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Skeptical Debunker

Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

social science individuals communitarians climate change disagreement

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 25 Feb 10 - Cached
  • "People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view," Braman says. The Cultural Cognition Project has conducted several experiments to back that up. Participants in these experiments are asked to describe their cultural beliefs. Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise. They are labeled the "individualistic" group. Others are suspicious of authority or of commerce and industry. Braman calls them "communitarians." In one experiment, Braman queried these subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.
  • "Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values," says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project. Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work. "If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way," he says. And if the information doesn't, you tend to reject it. In another experiment, people read a United Nations study about the dangers of global warming. Then the researchers told the participants that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial pollution. Many in the individualistic group then rejected the climate science. But when more nuclear power was offered as the solution, says Braman, "they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious problem."And for the communitarians, climate danger seemed less serious if the only solution was more nuclear power.
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  • Then there's the "messenger" effect. In an experiment dealing with the dangers versus benefits of a vaccine, the scientific information came from several people. They ranged from a rumpled and bearded expert to a crisply business-like one. The participants tended to believe the message that came from the person they considered to be more like them. In relation to the climate change debate, this suggests that some people may not listen to those whom they view as hard-core environmentalists. "If you have people who are skeptical of the data on climate change," Braman says, "you can bet that Al Gore is not going to convince them at this point." So, should climate scientists hire, say, Newt Gingrich as their spokesman? Kahan says no. "The goal can't be to create a kind of psychological house of mirrors so that people end up seeing exactly what you want," he argues. "The goal has to be to create an environment that allows them to be open-minded."And Kahan says you can't do that just by publishing more scientific data.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 25 Feb 10
     
    "It's a hoax," said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, "because clearly anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they don't." On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Ninety-eight percent of the research climatologists in the world say that global warming is real, that its impacts are going to be catastrophic," he argued. "There are 2 percent who disagree with that. I have a choice of believing the 98 percent or the 2 percent." To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it's not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy
Skeptical Debunker

Research: How you think about your age may affect how you age - 0 views

www.physorg.com/news186088769.html

study age attitude benefits

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • "How old you are matters, but beyond that it's your interpretation that has far-reaching implications for the process of aging," said Markus H. Schafer, a doctoral student in sociology and gerontology who led the study. "So, if you feel old beyond your own chronological years you are probably going to experience a lot of the downsides that we associate with aging. "But if you are older and maintain a sense of being younger, then that gives you an edge in maintaining a lot of the abilities you prize." Schafer and co-author Tetyana P. Shippee, a Purdue graduate who is a research associate at Purdue's Center on Aging and the Life Course, compared people's chronological age and their subjective age to determine which one has a greater influence on cognitive abilities during older adulthood. Nearly 500 people ages 55-74 were surveyed about aging in 1995 and 2005 as part of the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States. In 1995, when people were asked what age do you feel most of the time, the majority identified with being 12 years younger than they actually were. "We found that these people who felt young for their age were more likely to have greater confidence about their cognitive abilities a decade later," Schafer said. "Yes, chronological age was important, but the subjective age had a stronger effect. "What we are not sure about is what comes first. Does a person's wellness and happiness affect their cognitive abilities or does a person's cognitive ability contribute to their sense of wellness. We are planning to address this in a future study."
  • Skeptical Debunker on 23 Feb 10
     
    The saying "You're only as old as you feel" really seems to resonate with older adults, according to research from Purdue University.
fishead ...*∞º˙

There's trouble brewing, guys « Bits and Pieces - 0 views

bitsandpieces.us/...theres-trouble-brewing-guys

funny makes you think

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 20 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 20 Sep 10
     
    Barviarian Study that Proves Beer contains high amounts of female hormones and turns men into women.
fishead ...*∞º˙

Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning Of Ambient Streams - 0 views

www.techcrunch.com/...ambient-streams-realtime

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 31 Dec 09 - Cached
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 31 Dec 09
     
