Her Blog, Brain Pickings, is excellent. Here’s her take on Kahneman. Basically a lesson in learning how thinking works by watching how brains fail…on thinking.
Author: jlolds
Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University
Google’s love of data explained…
Hat tip to my colleague Steve Fiore and yes, relatively old news, but the article was very interesting to me. It’s here [pdf].
Conflict analysis and resolution….
Long style piece, in the Atlantic by Robert Wright, here. The title is “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along”. But the scope is all of humanity. Tall order, good ideas.
There’s no privacy anymore…
At least on Acela, story here. I’ve had my own similar experiences over the years so I believe the author.
Space Travel Writ Large from the Economist…
It’s here. And roughly speaking it’s about how to design an interstellar ship (unmanned first) that would be practical….solutions seem to range broadly.
I’m a real believer in eventual human exploration of the entire solar system. Star Trek, not so much.
Oxford, then and now…
FT’s Simon Kuper remembers the old Oxford University, here. Spoiler alert: he thinks the current Oxford is a whole lot better.
The best tuition cap of all?
Hat tip to Steve Fiore, the idea from Robert Samuels is here. Money quote:
Rather than directly paying for public higher-education institutions, state and federal governments have often relied on tax deductions and credits to support individual students. But what this system has achieved is a tremendous subsidy for upper-middle-class and wealthy families, while lower-income students are forced to take out huge loans to pay for their education.
It’ll be interesting to see what the future of public higher ed really looks like. My guess is qualitatively different from what we have today.
iBiology goes live…
Website here. Brain child of Nobel Laureate Ron Vale and led by my friend and colleague, Dr. Sarah Goodwin. In a sense, doing for life sciences what Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have been doing for economics at Marginal Revolution University. The key is the modularity. I’ll be plugging some of iBiology’s content into my cellular neuroscience course next semester.
Using social media as a social "telescope"…
More on the replication problem in Science…from The Economist
The article is here. The figure above demonstrates the non-fraud side of the problem. Central to the problem is the concept of statistical power. A lot of published science studies are statistically underpowered. Kudos to The Economist for publishing a serious and understandable piece about this problem.
