think or thwim

WellingtonGrey’s Science and Faith Flow Charts are good too.

:: Boing Boing

This is really funny.

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Po Bronson’s latest New York Magazine article reports the results of numerous studies showing that praise can be detrimental.

In one study, students were given a fairly easy test. When the test results were presented, the researcher also told one randomly chosen group that they must be very smart. The remaining students were praised for their hard work. Both groups of students were then given a second test in which the students were allowed to pick a problem to solve. The kids that had been called smart picked easy problems, and the kids told they were hard workers picked challenging problems. Emphasizing the hard worker’s efforts had given them something they could control in a positive way. The smart kids options were limited. They were forced to skirt challenges to avoid ruining their “smart” reputation. The hard workers also outscored the smart kids on a third test given to both groups.

Another set of researchers unexpectedly found that performance drops immediately after praise is given. Apparently, we become self-conscious, and some of our attention is diverted to our self-image rather than the task.

In a third series of studies two groups of kids were taught study skills, but one group was additionally taught that that the brain is a muscle that can be built up with exercise. The performance of both groups improved, but the group that believed that intelligence is not an innate ability outperformed the group without that knowledge.

Summary

1. Compliment people on their hard work, not their intelligence.
2. Don’t interrupt someone, even to compliment them.
3. Understand that brains rewire themselves based on how you use them.

:: David Shenk

When he’s not cracking heads, he has time to think about the big questions. This is a 2001 Errol Morris profile of Langan called The Smartest Man in the World:

Actually, Langan and his neuropsychologist wife, Gina, moved to a horse ranch in Missouri in 2004, but that doesn’t make for a good headline.

In this 2001 paper, Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), he describes his theory of the relationship between mind and reality.

The Art of Knowing is a 2004 collection of Langan’s philosophical essays in self-published book form.

For a while he also did a question and answer column. In one he answered “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”:

Contrary to popular belief, this age-old dilemma actually has a very straightforward solution. First, you must specify what kind of egg you mean. If you mean any kind of egg, then the egg came first (because chickens were preceded on the evolutionary timeline by, for example, egg-laying fish, insects and dinosaurs). If, on the other hand, you mean a chicken egg, then you must specify whether this means (a) an egg laid by a chicken, (b) an egg containing a chicken, or (c) an egg laid by and containing a chicken. In cases (a) and (c), the answer is by definition the chicken (if the answer were the egg, then the egg could not have been laid by a chicken).

In case (b), the usual and most interesting interpretation, the answer is the egg. This is because interspecies mutations separating a new species from its parent species occur in reproductive rather than somatic DNA, i.e. in germ cells rather than body cells. (Germ cells include the sperm and egg cells produced in the reproductive tracts of male and female animals respectively.) Since germ cells are merely produced, but not somatically expressed, by the parents of the organism(s) whose biological information they encode, their expression begins in the egg containing the offspring. So the egg contains a chicken, but was not laid by a chicken. (See how easy that was?)

I found it: Link

Kim Peek was the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man. He can read a book in about an hour, scanning the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye. He remembers essentially every thing he reads.

In this video Fran Peek, Kim’s father, describes what’s different about Kim’s brain at the inaugural meeting of the Anthanasius Kircher Society in New York on January 16, 2007, a Tuesday. Then, society members play “stump rain man.”

This 45 minute video has a lot more info about Kim Peek.

:: Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society

Bruce Burgess wrote a short insightful summary of what it was like to start an open source project. From the article:

The incompleteness, lack of documentation, and ugly code practices were, frankly, embarrassing. All of a sudden bMail became a daunting task — there was more to be done than could be accomplished by a single unpaid person. My milestones seemed far-reaching, and my forums were full of sysadmin 101 responses.

To top things off, I received a cease and desist letter about the bMail name, which turned out to be the same as an established Windows-based mass mailer. I was ready to abandon ship. It would have been easy to fold. After all, I had already accomplished my main goal of providing “usable” mailing list software for the band.

Positive public reaction, however, gave me new inspiration…

:: /.

In May 2004 PBS Frontline documented the decline of the music industry over the last 30 years. It is an interesting show, but as Barry Ritholtz pointed out, they spend a lot of time following a couple of artists and fail to address a lot of corporate stupidity that’s responsible. It’s sort of a VH1 Behind the Music combined with some insight into how the industry works.

The money quotes:

1) Micheal Guido, music attorney:

“Any kid that is a proponent of downloading will say within 30 seconds that they bought a CD because they liked a song, they paid all this money, they took it home, and the rest of the album was junk. That’s a result of creating a business that only cared about the ‘hit single’.”

2) Michael Williams, OutKast’s manager

“The public will buy good music when you give them good music to buy, and that’s what it should be about. We should get back to putting out good music.”

3) David Crosby’s whole interview.

Obviously, the days of this model of music distribution are numbered. Steve Jobs has started turning up the pressure. Even the majority of music industry execs agree the current DRM is too restrictive.

I like the Aime Street idea. Anyone can post a song, and anyone can download it for free. However, as a song starts to get downloaded, the price starts to rise. The more popular it is, the more you pay to get it.

:: Smashing Telly

This is what Widipedia should do their advertising profits.