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Law Schools’ Applications Fall as Costs Rise and Jobs Are Cut – NYTimes.com
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BBC News – Vegetarians ‘cut heart risk by 32%’
“Vegetarians ‘cut heart risk by 32%'”
Samir’s Selection 01/31/2013 (p.m.)
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Monthly Archives: January 2013
Samir’s Selection 01/30/2013 (p.m.)
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Why Palestine Should Take Israel to Court in The Hague – NYTimes.com
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Pollard vs Bell – the debate that highlights a journalistic dilemma | Media | guardian.co.uk
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Mahatma and the Poet: Tagore’s Letters to Gandhi on Power, Morality, and Science | Brain Pickings
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Why Amazon’s Stock Is Soaring While Apple’s Is Cratering – Business Insider
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My Route to Existential Risk – NYTimes.com
A man designs a machine that know the answers to everything. The first question he asks it is, “Is there a god?”
The machine answers, “There is now.” -
William Dalrymple on Afghanistan’s Trafalgar: Kicked out, with teeth kicked in | The Economist
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Grammar school myths | FT data
The net effect of grammar schools is to disadvantage poor children and help the rich…
Grammar schools are a part of many people’s identities: having won admission to a selective state school plays an important role in the story of their life, especially if they came from a less privileged family. But, as a way to raise standards or to close the gaps between rich and poor, it is hard to find evidence that they are effective.
Samir’s Selection 01/29/2013 (p.m.)
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Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It | The Tobin Project
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Transformative Research in the Social Sciences | The Tobin Project
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International money transfers: Skyping dough | The Economist
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Prosecuting the financial crisis: Just who should we be blaming anyway? | The Economist
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Quick study: Alan Dershowitz on criminal law: You must use science | The Economist
In the 21st century articulate advocacy in the courtroom is not nearly as powerful as the knowledge of and use of science…
I have another tactic I use. I never try to persuade a jury to believe me. I never say, ‘This should lead you to conclude that my client is innocent.’ I give them the evidence. I want them, the jury and judge, to have the ah-ha moment. If it’s their argument they’re going to stick with it…
I was brought here to be the ‘and’ teacher. Law and psychiatry. Law and medicine. Law and genetics. Law is an empty vessel into which you have to pour other disciplines. I taught a course on law and mathematics.
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How Facebook Taught Its Search Tool to Understand People – NYTimes.com
Samir’s Selection 01/28/2013 (p.m.)
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Brain Aging Linked to Sleep-Related Memory Decline – NYTimes.com
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“There’s a moment, tragically brief, after a new recording or broadcasting tool is introduced when it’s used unselfconsciously, with an endearingly human innocence and enthusiasm.”
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The futuristic past | ROUGH TYPE
” the future looks more like the past than the future.”
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Mobile Phones Disrupt India, for Better and Worse – Bloomberg
Samir’s Selection 01/25/2013 (p.m.)
Samir’s Selection 01/24/2013 (p.m.)
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“We don’t just search for car keys or missing socks. We search for truth and meaning, for love, for transcendence, for peace, for ourselves. To be human is to be a searcher…
In its highest form, a search has no well-defined object. It’s open-ended, an act of exploration that takes us out into the world, beyond the self, in order to know the world, and the self, more fully…In its new design, Google’s search engine doesn’t push us outward; it turns us inward. It gives us information that fits the behavior and needs and biases we have displayed in the past, as meticulously interpreted by Google’s algorithms. Because it reinforces the existing state of the self rather than challenging it, it subverts the act of searching. We find out little about anything, least of all ourselves, through self-absorption.
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Facebook’s polluted graph | ROUGH TYPE
“The Carr principle (which I came up with this morning while eating breakfast) states: the act of searching alters the reality being searched…
Here’s the difference between Google and Facebook: Larry Page recognized that commercial corruption was a threat to his ideal. For Mark Zuckerberg, commercial corruption is the ideal.” -
Me tweet pretty one day | ROUGH TYPE
“Another of the researchers, Nicholas Christenfeld, also of UC-SD, draws a larger conclusion. Pointing out that our minds did not ”evolve to process carefully edited and polished text” (cavemen’s tastes ran more to The Daily Grunt than The New Yorker), he says, “One could view the past five thousand years of painstaking, careful writing as the anomaly. Modern technologies allow written language to return more closely to the casual, personal style of pre-literate communication. And this is the style that resonates, and is remembered.”
Now, one might see in all of this a very good reason to celebrate the development of “painstaking, careful writing.” After all, it allowed us to escape our minds’ evolutionary bias for the simple social grunt and helped us to expand our capacity for expressing and comprehending more subtle, more eloquent, more complicated thoughts. Did we have to work harder, cognitively speaking, to understand and remember those more complex thoughts? Of course we did. I mean: duh.”
