Weekend's truly
off-topic but nevertheless interesting article links.
Previously
on MoreLiver's:
TECHNOLOGY
Score One for the Robo-Tutors – Inside
Higher Ed
In experiments at six public universities,
students assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on
“machine-guided learning” software -- with reduced face time with instructors
-- did just as well, in less time, as their counterparts in traditional,
instructor-centric versions of the courses.
Google's Self-Driving Car Gets Mixed Reviews – KTVZ
New Car Brings Thrills, Disappointment
BizDaily: Technology and ethics – BBC
(mp3)
What are the rights and wrong of sending robots
to war? Lesley Curwen meets innovators pushing the boundaries of technology and
ethics at the Future In Review (FiRe) conference in California. The actress Julia
Ormond tells us about using mobile phones to combat human trafficking. And
Sheryl Connelly a futurologist at Ford tells us how they anticipate what cars
the customers of 2030 will want to drive.
PSYCHOLOGY
Chimps' personalities are like people's, study
says – BBC
For years experts have debated whether great
apes truly display human-like personalities - or if such behaviour is simply
the anthropomorphic projections of human observers.
Interview with Daniel Kahneman: Debunking the
Myth of Intuition –
Spiegel
Can doctors and investment advisers be trusted?
And do we live more for experiences or memories? In a SPIEGEL interview, Nobel
Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses the innate weakness of
human thought, deceptive memories and the misleading power of intuition.
Why We Lie – WSJ
We like to believe that a few bad apples spoil
the virtuous bunch. But research shows that everyone cheats a little—right up
to the point where they lose their sense of integrity.
How Neuroscientists and Magicians Are Conjuring
Brain Insights – SciAm
Why are scientists working with sleight-of-hand
artists? Their tricks, honed through the decades, have revealed that people
respond to certain situations in specific ways. Like detectives looking for new
leads to solve a mystery, scientists can mine magicians’ knowledge for ideas to
test in the lab.
The Neuroscience of Effort – Wired
Such are the moment-by-moment melodramas of
work. It’s a constant cycle of intrinsic motivation battling against extrinsic
tedium, persistence against pleasure. We know what we need to do. And yet, it’s
always so much easier to do what we want to do.
Is there a cure for boredom? – Barking up the
wrong tree
The Feast – The
British Psychological Society
Tuck into our latest
round-up of the best psych and neuro links
BOOK AUTHORS, WRITING
'I Was There': On Kurt Vonnegut – The
Nation
“The cruelest thing you can do to Kerouac,”
Hanif Kureishi has a character say in The Buddha of Suburbia, “is reread him at
thirty-eight.” If that was true, I wondered as I opened the first two volumes
of the Library of America’s ongoing series of the complete novels, then what of Vonnegut at a
decade older still?
Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 1 – NYT
Philip K. Dick is arguably the most influential
writer of science fiction in the past half century. In his short and meteoric
career, he wrote 121 short stories and 45 novels.
Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S.
Thompson – brainpickings
Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life – brain
pickings
In Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life, Barnaby
Conrad and Monte Schulz, son of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, bring a
delightfully refreshing lens to the writing advice genre by asking 30 famous
authors and entertainers to each respond to a favorite Snoopy comic strip with
a 500-word essay on the triumphs and tribulations of the writing life.
Advice on writing research articles – Andrew Gelman
I’m going to start with my general advice after
reading and commenting on the two articles sent to me. I think this advice
should be of interest to nearly all the readers of this blog. Then I’ll link to
the articles and give some detailed comments.
SPACE
Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty – Washington
Monthly
This April 1980 Washington Monthly cover story
on the problems and progress of NASA's space shuttle program was written one
year before Columbia's first launch in 1981.
The Zero-G Spot – Outside
Michael Behar has a simple fantasy: to be the
first man on the planet to join the 100-mile-high club. But as he discovers in
his hot pursuit of the big bang, he's hardly alone. In fact, cosmic copulation
has become the hottest craze since the Kama Sutra.
King of the Cosmos – Playboy
A profile
of Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist
The inside story of the investigation—and the
catastrophe it laid bare
Into Orbit – and Beyond (1998) – The
Atlantic
How was the first space flight covered in the
media
The Coming Trip Around The Moon – The
New Republic
Original
article from the early days
SOCIETY
FiveBooks Interviews: Tariq Ramadan on Islam in
the West – The Browser
The Islamic scholar and commentator tells us
what it means to be Muslim and Western, and explains how mainstream views get
trapped between noisy extremism and a sensation-seeking media
FiveBooks Interviews: John Quiggin on Utopia – The Browser
The Australian economist and author of Zombie
Economics says we need to inspire people with a view of a better society that
we can achieve within our available resources
Envisioning Real Utopias: alternatives within
and beyond capitalism
– LSE
Professor Erik Olin Wright argues that we can be
simultaneously utopian and practical by pursuing projects for social
transformation within capitalism that point us in an emancipatory direction
beyond capitalism.
A revealing political crackdown on a usually
hidden form of art
Illegal drugs are one of the planet’s most
pressing problems. They shatter hundreds of millions of lives and wreak untold
social, economic and political damage in both consuming and producing nations.
In this column, ex-President of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo introduces
an eBook he edited on the issue that points very strongly in the direction of a
serious reconsideration of drug policy.
FiveBooks Interviews: Louise Foxcroft on the
History of Medicine and Addiction – The
Browser
The historian prescribes reading on medical
practices of the past, from treatments of madness and non-existent disease, to
drug use and the origins of hypochondria
OTHER
The end of fish, in one chart – Wonkblog
/ WP
Want to see how severely we humans are scouring
the oceans for fish? Check out this striking map from the World Wildlife Fund’s
2012 “Living Planet Report.”
The Art of Scientific Investigation (1957),
Part I: The Role of Chance-Opportunism and Openness in Creativity and Discovery – brainpickings
“To be perfectly original one should think much
and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has
learnt to think.”