Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. False beliefs are everywhere, and efforts to dispel misinformation are more difficult than one would expect because of quirky way our brains store memories and continue to mislead us. Sam Wang explains how your brain lies to you.
Category Archives: Linking Thinking
Why the Cloud Cannot Obscure the Scientific Method
There is little reason not to be enthused over the new avenues of research offered by increasingly comprehensive and electronic scientific data sets available to us. But reactions to Chris Anderson’s naive claim that the deluge of data makes the scientific method obsolete reminds us why models and theories are the best tools we have to understanding our world. For example, John Timmer responds: “Correlations are a way of catching a scientist’s attention, but the models and mechanisms that explain them are how we make the predictions that not only advance science, but generate practical applications.”
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Nobody’s A Critic
Criticism, laments Martin Meis, no longer defines what is good and bad in culture, and he blames new media. “Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.” What he laments is not so much the demise of criticism per se, which is actually quite robust, but rather the demise of the influence of professional critics and the sanctity of their domain. But if the relationship between amateur and professional critic has flattened, so too has the relationship between critic and artist. Participation is a two-way street. Martin Weis on the personal impact made by literary critic James Wood’s essay, “What Chekhov Meant By Life”:
Or, to put it another way, Chekhov is more Chekhov when you add James Wood. I prefer Wood/Chekhov to Chekhov/Chekhov and I suspect that there is simply no such thing as the old Chekhov after Wood got to him. By the same token, Wood is the critic that he is in no small measure because of how he was affected and transformed by reading Chekhov.
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The Itch
Scientists once saw itching as a form of pain. They now believe it to be a different order of sensation, one which suggests that perception is more than mere reception. Perception is inference. Atul Gawande explains the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception:
Perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning.
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Is Google Making Us Stupid
Contrary to the title of this article, Nicholas Carr isn’t so much asking if Google is making us stupid, but rather if Google making us think differently. The answer to this question is yes, and it echoes earlier sentiments by Neil Postman who pointed out (about television) that technology is not neutral:
Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
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The Myth of Multitasking
E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming – the great media din that has become an expected part of our lives is one in which we ration our attention among many competing tasks. Unfortunately, Christine Rosen points to a spate of recent studies indicating that not only is multitasking a poor strategy for learning, the learning you do manage while multitasking is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.
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Start Pages as Environments for Self-Organized Learners
Start pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes are not specifically designed for educational purposes, but as Malinka Ivanova points out, they are flexible enough to potentially support self-organized learning and research environments. In this presentation, she compares various start pages in terms of a model of multichannel learning in which learners may play a a wide range of roles: authors, contributors, distributors, searchers, moderators, reviewers, editors, researchers, or evaluators.
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Q-Tools: An Approach for Discovery and Knowledge Work
Noting that Google recognizes that the internet does not need to organized until you have a question in search of an answer, Dave Gray points out that questions may be the most basic tools for gaining knowledge and working with information. His standard set of questions offers an interesting way for informations management systems like feed readers and email clients eto organize and manipulate information. Examples of Q-tools include the Prism (one input, multiple outputs), the Razor (binary sorting), the Generator (creates new information), the Peeler (drives attention to deeper levels), and more.
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Frankenstein in the Universe
Can we shape technology as much as it shapes us? Or do we need to resign ourselves to the specter of technology out of control? If we do argues Luke Fernandez, we truly do become its victims:
But even if our lives are constrained and pushed in certain directions, we have some agency. To deny that would be to succumb to the most nihilistic form of technological determinism. If we believe that we can shape technology as much as it shapes us we can hold out the hope of at least playing some minor role in influencing the direction that the university takes in the information age.
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The math gender gap joins a long list of differences in test scores that were once ascribed to biology, but now appear to be influenced by social and cultural factors. John Timmer summarizes a study published in Science that suggests that the gender gap in math scores disappears in countries with a more gender-equal culture like Sweden and Iceland.