    "It was 1993 and I had just decided to drop out of college. I was a graphic design major in a great art school but decided I want to start my second company. Knowing this would mark the conclusion of my studies there I set out to create my final project. I would write a short story, design and produce it in print. I put out an edition of 300 and gave it to my friends and people who inspired me like author William Gibson. Cut to November, 2009, when I returned from sitting on a panel at the second Realtime CrunchUp. I had urged the audience and participants that when thinking about the realtime web we should not consider the challenge through the lens of how consumers behave today. I argued that the future potential of the realtime web is not in the misnomer "realtime search," as the consumption of this signal will predominantly be in what I call ambient streams. These are streams of information bubbling up in realtime, which seek us out, surround us, and inform us. They are like a fireplace bathing us in ambient infoheat. I believe that users will not go to a page and type in a search in a search box. Rather the information will appear to them in an ambient way on a range of devices and through different experiences. A few days after I got back from the CrunchUp, I was organizing some old documents when I stumbled on I Was Just Dead< , a cyberpunk short story I wrote 16 years ago. A story about a world of augmented reality. A world where at birth a chip is embedded in people's brains creating a reality where they no longer discern what is "real" and what is augmented in their surroundings (Hear the audio-book or download the free eBook below). It was strange to hear my former self calling out about the importance of augmented reality from across the span of almost two decades of experiences in the digital world, half of which were spent solving the problem of how to filter the massive realtime stream."
fishead ...*∞º˙

Russia May Send Spacecraft to Deflect Incoming Asteroid : Discovery News - 0 views

news.discovery.com/...steroid-spacecraft-russia.html

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 31 Dec 09 - Cached
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 31 Dec 09
     
    "Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth, the head of the country's space agency said Wednesday. Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized. When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37, but have since lowered their estimate. Further studies ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 18,300 miles (29,450 kilometers) above Earth's surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters. In October, NASA lowered the odds that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 from a 1-in-45,000 as earlier thought to a 1-in-250,000 chance after researchers recalculated the asteroid's path. It said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact. Without mentioning NASA findings, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. "I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032," Perminov said. "People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people," Perminov said. Scientists have long theorized about asteroid deflection strategies. Some have proposed sending a probe to circle around a dangerous asteroid to gradually change its trajectory. Others suggested sending a spacecraft to collide with the asteroid and alter its momentum, or using nuclear weapons to hit it."
François Dongier

Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1 - 1 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...with_adam_greenfield_part1.php

Adam Greenfield internet of things everyware

shared by François Dongier on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It's one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it's headed.
fishead ...*∞º˙

"Lost" Amazon Complex Found; Shapes Seen by Satellite - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...lost-civilization-circles.html

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 05 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Hundreds of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes once hidden by forest hint at a previously unknown ancient society that flourished in the Amazon, a new study says. Satellite images of the upper Amazon Basin taken since 1999 have revealed more than 200 geometric earthworks spanning a distance greater than 155 miles (250 kilometers).
fishead ...*∞º˙

The History Blog » Blog Archive » Oysters and hazelnuts: Elizabethan popcorn - 0 views

www.thehistoryblog.com/...4566

random different history snacks

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 30 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Oysters and hazelnuts: Elizabethan popcorn Elizabethan audiences at The Globe and The Rose theaters gnoshed on oysters, mussels, hazelnuts, walnuts, pies and dried fruit while attending plays by the likes of Shakepeare and Marlowe. The evidence has emerged from the most detailed study ever carried out on a Tudor or early Stuart playhouse. Archaeologists have been analysing the thousands of seeds, pips, stones, nutshell fragments, shellfish remains and fish and animal bones found on the site of the Rose Playhouse on London’s South Bank. Museum of London Archaeology has just published the findings in The Rose and The Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, written by archaeologists Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller.
fishead ...*∞º˙

