- Feedback for Learning:Seven Keys to Effective Feedback: ‘Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning’
- Critiquing the “who needs college, anyway?” meme
- Using genetic algorithms to find Starcraft 2 build orders
- The 7 Requirements of All Effective Scientists
- Wikipedia: Mendelian randomization
- ‘any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity’
- Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes. By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes,
- Knightmare: ‘For an entire generation of British children, it was the televisual equivalent of owning a terminally ill hamster’
- “Inbox Pause” — adds a pause/unpause button to your Gmail
- What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?
- FollowUpThen: forward an email to be sent back to you at a specified later point
- Vaughan summarises Paul Rozin’s list of 7 types of descriptive study which are undervalued by psychology
- ‘Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. They remind us that our way is not the only way.’
Links for January 2013
January 23rd, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink
Links for autumn 2012
November 13th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink
- America’s Billionaires
- ‘We asked thousands of people to describe their ideal distribution of wealth, from top to bottom. The vast majority — rich, poor, GOP and Democrat — imagined a far more equal nation.’
- Tolman on what rat psychology has to teach us about academic freedom
- Increases in individualistic words and phrases in american books, 1960-2008.
- Tim Harford: What does email want?
- Rapid prototyping in R&D at google (The missing link between impro and research?)
- Notes on filling out US tax form W-8BEN so your royalties aren’t withheld
- The Significance of Plot Without Conflict
- WSJ: This Isn’t Candid Camera, It’s a Science Project
- The Farmer Vanishes – the disappearance of Mr. Ambrose Bierce
- An interview with Dr. Martin Shaw: “A lot of opportunity is going to arrive in the next 20 years disguised as loss” » Transition Culture
- researchinprogress.tumblr.com
- The ‘Washing Hands’ of Learning: Think Pair Share
Links for summer 2012
July 27th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink
- ‘Alex Fradera and Edmund Harriss explain how theatrical techniques can help improve communication skills, inspire collaboration and build a sense of community in mathematics students’
- The reality of being here « After the Woods and the Water
- Kids Today Are Not Inattentive
- My new google search technique is unstoppable
- North Carolina senate tries to outlaw climate model which predicts exponential sea level rise
- ‘The graduates of 2012 will survive only in the cracks of our economy’
- ‘The paranoiac and mistrustful elements of creationism, and its stubborn rejection of the good faith of authority, are aspects of a much more general attitude towards society. Creationists look at scientists the way the world now looks at bankers.’
- The Setup: What do people use to get stuff done?
- Cosma on Red Plenty: ‘In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You’
- Lessons learned from MIT’s first free, Internet-based course
- in which Dan helps realists widen their definitions
Links for March-February 2012
March 23rd, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink
- Paying your $12.50 [for a cinema ticket], these days, is not unlike doing a few lines of cocaine and pretending you don’t know about the headless bodies in Juarez” Rick Moody is uncompromising about Hollywood
- BERG’s Matt Jones Gardens and Zoos
- Why Green Electricity Follows The Price Of Brown Electricity
- The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Shalizi reviews Flynn’s book)
- Why the Guardian’s facebook app is the way it is
- Naming something diminishes its emotional power : Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting Feelings Into Words. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421 -428. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
- Ed Cooke in the Guardian on how to remember names at parties
- How Doctors Choose To Die
- Physical proxomity of collaborators correlates with research quality
- The Unconquered World
- What happens if one of the best musicians in the world busks in the subway? Pearls Before Breakfast
- ‘A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong’
- Five cognitive neuroscientists go on a rafting trip to escape the distracting effects of technology
links for December 2012
December 28th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
- Tom Slee on the contradiction at the heart of Tim Harford’s Adapt
- Jerry Seinfeld (channelling George Ainslie) offers productivity advice for writers
- Coaching psychologist, based in London: Realizing your potential from an evidence-based perspective Dr. Anne Hsu, PhD
- Shilzi offers a thought experiment on economic efficiency: ‘The larger point is that while what is technologically efficient depends on facts of nature, what is economically efficient is a function of our social arrangements, of who owns how much of what. Economic efficiency may be a good tool, but it is perverse to serve your own tools, and monstrous to be ruled by them’
- Ian Martin missed “project US”
- Welcome to the Sigma Scan – a searchable repository for horizon scanning papers, designed for government users>
- Foresight’s Horizon Scanning Centre has built this toolkit: Exploring the future: Tools for strategic thinking
- Award winning radio documentary by Dan Box following the soldiers, and the families, of the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment over their seven-month deployment to Afghanistan.
