26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong

A nice collection of cognitive biases that seem very relevant to social software and social navigation in particular.
I suspect that there are ways that most of these biases could be used positively in a learning context, though whether the bad habits acquired in doing so would be more harmful than the good they might engender would have to be considered carefully!
Created:Tue, 29 May 2007 03:15:58 GMT


Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1288
Posted: May 28, 2007, 9:15 pm

The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth. Many-to-Many:

Typically brilliant article by Clay Shirky who once again elegantly proves a thing that, once you know it, is completely and intuitively obvious but that, before then, is just one of life’s curious puzzles. Of course – young people do interesting, creative and novel things and exploit new technologies more easily because they know less. This is the downside of wisdom – the more you know, the more you ignore the little anomalies, the more some things seem obvious and are not questioned.
Clay suggests that this is a real and unassailable advantage of young over old, but I think there is still a chance for us oldies. They key is to completely change your intellectual and/or working life every now and then. Not just a gentle shift from one job to another that is similar, or picking up another skill that draws on your existing skills (e.g. a new language), though that can probably help, but something utterly different and, on the face of it, unrelated to what you have done before.
Created:Sat, 26 May 2007 13:14:25 GMT


Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1285
Posted: May 26, 2007, 7:14 am

A new twist on anti-spam tech can help digitize books

OK, this is really cool – putting the time spent on filling in CAPTCHAs to good use to harness the wisdom of the crowd in a big big way – 60 million eyes a day, solving problems that computers cannot solve. Brilliant idea, so many possible applications apart from the simple task of fixing weaknesses in OCR.
Just a little worrying that it could be a tempting target for coordinated practical jokers and maybe worse – CAPTCHA-bombing could be the next big thing 🙂
Created:Sat, 26 May 2007 06:05:22 GMT


Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1284
Posted: May 26, 2007, 12:05 am

BibMe – the fully automatic & free bibliography maker (MLA, APA & Chicago)

as the title says – generates bibliographies in a small number of popular styles for inclusion in papers etc. The neat part is that the bibliographic database is generated by everyone who uses it.Simple idea, with collective intelligence.
Created:Thu, 17 May 2007 14:55:59 GMT


Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1279
Posted: May 17, 2007, 8:55 am

Numbers follow a surprising law of digits, and scientists can’t explain why

Benford’s law shows that, in a very diverse range of data sets, the first digit of numbers is 1 about a third of the time, and the next numbers follow a consistent pattern of distribution. This is both interesting and odd but, for me, it is much more interesting how the law was discovered, independently, by two reserachers:
“Both Benford and Newcomb stumbled upon the law in the same way: while flipping through pages of a book of logarithmic tables, they noticed that the pages in the beginning of the book were dirtier than the pages at the end.”
A wonderful example of the collective in action, without the aid of any computers!
Created:Sat, 12 May 2007 08:04:22 GMT


Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1274
Posted: May 12, 2007, 2:04 am