Sapere Aude
Tag: psychology
stickK is designed to promote a healthier lifestyle by allowing users to create “Commitment Contracts” that oblige them to follow through with commitments such as exercise and quitting smoking.
behavioral econ startup. the contacts pledged so far have an average value of $50. this should be interesting once we are talking real money
Communicators take on the Qualities They Describe in Others “say nice things about other people – it will make you, or possible indicate you already are, a nicer person.”
Of course, such thinking is absurd; thinking that flooded cities and continent-spanning droughts and forest fires will simply be a convenient way to escape your mortgage payments is ridiculous. Viewing famine, mass extinction, and global human displacement into diarrhea-wracked refugee camps as some sort of Outward Bound holiday – on the scale of a planet – overlooks some rather obvious downsides to the potentially catastrophic impact of uncontrolled climate alteration. Whether you’re talking about infant mortality, skin cancer, mass violence and rape, waterborne diseases, vermin, blindness, drowning, and so on, climate change entails radically negative effects that aren’t being factored into these escapist thought processes. But none of those things are depicted in these images.
he makes the good point that it is better to scare breeders with “your kids will drown” than to show them submerged manhattan for them to use their SUV less.
ha. that already happened. sarah often claims she married a robot 🙂
The goal of Domo is to contribute a novel approach to robot manipulation in unstructured environments. The approach is centered on integrating compliant and force sensitive manipulators into a behavior based architecture that accomplishes useful manipulation tasks in human environments.
this robot allegedly explores the uncanny valley even further than kismet
a fear of our own mortality guides many of our political choices without our ever realizing it.
time for SENS
He tried to explain what drew him to his computer. “When I’m talking to Cindy or you like this, face-to-face,, it’s hard for me to say what I feel.” As Tommy, however, the words came easily. And then there was Jessi. He loved her, or at least believed he loved her, though he knew he was “never going to meet her.” His plan was to “kill Tommy off” in Iraq, but Cindy intervened too soon. He nearly committed suicide because of his guilt about having lied to Jessi. Why, I asked, when he was suspicious of so much of what Jessi said, did he believe she was who she claimed? “She kept sending pictures. 1 picture, maybe not. But there were so many pictures over a period of time.”
too funny. both sides were internet dogs, as it were
All of the paranormal effects reported are very small, but a meta-meta analysis across all the 1019 experiments studied yields odds against the results being due to chance of 1.3×10e104 to 1.
- Non-verbal IQ has risen more rapidly than has verbal IQ.
- Performance gains are smallest on the most culturally specific tests, and largest on the most abstract tests.
- Performance gains, as they occur over time, are roughly constant for all age groups.
- Problem-solving abilities have seen the biggest performance gains.
IQ is rising across all age groupsw
hy we are now much more intelligent than our grandparents, by the discoverer of the flynn effect.
dementia rates among people 65 and older in England and Wales have plummeted by 25% over the past 20 years, to 6.2% from 8.3%, a trend that is probably occurring across developed countries and that could have major social and economic implications for families and societies.
if there is a flynn effect for dementia, this means life expectancy isn’t just going up, but what i would call useful life expectancy, ie when you are healthy enough to actually enjoy life, is also going up.
People over age 50 are scoring better on cognitive tests than people of the same age did in the past — a trend that could be linked to higher education rates and increased use of technology in our daily lives, according to a new study published in an open-access paper in the journal PLOS ONE. But the study also showed that average physical health of the older population has declined.
there may be a flynn effect for dogs:
“The big lesson is to recognize that dogs are smarter than we think, and given time, patience and enough enjoyable reinforcement, we can teach them just about anything.”
It’s true that dogs everywhere are doing things that would have been unimaginable in the Alpo era. Researchers trained shepherds and retrievers to sniff out lab samples containing ovarian cancer. Scent hounds are also being used to forecast epileptic seizures and potentially life-threatening infections. A black Labrador was accurate 98% of the time in picking up early-stage signs of colon cancer
what do getting locked in with long term phone contracts and losing your shirt with subprime mortgages have in common? financial illiteracy, especially the lack of understanding what net present value means.
2013-06-07:
Many people who gave themselves high marks for managing their finances also were using non-bank borrowing methods, such as payday loans, or had overdrawn their checking accounts.
I always thought dunning-kruger explained people’s infatuation with “owning” real estate, but it turns out it also explains their general financial ineptitude.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 