- Colman, R. J., Anderson, R. M., Johnson, S. C., Kastman, E. K., Kosmatka, K. J., Beasley, T. M., Allison, D. B., et al. (2009). Caloric Restriction Delays Disease Onset and Mortality in Rhesus Monkeys Science, 325(5937), 201 -204. doi:10.1126/science.1173635
- The End of Evil? Neuroscientists suggest there is no such thing. Are they right?
- News summary by Christian Jarrett of a new article by Scott Lilienfeld about the public’s scepticism of psychology
- Jonah Lehrer The Advantages of Tourette’s Studies of those with tourettes offer further evidence that self control can be trained
- Charles Fernyhough on The nature of thought, language, inner speech and Vygotsky
- ‘More and more, I’m finding myself inclined to think that philosophical reflection about ethical issues is, on average, morally useless’
- ‘Anthropology knows that what currently exists does not have to be. Anthropology knows more about capitalism than any other academic discipline.’
Links for October (ish) 2011
November 7th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
- Teenage soviet maths olympians in clandestine operation to fight racist University admissions procedures
- Think about your online security like a professional
- ‘the real task of jurors in criminal trials is to compose a story’
- Kendler, K. S. (2005). Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry. Am J Psychiatry, 162(3), 433-440. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.162.3.433
- Interview with editor of Nature about how the journal makes decisions on which papers to accept
- Atul Gawande in the New Yorker: ‘Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?’
- Update on the Zeigarnik Effect from the Baumeister lab: ‘How to Avoid Being Distracted From Your Goals. Making specific plans creates mental space’
- Brendan Stone at TEDx Sheffield about Storying Sheffield
- Shalizi critiques experiments on ‘Baysian cognition’
- Making Ubuntu talk to the iPhone
Links for August-September 2011
September 24th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
- ‘What you cannot do, with any intellectual honesty or even hope of getting what you want, is pretend that capitalism can work without a powerful, competent and intrusive state’
- gimp tutorial: Creating the Che Guevara Effect
- Matlab figure to powerpoint exporter
- Fix VPN routing issues
- Wise words on data sonification from Sarah Angliss
- Ben Hammersley’s speech to the Information Assurance Advisory Council
- NY Times: ‘individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn’t add up to enough’ (Not everyone agrees)
- ‘I’ve long cherished the notion that Watership Down, the 1972 English novel by Richard Adams, begs to be read through Jewish-colored glasses’
- The Significant Objects project adds value by telling stories: ‘We sold $128.74 worth of thrift-store junk for $3,612.51
- School of English, Trinity College Dublin webpage hacked to include Conan the Barbarian as staff member (web cache)
- Vinay Gupta sex and drugs can help us with the low-carbon future
- ‘Reading fiction ‘improves empathy’, study finds’
Links for June and July 2011
July 28th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
- ‘The crypto-homo-rockers David, Iggy and Lou‘
- George Monbiot on cost-benefit analysis
- Tony Kushner Responds to CUNY Board Decision to deny him an honoury degree
- Guardian / Information is Beautiful inforgraphic on which fish it is ok to eat
- A destination marketing dilemma: How do you sell a city like Sheffield? « Grumpy Traveller
- (Egoistic link warning:)Overload and Escape: Two Perspectives on Writing and Reading Narratives
- Download links for CBC’s How to Think About Science
- C Cleaner is a utility for windows which helps de-crud your machine
- Ray Tallis: What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves
- Late-Night Thoughts Against Reductionism – Whimsley
- A message to the illiberal Nudge Industry: push off | spiked
- Wired: Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die
- The Autofocus Productivity Method: Stop Maintaining To-Do Lists and Start Getting Stuff Done
- Thorough article on wealth and income distribution in America: Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power. See also Norton and Ariely – most Americans, including academic economists, are systemmatically ignorant of the extent of wealth inequality
- Casuals: The Lost Tribe of Britain, They dressed cool and fought
Links for April-May 2011
June 2nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
- NYTimes: How Slavery Really Ended in America
- Ahdaf Soueif: ‘Look at the streets of Egypt tonight; this is what hope looks like’
- How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University
- Private Eye reveals that just 18 of 12,000 companies left UK in 3 years because of tax
- synopsis of ‘Recovering from information overload: Always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy.’
