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the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.

we should be asking them a different set of questions:

How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.

Live free or die: This is the maxim of our age. But the freedoms we celebrate are particular and limited. We fetishize the freedom of business from state control; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to carry guns and speak our minds and worship whom we will. But despite, in some cases because of, this respect for particular freedoms, every day the scope of our lives appears to contract.

Half a century ago, we were promised that rising wealth would mean less work, longer vacations and more choice

our working hours rise in line with economic growth, and they are now governed by a corporate culture of snooping and quantification, of infantilizing dictats and impossible demands, all of which smothers autonomy and creativity. Technologies that promised to save time and free us from drudgery (such as email and smartphones) fill our heads with a clatter so persistent it stifles the ability to think.

Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.

Neisser became fascinated by the concept of flashbulb memories—the times when a shocking, emotional event seems to leave a particularly vivid imprint on the mind.

Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.

It is generally well-reported that there is a life expectancy gap between white and black Americans of about four years. But it can be hard to visualize exactly what this number means. In a recent conversation, David Williams, public health researcher at Harvard, described the racial gap to me in stark terms: One of the ways to think of the racial gap in health is to think of how many black people die prematurely every year who wouldn't die if there were no racial differences in health. The answer to that from a carefully done [2001] scientific study is 96,800 black people die prematurely every year. Divide it by 365 [days], that's 265 people dying prematurely every day. Imagine a jumbo jet — with 265 passengers and crew — crashing at Reagan Washington Airport today, and the same thing happening tomorrow and every day next week and every day next month. That's what we're talking about when we say there are racial disparities in health.

I asked Williams why there is such a tremendous gap in black and white life expectancy. He said there's no single issue to blame; it instead comes down to many factors, largely related to where people live.

Memorizing a person’s face in an instant, and being able to recall it later even if you only met once, and briefly at tha

With the discovery of super-recognizers in 2009 came a new way of thinking about face perception: The ability to recognize faces seems to exist on a spectrum, with the 2 percent of the population who are super-recognizers on one end, and prosopagnosiacs

— that is, the 2 percent who are unable to recognize familiar faces (including their own) — at the other. Previously, prosopagnosia was considered a disorder or an impairment; now many psychologists believe it’s just on the low end of normal visual functioning. And most of us, as is the case with any bell curve, are somewhere in between the two extremes.

Mathematics education in the United States is broken. Open any newspaper and stories of math failure shout from the pages: low international rankings, widespread innumeracy in the general population, declines in math majors. Here’s the most shocking statistic I have read in recent years: 60 percent of the 13 million two-year college students in the U.S. are currently placed into remedial math courses; 75 percent of them fail or drop the courses and leave college with no degree.

We need to change the way we teach math in the U.S., and it is for this reason that I support the move to Common Core mathematics.

One of the reasons for these results is that mathematical problems that need thought, connection making, and even creativity are more engaging for students of all levels and for students of different genders, races, and socio-economic groups. This is not only shown by my research but by decades of research in our field.

Scientists have been stealing ideas from animals for years.

One industrial “nose job” later, the bullet train is far quieter and goes 10% faster on 15% less fuel.

There are countless examples of similar “biomimicry.” The velcro on your coat is based on those aggravating burrs that cling to your jeans after a hike. Scientists are developing painless hypodermic needles modeled on mosquito mouths that get your blood out without your even noticing.

Simply walking through a sketchy-looking neighborhood can make you feel more paranoid and lower your trust in others

In a study published in the journal PeerJ, student volunteers who spent less than an hour in a more dangerous neighborhood showed significant changes in some of their social perceptions.

The researchers’ goal was to investigate the relationship between lower income neighborhoods and reduced trust and poor mental health.

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.

certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.

what human skills will be more valuable?

In the news business, some of those skills are already evident.

We fall in love with our technology. That’s how we talk about our gadgets — with the language of emotional attachment, with irrational expectations about happily ever after.

I loved what was possible with it. Even though I wasn’t able to actually make it do anything, I knew that someone could. And that was enough, the mere idea of a machine, one that anyone could have in their home, that would take strings of symbols and turn them into music, into movement, into something else out there in the world.

We’re certainly into the magic zone — and yet, the magic is somehow fading for me. Technology has crossed the uncanny valley; it is simply too good at representing our real world.

