Tag: data
-
Howdy Neighbor!
Gallup Polls, famous for its political odds-making every election cycle, has released a new poll that attempts to draw correlation between general happiness and certain everyday activities - like saying hello to your neighbors. As Anthony and Jeff dig into the data, however, it reveals the way polling can seemingly justify misleading conclusions. [more]
-
Intelligence and Personality
An enormous new publicly available dataset containing over 1,300 studies of millions of people from across the world, establishes reliable relationships between personality traits and cognitive abilities. Jeff and Anthony dig into this vast amount of information to see if our assumptions about the relationship between intelligence and personality are true. [more]
-
Movies in Space and Shared Creativity
The company co-producing Tom Cruise’s upcoming space movie, has unveiled plans to build a space station module that contains a sports and entertainment arena as well as a content studio by December 2024. Jeff and Anthony discuss the feasibility and application of such a project. Then, a new article in the Academy of Management Journal, finds that handing a mature idea to somebody else for execution harms the creativity of the final product. Anthony and Jeff discuss their own creative ventures, and look at the how data can inform creativity. [more]
-
Psych Warn
The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature. This experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically. But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit. Jeff and Anthony try the experiment out for themselves and flip a coin to see who gets to be the guard. [more]
-
Doggie Data Care
What can artificial intelligence learn from dogs? Quite a lot, say researchers from the University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI. They recently trained neural networks to interpret and predict the behavior of canines. Their results, they say, show that animals could provide a new source of training data for AI systems — including those used to control robots. Jeff and Anthony learn that you can teach a new bot an old dog's tricks. [more]
-
Lethal Collection
"What if we told you we could back up your mind?" That's the business pitch of Nectome, a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. The catch? They have to kill you first. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere. Jeff and Anthony accuse each other of already having undergone the procedure. [more]
-
Big Haply Family
IN THE LAST 20 years, genealogy websites have attracted more than 15 million customers by promising insights into your past. It’s deeply personal, affecting stuff. But when your family tree contains thousands, millions, even tens of millions of people, it’s no longer a personal history. It’s human history. Recently, scientists from the New York Genome Center, Columbia, MIT, and Harvard scraped crowdsourced public records into family trees the size of small nations. Their analysis, which was published today in Science, includes the single largest known family tree, containing 13 million people. Your cousins Jeff and Anthony discuss this story. [more]
Do NOT join our secret society. You’ll just wind up with a bunch of cool stuff. It’s gross.