- Can the media sector measure its brainprint?
- Learning from the struggle of the Freedom Riders
- Zoe Williams: Are gossip culture’s victims the celebs – or the gossipers?
Links for February 2011
February 27th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
- COMMONSense: ‘Commons is what we hold in trust’
- ‘an indispensable lesson about Burkean anti-meddling arguments: don’t get tangled up in them too much. Life is too short and there’s too much sewage in the world.’
- YouTube: Stewart Lee on Top Gear
- UK Universities could learn from Texas, where they admit the top 10% from every high school
- Russel Hoban on Riddley Walker: ‘what I have acheived as a writer has come from being friends with my own head’
- Video: Steve Jobs on How to live before you die
- The one-sentence solution to almost all procrastination: Don’t wait until you feel like doing something
- Tim Radford ‘Of course scientists can communicate’
- Jonah Lehrer: The Curse of Mental Accounting
- ‘Does a mild case of ADHD make us more creative? Why distraction is an essential part of the imagination’
- XKCD’s productivity tip: reboot your computer every time you get bored
- UK governments’ Behavioural Insight Team fails to convince any dept to use its ideas
- Twitter as public private speech
- ‘Procedural literacy [ie coding] will be essential if humanities students are to understand virtual worlds as rhetorical and ideological spaces, just as film and the novel are likewise understood as forms of representation and rhetoric’
- Existential Gaming: ‘On my first day, I thought the game was about punching pigs. So I punched pigs.’ (plus, lego as the ultimate Satrean toy)
- Is crime a beast or a virus? Thibodeau & Boroditsky. 2011. Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE
Links for January 2011
January 29th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
- Chris Rose’s intemperate critique of the Common Cause report
- Excellent rebuttal by Martin Kirk of this critique
- The Cabinet Office’s “Applying Behavioural Insight to Health” discussion paper is actually quite good
- Adam Curtis Experiments in the laboratory of consumerism 1959-67
- BBC Trial of environmental activists collapses after undercover officer changes sides
- Guardian: ‘Mark Kennedy: A journey from undercover cop to ‘bona fide’ activist’
- Essential reading: ‘We have to learn the limits of psychology from politics to popular culture, and new ways we can think and act rather than just as individuals and consumers all the time. ‘
- Parapsychology: the control group for science
- ‘localism is in many ways an indulgent form of self-interest. A self-sufficient community is … independent of the cares or needs of other communities and is unwilling to engage in the wider human enterprise.’
- ‘Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy’
- John Gray on human rights ‘the idea of rights has seized hold of the utopian imagination’
- ‘Why have a private firm run police to spy on a few greens? The Ratcliffe Six case is a warning story of securocrats out of control’
- Learning science : Actively recalling information from memory beats elaborate study methods
- “I’m giving £1m to charity on an ordinary salary”
Links for December 2010
January 2nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
- Talkoot: ‘a Finnish expression for a gathering of friends and neighbors to accomplish a task’
- Johann Hari: Protest works. Just look at the proof
- Plague Immunity Gene Stops HIV Aids
- The future of scientific publishing: Open post-publication peer review
- Israeli airport security puts faith in behavioural profiling.
- Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks
- ‘The science of mind is one of the most important intellectual developments in the last half century. It should not be obscured by neurobabble.’
- Tom Waits’ Raindogs and photos from Cafe Lehmitz
- A real Good Samaritan (pre rail privatisation version)
- Roy Baumeister: Do conscious thoughts cause behaviour?
- Causal density and the limits of experimental science: What Social Science Does–and Doesn’t–Know by Jim Manzi, City Journal Summer 2010
- ‘In 1974 we were living in a society with an enfeebled wealthy, and we didn’t know it.’
- Failure to replicate ‘paradox of choice’ experiments
- ‘Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence….Creating new people is thus morally problematic.’
