Clipmarks | wildcat's clips

Stanley Kubrick homage

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:45:45 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Tags: stanley kubrick, homage, films

50% chance of making it!

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:23:06 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

“Human Nature” -How Will it Affect Our Species Chances of Long-term Survival?

It’s a given that Earth cannot survive indefinitely, if for no other reason than that the sun will eventually expand and roast the planet. Of course, many scientists believe that by the time that happens, life will have long since disappeared on this planet for other reasons—many of them involving manmade disasters. Are they just being pessimistic, or realistic, or both?

Human behavior is often inexplicably bizarre, destructive and counterintuitive, and yet we’ve made it this far. However, in the past, we haven’t had the technological means to cause mass destruction to life on the planet. Now we do, says Sir Martin Rees, and he thinks we’ll get around to using it to our own detriment sooner or later. In fact, the Royal Society Research Professor at Cambridge and Britain's Astronomer Royal says he believes humans have only a 50% chance of making it through just the next century alone.

Tags: human nature, survival, earth

Comprehension Climbs When You Slooooow Doooown

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:54:41 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: clipversity, where art though?

Clip Source: www.wired.com

It should take you two and a half seconds to read this sentence. Any faster and you won't absorb its meaning. The motor response of the retina, and the time it takes the image of a word to travel from the macula to the thalamus to the visual cortex for processing, limits the eye to about 500 words a minute. (That's peak efficiency; the average college student can expect a rate about half that.) "There is no such thing as speed reading," says Keith Rayner a cognitive psychologist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "Not if your definition of reading is comprehending text." Studies show that fast readers fare worse than slower ones when questioned about the text. So, to get smarter, slow down. It's even OK to move your lips.

Tags: brain, reading, slowing down, comprehension

Justice in the brain: Equity and efficiency are encoded differently

Fri, 09 May 2008 09:11:04 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: physorg.com

Which is better, giving more food to a few hungry people or letting some food go to waste so that everyone gets a share? A study appearing this week in Science finds that most people choose the latter, and that the brain responds in unique ways to inefficiency and inequity.

“Morality is a question of broad interest,” Hsu said. “What makes us moral, and how do we make tradeoffs in difficult situations?”

Every decision pitted efficiency (the total number of meals given) against equity (how much the burden of lost meals was shared among the children).

This dilemma illustrates the core issues of distributive justice, which involves tradeoffs between considerations that are at once compelling but which cannot be simultaneously satisfied,” the authors wrote.

The study was designed to address the psychological and neurological dimensions of two longstanding debates about distributive justice

Tags: brain, equity, efficiency, morality