From http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/14/segments/113274
Tagged with “science”
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How Much is Too Much? RadioLab on Giving People Choices
Tagged with design choice science psychology
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Buddhist Geeks: What can science teach us about [meditation] practice?
In this episode, taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference in 2011, Kelly McGonigal, PhD in Health Psychology, speaks on how the neuroscience of meditation can help us understand how practice shapes the mind and can also offer fresh insights into concepts like mindfulness and suffering. As Dr. McGonigal presents various scientific studies that show differences in the brain functioning between meditators and non-meditators, she highlights how meditation practice benefits the practitioner in various ways such as higher pain thresholds and reduced depression.
Tagged with kelly mcgonigal meditation buddhism science psychology
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Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought — The Long Now
Languages are Parallel Universes
"To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.
Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research shows, make people think and act differently.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/26/how-language-shapes-thought/
Tagged with language linguistics cognitive science long now
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WNYC’s Leonard Lopate: Please Explain - How We Read
If it comes to you easily, being able to read is easy to take for granted. But reading is an extraordinarily complex process, one that researchers are still working to understand fully. On today’s Please Explain we look at the science of reading. Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz and Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz are professors in Learning Development at the Yale University School of Medicine and Co-Directors of the Yale Center for Learning.
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Bruce Sterling: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole - The Long Now
One reason lots of people don’t want to think long term these days is because technology keeps accelerating so rapidly, we assume the world will become unrecognizable in a few years and then move on to unimaginable. Long-term thinking must be either impossible or irrelevant.
The commonest shorthand term for the runaway acceleration of technology is “the Singularity”—a concept introduced by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1984. The term has been enthusiastically embraced by technology historians, futurists, extropians, and various trans-humanists and post-humanists, who have generated variants such as “the techno-rapture,” “the Spike,” etc.
It takes a science fiction writer to critique a science fiction idea.
Along with being one of America’s leading science fiction writers and technology journalists, Bruce Sterling is a celebrated speaker armed with lethal wit. His books include The Zenith Angle (just out), Hacker Crackdown, Holy Fire, Distraction, Mirrorshades (cyberpunk compendium), Schismatrix, The Difference Engine (with William Gibson), Tomorrow Now, and Islands in the Net.
The Seminar About Long-term Thinking on June 10-11 was Bruce Sterling examining “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole.” He treated the subject of hyper-acceleration of technology as a genuine threat worth alleviating and as a fond fantasy worth cruel dismemberment.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-your-future-as-a-black-hole/
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Imagined Futures
“Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. Those who can’t imagine the future are doomed to fuck it up.”
Lauren Beukes explores how fiction is a model our brains run to explore other lives and possibilities, overcome issue fatigue and fire our cultural imagination.
http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/beukes/
Lauren Beukes is the author of Zoo City, which won the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award. That’s because it’s bloody brilliant. Seriously, if you haven’t read it, grab a copy now.
Her first novel, the excellent near-future dystopia Moxyland, was set in Cape Town, where Lauren lives with her husband and daughter. Her next book, The Shining Girls, will be set in Chicago and feature a time-travelling serial killer.
As well as being a novelist, Lauren is a journalist and has collaborated on television and comic book projects.
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Big Picture Science
Humans Need Not Apply — ENCORE You are one-of-a-kind, unique, indispensible… oh, wait, never mind! It seems that computer over there can do what you do … faster and with greater accuracy. Yes, it’s silicon vs. carbon as intelligent, interactive machines out-perform humans in tasks beyond data-crunching. We’re not only building our successors, we’re developing emotional relationships with them. Find out why humans are hard-wired to be attached to androids. Also, the handful of areas where humans still rule… as pilots, doctors and journalists. Scratch that! Journalism is automated too – tune in for a news story written solely by a machine.
Tagged with science technology
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The Science Show - Open Data UK download audio
From http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/3090466.htm After a long campaign dating back to 2006, the UK government has released once classified data, changing the previous secrecy code purveying over government work and data sets. Naomi Fowler reports on what’s changed since the once secret data has been released. So is publishing data the new default position for government in the UK? Proponents argue releasing data allows new enterprises to emerge and site satellite navigation is a prime example.
Tagged with open data semantic web uk radio:program=the science show
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David Attenborough in conversation with Richard Dawkins
From mayflies and digital dinosaurs to life on Mars and pre-Cambrian fossils, David Attenborough and Richard Dawkins leave no stone unturned as they discuss the state of science.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/audio/2010/sep/11/evolution-dawkins
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Beyond Lies The Wub by Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick’s first published story originally appeared in Planet Stories in July, 1952.
A crew member of a spaceship visiting Mars buys an enormous pig-like creature known as a wub from a native just before departure.
From http://www.archive.org/details/short_scifi_015_0905_librivox