This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them — Netflix telling them what movies they should watch, Amazon telling them what books they should read — so this is an academic interest with real-world applications,” said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,” he added, “they know it will make them employable.
Posts tagged interesting
Posted 2 months ago
Chewing gum helps you concentrate for longer
Chewing gum can help you stay focused for longer on tasks that require continuous monitoring.
This is the finding of new research by Kate Morgan and colleagues from Cardiff University published in the British Journal of Psychology.
Previous research has shown that chewing gum can improve concentration in visual memory tasks. This study focussed on the potential benefits of chewing gum during an audio memory task.
Kate Morgan, author of the study explained: “It’s been well established by previous research that chewing gum can benefit some areas of cognition. In our study we focussed on an audio task that involved short-term memory recall to see if chewing gum would improve concentration; especially in the latter stages of the task.”
The study involved 38 participants being split in to two groups. Both groups completed a 30 minute audio task that involved listening to a list of numbers from 1-9 being read out in a random manner. Participants were scored on how accurately and quickly they were able to detect a sequence of odd-even-odd numbers, such as 7-2-1. Participants also completed questionnaires on their mood both before and after the task.
The results showed that participants who chewed gum had quicker reaction times and more accurate results than the participants who didn’t chew gum. This was especially the case towards the latter parts of the task.
Kate explained: “Interestingly participants who didn’t chew gum performed slightly better at the beginning of the task but were overtaken by the end. This suggests that chewing gum helps us focus on tasks that require continuous monitoring over a longer amount of time.”
The study was discussed in Radio Four Today programme.
(Image: iStock)
Posted 2 months ago
Great Teachers Can't Save America's Schools
Everybody loves a great teacher. When a student crosses paths with one, the influence can reverberate well beyond the last day of school. In last year’s State of the Union address, President Obama informed us that a “good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000,” a claim supported by a widely reported study by economists at Harvard and Columbia universities.
But by focusing too heavily on the teachers themselves, Obama may have missed an opportunity to bring out a far deeper problem. In this year’s address, he should focus on the disconnected and muddled curriculum that does more damage to our schools and colleges than bad teachers do.
» via The Atlantic
Posted 2 months ago
The feeling of uncertainty feels like pain, when you can’t predict when the lights will come back on and you’re holding multiple possible futures in your head. That turns out to be cognitively exhausting. And the more we can predict the future, the more rewarded we feel. The less we can predict the future, the more threatened we feel. As soon as any ambiguity arises in even a very simple activity, we get a threat response. So we are driven to create certainty.
Posted 2 months ago
We asked Garodnick if any of these angry drivers felt the city was intentionally trying to trick them, to which he replied: “Yes yes yes yes yes! That was part of the sadness of all of it – that people actually think that the city is deliberately trying to confuse them in order to give tickets. And that perception alone is a problem.” (via Anatomy of a Parking Sign That Actually Makes Sense - Emily Badger - The Atlantic Cities)
Posted 2 months ago
It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.
But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.
Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.
David Cain, “Procrastination Is Not Laziness” (via pawneeparksdepartment)
This totally justifies every excuse I’ve been giving myself from not doing that thing I’m supposed to do.
(via aaronmoles)
Posted 4 months ago
At its most basic level, tinkering is making something genuinely new out of the things that already surround us. Secondly, tinkering is something that happens without an initial sense of purpose, or at least with a purpose quite different from the one originally identified. Tinkering also emanates from a place of passion or obsession. Lastly, tinkering is a disruptive act in which the tinkerer pivots from history and begins a new journey that results in innovation, invention, and illumination.
Posted 4 months ago
Great Teachers Can't Save America's Schools
Everybody loves a great teacher. When a student crosses paths with one, the influence can reverberate well beyond the last day of school. In last year’s State of the Union address, President Obama informed us that a “good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000,” a claim supported by a widely reported study by economists at Harvard and Columbia universities.
