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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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POPSthe Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind "To a certain extent, memories are societal properties," says Adam Kolber, a visiting professor at Princeton. "We really need to articulate a moral code that governs all this," warns Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist.
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POPSGet an @live.com email address (Better Hurry) If you couldn't get a satisfying mail account at Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or Gmail, you can now get it at live.com. Although it's not yet official, it's quite easy to get a mail address like your.name@live.com Better hurry, if you want a short address
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POPSSynesthetes - people who hear colors, see flavors ... "For people of a poetic bent, this is quite useful: You get to tell your date that her eyes glow like the moon, hair ripples like the ocean and skin is smoother than a friendly corporate takeover. (Fine, I'm not a poet.) But life wasn't always so romantic. The arts are a latter-day human characteristic, one that requires a certain amount of security and stability to flourish. So how did it develop? To help our ancestors climb trees, said Ramachandran. Doing so requires a vision-informed mental map of the branches before us, as well as a touch-informed mental map of our limbs' positions. Somehow these have to correlate. Which is quite a trick, when you think about it."
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POPSGoogle's Secret Weapon: MapReduce As the inventors of MapReduce noted in a recent paper, "It has been used across a wide range of domains within Google including: large-scale machine learning problems; clustering problems...; extracting data to produce reports of popular queries; extracting properties of Web pages for new experiments and products...; processing of satellite imagery data; language model processing for statistical machine translation, and; large-scale graph computation." Or in other words, the tasks Google performs are similar to the functions performed by the brain: learning, categorization, vision and language.
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POPSAre Smart Drugs the Answer to Bad Moods—and a Bad Economy? "Artists and lawyers, musicians and businesspeople mingle, talk, and imbibe that eternally popular feel-good drug, alcohol. The slightly pungent scent of marijuana drifts in from a room off the kitchen, where joints are passed among a dozen people, some of them old enough to have been smoking marijuana as a recreational drug since the 1960s. Despite the fears of their worried parents in the hippie heyday, most of these folks have ended up successful; they say that they are using pot to unwind, de-stress, and be more sociable".
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POPSSearching in space and minds: New research suggests underlying link Some people might be more inclined to one search mode or the other, having a lesser ability to focus on a given task or difficulty letting go of an idea. An extreme form of the exploratory cognitive style would be someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. An extreme form of the exploitive cognitive style would be someone with obsessive compulsive disorder.
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POPSThe Internet Belongs To Everyone Gawd, I hope some dumb arse doesn't decide to bring freedom and democracy to the Internet one day. I like our oppressive and anarchistic web just the way it is.
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POPSWeb facts erode research “The higher-quality materials are not available to them on or off line,” says Tara Brabazon, professor of media at the University of Brighton. She says that Google in itself is not the problem, but students' over-reliance “on any single platform or media ”. But US research suggests that academics may struggle to undo such behaviour. “It is too late to reverse-engineer deeply ingrained habits, notably an uncritical trust in branded search engines to deliver quick fixes.”
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POPSThe Devil’s Guide to Google # Become a copyright lawyer, search Google Images for copyright violations committed by teenagers, and threaten their parents to pay you hard cash or be sued. :lol:
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POPSA crowd of people can gives accurate responses to questions compared to individual a crowd of people usually gives more accurate responses to questions compared to a mere individual" how can we be confident that we are giving a good answer? Psychologists Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig from the University of Basel wanted to know if individuals could come up with better answers using a technique they designed and called "dialectical bootstrapping."
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POPSFreebase - a database about everything Part of what makes this open database unique is that it spans domains, but requires that a particular topic exist only once in Freebase -- even if it might normally be found in multiple databases. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger would appear in a movie database as an actor, a political database as a governor, and in a bodybuilder database as a Mr. Universe. In Freebase, however, there is only one topic for Arnold Schwarzenegger that brings all these facets together. The unified topic is a single reconciled identity, which makes it easier to find and contribute information about the linked world we live in.
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POPSUK primary education 'is deficient' I may disagree with some of the detail but this is welcome and long overdue. In fact it makes me rather cross because experienced teachers in primary education have been saying this for 20 years now. It'll be interesting to see if the government takes any notice.
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POPSGoogle Cheat Sheet This two page Google Cheat Sheet lists all Google services and tools as well as background information. The Cheat Sheet offers a great reference to grasp of basic to advance Google query building concepts and ideas.' You won't find this cheat sheet on Google, it was put together by the site owner for reference material. The Cheat Sheet is a two page .pdf download. Google Cheat Sheet
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POPSWhen it's on the tip of your toungue If a picture paints a thousand words, a metaphor paints a million pictures. I love metaphors,so I just thought I'd do a clip then I figured if it was going to fit I was going to have to be more specific. I am amazed at the way a metaphor can translate ideas between people, that may have been mutually exclusive. The way when there is a completely new concept related, we may be unable to find any direct analogy, but a metaphor can provide enough clues to transmit understanding. It can be a case of I can't explain exactly, but I can show you where to look. The way poets, musicians, artists, writers use metaphors creatively to allow new ideas or emotions to be accepted more easily.
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POPS Vagus Nerve Stimulation Lifts Depression The amazing vagus nerve runs through the body and is involved in everything from sneezing to orgasm. As a relayer of signals from the brain to the rest of the body and back, it plays a key part in emotional and feeling states.
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POPSShould XXX sites have to use a .XXX domain name? Once again a report shows why we can not legislate proper behavior. I personally think that an XXX domain would be a great way for all pornographers to have their own home on the web place to gather. But like other legislation of this nature it would be worthless to attempt if they are going to allow the porn industry to continue to cloak itself in the .com world to appear legitimate. Those who wish to seek out this type of "entertainment" will find it no matter where it resides in the community. Therefore creating a virtual "Red Light District" would probably work as well as prohibition did. This one certainly belongs in the LOONY BIN.
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POPSBBC: "'Reduction' seen in abuse sites" "These websites, although reducing in number, represent an extremely serious problem," said Peter Robbins, chief executive of the IWF. In its report, the IWF said: "1,536 domains represent a problem of a scale which can be seriously targeted and significantly disrupted through international efforts." It said that about 69% of the children depicted in the images it saw were between zero and 10. About 24% involved children aged six or under. About 58% of the images seen showed the most serious sorts of abuse - involving rape or torture" ... BBC
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