June 2008 Archives

Your Brain Lies to You - International Herald Tribune

False beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories - and mislead us along the way.

The Murky Evidence for and Against Deterrence - Washintonpost.com

By Cass R. Sunstein and Justin Wolfers

Although the Supreme Court banned capital punishment for child rape last week, the justices have made it clear that for homicide, states may inflict the ultimate penalty. Last month, capital punishment resumed after a seven-month moratorium. Rapid scheduling of executions followed the Supreme Court's ruling in Baze v. Rees, reaffirming the constitutionality of the death penalty in general and lethal injection in particular.

To support their competing conclusions on the legal issue, different members of the court invoked work by each of us on the deterrent effects of the death penalty. Unfortunately, they misread the evidence.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Justin Wolfers is assistant professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Get Out of Your Own Way -- Science Journal - WSJ.com

"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. "The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us," Dr. Dijksterhuis said.

Atheists Are Distrusted | American Sociological Association

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. "Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years," says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study's lead researcher.

Link Directly to the video as well as comments and discussion at the TED website here: Sliced Bread and Other Marketing Delights -- Seth Godin

100+ Resources for Teaching Without Textbooks | Teaching Tips

What would your classroom be like without your students cracking open their oversized textbooks everyday? Probably a lot more interesting, especially for the kiddies. There are so many other resources out there for teachers to use, online and off, that teaching without textbooks is becoming more and more acceptable. If you don't believe us, scroll down this list of over 100 different resources -- including websites, iPod lectures and field trips -- that will encourage you to toss out your textbooks.

Thinking With the Body -- Blogs Scientific American Community

It has become commonplace in neuroscience - and even in everyday conversation - to compare human cognition to that of computers. We know that computers work by using rules to manipulate symbols composed of zeros and ones. According to this metaphor, people also use rules to manipulate abstract and arbitrary symbols. The brain, in other words, was a computer that processed data largely independently of the body. A newer theory that is gaining ground among neuroscientists, embodied cognition, departs from the "computer-as-mind" metaphor. Instead, the body is seen as playing an important role in cognitive processes. Cognition evolved to guide real bodies in the real world, argue the researchers in favor of this idea. Our thoughts are constrained and influenced by the details of our flesh. How you move your arm or leg actually shapes the way you perceive, think and remember.

Girls as Competitive as Boys

Girls are no less competitive than boys, they simply employ more subtle tactics, a study of pre-schoolers suggests. While boys use head-on aggression to get what they want, girls rely on the pain of social exclusion.

Stop distorting young minds! Faith organisations shouldn't run our schools
By AC Grayling -guardian.co.uk

Anousics, people with a worrying range of beliefs and practices, are indoctrinating our children with the full support of the government

Everything you are about to read is true. Without any public consultation or debate, without once having made this a manifesto pledge, without ever having invited independent or critical opinion to scrutinise the implications, the British government is handing over large tracts of the school education system, along with tens of millions of our tax money, to groups of Anousics.

Higher Education: From Craft-Production to Capitalist Enterprise?

One may well ask: why shouldn't higher education be produced more efficiently? When the power loom displaced hand-loom weaving, society gained cheaper cloth. The success of capitalism in revolutionizing the means of production was even praised in several oft-quoted paragraphs of The Communist Manifesto. And 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter saw the ever-cheaper commodity as capitalism's major accomplishment...

Can a Robot, an Insect or God Be Aware?: Scientific American

Can a lobster ever truly have any emotions? What about a beetle? Or a sophisticated computer? The only way to resolve these questions conclusively would be to engage in serious scientific inquiry--but even before studying the scientific literature, many people have pretty clear intuitions about what the answers are going to be. A person might just look at a computer and feel certain that it couldn't possibly be feeling pleasure, pain or anything at all. That's why we don't mind throwing a broken computer in the trash. Likewise, most people don't worry too much about a lobster feeling angst about its impending doom when they put one into a pot of boiling water. In the jargon of philosophy, these intuitions we have about whether a creature or thing is capable of feelings or subjective experiences--such as the experience of seeing red or tasting a peach--are called "intuitions about phenomenal consciousness."

The New Atlantis » The Motives That Ought to Encourage Us to the Sciences

But leaving aside savage peoples, if a Descartes had come to Mexico or Peru one hundred years before Cortez and Pizarro, and if he had taught these peoples that men, composed as they are, are not able to be immortal; that the springs of their machine, as those of all machines, wear out; that the effects of nature are only a consequence of the laws and communications of movement, then Cortez, with a handful of men, would never have destroyed the empire of Mexico, nor Pizarro that of Peru.