- The New Yorker: The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method : ‘When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe’
Links for November 2010, but a bit late
December 13th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
- ‘When it comes to understanding something as basic as the activities of human beings, then, the academy is divided. The social sciences sometimes hardly seem scientific at all, while the natural sciences cannot provide an account of human behaviour that is either rich enough to account for its diversity, or human enough to be accessible or meaningful to the rest of us.’
- Dilbert on The Confusolpoly
- Shalizi: ‘file-drawer problem alone will guarantee a steady stream of new results’ in a scientific field which is investigating non-existent phenomena
- ‘We let grand concentrations of private wealth reconstitute themselves across the American economic landscape. We let the super rich regain their power to dictate and distort America’s political discourse’
- Persuasion: The Sleeper Effect
- Wikipedia: Kobayashi Maru
- Chelsea Hotel #1
- ‘One day, though, Mr. Zimbardo hopes to have a hero project in every city.’
- ‘Are students
pre-programmed to live with inequality?’ - ‘the idea that other peoples of the world aren’t failed attempts at being you, that comes powerfully from the psychedelic experience’
- Clay Shirky on Wikileaks: ‘If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow’
- ‘The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat’
Links for October 2010
October 28th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
- BBC Radio 4 Nick Hunt’s Journey of a Lifetime
- Mistake making linked to success
- Semen as a psychoactive drug
- Roy F. Baumeister: Is There Anything Good about Men?
- Johann Hari against green consumerism
- waronthemotorist.wordpress.com: I don’t pay road tax
- The true size of Africa
- YouTube: Joel Burns tells gay teens “it gets better”
- ‘This is a news website article about a scientific finding’
- Guardian.co.uk : Steven Johnson: ‘Eureka moments are very, very rare’ “the vast majority of major innovations since 1800 have come from outside the free market – from universities and other environments where profit wasn’t the overwhelming motivation”
- ‘At night the hilliness creates fine effects because you look across from one hillside to the other and see the lamps twinkling like stars’ One of the few nice things George Orwell said about Sheffield
- Monbiot on the recent ‘Common Cause’ report ‘By changing our perception of what is normal and acceptable, politics alters our minds as much as our circumstances’
- WWF Common Cause report
- ‘Carlos the Jackal was my friend’ Undercover in the world of international terrorism
- Matt Webb talks about “fractional AI” at the DO lectures
- ‘here, just by answering a few short questions, you can find out where you lie in the Great Britain income distribution’
Links for September 2010
September 26th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
- Letters of Note: Jack Kerouac: Burroughs has gone insane
- NY Times: The Web Means the End of Forgetting
- Paul bloom : How do morals change?
- The Onion: ‘U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion’
- Mindhacks.com An emotional timeline of 9/11
- Guardian: ‘Israeli and West Bank women risk jail for day at the beach’: ‘we are using the tools of the occupation’
- Time: Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds
- Dinosaur Comics: My apocalyptic tenor has not been dispelled!
- East and West is an amazing Sri Lankan / South Indian restaurant in Sheffield, England
- Guardian, Cordelia Fine ‘Let’s end the great gender lie’
- Star Wars propoganda posters
- TV Tropes ‘Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.’
- atlasobscura.com ‘a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica’
- George Watson: In Praise of Parliament
Links for May 2010
June 2nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
- ‘the claim that Mind Hacks is a “popular high-quality psychology blog” is now SCIENTIFIC FACT!’
