It’s one thing to give a TED talk, and quite another to conduct further research during the very TED talk you’re giving. In a recent, thought-provoking post, Jan Chipchase, the well-known Nokia design anthropologist, confessed to just how disingenuous he found the applause that greeted him two years earlier. You might think that such an [...]
In an article entitled “Looking Differently at ADHD,” Julie Hail Flory reframes so-called attention deficit in terms of “memory retrieval”, or the “failure of active maintenance.” It happens to us all – you walk to the refrigerator, open the door, then stand there, unable to remember why you went to the kitchen in the first [...]
If wondering what it’s like to be a bat, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously did in a 1974 essay, no longer sates our appetite for the futile, designing simulations for them might. For more than thirty years now, as chronicled in Richard D’Eath’s extensive review, “Can video images imitate real stimuli in animal behaviour [...]
Responses to Vul et al.’s article on fMRI abuse, which proved as much of a “bombshell” as first predicted, are now too numerous to list. Needless to say, several of the authors of studies Vul criticized quickly responded with a defense [pdf] of their work, to which Vul in turn replied with a rebuttal of [...]
Originally advanced by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in a 1982 Atlantic article, the “broken windows theory” — which claims “that a decrease in visible signs of public disorder would lead to a reduction in crime rates” — continues to be a source of debate. Though it “helped make community policing commonplace, sparked [...]
Joanne Faulkner of What Sorts of People has a post up on what ought to now be known as the Gould affair, in reference to the well-known Sokal hoax — which continues to haunt the postmodern left more than ten years after its perpetration. Faulkner summarizes the turn of events thus far: Keith Windschuttle, editor [...]
A passage from Walter Benjamin, though from a different time, could just as well be said today of those who snicker at the ‘obscenity’ of social media. “(In Moscow I lived in a hotel in which almost all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan lamas who had come to Moscow for a congress of Buddhist [...]
Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks links to a forthcoming Perspectives on Psychological Science article by Edward Vul et al. that is sure to prove a “bombshell” for the field of cognitive neuroscience. Vul’s analysis demonstrates, in rigorous detail, how the too-good-to-be-true results of (mostly) headline studies are produced by complex statistical errors and biases. Vul’s [...]
Massimo Pigliucci of Rationally Speaking has a short post up on the many problems with “the idea that the DNA sequence of an organism’s genome is analogous to a computer ‘program,’ and that it provides the ‘blueprint’ for building said organism.” He then goes on to list the many ways in which this idea of [...]
Studies of the effects of class on the brain tend to invoke culture and environment as the predominant cause for distinctions. For example, a recent study of the respective effects of wealth and poverty on children’s brains found that “normal nine and 10-year-olds from rich and poor backgrounds had differing electrical activity in a part [...]
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