Compassion: How an Emotion Became a Virtue-- Incharacter.org

Compassion today is widely regarded as a good, and those who display it as good people. Indeed, many see compassion or some related virtue (e.g., empathy) as the core of goodness, as the virtue of virtues. It's not only a private but also a public virtue, much cherished in our politicians. Even in international affairs, of all places, the apex of virtuous action is widely taken to be "humanitarian intervention" or the use of force to relieve suffering. Compassion has not always enjoyed so lofty and uncontroversial a status; will it someday once again relinquish it?

The New Atlantis » The Myth of Multitasking

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: "There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time." To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence. "This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind."

More Than 90 Percent of Americans Believe in God, Study Finds - washingtonpost.com

More than 90 percent of Americans -- including one in five people who say they are atheists -- believe in God or a universal power, and more than half pray at least once a day, according to results of a poll released today that takes an in-depth look at Americans' religious beliefs.

THE BERTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY
Writings by Russell on the Web
A list of electronic texts of Russell's books and essays.

See also: Another excellent resource for texts east and west:
The Philosophy Pages at www.davemckay.co.uk
...a chronological list of Russell's books and essays.

Free Online Courses from Great Universities | Open Culture

Is the Universe Actually Made of Math? | Space | DISCOVER Magazine

According to Tegmark, "there is only mathematics; that is all that exists." In his theory, the mathematical universe hypothesis, he updates quantum physics and cosmology with the concept of many parallel universes inhabiting multiple levels of space and time. By posing his hypothesis at the crossroads of philosophy and physics, Tegmark is harking back to the ancient Greeks with the oldest of the old questions: What is real?

Short and Sweet: Technology Shrinks the Lecture - Chronicle.com

"Some traditional lectures are 50 minutes just because lectures always tended to be 50 minutes -- but there's not 50 minutes worth of material in there," he says. "When I'm done, I'm done. I'm not just going to keep talking just fill up the time."

From Big Bang to Us - Made Easy -A recently completed youtube series on Science and the history of the Universe. The 'Made Easy' series is designed to explain the evidence that shows how we got here, from the Big bang to human migration out of Africa. A better quality version will soon be available for free download from a website -- details to be announced. I will be happy to send DVDs free of charge to schools after the series is finished. (Full 11-part series)

By Potholer54 - I've been a journalist for 20 years, 14 years as a science correspondent. My degree is in geology, but while working for a science magazine and several science programs I had to tackle a number of different fields, from quantum physics to microbiology. My particular talent was my ignorance. By not understanding half of what I was assigned to cover, I had to reduce scientific discoveries from the complex to the simple. If I wrote it in a way that I could understand it, then my readers could understand it.

Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex 16 June 2008 - New Scientist

Brain scans have provided the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait.

The scans reveal that in gay people, key structures of the brain governing emotion, mood, anxiety and aggressiveness resemble those in straight people of the opposite sex.

The differences are likely to have been forged in the womb or in early infancy, says Ivanka Savic, who conducted the study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Original image Source: World Prison Population Per 100,000 Population

Only a Theory -- Science Friday broadcast Friday, June 13th, 2008

Once, there was the battle over whether the concept of evolution should be taught in public schools at all -- a fight remembered for the trial of high school teacher John Scopes in 1925. More recently, the terms of the debate shifted to whether the idea of 'intelligent design' needed to be taught alongside the scientific theory of evolution in the classroom. Now, the terms are shifting again...
Guest: Kenneth Miller, Professor, Biology, Brown University

Download mp3

Daniel C. Dennett: You Want Facts or Feelings? - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

The Question: Do you believe that faith can effect your health or is that a lot of new age nonsense?

Daniel Dennett:

Of course faith can affect your health, as various studies have shown. So can faith in new age nonsense. So can faith in the Yankees or the Red Sox. People cling to life to learn the outcome of the World Series, after all. This has been measured statistically. More seriously, I do not know of any studies that compare the health and longevity of those who attend church regularly to those who devote regular hours of work to some secular charity (Oxfam, you name it) or to volunteering for a political party, for instance. It might turn out that religious allegiance is a better health promoter than any other form of voluntary contribution, but so far as I know, this has not been determined.

