Interesting Links for 05-09-2019

[andrewducker]

Average speed cameras may be put on 25 Edinburgh roads

(tags:speed driving Edinburgh Scotland safety )

Thousands in UK born as result of extreme inbreeding (about 0.025%)

(tags:incest uk )

Giving People Simple "Moral Nudges" Encourages Them To Donate Much More To Charity

(tags:morality psychology charity money )

Active learning works best, even though students don't feel that way

(tags:education psychology )

How parliament works in the UK (the bit about the Queen's rabbit made me giggle a lot)

(tags:parliament UK satire )

Mental-health information sold to advertisers by websites

(tags:Web mentalhealth advertising )

Want your brain trained? Play Portal 2

(tags:learning psychology puzzle games portal )

40% of Americans think society should be burned to the ground to start over again

(tags:society usa )

Why phones that secretly listen to us are a myth

(tags:surveillance phones advertising )

Green-fingered couple devastated as new Fountainbridge curved glass office block will ruin their garden

(tags:Edinburgh light gardens OhForFucksSake viaSwampers )

Ex-Muslims of North America debuts billboards in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston

(tags:USA religion Islam society )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I think many people do not understand how painful "burning everything to the ground" actually is. They might want to have a conversation with a 95 year-old Pole and see how bad it actually is.

[andrewducker]

Or someone in Cornwall in a couple of years.

[danieldwilliam]

I don't think the Scottish Forward Self-Defence Force has plans to liberate Cornwall until after hostilities have ceased.

[channelpenguin]

why Cornwall in particular?

But seriously, surely anarchy/chaos only ever appeals to young, physically fit males who currently have very little societal status/power/money. At least they are, IMO, some the few groups for whom the possible gains might outweigh the losses ...

[nancylebov]

I know at least one older man who wants it all to burn.

It's possible that it's mostly because of him being in a bureaucratic trap of not being able to work for money because that would end his government aid.

[skington]

I assume because Cornwall is (comparatively) dirt poor and gets loads of EU subsidies as a result. Which a Boris Johnson government is hardly inclined to match.

[andrewducker]

Poor, likely to be badly hit, voted Leave.

[liv]

That study about active learning is foundational to the project I was working on for the past couple of years, so it's kind of fascinating to see it summarized on Ars Technica!

[andrewducker]

That's awesome! What was your part in it?

[liv]

Oh, I didn't carry out the study, sorry to be unclear. The existence of that study, and a few others like it, provided the foundational evidence which allowed my uni to apply for a government grant to change the whole university over to active learning. And part of that grant paid my salary for two years; my job was to train academics into how to do active learning well, and to carry out research to see if our approach to active learning was working. Including when active learning is a normal everyday thing that everybody just routinely does, not a special experimental set-up like in that study.

[anef]

I feel sorry for the peole whose garden is to be overshadowed by a massive office block. It isn't clear from the article whether the developers are obliged to pay for them to move somewhere else (I appreciate that they don't want to) but I would hope that they are. I wish them the best with their campaign.

[andrewducker]

I'll pass that on (I happen to know them!)

Re: Phones that listen

[fiddlingfrog]

I've been thinking and I believe there's a couple of flaws in the study about the phones listening to people. First, and the more major one, is that the researchers only tested major-brand apps. The problem, if it exists, likely stems from a rogue app like a game or camera or something like that, an app that makes you think "I just want to make a duck noise on command, why do you need access to my location, camera, and microphone?"
Secondly, instead of playing existing advertising the researchers should have used a script of people in conversation where the speaker's "new car" was mentioned prominently. Sub in new dog, new cat, new house, new baby, etc... to test if these made any difference. If these apps really are listening in, then I would imagine the processing is set to ignore existing advertising - I hear adverts all the time for products I'm not interested in, but words that I speak for myself are more likely to be things I'm interested in.