Psychologists reveal in a study published in Psychological Science a corollary of the wisdom of crowds: the average of two guesses made by the same person at different times are better than either guess on its own. The accuracy of the second guesses improves when it is made three weeks rather than immediately after the first. If a guess by definition is the best possible answer, where do these second guesses come from? The researchers suggest that we are constantly creating hypotheses about the world, and checking them against reality. Second guesses are refined first guesses that have passed muster.
Author Archives: Shanta Rohse
Rumours of the death of language by texting have been slightly exaggerated. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English, says linguistics professor David Crystal: points out that it improves children’s writing and spelling.
[On the contrary,] it is merely the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings…. In texting what we are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
The math gender gap thus joins a long list of differences in test scores that were once ascribed to biology, but now appear to be influenced by social and cultural factors. John Timmer summarizes a study published in Science that suggests that the gender gap in math scores disappears in countries with a more gender-equal culture like Sweden and Iceland.
E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming–the great media din that has become an expected part of our lives is one in which we ration our attention among many competing tasks. Unfortunately, Christine Rosen points to a spate of recent studies indicating that not only is multitasking a poor strategy for learning, the learning you do manage while multitasking is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.
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Scientists once saw itching as a form of pain. They now believe it to be a different order of sensation, one which suggests that perception is more than mere reception. Perception is inference. Atul Gawande explains the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception:
Perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning.
Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. False beliefs are everywhere, and efforts to dispel misinformation are more difficult than one would expect because of quirky way our brains store memories and continue to mislead us. Sam Wang explains how your brain lies to you.
Criticism, laments Martin Meis, no longer defines what is good and bad in culture, and he blames new media. “Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.” What he laments is not so much the demise of criticism per se, which is actually quite robust, but rather the demise of the influence of professional critics and the sanctity of their domain. But if the relationship between amateur and professional critic has flattened, so too has the relationship between critic and artist. Participation is a two-way street. Martin Weis on the personal impact made by literary critic James Wood’s essay, “What Chekhov Meant By Life”:
Or, to put it another way, Chekhov is more Chekhov when you add James Wood. I prefer Wood/Chekhov to Chekhov/Chekhov and I suspect that there is simply no such thing as the old Chekhov after Wood got to him. By the same token, Wood is the critic that he is in no small measure because of how he was affected and transformed by reading Chekhov.
There is little reason not to be enthused over the new avenues of research offered by increasingly comprehensive and electronic scientific data sets available to us. But reactions to Chris Anderson’s naive claim that the deluge of data makes the scientific method obsolete reminds us why models and theories are the best tools we have to understanding our world. For example, John Timmer responds: “Correlations are a way of catching a scientist’s attention, but the models and mechanisms that explain them are how we make the predictions that not only advance science, but generate practical applications.”
Norm Friesen uses critical theory to “de-mystify” three particular truths or myths in the e-learning domain…that 1) we live in a “knowledge economy,” 2) learners enjoy “anywhere anytime” access, and 3) educational and social change is an inevitable consequence of technological change.
Understanding technology as a scene of struggle rather than as a destiny or fait accompli might also help to guide the exploration of metaphors other than “impact” or “dissemination” when inquiring into the relationship between technology and changing institutions and practices.
Start pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes are not specifically designed for educational purposes, but as Malinka Ivanova points out, they are flexible enough to potentially support self-organized learning and research environments. In this presentation, she compares various start pages in terms of a model of multichannel learning in which learners may play a a wide range of roles: authors, contributors, distributors, searchers, moderators, reviewers, editors, researchers, or evaluators.
Noting that Google recognizes that the internet does not need to organized until you have a question in search of an answer, Dave Gray points out that questions may be the most basic tools for gaining knowledge and working with information. His standard set of questions offers an interesting way for informations management systems like feed readers and email clients eto organize and manipulate information. Examples of Q-tools include the Prism (one input, multiple outputs), the Razor (binary sorting), the Generator (creates new information), the Peeler (drives attention to deeper levels), and more.
Can we shape technology as much as it shapes us? Or do we need to resign ourselves to the specter of technology out of control? If we do argues Luke Fernandez, we truly do become its victims:
But even if our lives are constrained and pushed in certain directions, we have some agency. To deny that would be to succumb to the most nihilistic form of technological determinism. If we believe that we can shape technology as much as it shapes us we can hold out the hope of at least playing some minor role in influencing the direction that the university takes in the information age.
Is it a problem,
asks Lawrence Hill, that many of the most famous and enduring fictional accounts of African Americans have been penned by whites?
A solution to this trend of ignoring African-American writers is to incorporate memoirs into the body of Civil War literature into the curriculum:
What’s striking about such narratives is the immediacy of expression. These authors have a fundamental point to make, one of such personal urgency that the reader can hardly turn away. Between each line breathes a voice that seems to whisper: “This is my name, this is when I was born, this is who I am and how I have lived, and I am going to assert my own humanity by setting my story down on paper.†If we are to persuade bookstores, reviewers, librarians, and curriculum writers to look for fresh literature touching on the African-American experience, and prevail on teachers to exercise more imagination than merely shoving the old pile of school editions of To Kill a Mockingbird at yet another class of yawning students, it may be memoir that does the trick.
The story of Darwin and his big idea of evolution through natural selection offers numerous insights into how ideas become widespread. For example, why is it Darwin we celebrate above the others who thought of it first (William Wells and Patrick Matthew), or arguably conceived of it better (Alfred Russel Wallace)? The reason, says Olivia Judson is the “Origin,” which changed our view of other species and ourselves through relentless evidence.
What if Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie isn’t as bad as everyone said it was? Comic-book adaptations typically invent new adventures for their protagonists while remaining relatively faithful to the back story of their heroes. Lee, however, reimagined the story of the Hulk, blending elements from the comic book, the television show that aired in the ’70s and ’80s, and his own imagination. The verdict? Comic-book fans, critics, and everyone in between agreed: It stunk.
Peter Dizikes points out that while pop culture references to the butterfly effect are not just bad physics, they also reveal how the public thinks about science: They expose the growing chasm between what the public expects from scientific research - that is, a series of ever more precise answers about the world we live in—and the realms of uncertainty into which modern science is taking us.
Mainstream media coverage of games seems to be one of two sorts. Either they are dazzling accounts of endless digital features proclaiming their superiority, or bitter discounts of their claims as culture, usually advocated by representatives from generations on either side of the computer era. What is lacking, says Tom Chatfield, is a serious, mutually well-informed debate about the gaming phenomenon that will be a dominant cultural force in this century.
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John Houtz, Julia Cameron and Robert Epstein, all experts on creativity, and each with different backgrounds and perspectives offer practical tactics to unleash your creative self. Their advice intersects at four different skills sets essential for creative expression: capture new ideas they occur to you, challenge yourself with tough problems, broaden your interests in new things, and surround yourself with interesting people and things.
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Fascinating description by computer scientist Hany Farid who works with various law-enforcement agencies to uncover doctored images. Modern software has made photograph manipulation easier to carry out, but also easier to detect.
I expect that as the field progresses over the next five to 10 years, the application of image forensics will become as routine as the application of physical forensic analysis. It is my hope that this new technology, along with sensible policies and laws, will help us deal with the challenges of this exciting—yet sometimes baffling—digital age.
George Miller’s famous 1957 paper, ‘The Magic Number 7 Plus and Minus Two’ has been proven to be overly optimistic. Jeff Rouder and Nelson Cowan’s study, published in the April Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the average person struggles to keep just three or four things in their “working memory†or conscious mind at one time.
