I had not know what Ashton Kutcher does have such liberal position. And he can speak his position very well on TV show Real Time with Bill Maher( Aug 14th 2009), where he discuss with Bill Maher and other 2 guests of the show current issues such as Obama’s health care reform, “death panels”, war on terrorism, climate change. It so surprised me because Hollywood actors usually are say some stupid things or even complete nuts or just talk about help to African children.
But it was not last surprise on this show. Another actor Brad Pitt reveal( at least for me) his position on religion and it was definitely not a “thank my Lord for this Oscar” position.
It is important that some public person which can influence people have a clear view on things.
The Brain and The Law By David Eagleman
An overview of neuroscience in application to ethics and law. It covers a lot of subjects from Phineas Gage and Charles Whitman to people brain life in comas. Ways that the brain controls behaviour, issues of responsibility and accountability in the legal system, decision making, recidivism and rehabilitation, predicting violence, the hype and reality of fMRI lie detectors. Interesting part about new clinical trial that’s testing neurofeedback for controlling cravings and its uses for smokers and killers.
Computer security scientists from Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. show how to run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines. They use 4480-node high-performance computer cluster. It is about 225 virtual machines on each real one.
They did this not only for record number of VM but also to create tools to investigate/model behavior of botnets with high number of hosts.
Poligraph is not the only one of method to detect a lie. Another one method is Implicit Association Test. It is based on assumption what timing for True-Guilty answers is shorter for guilt person than False-Guilt answers and True-Innocent is faster than False-Innocent for innocent person.
And this was tested by Bruno Verschuere and 36 volunteers. Study shows what it works perfect but only if questioned person knows nothing about this method, does not take it before and do not want to cheat.
Full study review on Cognitive Daily blog.
They also give link to on-line version of such a test. Try it today, you never know when you need to cheat lie detector next time.
I have found today another good site with video lectures – http://videolectures.net/
I came to this site by link to lecture about Psychology and Human Computer Interface by David Kieras, University of Michigan. psychology
Presentation “Just You Wait” by Kent Beck on QCon. A look at trends and how they affect us. Communication, simplification, unintended consequences, disappearing models, and new approaches of design and tests are examined. Kent takes diverse set of issues that are changing in our world and asks “why are we doing this?”
Economic historians have discovered since the 1960s that the average participant in the British economy in 2000 was fifteen times better supplied with food and clothing and housing and education than her remote ancestors. If ones ancestors lived in Finland, the factor is more like 29, the average Finn in 1700 being not a great deal better off in material terms than the average African at the time. If ones ancestors lived in the Netherlands it is only a factor of 10 or so, since in 1700 the Netherlands was the richest (and the most free and bourgeois) country in the world, 70 percent better off than the soon-to-be United Kingdom. If in Japan, the factor since 1700 is fully 35. 2 If South Korea, the factor merely in the past half-century, since 1953, when income per head, despite access to some modern technology, was about what it had been in Europe 450 years before, is almost 18, crammed into a four decades instead of, as in the British case, stretched out over two centuries.
Interesting article from Neurophilosophy blog on scienceblogs.com about how our emotion can affect not only our behavior but our exact vision.
A number of behavioural studies have already shown that emotions can have an effect on perception. When, for example, observers are asked to selectively pay attention to a target at the centre of the visual field while ignoring surrounding “distractor” objects, the prior induction of a positive emotional state leads to more interference from the surrounding objects than does induction of a negative mood. Full article on Neurophilosoply
Time perception also affected by emotion state. There is another article.
That is the time–emotion paradox: why given that we possess a sophisticated time measurement mechanism, are we so inaccurate in our temporal judgements when experiencing emotions?
One more example of this. People believe that when we deal with physical attraction, we see somebody, and we know immediately whether we like them or not. Attracted or not. Which is why we have these four-minute dates. So I decided to do this experiment with people. I’ll show you graphic images of people — not real people. The experiment was with people. I showed some people a picture of Tom, and a picture of Jerry. I said “Who do you want to date? Tom or Jerry?” But for half the people I added an ugly version of Jerry. I took Photoshop and I made Jerry slightly less attractive. (Laughter) The other people, I added an ugly version of Tom. And the question was, will ugly Jerry and ugly Tom help their respective, more attractive brothers? The answer was…