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The mixed reality setup | ROUGH TYPE
preemptive nostalgia …
“Given society’s current bias toward efficiency and safety and the meticulous measurement of outcomes, I predict that, going forward, the computer reality setup will have an advantage over the human reality setup. Slowly but surely, we’ll defer to the computer reality setup, and eventually the computer reality setup will shoulder aside all other reality setups and become the uniform reality setup. The mixed reality setup that has always characterized human society will go the way of the Dodo and the PalmPilot. Plenty of people will celebrate this eventuality, particularly as they zip effortlessly through complex, accident-free highway systems while playing Words With Friends or writing odd, rambling blog posts. But there’s something to be said for the mixed reality setup. Sure, it leads to inefficiencies and annoyances, but it’s also life’s Sriracha sauce. The conflicts that emerge from the mixed reality setup are the stuff of art, for one thing. And, certainly, you can’t have comedy without a mixed reality setup. Steve Martin? Gone. Tragedy becomes unthinkable, too. The unexpected pleasures of serendipity and ambiguity? Gone, and gone. This may just be a case of preemptive nostalgia, but I already find myself clinging to my mixed reality setup, refusing to let go of the wheel. I’m finding it hard to see a big difference between a uniform reality setup and absolute heat death. We’re going to miss those traffic lights when they’re gone.”
Samir’s Selection 01/23/2013 (p.m.)
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BBC News – Toys and games: Are we paying for products that teach?
“The key for their development, he says, is that they are given time to play with other children….
Toys are known for assisting with some of the most basic of skills. Some youngsters who struggle to hold a pencil to write are encouraged to play with Lego to build up these fine motor skills. Throwing and catching a ball is said to help co-ordination with pens and pencils…
Prof Jeffrey Goldstein, a psychology expert with the National Toy Council, says that a variety of different toys can help a child’s brain to develop. “I would rather buy three toys for £3 each than one £9 toy,” he says.
Samir’s Selection 01/21/2013 (a.m.)
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School reform: Stay focused | The Economist
” new research from a spate of economists, psychologists, neuroscientists and educators has found that the skills that see a student through college and beyond have less to do with smarts than with more ordinary personality traits, like an ability to stay focused and control impulses. ”
So non-cognitive skills like persistence and curiosity are highly predictive of future success. But where do these traits come from? And how can they be developed? In search of answers, Mr Tough first looks at the problem on a neurological level. Apparently medical reasons explain why children who grow up in abusive or dysfunctional environments generally find it harder to concentrate, sit still and rebound from disappointments. The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical for regulating thoughts and mediating behaviour. When this region is damaged-a common condition for children living amid the pressures of poverty-it is tougher to suppress unproductive instincts.
Studies show that early nurturing from parents or caregivers helps combat the biochemical effects of stress. And educators can push better habits and self control. The “prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain,” writes Mr Tough. It stays malleable well into early adulthood. Character can be taught.
Figuring out the best way to help youths develop “grit”-a passionate dedication to a goal-is trickier. Psychological interventions require more sophistication than teaching maths…
Samir’s Selection 01/13/2013 (p.m.)
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BBC News – Paul Salopek: Going for a seven-year walk
US journalist Paul Salopek is going to spend the next seven years walking from Ethiopia to the tip of South America, retracing the journey of early humans out of Africa and around the world.
Samir’s Selection 01/09/2013 (a.m.)
Samir’s Selection 01/08/2013 (p.m.)
Samir’s Selection 01/08/2013 (a.m.)
Samir’s Selection 01/07/2013 (p.m.)
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Secret of Adulthood: People Do Best What Comes Naturally. « The Happiness Project
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BBC News – A Point of View: The British and their bizarre view of Americans
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When Reporters Get Personal – NYTimes.com
Let’s acknowledge upfront that it is a two-headed beast: partly about the personal biases that reporters may bring into their work, and partly about the middle-ground reporting that muddies the truth in the name of fairness…
objectivity is problematic when it involves “taking the midpoint between opposing sides and calling that neither/nor position ‘impartial.’ ” He’s dead right about that.
As I’ve written before, what readers really want is reporting that gets to the bottom of a story without having to give opposing sides equal weight. They also want reporters to state established truths clearly, without hedging or always putting the words in a source’s mouth…
Paul Krugman: “Shape of Earth: Opinions Differ.” -
FTC Commissioner warns Google settlement may look like ‘preferential treatment’ | The Verge
Samir's Selection 