LOTS OF PUNS - StumbleUpon ...A guy goes into a nice restaurant bar wearing a shirt open at the collar and is met by a bouncer who tells him he must wear a necktie to gain admission. So the guy goes out to his car and he looks around for a necktie and discovers that he just doesn't have one. He sees a set of jumper cables in his trunk. In desperation he ties these around his neck, manages to fashion a fairly acceptable looking knot and lets the ends dangle free. He goes back to the restaurant and the bouncer carefully looks him over for a few minutes and then says, "Well, OK, I guess you can come in -- just don't start anything." ...This mushroom walks into a bar and starts hitting on this woman... ...This horse walks into a bar and the bartender says "Hey, buddy, why the long face... ...These two strings walk upto a bar... ...This grasshopper walks into a bar, and the bartender says "Hey! ...This baby seal walks into a bar and the bartender says,"What'll ya have..." ...A neutron walks into a bar. Back
Are we on information overload? The last two decades have completely transformed the way we know. Thanks to the rise of the Internet, information is far more accessible than ever before. It’s more connected to other pieces of information and more open to debate. Organizations — and even governmental projects like Data.gov — are putting more previously inaccessible data on the Web than people in the pre-Internet age could possibly have imagined. In his new book, “Too Big to Know,” David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, attempts to answer that question by looking at the ways our newly interconnected society is transforming the media, science and our everyday lives. Salon spoke to Weinberger over the phone about the rise of the information cloud, the demise of expert knowledge, and why this is the greatest time in human history. In the book you mention the “smartest guy in the room” metaphor. In the West, knowledge begins as a winnowing process. Yes. Yes, exactly. OK.
Wandering mind not a happy mind People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone Web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives. The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science. “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert write. Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Subjects could choose from 22 general activities, such as walking, eating, shopping, and watching television. “Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities,” says Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard.
What’s On the Horizon in Higher Education Big Ideas Culture Digital Tools Teaching Strategies Flickr: Dexterwas How will college life be different in five years than it is today? In its recently released 2012 NMC Horizon Report on Higher Education, New Media Consortium predicts there may be more gesture-based computing, and lots of inter-connected (and Internet-connected) objects packed with useful information. Video games will become more commonplace in classrooms, and Big Data will drive big decisions on the part of students, faculty, and the foundations and companies in the education sphere. The Horizon Report crystallizes a lot of what we’re witnessing in education. What the report does focus on are six technologies to watch, categorized in the near, middle, and foreseeable future. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. MOBILE APPS. Some institutions are creating programs to teach student entrepreneurs how to create apps from scratch and to market them. Flickr:Chirantan Patnaik TABLET COMPUTING. GAME-BASED LEARNING. LEARNING ANALYTICS. Daniel Choo
Working Model of Stephensons STEAM ENGINE made of GLASS ! Rare! Video - StumbleUpon Log in High-Tech: Software, Hardware, and More Cynthia Yildirim Working Model of Stephenson's STEAM ENGINE made of GLASS ! This Model of Stephenson's Steam Engine was made in 2008 by master glassblower Michal Zahradník. posted 3 years ago © 2014 Redux, Inc. about redux | contact us | copyright | legal
Why we make bad decisions What role do our surroundings have in the choices we make? Consider the fact that we are more likely to commit a “random” act of kindness toward a person who has already done something kind toward us. We are less likely to help someone in serious trouble when we’re in a crowd, or choose different professions based on the sound and spelling of our first names. In his new book “Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World,” author Sam Sommers, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, looks at what context can teach us about everything from test questions to romantic partners to career choices. Salon spoke with Sommers over the phone about Occupy Wall Street, online dating and Penn State’s Joe Paterno riot. In the book you argue that this perception that, as you describe it, “What you see is what you get” is flawed and dangerous. It’s our default assumption. In the book you discuss crowd mentality and conformity in detail. It’s a good question.
Rosenhan experiment Experiment to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis Rosenhan's study was done in eight parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men, including Rosenhan himself) who briefly feigned auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had no longer experienced any additional hallucinations. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and had to agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The second part of his study involved an offended hospital administration challenging Rosenhan to send pseudopatients to its facility, whom its staff would then detect. While listening to a lecture by R. Pseudopatient experiment[edit] Non-existent impostor experiment[edit] See also[edit]
Prozac and Sexual Desire by Helen E. Fisher and J. Anderson Thomson Jr. In response to: Talking Back to Prozac from the December 6, 2007 issue To the Editors: We applaud Frederick Crews’s discussion of the unappreciated problems of antidepressants and the subtle techniques used to enhance their use and sales [NYR, December 6, 2007]. Homo sapiens evolved three distinct (yet overlapping) brain systems for courtship, mating, reproduction, and parenting. Studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) indicate that romantic attraction is associated with subcortical dopaminergic pathways—pathways that are suppressed by elevated central serotonin. Due to their impact on the sex drive, these medications can also jeopardize other brain/body mechanisms that govern mate assessment, mate choice, pair formation, and partner attachment. Helen E. Research Professor Department of Anthropology Rutgers University New York City J. Charlottesville, Virginia H.E.
- StumbleUpon Jacob Aron, technology reporter (Image: Electronic Arts 2012) Video games publishers normally include a variety of copy-protection methods designed to stop pirates distributing their titles, but most games still end up available for free download on torrent sites within days of their official release. Now one developer has taken a new approach to fighting the pirates - by offering them a job. When Syndicate, a sci-fi shooter developed by Starbreeze Studios, was released this week, Reddit user MikkelManDK noticed an ".nfo" file on the game disc. This was unusual, because such files are not normally included with genuine copies of a game, but rather added by game pirates to brag about their illicit releases. Such .nfo files normally included text-based ASCII art with the pirates' logo and instructions for installing the game, which usually involves a series of steps to circumvent the game's copy protection.