Category Archives: Linking Thinking

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

V
Digital Forensics →

Fas­ci­nat­ing descrip­tion by com­puter sci­en­tist Hany Farid who works with var­i­ous law-enforcement agen­cies to uncover doc­tored images. Mod­ern soft­ware has made pho­to­graph manip­u­la­tion eas­ier to carry out, but also eas­ier to detect.

I expect that as the field pro­gresses over the next five to 10 years, the appli­ca­tion of image foren­sics will become as rou­tine as the appli­ca­tion of phys­i­cal foren­sic analy­sis. It is my hope that this new tech­nol­ogy, along with sen­si­ble poli­cies and laws, will help us deal with the chal­lenges of this excit­ing yet some­times baf­fling dig­i­tal age.

♦ ♦ ♦

V
Rage Against the Machines →

Main­stream media cov­er­age of games seems to be one of two sorts. Either they are daz­zling accounts of end­less dig­i­tal fea­tures pro­claim­ing their supe­ri­or­ity, or bit­ter dis­counts of their claims as cul­ture, usu­ally advo­cated by rep­re­sen­ta­tives from gen­er­a­tions on either side of the com­puter era. What is lack­ing, says Tom Chat­field, is a seri­ous, mutu­ally well-informed debate about the gam­ing phe­nom­e­non that will be a dom­i­nant cul­tural force in this cen­tury.

♦ ♦ ♦

A
Limits of Working Memory →

George Miller’s famous 1957 paper, ‘The Magic Num­ber 7 Plus and Minus Two’ has been proven to be overly opti­mistic. Jeff Rouder and Nel­son Cowan’s study, pub­lished in the April Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences shows that the aver­age per­son strug­gles to keep just three or four things in their “work­ing mem­o­ry” or con­scious mind at one time.

♦ ♦ ♦

A
Ten Facts About Learning →

Don­ald Clark points to ten evidence-based facts about learn­ing.

♦ ♦ ♦

R
Put a Little Science in Your Life →

Brain Greene explains why sci­ence matters:

Sci­ence is a way of life. Sci­ence is a per­spec­tive. Sci­ence is the process that takes us from con­fu­sion to under­stand­ing in a man­ner that’s pre­cise, pre­dic­tive and reli­able — a trans­for­ma­tion, for those lucky enough to expe­ri­ence it, that is empow­er­ing and emo­tional. To be able to think through and grasp expla­na­tions — for every­thing from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal pat­terns con­firmed by exper­i­ment and obser­va­tion, is one of the most pre­cious of human experiences.

♦ ♦ ♦

R
Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science →

David Sloan Wil­son on design­ing the Human­i­ties Ini­tia­tive, a course con­ceived to cross the cul­tural chasm between the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, bring­ing together the strengths of both mind­sets to issues in evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy, and to avoid roman­ti­ciz­ing sci­ence or pre­sent­ing it as the ulti­mate arbiter of meaning:

You can study music, dance, nar­ra­tive sto­ry­telling and art­mak­ing sci­en­tif­i­cally, and you can con­clude that yes, they’re deeply bio­log­i­cally dri­ven, they’re essen­tial to our species, but there would still be some­thing miss­ing, and that thing is an appre­ci­a­tion for the work itself, a true under­stand­ing of its mean­ing in its cul­ture and context.

♦ ♦ ♦

R
Perceived Moral Blame Can Change the Memory of a Crime →

The inter­est­ing out­come of Pizarro’s study shows that people’s mem­ory of facts can be dis­torted by chang­ing details about an individual’s char­ac­ter. If the sub­jects thought Frank was a good guy, they remem­bered the bill at being $55; if they thought he is a bad guy, they remem­ber the bill was $65.

♦ ♦ ♦

E
Blogging – It’s Good for You →

The neu­ro­log­i­cal under­pin­nings sur­round­ing the ther­a­peu­tic ben­e­fits of expres­sive writ­ing are not clear. What is clear is that peo­ple cop­ing with can­cer diag­noses and other seri­ous con­di­tions are increas­ingly seek­ing – and find­ing – solace in the blo­gos­phere.

♦ ♦ ♦

V
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain →

Some brains do dete­ri­o­rate with age. But for most aging adults, much of what occurs is a grad­u­ally widen­ing focus of atten­tion and sift­ing through a clut­ter of infor­ma­tion that makes it more dif­fi­cult to latch onto just one fact like a name or a phone num­ber. This is a good thing.; it may increase the amount of infor­ma­tion avail­able to the con­scious mind.

♦ ♦ ♦

R
Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme →

Pat Ship­man explores the ironic legacy of Richard Dawkin’s The Self­ish Gene (1976): “The ben­e­fit to sci­ence of ‘The Self­ish Gene’ in trig­ger­ing a new under­stand­ing of the mag­nif­i­cent com­plex­ity of evo­lu­tion­ary processes must be weighed against the harm the book has done in pro­vok­ing a back­lash against science.

♦ ♦ ♦