- Mindhacks.com: Towards an aesthetics of urban legends
- World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale
- Andrew Brown reviews Avatar
- Youtube.com: Jeweller in Saltaire fights off sword and axe wielding would-be-robbers
- How To Remove Broken Songs From iTunes Library
- campaignstrategy.org ‘Explore ideas for structure & strategy applicable to most campaigns’
- Blood, sweat and containerisation
- Mindhacks.com Paradise Learnt 74 year old man knows Paradise Lost by heart, but has otherwise normal memory
- Guardian datablog / Information is Beautiful: Military Spending
- My Father, The Spy by John H. Richardson
- Paul Broks on 150 years of Sigmund Freud
- The Data Driven Life
- LaTex: APA 5th Document Class
- LaTex: Obsolete packages and document classes
Quote #254: Democracy
May 6th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Links for March 2010 II
April 9th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
- Stephen Anderson on ‘When Data Gets Up Close and Personal’ making a game out of email using personal metrics
- Alec Patton on the RSA’s seminar on the Social Brain and education
- YouTube: Extreme Base Jumping With Wingsuits
- www.wikepage.org/ – free, easy, small, wiki package
- Sachzwang = ‘compelled action’
- YouTube: Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science)
- YouTube: Shockwave traffic jams recreated for first time
- ‘You have chosen to spend your life this way’
- lukesurl.com: Choose Your Own Philosophical Adventure
- Me, In the Exploratorium’s Distorted Room
- Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P.(1994) On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive Science, 18(4), 513-549. doi: 10.1016/0364-0213(94)90007-8.
- Guardian: Ten rules for writing fiction Will Self: ‘The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.’
- Podcast: Robert Krulwich of Radiolab on why storytelling should be at the heart of science
- Hunting Grizzly Bear with bow and arrow
- Installing Latex in Ubuntu Linux
- Dan Robert’s article about brain training in the independent, quoting me very kindly
Links for March 2010 TED talks edition
March 17th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
I’ve been listening to podcasts while walking to work
- TED: Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world
- TED: Robert Ballard on exploring the oceans
- TED: Paul Collier shares 4 ways to help the bottom billion – which are aid, trade, security and governance, in which he explains that democracy is more than elections and vital for overcoming the resource curse
- TED: Joshua Klein on the amazing intelligence of crows (but I can’t figure out why the lost change idea isn’t a go-er)
- TED Dave Eggers set up an alternative after-school-club to use the surplus time of his writer/editor buddies
- TED Benjamin Zander on how a passion for classical music can be for everyone
- TED Murray Gell-Mann on beauty and truth in physics
- TED Howard Rheingold on collaboration
- TED Neil Turok wishes for the next Einstein to be from Africa and he AIMS to make it happen
- TED Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration
- TED Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives
- TED Patrick Awuah on educating leaders
Links for February 2010, part II
February 19th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
- Wim Hof is reportedly the only non-monk to master Tummo, the ability to control your own body temperature to withstand extreme cold
- Benson, Herbert; Lehmann, John W.; Malhotra, M. S., Goldman, Ralph F.; Hopkins, Jeffrey; Epstein, Mark D. (1982) Body temperature changes during the practice of g Tum-mo yoga. Nature 295, 234 – 236 (21 January 1982). “The subjects in the current experiment exhibited a capacity to warm fingers than had previously been recorded during hypnosis and after biofeedback training”
- Havard Gazette: Mind controls body in extreme experiments
- Wikipedia: Biofeedback
- Dogs can smell cancer. amazing
- Software: Use your computer to simulate a typewriter
- Proulx, T., & Heine, S. J. (2009). Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1125-1131.
- Drug treatment combined with skill-specific training proves effective in animal model of rehabititation after complete spinal cord severance
- Vaughan Bell: A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook.
- PhDcomics: ‘What is…the thesis?’
- creawriter is a full screen disrraction free text editor for windows, inspired by Omniwriter for Mac
- Mindhacks.com: Vaughan on the Rough Guide Book of Brain Training
- Web resources for Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”
- A Small, Good Thing by Raymond Carver
- IoP Maudsley Debartes: A Born Again Brain (podcast)
- YouTube: This is the only scene I remember from Flash Gordon. It still haunts me when I put my hand into something
- Morality in Star Wars and Star Trek – most science fiction as ‘a new kind of storytelling that often rebels against those very same archetypes Campbell venerated. An upstart belief in progress, egalitarianism, positive-sum games — and the slim but real possibility of decent human institutions.’
- instapaper.com stores things for you to read later (and synchs with your iPhone)
- ‘Our Lives Are Filled With Worthless Crap That’s Destroying the Earth: Here’s What You Can Do’
- Dark Mountain response to John Gray’s review of their manifesto
Links for February 2010
February 13th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
- Guardian article by shadow cancellor and richard thaler: we want to ‘embed behavioural thinking throughout government’
- Johann Hari: “What about X?” as a rhetorical trick
- Online collaborative doodling: skrbl.com
- Your rights to a refund on an unused rail ticket are covered by National Rail Conditions of Carriage, section 26
- Press release from University of Sheffield about the Rough Guide Book of Brain Training
- Guardian: ‘Turkish girl, 16, buried alive for talking to boys’
- Dougald’s guide to Twitter “it’s like having a little part of you that’s always down the pub!”
