Tag: #TheInformationLens
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Complex Systems Research in Psychology
Han L. J. van der Maas published August 31, 2024 this SFI book “Complex Systems Research in Psychology“, available as PDF for free. Prologue This book is intended for psychologists and social scientists interested in modeling psychological processes using the tools of complex-systems research. The book has three primary objectives. The first is to provide…
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New Stakeholder Theory to rescue the megaproject puzzle …
“Cracking the megaproject puzzle: A stakeholder perspective?” advocates the perspective ” new stakeholder theory ” to make sense of empirical regularities in megaprojects, so make sense of delays, cost growth, and scope creep. It is suggested that empirical regularities are not isomorphic with bad management and/or dishonesty, but rather an outcome of the ‘rules of the game’.…
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Bayesian inference from the ground up
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and Dora Matzke developed a course book “Bayesian inference from the ground up: The theory of common sense” will be made freely available on their BayesianSpectacles website. Click here to obtain the first 27 chapters and 4 appendix chapters. The website is full of interesting information, including the Let’s Poke a Pizza: A New…
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Do we all see the same colours?
Patrick Mineault made a little app to test if we all see the same colours. https://ismy.blue He did the test, and in the end, yes, his wife has consistently different blue/green boundaries. It takes access to an adaptive optics ophthalmoscope to figure out if it’s a cone density difference or more of a Sapir-Whorf situation.…
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Insight –> selection of ideas
“Insight and the selection of ideas” describes the mechanisms underlying Eureka heuristic, explained within an active inference framework. Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity’s most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from…
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music and aging | Bayesian inference
“Understanding music and aging through the lens of Bayesian inference“ Bayesian inference has recently gained momentum in explaining music perception and aging. A fundamental mechanism underlying Bayesian inference is the notion of prediction. This framework could explain how predictions pertaining to musical (melodic, rhythmic, harmonic) structures engender action, emotion, and learning, expanding related concepts of music…
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The Edge of Sentience
“The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI.” by Jonathan Birch Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences?…
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exploring One Health
The eco-epidemiology of zoonoses is often oversimplified to host-pathogen interactions while findings derived from global datasets are rarely directly transferable to smaller-scale contexts. Through a systematic literature search, we compiled a dataset of naturally occurring zoonotic interactions in Austria, spanning 1975–2022. We introduce the concept of zoonotic web to describe the complex relationships between zoonotic…
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nature was much more inventive
Space scientist Edward Stone served as project scientist for NASA’s Voyager missions for 50 years, as well as playing a major role in many other missions, acting as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and running his own lab at Caltech. Stone has died, aged 88. Here are some remarkable quotes from “Celebrating Voyager’s 40…
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Market forces are not enough to halt climate change
A very interesting opinion has been published a while ago in the FT: “Market forces are not enough to halt climate change“ I like to repeat the quote used in the “Nature Anthropocene briefing of July 5“, with following comments:The desire for financial returns will mean that fossil fuels continue to be good investments, thus…
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Shifting attention
The Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis (I referred to earlier) asserts, contrary to the traditional view of attention as being primarily externally oriented, that attention is inherently biased toward internal information. A related work on attention switching has been published: “Shifting attention between perception and working memory“ Most everyday tasks require shifting the…
