Archive for the '–' Category
Here’s Why Parents Are Angry at Nest | TIME
September 20, 2015Introduction to Systems Modeling in Biology MCDB 261 S15
September 19, 2015Single-Cell Genomics Allows Identification of New Cell Types | MIT Technology Review
September 18, 2015What Is a Tree Worth? – The New Yorker
September 15, 2015What Is a #Tree Worth?
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-is-a-tree-worth Study on Toronto shows 10 more trees/block =+1% in wellness =$10k/person =being 7yrs younger
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“That is the riddle that underlies a new study in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, led by the University of Chicago psychology professor Marc Berman. The study compares two large data sets from the city of Toronto, both gathered on a block-by-block level; the first measures the distribution of green space, as determined from satellite imagery and a comprehensive list of all five hundred and thirty thousand trees planted on public land, and the second measures health, as assessed by a detailed survey of ninety-four thousand respondents. After controlling for income, education, and age, Berman and his colleagues showed that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt. “To get an equivalent increase with money, you’d have to give each household in that neighborhood ten thousand dollars—or make people seven years younger,” Berman told me.
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You can produce an attenuated version of the same effect simply by looking out a window, or (for experimental convenience) at a picture of a nature scene. Over the past few years, Berman and his colleagues have zeroed in on the “low-level” visual characteristics that distinguish natural from built environments. To do this, they broke down images into their visual components: the proportion of straight to curved edges, the hue and saturation of the colors, the entropy (a statistical measure of randomness in pixel intensity), and so on. The view of an arboretum, for instance, tends to have higher color saturation than that of a street corner, indicating that “the colors in nature are more of the ‘purer’ version of those colors,” Berman said. Even when images are scrambled so that there are no recognizable features, like trees or skyscrapers, to betray what they represent, their low-level visual characteristics still predict how much people will like them.”
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a book review by Anne Parfitt-Rogers: The Deeper Genome: Why There Is More to the Human Genome than Meets the Eye
September 15, 2015Multi-tasking: how to survive in the 21st century – FT.com
September 15, 2015Multi-tasking: how to survive in 21C http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bbf1f84a-51c2-11e5-8642-453585f2cfcd.html Explains @gtdguy’s plan of closing "open loops" in terms of the Zeigarnik effect
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“The principle behind Getting Things Done is simple: close the open loops. The details can become rather involved but the method is straightforward. For every single commitment you’ve made to yourself or to someone else, write down the very next thing you plan to do. Review your lists of next actions frequently enough to give you confidence that you won’t miss anything.
This method has a cult following, and practical experience suggests that many people find it enormously helpful — including me (see below). Only recently, however, did the psychologists E J Masicampo and Roy Baumeister find some academic evidence to explain why people find relief by using David Allen’s system. Masicampo and Baumeister found that you don’t need to complete a task to banish the Zeigarnik effect. Making a specific plan will do just as well. Write down your next action and you quiet that nagging voice at the back of your head. You are outsourcing your anxiety to a piece of paper.”
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