- FT.com: Moscow’s Stray Dogs
- Quinn Norton had a magnet implanted under the skin of her finger, allowing her to sense electromagnetic fields
- ‘Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege’
- ‘Politics, according to Berger, ‘begins with asking oneself questions. Everybody, when they wake up at two or three in the morning, asks themselves these questions – but no discourse encourages them.’
- LaMarre, H. L., Landreville, K. D., & Beam, M. A. (2009). The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report. International Journal of Press/Politics, 14(2), 212-231. doi: 10.1177/1940161208330904.
- YouTube: Animal Hypnosis and Trances
- Hemmingway’s Five Rules for writing well
- Diedre McClosky on how she realised that (economic) science was unavoidably affected by ideology.
- Steve Fuller letter in the Guardian: it makes no sense to talk about what people “naturally are” without socioeconomic constraints
- Big Brother Watch
Links for January 2010
January 30th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink
- The Significant Objects project: a story transforms the value of ordinary objects
- Wikipedia False Consciousness
- practice at self-control strengthens self-control in unrelated tasks Baumeister, R. F., Gailliot, M. T., DeWall, C. N. & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and personality: Strength-boosting interventions and trait moderators of ego depletion. Journal of Personality, 74, 1773-1802.
- Madeleine Bunting: on the modern attention span ‘faced with such an abundance of interesting choices, there is a reluctance to commit and a provisionalism which promotes grazing, keeping options open.’
- Remove YouTube comment idiocy, and replace with quotes from Richard Feynman: Feyntube
- Anonymous facebook employee “We track everything”
- Women and Guns by photographer Amy Stein
- Training the brain with music to remove tinnitus
- The Rough Guide to Brain Training, with words by me, published 14/1/10
- Wikipedia, World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood Incident
- Abstruse Goose: Artificial
- So you think you’ve found leylines? Control comparisons are important, installment #89354
- Naomi Klein: 10 years after No Logo, the biggest brand is the White House
- ‘That a lawyer representing men who have no respect for democracy and liberty can quote Voltaire shows how abandoned that great thinker is.’
- actor and singer Arran Glass was upset by a negative review written by Matt Boothman
- Hyper-binding as a form of intuition
- Haaretz: The Binationalism Vogue: ‘But if the fictitious option is taken off the table, the real dilemmas will finally be revealed. And this is precisely what the talk of a binational state seeks to accomplish.’
Quote #251: What man can make of man
January 8th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink
An experimental analysis shifts the determination of behavior from autonomous man to the environment—an environment responsible both for the evolution of the species and for the repertoire acquired by each member. Early versions of environmentalism were inadequate because they could not explain how the environment worked, and much seemed to be left for autonomous man to do. But environmental contingencies now take over functions once attributed to autonomous man, and certain questions arise. Is man then “abolished”? Certainly not as a species or as an individual achiever. It is the autonomous inner man who is abolished, and that is a step forward. But does man not then become merely a victim or passive observer of what is happening to him? He is indeed controlled by his environment, but we must remember that it is an environment largely of his own making. The evolution of a culture is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia. But no theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been. And a new theory may change what can be done with its subject matter. A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
B.F.Skinner, last words of Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)
Links for December 2009
December 30th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink
- In 1938 Frank Sinatra was arrested by the Bergen County, New Jersey sheriff and charged with carrying on with a married woman
- Amy Mount’s Copenhagen climate talks blog
- Couzin et al (2005). Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move. Nature, 433(7025), 513-516 ‘We
also demonstrate how groups can make consensus decisions, even though informed individuals do not know whether they are in a majority or minority, how the quality of their information compares with that of others, or even whether there are any other informed individuals. Our model provides new insights into the mechanisms of effective leadership and decision-making in biological systems’ - Wired from 1994: Tetris as pharmatronic – Tetris inventor: ‘For me, Tetris is some song which you sing and sing inside yourself and can’t stop.’ Why? ‘His clinical psychologist business-partner: “The main part is visual insight. You make your visual decision and it happens almost immediately. Insight means emotion: small, but many of them, every two, three seconds. The second mechanism is unfinished action. Tetris has many unfinished actions (that) force you to continue and make it very addictive. The third is automatization: In a couple of hours, the activity becomes automatic, a habit, a motivation to repeat.”
