Why the "loudness wars" are killing today's music July 03, 2006 Why the “loudness wars” are killing today’s music Pull out a vinyl record from the 70s or early 80s, and listen to it. Odds are it’ll have a big dynamic range — it’ll be whisper-quiet in some parts and booming loud in others. You’ll pick up new nuances every time you listen to it. Now listen to any music track recorded in the last ten years, and it’ll be radically different. Nope, says a writer at Stylus magazine. See those two graphs overhead? But so what? One result of [overcompression] is that modern CDs have much more consistent volume levels than ever before. I’ve messed around with lots of home-recording technology — for music and for my Wired podcasts — and this guy’s right. (Thanks to Andrew Hearst for this one!) <a href="
BUILDYOURMEMORY.COM / A mnemonics and memory improvement resource Seed: Who Wants to Be a Cognitive Neuroscientist Millionaire? Ogi correctly answers the $250,000 question. Courtesy of Valleycrest Productions. Boston University’s doctoral program in cognitive neuroscience prepares students for a career in brain modeling, robot design, or biomedical engineering—or for winning cash on the television quiz show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?. Researchers in my department, Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS), seek to understand the brain’s mechanisms, including three cognitive systems that happen to be essential for a profitable performance on Millionaire: learning, memory, and decision-making. I went to New York, where I passed a multiple-choice audition test. The first technique I drew upon was priming. I used priming on my $16,000 question: “This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?” I used priming even more explicitly on my $50,000 question: “Which of the following acronyms represents an organization that does not include the word ‘Association?’” “That’s right!”
Psychology Today: The Girl With a Boy's Brain "Don't step on that—it's not a rug!" warns Kiriana Cowansage. It's a 9,000-piece puzzle of the astrological heavens, half completed, which she's putting together on the floor of her brightly colored studio apartment in Manhattan's West Village. Kiriana, a 24-year-old graduate student, is enamored of details. She's also easily absorbed: A week earlier, she worked on the puzzle for 10 straight hours, without pausing for so much as a sip of water. A clothing maven, she's fashionably put together in chunky jewelry and a black minidress with billowing sleeves. Such perplexing contradictions are the hallmarks of Asperger's Syndrome (AS), with which Kiriana was diagnosed when she was 19. Kiriana fits the AS profile quite neatly. Other experts attribute some of the gender gap to the widespread misdiagnosis of girls. When she was 4, Kiriana became infatuated with dinosaurs. In school, Kiriana barely spoke at all.
Cognitive Daily: What can you remember in a glimpse? The text below will bring up an animation. Just look at it once — no cheating! A picture will flash for about a quarter of a second, followed by a color pattern for a quarter second. Then the screen will go blank for about one second, and four objects will appear. Use the poll below to indicate which object (#1, 2, 3, or 4) appeared in the picture. Click here to view the animation! I’ll let you know which answer was correct at the end of the post, but this test approximates the procedure of an experiment conducted by Kristine Liu and Yuhong Jiang, designed to measure the capacity of visual working memory. Previous studies have had conflicting results, with some indicating we can remember a large number of details of a briefly presented scene, and others suggesting that we don’t notice differences between scenes even when we look at them for several seconds (see this Cognitive Daily article for one example). So were we able to replicate their experiment?
Visual Cliff - Psychology experiment Infants develop an avoidance reaction to the appearance of depth by the age of 8 to 10 months, when they begin to crawl. This discovery was made on the surface of an apparatus called the visual cliff. The latter is a table divided into two halves, with its entire top covered by glass. One half of the top has a checkerboard pattern lying immediately underneath the glass; the other half is transparent and reveals a sharp drop of a metre or so, at the bottom of which is the same checkerboard pattern. The infant is placed on a board on the centre of the table. The mother stands across the table and tries to tempt her baby to cross the glass on either the shallow or the deep side. Infants younger than seven months will unhesitatingly crawl to the mother across the deep side, but infants older than eight months avoid the deep side and refuse to cross it. source: Encyclopedia Britannica
Hoarding Hoarding is usually considered a subtype of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Like other compulsive behaviors, hoarding is an effort to manage the anxiety raised by obsessive doubts. There are varying levels of hoarding behavior. A diagnosis of OCD of the hoarding type is made when there is significant distress or disruption to feelings of self-worth, interpersonal relationships, education, occupation, housing, finances, legal issues, or health as a result of hoarding behavior. Symptoms vary from person to person, but may include: Saving items seen by most people as unneeded or worthless, (i.e., not true collectibles). Compulsively buying or saving excessive quantities of items of any kind. Treating all saved items as equally valuable--whether or not the object has sentimental, financial or functional value. Experiencing intense anxiety or distress when attempting to discard-or even think about discarding-what most others view as useless objects. Avoid repetitive questioning (e.g., "Why?
Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.
Two Legs, thing using and talking Two Legs, Thing Using and Talking: The Origins of the Creative Engineering Mind Professor F.T. Evans School of Engineering, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK Abstract: Instead of seeing technology as outside ourselves, it is argued that it is an innate human function and the main driving force in human evolution. Keywords: Bipedalism; Creativity; Language origins; Palaeontology; Technology; Tool using; 1. The important thing is not what you know, but what you know about what you know.'' This paper explores our ideas about the nature of technology. These questions will be approached under three sections. In the second section of the paper, the question of creativity leads into a consideration of ideas about human origins. 2. As an academic subject, the history of technology has been a slow developer. Take the familiar example of the fight between David and Goliath. Questions of perspective and interpretation are not just academic. fig. 1. the meaning we attribute to them. Fig. 2.