Semantic satiation History and research[edit] The phrase "semantic satiation" was coined by Leon Jakobovits James in his doctoral dissertation at McGill University, Montreal, Canada awarded in 1962.[1] Prior to that, the expression "verbal satiation" had been used along with terms that express the idea of mental fatigue. The dissertation listed many of the names others had used for the phenomenon: "Many other names have been used for what appears to be essentially the same process: inhibition (Herbert, 1824, in Boring, 1950), refractory phase and mental fatigue (Dodge, 1917; 1926a), lapse of meaning (Bassett and Warne, 1919), work decrement (Robinson and Bills, 1926), cortical inhibition (Pavlov, 192?) The explanation for the phenomenon was that verbal repetition repeatedly aroused a specific neural pattern in the cortex which corresponds to the meaning of the word. Applications[edit] In popular culture[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] Further reading[edit] Dodge, R.
Made in China: European Clone Towns Taking counterfeiting to a whole new level… Paris in China In the outskirts of Shanghai stands a fake Eiffel Tower overlooking a replica of the Champ de Mars and rows of Parisian townhouses. This is not Disneyland in China, this is the gated community of Tianducheng, built in 2007 by real estate develepors Zhejiang Guangsha Co. Ltd. Rather mysteriously, very little information about the town has been made available since it’s opening in 2007. The last known population of Tianducheng is around 2,000, yet the town can comfortably house over 100,000 people. More than anything, Tianducheng is a popular place for young newlyweds to use for their wedding photography, using the fake Paris as a backdrop. This is Hallstatt, Austria: And this is it’s Chinese knock-off: A replica of an entire historical Austrian town was unveiled in the Chinese province of Guangdong earlier this year. Hallstatt: Not Hallstatt: Little London in China Photos via here, here, here and here.
Milgram experiment The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.[1] The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" The experiment[edit] Milgram Experiment advertisement Results[edit] Criticism[edit] Ethics[edit] Replications[edit]
Hallstat chinese copy Just one year after announcing ambitious plans to copy of a small idyllic Austrian mountain village, Chinese developers have unveiled their clone hamlet. Located just outside the southeastern city of Huizhou, the new village is a close approximation of Hallstatt, Vienna, complete with rows of pastel-colored chalets, architectural finials, and even an exact replica of the town clock tower that characterize the 900-year old original. Overseen and operated by Minmetals Land Inc., the $940 million project was recently completed, with Halstatt mayor Alexander Scheutz on hand to open the complex to tourists this past Saturday. When news of the project spread last summer, Hallstatt residents expressed outrage at the idea of the Chinese fake, threatening to make an appeal to UNESCO to potentially halt the building. As Reuters reports, the Chinese Hallstatt is comprised of expensive housing units for the city’s nouveau riche, with other shops and sites for tourists.
Stanford prison experiment The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University from August 14–20, 1971, by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo.[1] It was funded by the US Office of Naval Research[2] and was of interest to both the US Navy and Marine Corps as an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners. Goals and methods[edit] Zimbardo and his team aimed to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. The experiment was conducted in the basement of Jordan Hall (Stanford's psychology building). The researchers held an orientation session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners. The prisoners were "arrested" at their homes and "charged" with armed robbery. Results[edit] [edit]
Thames town and more By Daily Mail Reporter Published: 11:47 GMT, 6 May 2013 | Updated: 12:15 GMT, 7 May 2013 China is notorious for making knock-off designer clothes and high-end electronics. With its mock Tudor buildings, cobbled streets, red telephone boxes and a Gothic church, this could be a quaint English market town, but bizarre settlement is actually in the People's Republic. And unlike most places in the UK, its population is shrinking. Scroll down for video Quaint: Newly-wed Chinese couples pose in the streets of Thames town, a British themed town near Shanghai Chinese knock off: Thames Town is in Songjiang District, about 19 miles from central Shanghai Spot the difference: With its mock Tudor buildings, cobbled streets, red telephone boxes and a Gothic church, it is an almost perfect replica of a quaint English town Bizarre: Contrary to appearances, Thames Town is not a resort or a theme park but is actually a new town modelled on the 'British way of life' 'I think English properties are very special.
Sense of agency The "sense of agency" (SA) refers to the subjective awareness that one is initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world.[1] It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In normal, non-pathological experience, the SA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SO) for that movement. Normally SA and SO are tightly integrated, such that while typing one has an enduring, embodied, and tacit sense that "my own fingers are doing the moving" (SO) and that "the typing movements are controlled (or volitionally directed) by me" (SA). Definition[edit] Neuroscience of the sense of agency[edit]
Centralia Mine Fire Centralia, Pennsylvania No one knows exactly how it started, but a coal vein has been burning under the Pennsylvania mining town of Centralia since 1961. Some trace it back to careless trash incineration in an open pit mine igniting a coal vein. The fire crawled, insidiously, along coal-rich deposits far from the miner's pick, venting hot and poisonous gases up into town, through the basements of homes and businesses. With dawning horror, residents came to realize that the fire was not going to be extinguished, or ever burn itself out -- at least not until all the interconnected coal veins in eastern Pennsylvania were spent in some epic, meatless barbecue. The government eventually stepped in, and Centralia joined an elite club of communities, including Love Canal and Times Beach. We first visited in the mid-1980s, when 80% of Centralia had already been abandoned. Today, still no trench, but charred remains of Centralia hang on. It's dusk, and we don't see any signs of the fire.