- Writing Tips for Non-writers
- What Philosophers Believe: David Chalmers and David Bourget recently canvassed several thousand professional philosophers for their views on a range of central philosophical issues.
- Two references on feedback helping consumers cut energy consumption here and here (thanks Julie Dirksen)
- ‘To a psychologist, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored.’
- ‘Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries.’ (thanks Dan)
- ‘Properties of the nervous system that are key to its function and that many of us naively regard as unique to neurons are actually expanded, elaborated, specialized versions of properties that are also present in organisms that lack brains, nervous systems, or even neurons…and that aren’t even multicellular. This is precisely what we’d expect from evolutionary origins, that everything would have its source in simpler precursors.’
- The Beck Record Club covers Songs of Leonard Cohen
- Mark Changizi on what we can deduce about Alien vision
- Break the Inverted Pyramid to put science news in context
- YouTube: Lambchop cover ‘This Corrosion’
- Guardian interview with one of my heroes, Peter Tatchell
- Guardian: Tom James’ article about ten years of regeneration in Sheffield and across the UK
Links for november 2009
December 2nd, 2009 § 1 comment § permalink
- ‘Advice for the young climate blogger’ from RealClimate.org
- David Sloan Wilson: ‘Science as a Religion that Worships Truth as its God’
- 1992: secret freight tunnels under Chicago cause underground flood costing billions of dollars
- ‘Women cyclists make up a far higher proportion of deaths involving lorries than men. Why?’
- New Statesman on how the Warp20 Sheffield celebrations reveal a divided city
- Wired article by Jonah Lehrer on the surprising power of social networks
- Coveredinbees.org on climate science: ‘how is the non-scientist supposed to come to any sort of conclusion?’
- Mindhacks.com “I read Playboy for the articles”: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences
- YouTube They’re Made Out of Meat
- ‘somewhere along the way the caper went awry’
- Mindhacks.com: ‘You are kind, strong willed, but can be self-critical’ – the Forer Effect
- xkcd: ‘When you take apart a lego house and mix the pieces into the bin, where does the house go?’
- ‘Is learning in schools ‘meaningful work?’
links for october 2009
November 1st, 2009 § 3 comments § permalink
- Newscientists.com: Randy Olson’s Top Five Science Communication Tips
- Information is beautiful The Billion Dollar Gram
- Bishop Berkeley’s Cherry
- Proportion of those in various UK professions who were privately educated
- Behavioural change through the power of fun: Piano Stairs (YouTube)
- Colour pictures of Nazism
- Pavlov, Office Style
- Early Risers Crash Faster Than People Who Stay Up Late
- High-speed dextrous robot
- Physical interpretation of imaginary numbers
- ‘for today’s smug and pampered American radicals to wrap themselves in the mantle of victims of fascism, while relying on civil rights no fascist system grants its citizens, displays a profound disrespect for those who have actually suffered under totalitarian regimes.’
- Schwartz, D. L. (1995). The emergence of abstract representations in dyad problem solving. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(3), 321-354.‘The results are interpreted to be a natural result of the collaborative task demand… To facilitate discourse dyads negotiated a common representation that could serve as a touchstone for coordinating the members’ different perspectives on the problem. Because the representation bridged multiple perspectives of the problem structure, it tended to be an
abstraction.’
Links for August-September 09
September 29th, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink
- ‘I just lost The Game’ – Andy Fugard rediscovers The Game
- A sad tale of scientific publishing
- Why teams in red win more
- New York Times: Facebook Exodus
- Dangers of Self-delusion (martial arts edition)
- If fairy tales have adaptive values, shouldn’t we be able to see this in the history of their mutation and spread?