The larger problem with this week's ON FAITH question is that it is being asked at all. This question should not be seen as a matter of personal conviction or opinion at all. People's hunches, anecdotal recollections, or personal convictions are of no more weight here than they would be about the causes of global warming. You have asked an empirical question, and there are established methods for answering such questions. Encouraging any other approach is actually undermining proper respect for scientific methods and facts, right alongside the nefarious tactics of the tobacco companies, the global warming skeptics, and the "teach the controversy" Intelligent Design crowd who have so successful persuaded so many people to treat factual material as if it were mere opinion.

But you can put a respectable spin on it: by asking the question you are gathering data on people's convictions, data that can later be compared to the facts, whatever they turn out to be. It will be interesting to see, for instance, how many respondents declare with confidence that they know the answer to your question quite independently of any careful research. And it will be interesting to learn if they are right.

American Exception - Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech
By Adam Liptak -The New York Times

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article's tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean's, Canada's leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their "dignity, feelings and self-respect."

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean's violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

"It's hate speech!" yelled one man.

"It's free speech!" yelled another.

A Brief History of Child Welfare in the United States

While there were attempts at times, there werent consistent legal limits placed upon the way a child could be treated, until 1875. At that time, Mary Ellen, a very abused child who had been beaten and chained in a room by the couple who took her from a charitable institution, was discovered by a church visitor. To her dismay, the worker found that the police were helpless to intervene. As a last resort, the worker made a plea to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, stating that Mary Ellen was an animal in need of protection. The SPCA investigated, and took the case to court. The guardian was sentenced to jail and the child was removed. With this, the New York SPCA incorporated child protective services. Other SPCAs followed suit, and yet other communities formed separate Societies for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Laws were written to protect children from abuse and neglect.

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind -- Gary Marcus

Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.

Why the Brain Follows the Rules: Scientific American

How are social norms maintained? And what makes us comply with social norms? Primarily, the answer is that, if we don't follow the rules, we might get in trouble. Numerous studies demonstrate that, when the threat of punishment is removed, people tend to disregard social norms. The neat and orderly line disintegrates...

One of the interesting things about social norm compliance, however, is that there is tremendous individual variation. Some people would never cut in line or act unfairly, whereas others don't think twice about it. Using a questionnaire, the researchers measured each participant's "Machiavellism," a combination of selfishness and opportunism, which is often used to describe someone's tendency to manipulate other people for personal gain. Sure enough, the people with high Machiavellism scores gave less money away when there was no punishment threat and were best at avoiding punishment when the threat of punishment was present. Therefore, these individuals earned the most money overall...

Antiquities, the World Is Your Homeland - James Cuno Challenges Nationalist View of Cultural Property - NYTimes.com

In the United States, for example, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required every museum getting public funds to survey its collections; identify Indian remains and funerary, sacred and other objects; and consult with Indian tribes and "repatriate" the artifacts if requested. Such objects may have been legitimately purchased a century ago from the tribes or have no issue clouding their provenance, but claims of ordinary property give way before claims of cultural property.

Birdbrain: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

As the crowd at the Midwest Bird Expo waited for the cognitive scientist Irene Pepperberg to take the podium, the hum of human chatter was punctuated by the sound of parrots whooping it up--twittering and letting loose with wolf whistles, along with the occasional full-out jungle squawk...

"People used to think birds weren't intelligent. Well, they used to think women weren't intelligent, either. They talked about the smaller circumference of our skulls as though it made us inferior to men! You know what? They were wrong on both counts."

Albinos, Long Shunned, Face Threat in Tanzania - NYTimes.com

"I feel like I am being hunted," he said.

Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts...

Al-Shaymaa J. Kwegyir, Tanzania's new albino member of Parliament, said, "People think we're lucky. That's why they're killing us. But we're not lucky."

John McCain: America a Christian nation, needs Christian president.

Last fall, John McCain said that he wanted a Christian to be president because he felt that the Christian faith was a better guide than other faiths. He also said that his faith was an important part of his qualification to lead, adding the the United States Constitution established the America as a Christian nation.

The Neural Buddhists - New York Times

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as "The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein's theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it's going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.

'Slow movement' wants you to ease up, chill out - CNN.com

Cahn is a leader in the "slow movement," a national campaign that claims that speed kills. Its leaders say that Americans are so starved for time, our need for speed is destroying our health, families and communities.

They say we live in a culture in which being overworked has become a status symbol. Cahn created TimeBanks USA, a nonprofit group that treats time as money, to put the brakes on people's high-velocity lifestyles.

