Friday, December 29, 2017

When intuition overrides reason.

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Gilbert Chin points to work by Walco and Risen showing that a third to a half of us will elect to rely on gut feelings even after having d...
4 comments:
Thursday, December 28, 2017

On gratitude...

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I want to pass on this bit from an essay by Philip Garrity in the New York Times Philosophy Forum "The Stone". On recovering fro...
Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Mind the Hype - Mindfulness and Meditation

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Smith et al. point to and summarize an article by Van Dam et al. I pass on the Van Dam et al. abstract: During the past two decades, ...
Tuesday, December 26, 2017

The 11 separate nations of the United States

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I just became aware, through an article by Matthew Speiser in The Independent , of the interesting work of Oolin Woodard that suggests that...
2 comments:
Monday, December 25, 2017

Autopilots and metastates of our brains.

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I pass on summaries from two recent contributions to understanding automatic information processing in our brains. First from Vatansever et ...
1 comment:
Friday, December 22, 2017

Detailed demographics from Google Street Views.

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Interesting....neighborhood-level estimates of the racial, economic and political characteristics of 200 U.S. cities using Google Street Vie...
Thursday, December 21, 2017

Some morning Rachmaninoff - Fantasy Piece, in E, Op. 3. No. 3

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Here is a Rachmaninoff Fantasy Piece, in E, Op. 3 No. 3, which I recorded last week, continuing to play with using my new iPhone X with a US...
Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Wealth inequality as a law of nature.

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Here is the abstract from Scheffer et al. ,  a bit of work that casts an interesting light on the current Republican tax legislation that si...
Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Skill networks and human capital.

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Anderson does an interesting analysis showing that workers who can combine different skills synergistically earn more than other skilled wo...
Monday, December 18, 2017

Positive stimuli blur time.

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From Roberts et al. : Anecdotal reports that time “flies by” or “slows down” during emotional events are supported by evidence that the mot...
Friday, December 15, 2017

Teaching A.I. to explain itself

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An awkward feature of the artificial intelligence, or machine learning, algorithms that teach themselves to translate languages, analyze X-r...
1 comment:
Thursday, December 14, 2017

Debussy La plus que lente - a first musical offering from Austin Texas.

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This is a personal post, a musical offering of the sort I have done on MindBlog in previous years. The Steinway B that I have used since 20...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Digital mass persuasion via psychological targeting.

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Sigh...we're heading full-tilt towards a plutocracy which will manipulate the masses via technologies of the sort described by Matz et a...
Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Trauma is passed over generations.

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Bakalar points to work by Santavirta et al. showing that the daughters of women exposed to childhood trauma are at increased risk for psyc...
Monday, December 11, 2017

How is American (and World) governance evolving?

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So... what is the United State to become? From the recent outpouring of Op-Ed pieces you can take your choice: Autocracy, Plutocracy, Olig...
Friday, December 08, 2017

Dogs can smell our happiness and fear.

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From D'Aniello et al : We report a study examining interspecies emotion transfer via body odors (chemosignals). Do human body odors (ch...
Thursday, December 07, 2017

How Evil is Tech?

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The title of this post is from an Op-Ed piece by David Brooks . Some clips: There are three main critiques of big tech. The first is that...
Wednesday, December 06, 2017

Trust and cooperation across societies.

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Romano et al. (open source) offer, in a study over 17 countries, an example of the kind of research needed to understand and enhance cooper...
Tuesday, December 05, 2017

The emotional political base supporting the consolidation of the U.S. plutocracy.

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I want to pass on the ending paragraphs from a piece by Fareed Zakaria : Is it that the Republican Party is cleverly and successfully hoodw...
Monday, December 04, 2017

A mind reading machine?

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Not quite, but Matthew Hutson points to work by Wen et al. using an artificial neural network to categorize fMRI signals from subjects wat...