Learn Yourself

poptech:

By Dan Ariely (PopTech 2009)

Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.

Much of what we have learned about the causes of dishonesty comes from a simple little experiment that we call the “matrix task,” which we have been using in many variations. It has shown rather conclusively that cheating does not correspond to the traditional, rational model of human behavior—that is, the idea that people simply weigh the benefits (say, money) against the costs (the possibility of getting caught and punished) and act accordingly.

futurejournalismproject:

dbreunig:

Nate St. Pierre writes:

Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”

He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”

A patent request for Facebook, filed by Abraham Lincoln in 1845.

I’ve long argued Facebook is working towards natural or timeless (for lack of better words) human interaction. That their central idea is relevant in any age should not be surprising.

(Though it is astounding Lincoln was imagining a nearly identical privacy system.)

(Via The Next Web)

FJP: Color me fascinated — Michael.

world-shaker:

My favorite was “Just How Small is an Atom?”

tetw:

A Tetw reading list

The Naked Face by Malcolm Gladwell - The window to your soul may be easier to unlock than you ever thought possible.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids by Po Bronson - Could telling kids that they’re smart be stopping achieving their full potential?

Want to Remember Everything you’ll Ever Learn? by Gary Wolf - Meet the inventor of a program that could revolutionise learning.

The Possibilian by Burkhard Bilger - How the subtlest shift in perception can create whole a new way of seeing the world.

The Science of Success by David Dobbs - The double-edged sword of extraordinary mental potential.

Caring for Your Introvert by Jonathan Rauch - Are you getting the best out of the introverts in your life?

Mind vs. Machine by Brian Christian - An intrepid reporter takes on the latest in artificial intelligence in a battle for humanity.

Why Men Lie by Vince Passaro - Essential reading for anyone who has to deal with men on a day-to-day basis.

Adventures in My Bed by Bucky McMahon - A journey through the emotionally charged world of the lucid dreamer.

TV Makes You Smarter by Steven Johnson - How increasingly sophisticated TV programming may be driving up our IQs.

smarterplanet:

Ivan Herman recently offered some insight into how Watson actually works. Herman reports, “I was at Chris Welty’s keynote yesterday at the WWW2012 Conference. His talk was on Jeopardy/Watson and, although this is not the first time I heard/saw something on Watson, some things really became clear only at his keynote. Namely: what is really the central paradigm that made the question answering mechanism so successful in the case of Watson? Well… query answering in Watson is not some sort of a deterministic algorithm that turns a natural language question into a query into a huge set of data. This approach does not work.”

He continues, “Instead, a question is analyzed and, based on search in various set of data, a large set of possible answers is extracted. These ‘candidate’ answers are analyzed separately along a whole series of different dimensions (geographical or temporal dimensions, or, which I found the most interesting, putting back candidate answers into the original question and search that again against various sources of information to rank them again). The result is a vector of numerical values representing the results of the analysis along those different dimensions. That ‘vector’ is summed up into one final value using a weight values for each dimension. The weights themselves are obtained through a prior training process (in this case using a number of stored Jeopardy question/answers). Finally, the answer with the highest value (I presume over a certain threshold value) is returned.”

Read more here.

newwavefeminism:

mehreenkasana:

It makes me so happy to know that whenever I share these links on free education, books and resources online, people not only learn a lot from it but are often generous enough to share it with their friends and other folks online. It goes positively…