Category Archives: Linking Thinking

Linking to what others are thinking about learning as a way to explore how we learn online.

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Just How Slow is Your Perception? →

We are always living nearly one-half second in the past. Now, it isn’t surprising that there is some delay between an event and our becoming aware of it. This is the normal unfolding of cause and effect. And this might not be a concern if we were just passive spectators, watching the world unfold before us like a film. But given that we must also respond to events, neuroscientist David Eagleman wonders, will you perceive the event that kills you?

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The Gospel According the Darwin →

Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. If evolution is the true story of why we all exist, then why is there any doubt to its veracity? Richard Dawkins tackles the “evolution is just a theory” narrative, which implies evolution is merely an unfalsified scientific hypothesis, with this practical definition of truth:

Evolution is true in whatever sense you accept it as true that New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere. If we refused ever to use a word like “true”, how could we conduct our day-to-day conversations? Or fill in a census form: “What is your sex?” “The hypothesis that I am male has not so far been falsified, but let me just check again”. As Douglas Adams might have said, it doesn’t read well. Yet the philosophy that imposes such scruples on science has no basis for absolving everyday facts from the same circumlocution. It is in this sense that evolution is true – provided, of course, that the scientific evidence for it is strong. It is very strong.

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The Cost of Fearing Strangers →

So which would scare you more: an American Muslim family you knew nothing about or the guy from your church who had just gone through a divorce? You would probably get this wrong; most of us are terrible at risk assessment. Stephen J. Dubner on why the things we fear the most are simply irrational:

Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger question than I can answer here (not that I’m capable anyway), but it probably has to do with the heuristics — the shortcut guesses — our brains use to solve problems, and the fact that these heuristics rely on the information already stored in our memories.
And what gets stored away? Anomalies — the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dramatic, so unpredictable, and perhaps world-changing, that they imprint themselves on our memories and con us into thinking of them as typical, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extraordinarily rare.

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Tech Law Crystal Ball →

What’s in store for Canada in 2009 in the area of technology law and policy? Michael Geist’s month-by-month blow predicts entrenched positions, slow, comprised progress on issues like copyright reform and net neutrality, only to be interrupted and displaced off the agenda by a November election (the fourth in six years). Funny in a laugh-instead-of-cry kind of way.

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Drug Companies, Doctors and Corruption →

Clinical trials are broken. In her review of three recently published books about the collusion between influential doctors and pharmaceutical companies, Marcia Angell reveals the systematic biases inherent in the very scientific method designed ensure best medical practices. Knowledge translation rests on the assumption that evidence-based research must make its way into practice. Her conclusion is sickening:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of TheNew England Journal of Medicine.

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Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard →

Even though we yearn for what is new, most of us are unable or willing to make fundamental changes in our lives. <a href=“http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways” title=“Set in Our Ways” Why Change is so Hard”>Change is rarely as easy as we think it will be. Our openness to new experiences typically increases during our 20s and then gradually declines until about age 60. After that, some of us become more open again, perhaps because our responsibilities for raising a family and earning a living have been lifted.

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Skeletal Remains →

Dinosaur mounts have become so fundamental to our idea of what makes a natural history museum that it can be difficult to imagine the institutions ever existing without them. So does it matter that 140 years after the first Hadrosaurus foulkii mount, today’s paleontologists have reinterpreted its reliance on four rather than two legs? Yes, says Jesse Smith:

… it’s not so much that, say, Hadrosaurus walked on four legs, but more that this new knowledge reflects a better understanding of the world as it was before we appeared in it. We’re compelled by improved understandings of those environments that have yet to open themselves to human occupation — Mars, the deep sea, the past. Understanding life in a way that either spatially or temporally transcends the presence of humans builds a context that helps us understand that presence. The fact that we have a better idea of what the Hadrosaurus’ skull looked like, that we can replace some of the bones Hawkins used to fill in the blanks, so to speak, suggests that an image of the past is fully constructible if only we’re given the right parts.

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New Tools Help Information Overload →

Take a scientific question like the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees. Would you prefer to plough through an essay on the subject, or to glance at the visualization created by Ben Fry in which the 75,000 letters of coding in the human genome form a photographic image of a chimp’s head? Virtually all of our genetic information is identical, and Fry highlights the discrepancies by depicting nine of the letters as red dots. No contest. Alice Rawsthorn explains why.

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EEGs Show Brain Differences Between Poor and Rich Kids →

Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult, said Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and director of their Neuroscience Institute. This is a wake-up call. It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums. This study has been repeated many times in the last thirty years, with analogous results; this one is unique in that is sorts out the variables that people have used to discount previous studies and yet ends by asking “Can this be replicated?” For heaven’s sake. What more proof do we need?

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Google’s Gatekeepers →

A sobering piece by law professor Jeffrey Rosen about the critical and reluctant role that Google’s corporate gatekeepers play in deciding what we can and cannot see as it navigates the territory between providing neutral platform for free speech and a company in the media and advertising business:

“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” [law professor Tim] Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.

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