Culture
jgoldman | April 28, 2011
What is learning?
Most psychologists (indeed, most people in general) would agree that learning is the acquisition of new knowledge, or new behaviors, or new skills. Hungarian psychologists Gergely and Csibra offer a deceptively simple description: "Learning involves acquiring new information and using it later when necessary." What this means is that learning requires the generalization of information to new situations - new people, objects, locations, or events. The problem is that any particular piece of information that a human or animal receives is situated within a particular context…
cagapakis | April 25, 2011Two videos that Patrick Boyle and I made were selected for the Bio:Fiction Film Festival! One of the prizes is an online audience award, and you can watch and rate all of the films! It's such an honor to be part of this festival and to be showing our work next to that of so many amazing artists, scientists, and filmmakers, and we would be super thrilled if you voted for us!
Here are our videos! First, the world premiere of Compound 74, a fictional documentary about a possible future of synthetic drug design through synthetic biology:
And second, the commercial we made for Ginkgo BioWorks--…
jgoldman | April 25, 2011
There's a very well-known experiment in developmental psychology called the "A-not-B task." The experiment goes something like this: you, the experimenter, are seated opposite a human infant. Within the reach of both you and the child are two boxes: box "A," and box "B." You hide a toy in "A," in full view of the infant. As expected, the infant reaches for "A" to retrieve the toy. You repeat the process several times. Each time you hide the toy in "A," and each time the infant reaches for "A" to find the toy. Experimental set-ups like this are extremely common in infant and animal studies.…
drorzel | April 21, 2011After chasing a bunch of kids with cell phones off of his lawn, Kevin Drum has kicked off a discussion of "multitasking", specifically about whether it's merely a threat, or a positive menace. He points to an interview with Clifford Nass, a researcher who says his experiments show that nobody is any good at doing two things at once. John Holbo at Crooked Timber picks up the discussion and adds a few good points, and there are some others in the comments (CT's comment section being one of the most civilized and erudite in blogdom).
In particular, I think John's comment on satisficing is an…
drorzel | March 21, 2011I've been watching a lot of basketball lately, and between the channel-flipping and occasional single-game windows, it has not been possible to use the DVR to avoid seeing commercials. Which means I've seen a lot of the current paradigm of advertising in America, which seems to consist of two main modes:
Smug and "dickish": The main exemplar of this is the Fidelity commercial in which a smug Fidelity customer at a cafe sneers at another customer for not knowing the wonders of his commercial invetment advice provider, but really, just about any investment commercial would do. Sam Waterston…
drorzel | March 15, 2011It's NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they've been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities in graduation rates in major college baskeball:
An annual report by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for Division I players, but showed the rates…
drorzel | March 8, 2011Everybody's favorite science blogger did a podcast with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has been posting highlights of it. One of these, on scientific thinking, has a bit that I don't quite agree with. Tyson says:
I think the, if it were natural to think scientifically, science as we currently practice it would have been going on for thousands of years. But it hasn't. It's relatively late in the activities of a culture. Science as we now practice it...this is a relatively modern, that's been going on for no more than 400 years. And you look at how long civilizations have been around, and you say,…
jgoldman | March 7, 2011Welcome to Territoriality Week! Every day this week, I'll have a post about some aspect of animal or human territoriality. How do animals mark and control their territories? What determines the size or shape of an animal's territory? What can an animal's territory tell us about neuroanatomy? Today, I begin by asking two questions: first, what is the functional purpose of establishing territories? Second, to what extent can we apply findings from research on animal territorial behavior to understanding human territorial behavior?
It seems that everyone becomes an amateur animal behaviorist…
jgoldman | February 24, 2011PsychBytes is an experiment: three recent findings in psychology, each explained in three paragraphs or less. Generally, these are papers that I wouldn't have otherwise covered in this blog. Please share your thoughts on this model in the comments. What works, and what doesn't? Would you like more PsychBytes in the future?
What's In A Name?
