See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future
The evolutionary causes of the Internet’s inescapable charisma
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So here you are, once again, on the Internet. (Hello, there. Welcome back, friend.) Here you are, another Norm within the Cheers that is the World Wide Web, hanging out in the place where everybody (or, more likely, nobody) knows your name.
But why are you really here? I mean, why are you really here? Why, ultimately, do you — and, because I’m right here with you, we — keep coming back to this crazy place, day after day?
It’s easy to attribute the web’s ongoing magnetism to the powerful combination that is “human connection” and “cat videos”; that isn’t the full story, though. The Internet is beguiling not just because of its content, but because of its structure.
That’s according to Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. The Internet, Sheffield told told LiveScience, offers the same kind of incentives and rewards that, say, slot machines do: You could pull several — even several hundred — rounds of duds (cherry-bar-7! bell-bell-lemon! unfunny “humor” piece! terrible listicle! bell-bell-lemon!). But when you get that one payoff — when you hit even the smallest of jackpots — your patience is rewarded. The monotony of the arm-pulls or the button-presses seems to be justified by the win. You get a rush of dopamine. You are happy. (For more on how this works, check out the excellent “No Armed Bandit” episode of Roman Mars’s 99 Percent Invisible podcast.)
See on theatlantic.com
See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future
Marcus du Sautoy: A physicist has formulated a mathematical theory that purports to explain why the universe works the way it does – and it feels like ‘the answer’
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Two years ago, a mathematician and physicist whom I’ve known for more than 20 years arranged to meet me in a bar in New York. What he was about to show me, he explained, were ideas that he’d been working on for the past two decades. As he took me through the equations he had been formulating I began to see emerging before my eyes potential answers for many of the major problems in physics. It was an extremely exciting, daring proposal, but also mathematically so natural that one could not but feel that it smelled right.
He has spent the past two years taking me through the ins and outs of his theory and that initial feeling that I was looking at “the answer” has not waned. On Thursday in Oxford he will begin to outline his ideas to the rest of the mathematics and physics community. If he is right, his name will be an easy one to remember: Eric Weinstein.
See on guardian.co.uk
See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future
Something really interesting happens in the curation process, because stories don’t have intrinsic value. An unshared story is basically like rubbish, lying around without any value. Stories gain their meaning and value by sharing, but it’s not as simple as that. The curator imparts her own value, status and trust, upon the story.
Curators represent a new type of tribal leadership that operates bottom-up and peer to peer. As a member of a tribe, curators will always be more native and relevant than any outsiders will ever be. Within a tribe they are not only appreciated for leveraging their insider skills, but for sustaining and developing their culture.
See on tribaling.com
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I’ve concluded that the goal of most college courses should not be knowledge but engaging in certain intellectual exercises. For the last few years I’ve had the privilege of teaching a seminar to first-year Honors students in which we read a wide range of wonderful texts, from Plato and Thucydides to Calvino and Nabokov. We have lively discussions that require a thorough knowledge of the text, and the students write excellent papers that give close readings of particular passages. But the half-life of their detailed knowledge is probably far less than a year. The goal of the course is simply that they have had close encounters with some great writing.
What’s the value of such encounters? They make students vividly aware of new possibilities for intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment—pleasure, to give its proper name. They may not enjoy every book we read, but they enjoy some of them and learn that—and how—this sort of thing (Greek philosophy, modernist literature) can be enjoyable. They may never again exploit the possibility, but it remains part of their lives, something that may start to bud again when they see a review of a new translation of Homer or a biography of T. S. Eliot, or when “Tartuffe” or “The Seagull” in playing at a local theater.
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Everyone knows that cockroaches are the ultimate survivors, with enough evolutionary tricks up their carapaces to have thrived for 350 million years and to have completely adapted to the human species.
But the nature of the adaptation that researchers in North Carolina described on Thursday in the journal Science is impressive even for such an ancient, ineradicable lineage, experts say. Some populations of cockroaches evolved a simple, highly effective defense against sweet-tasting poison baits: They switched their internal chemistry around so that glucose, a form of sugar that is a sweet come-hither to countless forms of life, tastes bitter.
The way the roach’s senses changed, experts say, is an elegant example of quick evolutionary change in behavior, and offers the multibillion-dollar pest control industry valuable insights into enemy secrets, perhaps even revealing some clues for the fight against malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which are far more dangerous to human health than roaches. (via Some Cockroaches Avoid Sweet Flavors as a Defense - NYTimes.com)
See on Scoop.it - Cyborg Lives
I In an age when “extremely violent and sadistic imagery is two clicks away” school sex education is struggling to keep pace, a study suggests.
Pornography can distort children’s attitudes to sex said Deputy Children’s Commissioner Sue Berelowitz.
Urgent action is needed to develop children’s resilience to extremely graphic types of porn argues the study.
The government said its curriculum changes would teach children from the age of five to stay safe online.
The report, led by the University of Middlesex and commissioned by the Office of The Children’s Commissioner, suggests some children are exposed to pornography while still at primary school, and the proportion increases with age with “a significant proportion of children and young people” viewing pornography.
Lessons on relationships should start in primary school, it argues, while relationships and sex education should be compulsory in all schools and include time for pupils to discuss the impact of pornography.
Some types of online porn are “very different” to what today’s parents may have seen as children, said Ms Berelowitz.
“Just a few clicks away on any mobile phone, on any tablet for example, children can find really graphic depictions of extreme and violent sexual acts.”
The report suggests that pornography can affect attitudes and behaviour among children and young people.
See on bbc.co.uk
Scientists have built a digital camera inspired by the compound eyes of insects like bees and flies. The camera’s hemispherical array of 180 microlenses gives it a 160 degree field of view and the ability to focus simultaneously on objects at different depths.
Human eyes, and virtually all cameras, use a single lens to focus light onto a light-sensitive tissue or material. That arrangement can produce high-resolution images, but compound eyes offer different advantages. They can provide a more panoramic view, for example, and remarkable depth perception.
The new artificial version, created by by John Rogers and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and described today in Nature, could potentially be developed for use in security cameras or surgical endoscopes.
“The resolution is roughly equivalent to that of a fire ant or a bark beetle,” Rogers wrote in an email to Wired. “With manufacturing systems more like those in industry, and less like the academic, research setups that we are currently using, we feel that it is possible to get to the level of a dragonfly or beyond.” (via Tiny New Compound Camera Is Built Like a Bug’s Eye | Wired Science | Wired.com)