When two worlds collide: threat of class warfare over faith-based schooling
-The Sydney Morning Herald

The debate about 'values based' education is hotting up. John Kaye and Stephen O'Doherty outline the opposing positions on the role of religion in schools.

JOHN KAYE Greens NSW MP and education spokesman: Alarm bells start sounding when young people leave school confused about the boundaries between faith and evidence. They get even louder when the penny drops on the massive state and federal funding that supports the growth of schools that systematically mislead their students. And they reach a crescendo when governments are caught accepting the distortion of education in faith-based private schools.

Character Attacks: How to Properly Apply the Ad Hominem
A new theory parses fair from unfair uses of personal criticism in rhetoric
By Yvonne Raley -Scientific American

A doctor tells her patient to lose weight, and the patient thinks: "If my doctor really believed that, she wouldn't be so fat." A movie aficionado pans the latest Tom Cruise flick because Cruise is a Scientologist. A home­owner ignores a neighbor's advice on lawn care because the neighbor is a ... you name it: Democrat, ­Re­publican, Christian or atheist. These examples illustrate classic uses of ad hominem attacks, in which an argument is rejected, or advanced, based on a personal characteristic of an individual rather than on reasons for or against the claim itself.

Jackson Pollock Flash Animation

Ever seen a Jackson Pollock painting and thought "I can do that!" Well, here is your chance! Let your mouse do the walking as you produce works of art that the Saatchis will be after in no time at all!

DNA explodes Greek myth about women | Science | The Observer

Women in Ancient Greece were major power brokers in their own right, researchers have discovered, and often played key roles in running affairs of state. Until now it was thought they were treated little better than servants.

The discovery is part of an investigation by Manchester researchers into the founders of Mycenae, Europe's first great city-state and capital of King Agamemnon's domains.

'It was thought that in those days women were rated as little more than chattels in Ancient Greece,' said Professor Terry Brown, of the faculty of life sciences at Manchester University. 'Our work now suggests that notion is wrong.'

'Rage against the machines' by Tom Chatfield | Prospect Magazine June 2008 issue 147

Within the virtual worlds we have begun to construct, players can experience the kind of deep, lasting satisfactions that only come from the performance of a complex, sociable and challenging task. Yet such satisfactions will always remain, in a crucial sense, unreal. Whatever skills it teaches and friendships it creates, an eight-hour World of Warcraft session is nevertheless solipsistic like few other activities.

BBC/OU Open2.net - Ethics Bites Podcast - Trolleys, Killing And Double Effect

You're standing by a railway line. An out-of-control trolley is heading towards you. Tragically, there are five people tied to the track ahead. It looks like they'll all be killed. Fortunately you have a chance to save them. By turning a switch you can send the trolley hurtling down a spur, a side track, where, most unfortunately, one man is tied to the rails. But killing him would save the five. There's another option. A second switch would operate a trap door on an overhead footbridge, dropping an overweight unsuspecting train-spotter onto the track below, stopping the train (he's large enough to do this), but, of course, killing the train-spotter. What should you do?...

In fact, you might be surprised to learn that psychologists have actually hooked individuals up to what are called functional magnetic resonance imaging machines. People are able to see what bits of the brain light up when people are confronted with these problems and decide what they should do. And as it happens, when people are presented with the footbridge case and the prospect of pushing someone off the footbridge and when they recoil at that prospect, parts of the brain that are associated with emotional responses light up, whereas when people contemplate turning the switch so that the trolley goes off onto the side spur and decide that they ought to do that, other bits of the brain light up, where these bits of the brain are associated with cognition and means, and reasoning and the like.

BBC/OU Open2.net - Ethics Bites Podcast - Practical ethics

We make decisions all the time. Some of these can be trivial (should I wear the white or the blue shirt?) and some can be important (should we operate or leave the patient to die?). Some of these decisions will involve thoughts about ourselves and what we want (where should we go for the weekend?) and some thoughts about other people (should we close the firm and make everyone redundant?). Some of these decisions will involve tastes and appetites (which chocolate?) and others questions of morals and ethics (should I tell my partner about my affair?)...

In the Ethics Bites you'll hear some of the leading contemporary philosophers talking about a whole range of issues. Some of these deal directly with ethical theory - for example, Miranda Fricker talking about making moral judgements about people6 distant from us in time or space - and some with issues of immediate practical relevance - for example, Peter Singer on the treatment of animals1.