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POPSAwesome research/ Homework resource I only found this the other day and mostly I'm clipping it for my own uses; however, it's a great resource and I thought I'd share. The site itself has pretty cool info too. 'Hope you guys like the clip.
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POPS26% of Americans don't know that earth revolves around sun (my understanding is that the 71.2% who correctly said that it takes the earth 1 year to revolve around the sun is actually 71.2% of the 73.6% of respondents who correctly said the earth revolves around the sun. That means that only 52.4% of all Americans know it takes the earth one year to revolve around the sun. That noise you just heard is my jaw hitting the floor. Via Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber
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POPSWhy The Loudest are Often the Most Wrong This classic paper by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments , examines the psychological reasons for the unfortunately common correlation between ignorance and confidence. We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." ( PDF here .)
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POPSPoverty Hurts Been waiting for science to confirm what I always knew & felt growing up in poverty. It's not just about the money, it's the pain that makes it traumatic. This article was life-validating.
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POPSCan human consciousness survive without a brain? "Why do you think there is such resistance to studies like yours? Because we're pushing through the boundaries of science, working against assumptions and perceptions that have been fixed. A lot of people hold this idea that, well, when you die, you die; that's it. Death is a moment — you know you're either dead or alive. All these things are not scientifically valid, but they're social perceptions.How is technology challenging the perception that death is a moment?"
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POPSMIT Finds Cure For Fear The social benefits of an anti-fear drug are huge, but I also wonder about its abuses... what if we forced soldiers in the field to take it? -David M. Ewalt
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POPSWho's Minding the Mind? New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it. In describing my own research or cognitive science in general to people, the most difficult obstacle I would eventually encounter was the stubborn human belief that there was a independent entity — a free will — in charge of everything important that goes on in their brain. While science has been steadily dismantling this understandable misconception for decades, recent studies on subconscious social priming like these would have helped me demonstrate my point. To be fair, it's more than a little disconcerting to realize what a messy mix of competing, semi-independent, multi-layered neural modules are responsible for producing our daily behavior.
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POPSModern day slavery Check the source for ways to help end modern day slavery. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King Jr.,
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POPSMan Made Life Whoa. The implications from this will be enormous. If this project succeeds expect a concerted campaign of denial and attack from the religious conservatives.
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POPS Wondeful images - 2000 years of human culture Awards competition winner -Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.
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POPSWikipedia and the Meaning of Truth
These policies have become the social contract for Wikipedia's army of apparently insomniac volunteers. Thanks to them, incorrect information generally disappears quite quickly. So how do the Wikipedians decide what's true and what's not? On what is their epistemology based? Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wiki
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POPS(Rethinking) Gender " What is gender anyway? It is certainly more than the physical details of what's between our legs".
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POPSSave the languages, save the world Linguistic integrity is as important to our survival as a species as environmentalism. Check out the source to see why. Many resources and information at www.terralingua.org.
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POPSBy imagining many possible worlds fiction can chang our Minds "For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for bookyou. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction—is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people. This is a strong argument for schools to continue to focus on the literary arts, not just history, science, and social studies. But is the idea of fiction being good for you merely wishful thinking?'
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POPSShe's Her Own Twin In human biology, a chimera is an organism with at least two genetically distinct types of cells -- or, in other words, someone meant to be a twin. But while in the mother's womb, two fertilized eggs fuse, becoming one fetus that carries two distinct genetic codes -- two separate strands of DNA. The twin is invisible, but for chimeras the twin lives microscopically inside the body as DNA.
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POPSRemedial Fascism for Confused Conservatives Hitler said Germany had collapsed because of loose morals, religious tolerance, the liberal media and all the usual boogeymen that we hear about today from conservatives. What we see with Jonah Goldberg and his entourage of pseudointellectuals is an effort to destroy the meaning of the word "Fascism" and to reduce Hitler to a buffoonish anti-Semite, rather than a devious master propagandist.
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POPSWhy the Brain Follows the Rules Not surprisingly, the threat of punishment made people act more fairly. In the “punishment threat condition” people split the money close to equally. However, when Person B had no recourse, the people given the money acted very differently and gave away, on average, less than 10 percent of the money. When the researchers looked at the brain activity of people playing this simple game, they found a consistent pattern. One region in the frontal lobes, the orbitofrontal cortex, seemed to be responsible for evaluating the potential for punishment. In other words, it figured out whether or not violating the social norm would get us in trouble. A second brain region, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was responsible for inhibiting the natural tendency to keep most of the money (this would be the greedy thing to do) if this action might lead to future punishment. Interestingly, these brain areas only were activated when the threat of punishment came from a real person, and not a compute
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POPS "Dudes, It's the 21st century Evolve! girl can be smart & sexy, science-y & sleek" ;-) "When physicist Lisa Randall posed for Vogue a couple of years ago, there were all sorts of outrageous criticisms of how she was playing into appearance-obsessed stereotypes and hurting the image of women in physics, blah, blah, blah. No one stopped to marvel at how incredible it was that Vogue -- which reaches millions of women around the globe each month who would never, in a million years, pick up a book or article about science -- chose to feature a woman scientist in its pages at all. If even a fraction of those millions of readers worldwide had their perceptions of female scientists changed for the better, huzzah! "
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