Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About - David DiSalvo - Brainspin
Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife Several great psychology and neuroscience studies were published in 2009. Below I’ve chosen 10 that I think are among the most noteworthy, not just because they’re interesting, but useful as well. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Artificial Intelligence will not kill us all | WISDOMINATION
Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are worried the human race might be replaced by robots. A couple of problems with that: They never said that, until the news got exaggerated (to put it mildly) by clickbait science & tech tabloids.Although they did not say it, others did – and I disagree.It might be a good thing. From the top: such scandalising journalism is enormously irresponsible, because it warps public perception of science and technology into a cartoon, increasing the risk that important research and groundbreaking discoveries with incalculable benefits to human knowledge and well-being will (again) be opposed by misinformed screaming baboons. There is a gigantic difference between “AI researchers agree we need to develop this in beneficial and controlled ways”, which is what the open letter actually says, and “TWO GREATEST MINDS ALIVE SAY ROBOTS WILL KILL US ALL!” Now, onto the second point. An important distinction Strong AI is proper, self-aware* machine intelligence. Why common sense?
PARALLAX - StumbleUpon
Everyday Objects Under Electron Microscope
<div style="display:none"><img src=" ID>&oid=<Offer ID>" /></div> EgoTV 25 Everyday Objects Under an Electron Microscope digg March 13, 2012 at 5:24 am You come into contact with millions of different objects every day. Most Popular Today WTF Photo of the Day More Photos What’s Trending Now! Friends TruTV Maxim Magazine Uproxx © Hutch Media.
INTJ Profile
Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judgingby Marina Margaret Heiss Profile: INTJ Revision: 3.1 Date of Revision: 17 Oct 2009 To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of "definiteness", of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest. INTJs are known as the "Systems Builders" of the types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability. In the broadest terms, what INTJs "do" tends to be what they "know". Personal relationships, particularly romantic ones, can be the INTJ's Achilles heel. Functional Analysis by Joe Butt Introverted iNtuition INTJs are idea people. Extraverted Thinking Introverted Feeling U.S.
Does the comfort of conformity ease thoughts of death? - life - 25 February 2011
AS THE light at the end of the tunnel approaches, the need to belong to a group and be near loved ones may be among your final thoughts. So say Markus Quirin and his colleagues at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. The team prompted thoughts of death in 17 young men with an average age of 23 by asking them whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements such as "I am afraid of dying a painful death". At the same time, the men's brain activity was monitored using a functional MRI scanner. To compare the brain activity associated with thoughts of death with that coupled to another unpleasant experience, the team also prompted thoughts of dental pain using statements like "I panic when I am sitting in the dentist's waiting room". Quirin's team found that thoughts of death, but not of dental pain, triggered heightened activity in brain regions such as the right amygdala, which is associated with fear and anxiety. New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist
“Doomsday Seed Vault” in the Arctic – Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don’t (2007)
One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can’t be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world’s richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers. In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest ‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at. Did we miss something here? John H.
Why Do Some People Learn Faster? &124; Wired Science&&124; Wired.com
The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroenchephalography, or EEG. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. In this new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain, both of which appear in less than half a second.