Proprioception The cerebellum is largely responsible for coordinating the unconscious aspects of proprioception. Proprioception (/ˌproʊpri.ɵˈsɛpʃən/ PRO-pree-o-SEP-shən), from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own", "individual" and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.[1] It is provided by proprioceptors in skeletal striated muscles and in joints. It is distinguished from exteroception, by which one perceives the outside world, and interoception, by which one perceives pain, hunger, etc., and the movement of internal organs. The brain integrates information from proprioception and from the vestibular system into its overall sense of body position, movement, and acceleration. The word kinesthesia or kinæsthesia (kinesthetic sense) has been used inconsistently to refer either to proprioception alone or to the brain's integration of proprioceptive and vestibular inputs. History of study[edit] Components[edit]
Gunkanjima: l'isola fantasma. ENGLISH VERSION: Gunkanjima: the ghost island L'isola di Hashima, sperduta tra le 505 isole disabitate della prefettura di Nagasaki, in Giappone, è un luogo spettrale e affascinante, meta di un insolito turismo avventuroso e alternativo. L'isola è chiamata anche Gunkanjima, che significa "nave da guerra", per via dell'aspetto che assume il suo profilo sul letto dell'Oceano: un'isola grigia e decadente, circondata da un grande muro di cemento e i cui edifici prossimi al collasso vanno a delineare la forma di una specie di grande nave da guerra. Questa misteriosa isola fu costruita sopra un'importante miniera di carbone (di proprietà della Mitsubishi) che, nel periodo compreso tra il 1887 ed il 1974, contribuiva notevolmente a rifornire di energia la città di Nagasaki, che si trovava ad un'ora di navigazione. Nel periodo di massima attività l'isola produceva 410.000 tonnellate di carbone all'anno, una produzione intensa che andava però a discapito della vita umana. Altri link:
Operant conditioning Diagram of operant conditioning Operant conditioning separates itself from classical conditioning because it is highly complex, integrating positive and negative conditioning into its practices; whereas, classical conditioning focuses only on either positive or negative conditioning but not both together. Another dubbing of operant conditioning is instrumental learning. Instrumental conditioning was first discovered and published by Jerzy Konorski and was also referred to as Type II reflexes. Operant behavior operates on the environment and is maintained by its antecedents and consequences, while classical conditioning is maintained by conditioning of reflexive (reflex) behaviors, which are elicited by antecedent conditions. Historical notes[edit] Thorndike's law of effect[edit] Main article: Law of effect Operant conditioning, sometimes called instrumental learning, was first extensively studied by Edward L. Skinner[edit] Main article: B. B.F. Tools and procedures[edit] See also[edit] 1.
Petra and the Nabataeans This Bible History Daily article was originally published in 2012. It has been updated.—Ed. Who were the Nabataeans? For every tourist who visits the ancient city of Petra in modern-day Jordan, there is one breathtaking moment that captures all of the grandeur and mystery of this city carved in stone. The façade, popularly known as the Khazneh, or “Treasury,” appears first only as a faint vision, its architectural details and full dimensions crowded out by the darkened walls of the Siq. The Khazneh is both unexpectedly familiar, and at the same time, strangely exotic. Al-Khazneh (“the Treasury”), likely a tomb or monument to King Aretas IV who ruled over the Nabataeans from 9 B.C. to 40 A.D. In many ways, the Khazneh epitomizes the complex character and competing ambitions of the Nabataeans, the industrious Arab people who built the city of Petra and its towering rock-cut monuments (including the Khazneh) over 2,000 years ago. Not a BAS Library member yet? Glenn J.
Macdonald triad The Macdonald triad (also known as the triad of sociopathy or the homicidal triad) is a set of three behavioral characteristics that has been suggested, if all three or any combination of two, are present together, to be predictive of or associated with, later violent tendencies, particularly with relation to serial offenses. The triad was first proposed by psychiatrist J.M. Macdonald in "The Threat to Kill", a 1963 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry.[1] Small-scale studies conducted by psychiatrists Daniel Hellman and Nathan Blackman, and then FBI agents John E. Douglas and Robert K. The triad links cruelty to animals, obsession with fire setting, and persistent bedwetting past a certain age, to violent behaviors, particularly homicidal behavior and sexually predatory behavior.[5] Some other studies claim to have not found statistically significant links between the triad and violent offenders. Firesetting[edit] Cruelty to animals[edit] Enuresis[edit] See also[edit]
Nuove sette meraviglie del mondo Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera. Le nuove sette meraviglie del mondo sono sette opere architettoniche che idealmente richiamano l'antico elenco canonico delle sette meraviglie del mondo (risalente al III secolo a.C.). L'iniziativa non è in alcun modo legata all'UNESCO. Storia[modifica | modifica sorgente] Durante i Giochi della XXVII Olimpiade, svoltisi nel 2000 a Sydney, lo svizzero-canadese Bernard Weber lanciò un referendum mondiale via internet per determinare le "Nuove sette meraviglie del mondo" fra 17 opere architettoniche. A partire dal 2004, i voti sono potuti pervenire anche via telefono o (in alcuni Paesi) via SMS. Il 1º gennaio 2006, i sette giudici resero note le 21 opere "finaliste"[3] (fra cui l'unica antica meraviglia ancora esistente, le Piramidi di Giza, in seguito esclusa dalla votazione e nominata "Candidata onoraria").[4] La scelta ufficiale delle Sette Meraviglie del Mondo avvenne a Lisbona il 7 luglio 2007, scelta per la ricorsività del numero 7 (07/07/07).[5]