But by focusing too heavily on the teachers themselves, Obama may have missed an opportunity to bring out a far deeper problem. In this year’s address, he should focus on the disconnected and muddled curriculum that does more damage to our schools and colleges than bad teachers do.
» via The Atlantic
Posted 5 months ago
Can parents share child-raising responsibilities equally?
“Across the country, parents are struggling through what many of us thought would come easily: an authentic split-down-the-middle approach. Is it working?
For a fortunate family like the Kranenburgs, it is, but it’s a no-margin, high-anxiety lifestyle. For the majority of parents who have the ability and inclination to divvy up responsibilities equally, the answer can be more complicated. Subtract the zucchini and the deck, the plush bathrobe and the swimming pool. Add money woes or work rigidity or marital conflict or a child who needs more attention. Voila, we have fathers and mothers reporting unprecedented levels of stress and resentment.”
And further on:
A repercussion of this lack of recognition is that there is little advocacy for structural change. By the time parents realize what they’re up against, they don’t have time to mobilize for political or economic reform on the family front. They’re too busy dashing between the afternoon meeting and ballet class and bickering about who isn’t multi-tasking enough.
“I think what you have to do is recognize together where society is going to push you into traditional roles,” Amy Vachon says. She says she and Marc are vigilant, constantly pointing out imbalances to each other, such as the mother-dominated PTA, and acknowledging when one is veering back toward traditional behavior. “We talk and keep our eyes open all the time. Otherwise, we would fall into the trap.”
I find this extraordinarily daunting. Thoughts?
Posted 6 months ago
ub14:
Seven Scenes from Joe Biden’s Big Adventure ‘Looking for Pies’ at Costco
I love this. Do you think he called up the Costco CEO after that NYT article went viral and said, hey, I’m coming over for some pies? Because I’d want to ride that kind of good PR too.
Posted 6 months ago
NASA And Google Chief Test-Launch An Internet That Works In Space
This month, NASA and the European Space Agency completed the first test of an Internet designed for outer space: Disruption Tolerant Networking, or DTN. Led by Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google, the team has spent the past decade developing an interplanetary Internet, impervious to the many challenges involved in transmitting information over many millions of miles. Internet historians will know Cerf as one of the original authors of this planet’s Internet. “The methods we use in the terrestrial Internet don’t quite work when we’re going at interplanetary distances,” Cerf explains in a NASA-produced video. “After quite a bit of work, we realized we needed to design a new set of communication protocols.”
» via Fast Company
Posted 6 months ago
Costco’s average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam’s Club. And Costco’s health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.” Mr. Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street’s assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street’s profit demands. Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco’s customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers’ expense. “This is not altruistic,” he said. “This is good business.
How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart - New York Times (via alexdarke)
This is good business. Happy employees mean happy and well served customers.
(via justshy)
Costco is my favorite place!
Posted 6 months ago
Wikipedia is like a calculator in math classes. What if there was a math assignment where students were to do long division? Would it be wrong for the students to use a calculator? I think it depends. Why are they doing long division? In the past, long division was taught in schools so that students could divide numbers. But if the goal is to divide stuff, a calculator would make more sense. There is another reason to teach long division: to give insight into how division works and what place value means. If this is the goal, the calculator actually doesn’t help. It just skips the whole processes, so it would be a bad-thing.
Posted 6 months ago
For the most part, people have no idea the extent to which they are being followed and watched, analyzed and targeted, bought and sold. Now, more than ever, we need a national digital and data literacy effort on the scale of the anti-Big Tobacco campaign to address the escalating privacy and security issues facing citizens and their data.
Posted 6 months ago
He says that when we feel powerful, the brain structures associated with positive feelings, with rewards, are much more activated than the structures that help steer us away from bad choices. In other words, when we feel powerful, we are more likely to focus on the things we enjoy, the things that are rewarding to us, and ignore the potential consequences.