5 Things Art is Not

in over two decades of study through my work as a curator, college professor, and critic, art has become more mysterious, eluding my attempts to pin it down, to fully understand it, becoming so much more and other than I had expected.

But what I have learned are a few things about what art is not, things that I have believed about art over the years that I have gradually had to abandon.

All scientific results are, of course, subject to revision and refutation by later experiments. The problem comes when these replications don’t occur and the information keeps spreading unchecked. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Raw Data: Hills to Scientific Discoveries Grow SteeperFEB. 17, 2014 Raw Data: New Truths That Only One Can SeeJAN. 20, 2014 D

Based on the number of papers in major journals, Dr. Ioannidis estimates that the field accounts for some 50 percent of published research.

Together that constitutes most of scientific research. The remaining slice is physical science — everything from geology and climatology to cosmology and particle physics. These fields have not received the same kind of scrutiny as the others. Is that because they are less prone to the problems Dr. Ioannides describe

What would a new full-fledged pictorial language—not the hieroglyphics of old, but a language built to suit the social media-mentality of “right here, right now, this is who I am, who I’m with, and what I’m up to”—look like?

It is possible to examine any object—including a brain—at different levels

if we want to know how the brain gives rise to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we want to focus on the bigger picture of how its structure allows it to store and process information—the architecture, as it were. To understand the brain at this level, we don’t have to know everything about the individual connections among brain cells or about any other biochemical process.

top parts and the bottom parts of the brain have differ­ent functions. The top brain formulates and executes plans (which often involve deciding where to move objects or how to move the body in space), whereas the bottom brain classifies and interprets incoming information about the world. The two halves always work together;

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Grunberg has spent several hours a day writing his novella, while a battery of sensors and cameras tracked his brain waves, heart rate, galvanic skin response (an electrical measure of emotional arousal) and facial expressions. Next fall, when the book is published, some 50 ordinary people in the Netherlands will read it under similarly controlled circumstances, sensors and all.

Researchers will then crunch the data in the hope of finding patterns that may help illuminate links between the way art is created and enjoyed, and possibly the nature of creativity itself.

the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics, which over the last decade or so has attempted to uncover the neural underpinnings of our experience of music and visual art, using brain imaging technology. Slowly, a small but growing number of researchers have also begun using similar tools to scrutinize the perhaps more elusive, and perhaps endangered, experience of literary reading.

a complete understanding of how the mouse brain interprets visual information. To succeed, they’ll have to go beyond static gene maps and learn how to watch a living brain in action.

Well, as a programmer you’re working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

With colleagues at the University of Cambridge, I worked on a web game called urbangems.org. In it, you are shown 10 pairs of urban scenes of London, and for each pair you need to choose which one you consider to be more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on user votes, one is able to rank all urban scenes by beauty, quiet and happiness. Those scenes have been studied at Yahoo Labs, image processing tools that extract colour histograms. The amount of greenery is associated with all three peaceful qualities: green is often found in scenes considered to be beautiful, quiet and happy. We then ran more sophisticated image analysis tools that extracted patches from our urban scenes and found that red-brick houses and public gardens also make people happy.

On the other hand, cars were the visual elements most strongly associated with sadness. In rich countries, car ownership is becoming unfashionable, and car-sharing and short-term hiring is becoming more popular. Self-driving cars such as those being prototyped by Google will be more common and will be likely to be ordered via the kind of mobile apps similar to the ones we use for ordering taxis nowadays. This will result into optimised traffic flows, fewer cars, and more space for alternative modes of transportation and for people on foot.

Cities will experience transformations similar to those New York has experienced since 2007. During these few years, new pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes were created in the five boroughs, creating spaces for public art installations and recreation. And it’s proved popular with local businesses too, boosting the local economy in areas where cyclists are freer to travel.

Intelligence, according to Gardner, is of eight types - verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic; existential and moral intelligence were added as afterthoughts in the definition of Intelligence. This is the first in a series of posts that explore and understand how each of the above forms of intelligence is affected by technology-mediated education.

Verbal-linguistic Intelligence involves sensitivity to spoken and written language, the ability to learn languages, and the capacity to use language to accomplish goals. Such intelligence is fostered by three specific activities: reading, writing and interpersonal communication - both written and oral.

Technology allows addition of multisensory elements that provide meaningful contexts to facilitate comprehension, thus expanding the learning ground of language and linguistics.