sound waves.
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  • How much of this kind of reality can the public take? Producers clearly see no end in sight, and the results are increasingly becoming more questionable.
  • This is what's called a ''reality-based'' series, a label that has less to do with reality than comforting formula. The cameras do not go to a real hospital. But three real doctors are on the production staff.
  • ''What you are about to see is real,'' we were told once again.
  • ''On Trial'' opens with an announcer exclaiming that viewers are about to see ''Real people! Real Cases! Real Life!'' Mr. Clooney, a distinguished-looking fellow, fills in the pertinent facts.
  • His life shattered, he now has the dubious pleasure of knowing that, for some 20 minutes, he was the star of a television reality entertainment.
  • Everything is designed, they say, to ''give the show its docudrama look.'' The show's regular staff of three doctors are depicted by actors.
  • Needless to say, medical problems and crises have long been popular on television, especially on soap operas. ''Family Medical Center'' merely dispenses with extraneous plot and character developments and goes right to the medical core. A press release is candid about the show's interpretation of reality: ''It will have suspense, conflict and a resolution, which in almost all cases will be a happy one.''
  • The show looks as real as television entertainment can possibly make it. Alert viewers, however, will note whizzing by in the final credits the following advisory: '' 'Family Medical Center' is a dramatization. The characters are fictional and bear no resemblance to persons living or dead.''
  • Television reality wears many masks. A key to the overall picture was provided by one of those actors who deceived Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera with false impersonations on air. Why not, he shrugged, it's all entertainment. Frightening but not beyond comprehension.
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    How can you know if a show that is called reality, is actually reality, or if it is just "reality"?
summertyler

'A Great Moment': Rover Finds Methane, a Clue That Mars May Harbor Life - 0 views

  • SAN FRANCISCO — Life on Mars? Today? The notion may not be so far-fetched after all.
  • Curiosity has now recorded a burst of methane that lasted at least two months.
  • for the first time, they had confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The so-called organics are not direct signs of life, past or present, but they lend weight to the possibility that Mars had the ingredients required for life, and may even still have them.
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  • Even if the explanation for the methane turns out to be geological, the hydrothermal systems would still be prime locations to search for signs of life
  • But the new findings, which are described in detail in a paper this week in the journal Science, are a 180-degree flip from a year ago, when mission scientists said that Curiosity had found no signs of methane, placing an upper limit of 1.3 parts per billion by volume.
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    Methane is found on Mars suggesting that there is life on Mars. This is a big change from what scientists knew only a year ago. Theories can change at any time, and when new ones are made, old ones are discarded.
summertyler

The Dangers of Pseudoscience - 0 views

  • Philosophers of science have been preoccupied for a while with what they call the “demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience (and everything in between).
  • Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery
  • our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard
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  • pseudoscience is not — contrary to popular belief — merely a harmless pastime of the gullible; it often threatens people’s welfare, sometimes fatally so
  • It is precisely in the area of medical treatments that the science-pseudoscience divide is most critical, and where the role of philosophers in clarifying things may be most relevant.
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    Pseudoscience is dangerous for three reasons, a philosophical, a civic, and a ethical reason.
summertyler

New iPad Appeals More to Emotion Than Reason - State of the Art - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Are your emotions telling you to get an iPad?
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