People who settle down and build a life in the frontier tend to be more individualistic, even if they started out with more interdependent values. Some features of the frontier life that would be attractive to an independent person are low population…
jgoldman | February 16, 2011
"At home, a young man should be dutiful towards his parents; going outside, he should be respectful towards his elders." -Confucius (Chinese philosopher, 551-479 BCE)
"Your real boss is the one who walks under your hat." -Napoleon Hill (American author, 1883-1970)
Those two quotations reflect a cultural difference in how people construct their own conceptions of who they are and how they interact with others. That the particular culture an individual is raised in helps to determine the way they understand the self is clear. Western cultures, such as in America or the UK, tend to focus on…
drorzel | February 6, 2011I'm taking some flak in the comments to yesterday's book recommendation request post, so let me illustrate what I meant with an example. Lots of people recommended the Andrew Lang Fairy books, which are freely available online. I looked at the first story in the first book, which is plenty entertaining, but also has this bit that stopped me short:
Hardly had [an evil sorceror] reached his own house when, taking the ring, he said, "Bronze ring, obey thy master. I desire that the golden ship shall turn to black wood, and the crew to hideous negroes; that St. Nicholas shall leave the helm and…
drorzel | February 4, 2011I've been watching the Al Jazeera English livestream off and on this week to keep up with events in Egypt. At some point, SteelyKid came in while I had it on, saw shots of the cheering crowds from Tuesday, and said "People dancing!"
Sometime on Wednesday, she marched over to me, and demanded to watch a video. I asked what she wanted, and she said "People dancing!" At that point, though, the live video was of people throwing Molotov cocktails off a hotel roof onto protesters below. I didn't think that was really appropriate toddler fare, so I showed her this instead:
Three-ish years later,…
cagapakis | February 1, 2011Scientists aren't known for their fashion sense, but they do have their own unique charm, as you can see in this episode of In The Lab, with Bill Cunningham.
cagapakis | January 30, 2011All the science blogs are talking about it. Where are all the female science bloggers? The question itself and the long lists of great bloggers who happen to be female bring up a lot of interesting questions about what makes a good blog, what is best for blog (self-)promotion, who is in what science blogging clique, what it means to write about "women's issues," and what it means to be a woman in science. But what these lists (and the blogs that they're on) highlight even more is just how homogeneous the community can be: Where are the non-white science bloggers? Where are the LGBTIQ science…
drorzel | January 26, 2011I'm about halfway through Jo Walton's Among Others, a fantasy novel set in Britain in 1979, featuring an unhappy teenage girl who finds relief in reading science fiction and fantasy, and becoming involved with SF fandom. It's getting rave reviews from a lot of the usual sources, and the concept sounded interesting, so I grabbed it right after it came out.
It's an easy read in a lot of ways, but also an odd one. In particular, I keep having trouble remembering when it's set. Despite the frequent reminders that it's set in an era I lived through (it's written as a diary, and every entry…
cagapakis | January 23, 2011Industrial food production separates us from our food, increasing the distance from living thing to food product. As factories continue to import corn and export almost everything we eat, writers like Michael Pollan urge us to eat "real" food, and projects like the Slow Food movement have gained over 100,000 members who strive to preserve traditional and regional ways of growing and cooking food. At the same time, a growing number of young contemporary artists also explore the distance between us and what we eat by bringing secretions of the human body into food production.
Human secretions…
cagapakis | January 15, 2011
With The Symbiotic Household, Elliott P. Montgomery seeks to find answers to problems caused by climate change. Low-cost, low energy solutions are proposed through complex genetic engineering of domesticated insects--"What better way to deal with a future need than with a future technology?"
The project is deliberatively provocative; "By offering a problematic answer, I want to encourage viewers to question the entire scenario and thereby take part in the discussion." What do you think?
via we make money not art
drorzel | January 10, 2011A seasonally appropriate poll, brought to you by this morning's frigid dog walk (15F/ -9C), and the memory of a newscast back when I was in Maryland that referred to an overnight low temperature of 22F/-6C as "Bitter, bitter cold":
The maximum (daytime high) temperature I would characterize as "bitter cold" would be:survey software
For the purposes of this poll, assume a still day with no significant "wind chill." All of these temperatures are too high for quantum effects to be significant, so you may only choose one answer at a time, not a superposition of multiple answers.
drorzel | January 7, 2011There's a new wrinkle in the endless controversy about Huckleberry Finn, with NewSouth Books preparing an expurgated edition replacing "nigger" with "slave" throughout. Sentiment in the parts of the Internet I frequent is mostly against the change, which has been made with the goal of getting it back on high school reading lists, which it has fallen off in many places because of concerns over the language. (Note that it doesn't appear to have been done in response to any great outcry for such an edition: "Mr. Gribben said no schools had expressed interest yet in teaching the book.")
It's a…
drorzel | January 7, 2011What with one thing and another, I forgot to tag anything for the links dump yesterday, which means no links dump this morning. But that's all right, because Fred Clark's post about humorless prigs deserves a more prominent link. The proximate cause is yet another story about a crazy religious group working themselves into a tizzy over what turns out to be an online parody. This by itself is unremarkable-- as Fred says, "So in other words, it's a weekday."
What's notable about the post is the bit that comes next, though:
We've previously discussed how an addiction to self-righteous…