Alfred Korzybski. Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory". Early life and career[edit] Korzybski was educated at the Warsaw University of Technology in engineering. His first book, Manhood of Humanity, was published in 1921. General semantics[edit] Korzybski maintained that humans are limited in what they know by (1) the structure of their nervous systems, and (2) the structure of their languages.
"To be"[edit] Anecdotes[edit] Reception[edit] Quotation[edit] Does Depression Help Us Think Better? | Wired Science Why do people get depressed? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Once that malfunction happens — perhaps it’s an errant gene triggering a shortage of some happy chemical — we sink into a emotional stupor and need medical treatment. But this pat explanation obscures a lingering paradox of depression, which is that the mental illness is extremely common. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted by the god-awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything.
We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. In recent years, a small cadre of researchers has begun exploring this apparent paradox, trying to understand why states of such extreme sadness are so widespread. Thomson and Andrews wondered if, just maybe, rumination wasn’t all bad. Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. Grand Theft Attention: video games and the brain. Having recently come off a Red Dead Redemption jag, I decided, as an act of penance, to review the latest studies on the cognitive effects of video games. Because videogaming has become such a popular pastime so quickly, it has, like television before it, become a focus of psychological and neuroscientific experiments.
The research has, on balance, tempered fears that video games would turn players into boggle-eyed, bloody-minded droogs intent on ultraviolence. The evidence suggests that spending a lot of time playing action games – the ones in which you run around killing things before they kill you (there are lots of variations on that theme) – actually improves certain cognitive functions, such as hand-eye coordination and visual acuity, and can speed up reaction times. In retrospect, these findings shouldn’t have come as a surprise. But these studies have also come to be interpreted in broader terms. If only it were so. Recent studies back up this point. Ornithopter Flight. My Blackberry Is Not Working! - The One Ronnie, Preview - BBC One. Son Of God At Risk From Social Networking. A good friend of mine sent me a link to a really great viral video entitled “The Digital Story of Nativity (or Christmas 2.0)” and it set us wondering if Christmas would ever have survived in the socially networked world of today.
Have a watch for yourself… Suddenly the three wise men don’t look so wise, and even though Joseph was a humble carpenter, there are a few basic rules he could benefit from when it comes to sharing information online. Such a liberal and open use of social media could have halted the development of a world religion in its tracks and Christmas may never have come to be. What the blazes am I talking about? It is never a good idea to use an unprotected social network profile to post information regarding your whereabouts, particularly if that post betrays the fact that you are not at home. It seems Joseph may have been lucky though, as only three strangers showed up for the birth, and they even had the decency to show up bearing gifts.
The secret of self-control. In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks.
Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” Although Carolyn has no direct memory of the experiment, and the scientists would not release any information about the subjects, she strongly suspects that she was able to delay gratification. Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer.
Most of the children were like Craig. Smapte on deviantART. Kinect x-ray hack: see your bones! Another Kinect hack has appeared and it is ACE. The Kinect x-ray hack uses the Microsoft motion controller to allow you to see your skeleton on your HDTV as if it has been turned into an x-ray machine. The image you see is based on a cross section from a medical data image set.
The Kinect x-ray hack was created by the Technische Universitat Munchen as part of a Medical Augmented Reality projects programme. The skeleton is not perfectly accurate but it’s pretty impressive nonetheless. You can see the Kinect x-ray hack in action below. Check out the Kinect x-ray hack after the break then tell us what you make of it and what other Kinect hacks you’re hoping to see… Out now | £129 | Kinect (via Wired)