- mindhacks.com ‘Latah is a curious mental state seemingly localised to Malaysia and Indonesia ‘
- Mindhacks.com: ‘It’s remarkable how little cultural variation we have found in developmental patterns of moral reasoning’
- Walled World (fantastic visualisation)
- Alec Patton on what it feels like to become a ‘knowledge creator’ (with a guest appearance by YT)
- Tom Walton’s blog about Optimal Foraging
- Gallery of Leunig cartoons, old and new
- TED: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation
- “I love you so much,” he would say, if he could read his evolutionary impulses, “because you have a symmetrical face!”
- Gaze dependent visual illusion
Links for July 09
August 1st, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink
- Damned or redeemed?
- Passive dynamics: ‘walking is just the name we give to the way this type of object falls down hills’
- The Ontology of the French Revolution
- A great advert, for VB
- Loss of episodic memory may help with endurance sports
- World-wide Berlinification ‘Temporary lease agreements will enable owners who want to retain a vacant property in the long term to make it available for community or creative use’
- ‘Dialectacal bootstrapping’
- Great blog post on prism adaptation experiments
- Žižek in the LRB: ‘Alain Badiou has proposed a distinction between two types (or rather levels) of corruption in democracy: the first, empirical corruption, is what we usually understand by the term, but the second pertains to the form of democracy per se, and the way it reduces politics to the negotiation of private interests.’
- Just because you don’t remember something, doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed you
- xkcd: ‘I’m concerned that we’re sitting here like I’m a responsible adult’
links for june 09
July 2nd, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink
- North of Ping Pong: What Goes Up Must Come Down
- Ugly Funk: The Music Was So Loud We Did Not Notice the World Falling Apart
- Time: How Obama is using the science of change
- ‘I have a very very large house’
- My review of Lone Franks ‘Mindfield’ in the Psychologist magazine
- Mann news: ‘Barak: Israel must choose two states over apartheid’
- Native American Cybernetics: Indigenous Knowledge Resources in Information Technology
- ‘Estimating dinosaur maximum running speeds using evolutionary robotics’
- Alec Patton blogs sense about jargon in Higher Education studies
- Brain Exercise Training With Oxygen
- Language can enforce training of spatial orientation
- A blindspot for our own body language?
- ‘More Talk, Less Chalk: Lexically Sparse Slides Improve Recall of Taught Material’
- The University of Minnesota Nun Study A healthy 100 year old brain and an Alzerimer’s brain side by side
- Vinay Gupta on infrastructure: Dealing in Security – understanding vital services and how they keep you safe
- Jon Birdseed – Going dark
- ‘The social technology of drug production: can we do better?’
- Man, 113, attributes longevity to ‘cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women – and a sense of humour’
- Google search for phrase “attributes longevity to” is revealing : Answers include “active life” “quiet life” “sex” “eating beans” “crispy bacon” and “sleeping for 2 days and then being awake for 2 days”
- ‘I look forward to an eco-friendly future where everyone wears drab and similar clothes until they wear out, just like I do. Obviously I don’t do it out of environmental conscience, but laziness and the fear that, if I try to demonstrate taste, I’ll be exposed as a twat.’
- Dramatic play improves executive function in children
- My article in July’s Prospect magazine on what dramatic improv and confabulation tell us about creativity
- richardmasters.co.uk
- Video Game conditioning spills over in to real life
- Adaptive order beyond the price system ‘Three adaptive landscapes’
links for may 09
June 2nd, 2009 § 3 comments § permalink
- Why randomisation is vital to infer causality (bacon and colorectal cancer edition)
- Shalizi on an information theoretic test for archaeological signs of literacy
- Decriminalising does not raise drug use (at least in Portugal)
- The Man is Seat 61 brings you Trains vs Planes in time and CO2
- Two improvisation games taught at RADA
- Mindhacks.com on psychohistory (“The story of our lives”)
- Mindhacks.com on the neuroscience of hypnosis
- What a pitch to the New Yorker looks like
- ‘What happens when millions of youngsters in a notoriously ADHD generation start getting programmed by these new toys? What happens when they start being rewarded for very long periods of intense concentration? Nobody in the toy industry seems to know. ‘
- Telegraph 2007 Professor pans ‘learning style’ teaching method
- The Onion: Parents Of Nasal Learners Demand Odor-Based Curriculum
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