Various web links I found to be of interest recently:
Losing the sense of smell predicts death within five years, according to new research.
According to new research, the sense of smell is the canary in the coalmine of human health. A study published today in the open access journal PLOS ONE, shows that losing one's sense of smell strongly predicts death within five years, suggesting that the nose knows when death is imminent, and that smell may serve as a bellwether for the overall state of the body, or as a marker for exposure to environmental toxins.
... The tip of the olfactory nerve, which contains the smell receptors, is the only part of the human nervous system that is continuously regenerated by stem cells. The production of new smell cells declines with age, and this is associated with a gradual reduction in our ability to detect and discriminate odours. Loss of smell may indicate that the body is entering a state of disrepair, and is no longer capable of repairing itself.
The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise.
In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psycholog,
my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper
that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people
do not recognize - scratch that, cannot recognize - just how
incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as
the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack
of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude
would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know
how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for
instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules,
an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers - and we
are all poor performers at some things - fail to see the flaws in
their thinking or the answers they lack.
What's curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave
people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent
are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something
that feels to them like knowledge.
The study published in Science provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of climate change today.
In their study, the researchers say the major cooling of Earth and continental ice build-up in the Northern Hemisphere 2.7 million years ago coincided with a shift in the circulation of the ocean - which pulls in heat and carbon dioxide in the Atlantic and moves them through the deep ocean from north to south until it's released in the Pacific.
Some scientists are arguing that our new understanding of a particular network in the brain is allowing neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists - even artists and writers - to understand each other in ways that wouldn't have made sense ten years ago. Called the default mode network, or DMN, it's a set of brain regions that are typically suppressed when a person is engaged in an external task (playing a sport, working on a budget), but activated during a so-called "resting state" (sitting quietly, day-dreaming). ... "We should be wary of seeing a schizophrenic person as someone with a kind of deficiency," Woods says. Rather, it may be just another part of what it means to be human. A person might simply process language differently or ruminate on social interactions for too long. His or her inner speech might be more fragmented or circuitous. Individual differences in DMN activity account for the diverse ways the human mind freely wanders.
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors is a public institution,
which writes banking rules and enacts monetary policy. But the
12 regional banks, which carry out regulatory examinations,
are privately run. The local banking industry and other corporate
interests choose the majority of the regional bank boards,
who subsequently select a president. Unsurprisingly, those presidents
often reflect the business management perspective of those who choose them.
Bill Dudley, the New York Fed president, spent his career as chief
economist for Goldman Sachs.
This public/private hybrid leads to a lack of transparency about the
regional banks and their activities. The New York Fed, which because
of the presence of Wall Street has by far the most power of the regional
banks, routinely exempts itself from public disclosure requirements.
Why doesn't positive thinking work the way you might assume? As my colleagues and I have discovered, dreaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals. ... Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we've already attained our goal, slackening our readiness to pursue it. ... What does work better is a hybrid approach that combines positive thinking with "realism." Here's how it works. Think of a wish. For a few minutes, imagine the wish coming true, letting your mind wander and drift where it will. Then shift gears. Spend a few more minutes imagining the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing your wish.
In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Julian Assange describes his encounter with Google's Eric Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.
Bill Gates on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
It's part of a research project with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University that focuses on how unverified information and rumor are reported in the media. It aims to develop best practices for debunking misinformation.
Article about the U.S. Open of Table Tennis in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A plug for my favorite sport.
Protecting the constitutional principle of the separation of state and church
The Freedom From Religion Foundation's ad featuring Ron Reagan describing himself as "an unabashed atheist" has been rejected for airing by CBS, not only by "60 Minutes," the desired placement, but for any CBS TV show. Watch it: CBS, '60 Minutes,' reject Ron Reagan's `unabashed atheist' ad
We need more prominent people to come out as atheists. Laws won't change until public opinion does, just like for women's rights, gay rights, etc.
A key finding from neuroscience research over the last few decades is that non-conscious preparatory brain activity appears to precede the subjective feeling of making a decision. Some neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, have argued that this shows our sense of free will is an illusion, and that lay people would realize this too if they were given a vivid demonstration of the implications of the science.
... However, in a new paper, Eddy Nahmias, Jason Shepard and Shane Reuter counter such claims. They believe that Harris and others (who they dub "willusionists") make several unfounded assumptions about the basis of most people's sense of free will.
I was hoping for a better argument.