The differential biology reader

July 4, 2011

"Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind."

— David Sosa, “The Spoils of Happiness,” via brainpicker (via dianakimball)

8:32am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy6kSNgT

June 27, 2011

"It’s probably just a coincidence that when people get exercised about the reasoning behind inferring function from form, it just happens to be in the context of one tiny part of the natural world, the computational mechanisms that underlie human social behavior."

— Robert Kurzban, To Which Organisms, If Any, Does The Logic Of Adaptationism Apply?

1:46pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy6VbaWB

(Notes: 1)

June 20, 2011

"A test is said to be face valid if it appears to measure what it purports to measure, especially to subjects. Face validity bears no relation to true validity and is important only in so far as adults will generally not co-operate on tests that lack face validity, regarding them as silly and insulting. Children, used to school, are not quite so fussy."

— Paul Kline, A handbook of test construction: introduction to psychometric design, 1986 via Mind Hacks

11:27am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy6GWLyW

June 9, 2011

thingsorganizedneatly:

SUBMISSION: Elements of Happiness

How can a life be visualized? Can a happy life be captured in numbers and diagrams?

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest prospective study of mental and physical well-being ever conducted. For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been following 824 individuals through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age.

In this book, I’ve taken 10 representative case studies and visualized their salient character traits, personal timeline, social supports, and physical health to draw conclusions about “the happy life.”

7:26pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy5x1Kmn

(Notes: 586)

May 11, 2011

Gorilla traditions for eating nettles.

Byrne, Hobaiter, Klailova. 2011. Local traditions in gorilla manual skill: evidence for observational learning of behavioral organization. Animal Cognition.

(Source: newscientist.com)

9:05am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy513AR-

Filed under: culture

May 11, 2011

How to incentivise research through reputation. Same.as Reputation (by @yahnyinlondon via @kaythaney)

7:02am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy50zAgb

May 9, 2011

"We’re often tempted to add decimal places to the answer to one question instead of moving on to the next question."

— John D Cook, Move on to the next question — The Endeavour

4:57pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy4_3UlQ

May 5, 2011

Star plot to visualize factor loadings.

Bielby et al. 2007. The fast-slow continuum in mammalian life history: an empirical reevaluation. Am Nat 169.

9:46am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy4sp12l

Filed under: life history

May 4, 2011

Personality and the senses

there is an apparent relationship between certain personality traits and sensory capacities.…[S]ensory capacity may provide a filter through which we perceive the world, and that this filter may influence the picture we receive of the world….We found no coherence between personality traits and gustatory modality (mainly related to eating) but significant coherence between personality traits and olfactory, trigeminal sensory and electrical cutaneous modality; systems usually thought to be related to detection of social cues and awareness of danger.

If behavior is the output of a reaction to a stimulus, part of the behavior (and therefore personality) will be related to how each stimulus is perceived. It is interesting to find this at such a basic level (as opposed to say, the global stimulation experienced by the extravert versus the introvert).

Croy I, Springborn M, Lötsch J, Johnston ANB, Hummel T, 2011 Agreeable Smellers and Sensitive Neurotics – Correlations among Personality Traits and Sensory Thresholds. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18701. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018701

(Source: plosone.org)

10:18am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy4r6zGA

Filed under: personality one column

April 16, 2011

David Attenborough on identifying individual animals in field studies.

BBC Radio 4 - David Attenborough’s Life Stories, Series 2, Identities

2:46pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy4LhjTu

March 29, 2011

"[T]heory [is] the formation of testable hypotheses, while…empirical work [is] hypothesis testing. This pair of definitions highlights the false dichotomy between theory and empirical work insofar as models, mathematics, and methods do not fall in either category, but instead provide the operational link between theory and empirical work."

— R Gorelick, What is theory? _Ideas in Ecology and Evolution_.

7:06am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy3v7IZm

March 9, 2011

"All of what follows will appear ridiculously obvious to those who have had no statistical training. Those who have must struggle."

— William M. Briggs, Group Differences: An Exceedingly Brief Introduction To Bayesian Predictive Inference via @StatFact.

3:42pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z23PQy3V8cCp

March 5, 2011

This American Life #317: Unconditional Love

psychotherapy:

Hard as it is to believe, during the early Twentieth Century, a whole school of mental health professionals decided that unconditional love was a terrible thing to give a child. The government printed pamphlets warning mothers against the dangers of holding their kids. The head of the American Psychological Association and even a mothers’ organization endorsed the position that mothers were dangerous—until psychologist Harry Harlow set out to prove them wrong, through a series of experiments with monkeys. Host Ira Glass talks with Deborah Blum, author of Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection. (9 minutes)