mental_floss Blog » Extreme Weirdness: Antarctica's "Blood Falls" - 0 views

www.mentalfloss.com/...45981

weirdness out of the ordinary interesting

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 30 Jan 10 - Cached
  • There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of blood. It’s one of the continent’s strangest features, and it’s located in one of the continent’s strangest places — the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a huge, ice-free zone and one of the world’s harshest deserts. So imagine you’re hiking through this – – which has been kept ice-less since God was a child because of something called the katabatic winds, which sweep over the valleys at up to 200 mph and suck all the moisture out of them. Anyway, you’re hiking along, passing dessicated penguin carcasses and such, and you come to this. A bleeding glacier. Discovered in 1911 by a member of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition team, its rusty color was at first theorized to be caused by some sort of algae growth. Later, however, it was proven to be due to iron oxidation. Every so often, the glacier spews forth a clear, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns a deep shade of red. According to Discover Magazine – The source of that water is an intensely salty lake trapped beneath 1,300 feet of ice, and a new study has now found that microbes have carved out a niche for themselves in that inhospitable environment, living on sulfur and iron compounds. The bacteria colony has been isolated there for about 1.5 million years, researchers say, ever since the glacier rolled over the lake and created a cold, dark, oxygen-poor ecosystem. Even weirder: scientists think that the bacteria responsible for Blood Falls might be an Earth-bound approximation of the kind of alien life that might exist elsewhere in the solar system, like beneath the polar ice caps of Mars and Europa.
Skeptical Debunker

Technology Review: Mapping the Malicious Web - 1 views

www.technologyreview.com/...24705

Fireshark security monitoring software web connections

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Now a researcher at Websense, a security firm based in San Diego, has developed a way to monitor such malicious activity automatically. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, Stephan Chenette, a principal security researcher at Websense, detailed an experimental system that crawls the Web, identifying the source of content embedded in Web pages and determining whether any code on a site is acting maliciously. Chenette's software, called FireShark, creates a map of interconnected websites and highlights potentially malicious content. Every day, the software maps the connections between nearly a million websites and the servers that provide content to those sites. "When you graph multiple sites, you can see their communities of content," Chenette says. While some of the content hubs that connect different communities could be legitimate--such as the servers that provide ads to many different sites--other sources of content could indicate that an attacker is serving up malicious code, he says. According to a study published by Websense, online attackers' use of legitimate sites to spread malicious software has increased 225 percent over the past year.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 11 Mar 10
     
    Over the past couple of years, cybercriminals have increasingly focused on finding ways to inject malicious code into legitimate websites. Typically they've done this by embedding code in an editable part of a page and using this code to serve up harmful content from another part of the Web. But this activity can be difficult to spot because websites also increasingly pull in legitimate content, such as ads, videos, or snippets of code, from outside sites.
François Dongier

Clickers in the Classroom: An Active Learning Approach (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

www.educause.edu/...157458

Active learning clickers

shared by François Dongier on 11 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Clickers, or student response systems, are a technology used to promote active learning
  • Clickers provide a mechanism for students to participate anonymously. Clickers integrate a "game approach" that may engage students more than traditional class discussion.
  • modern students are primarily active learners, and lecture courses may be increasingly out of touch with how students engage their world.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • clickers offer one approach to employing active learning in the classroom. They are more formally denoted as student response systems (SRS), audience response systems (ARS), or personal response systems (PRS).
  • Clickers help instructors actively engage students during the entire class period, gauge their level of understanding of the material being presented, and provide prompt feedback to student questions.
  • With clickers, students have an input device that lets them express their views in complete anonymity, and the cumulative view of the class appears on a public screen
  • In a normal class discussion situation, only one or two students have the opportunity to answer a question
  • Despite the lack of statistically significant results in this study, the perception survey data show that students perceive value in the use of clickers and would recommend their use in future classes. Contrary to expectations, learning outcomes of students using clickers did not improve more than the traditional active learning approach of using class discussion. Perhaps the value of the active learning pedagogy outshadowed the benefit of using clickers.
  • Sharing questions between instructors, or even providing a library or model curriculum of predesigned question sets, can make a big difference to a new instructor trying to climb a steep learning curve
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 11 Apr 10
     
    gives a new meaning to getting the 'high score'
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