8/21/14 Today's Inquiries

Guten tag.

The links:

Fark, one of my longtime favorite sites, is adding misogyny to it's moderator guidelines. Amanda Hess wonders if it's even possible. I'd say yes. Fark already moderates for a wide variety if issues with "grey areas"and it's pretty successful. One big push came in the way submitted headlines were approved. Those set the tone for the whole comment thread and often set off the trolling and counter-trolling.

Female entrepreneurs and techies are beginning to out the sleazy mean who are demanding sex in order to fund their tech products. Good on them. The only way this situation gets better is if people are named and shamed publicly.

Oh good. It's time for Burning Man again. I'd only recommend reading the article if you're looking for more reasons to hate the super-rich.

Speaking of burning, a California solar plant is igniting birds in mid air as they fly through it's magnified beams.

The advantages of dyslexia. Very interesting.

One thing we do know for sure is that reading changes the structure of the brain. An avid reader might read for an hour or more a day, day in and day out for years on end. This highly specialized repetitive training, requiring an unnaturally precise, split-second control over eye movements, can quickly restructure the visual system so as to make some pathways more efficient than the others.

When illiterate adults were taught to read, an imaging study led by Stanislas Dehaene in France showed that changes occurred in the brain as reading was acquired. But, as these adults developed skills for reading, they also lost their former abilities to process certain types of visual information, such as the ability to determine when an object is the mirror image of another.  Learning to read therefore comes at a cost, and the ability to carry out certain types of visual processing are lost when people learn to read. This would suggest that the visual strengths in dyslexia are simply an artifact of differences in reading experience, a trade-off that occurs as a consequence of poor reading in dyslexia.

Nick Bunker answers my questions about the variability of spending on children. He finds that the risk spend more on their kids overall but that it is a much smaller portion of their income. Importantly, that spending seems to take place in areas which could improve their children's cognitive abilities.

Americans, unlike Europeans, think their country is more equal than it really is.

The middle class isn't buying all this talk about economic good time returning. Maybe they just need to go to Burning Man.

Perhaps it's because home ownership rates have returned to where they were in the mid 90's.

Or maybe:



A pretty cool discussion of why the Roman buried a "tech cache" while retreating from some celts.

I can't embed this trailer, but it looks pretty cool. The film is Automata and apparently robots like kidnapping humans or something. Also, 3 laws and no Will Smith.

I was going to link several more articles about Ferguson and inequality and race but I decided to show a video of the St. Louis police killing a man instead. It's kind of making the rounds but many people are choosing not to link it. I'm going to embed it below because I want you to watch it and to think about whether or not these police offices were justified in taking a life. In other civilized countries, as best as I can tell, they would be facing murder charges. When I was teaching, I had several students act similarly in the hallways and never once did I think aggressive or lethal force was the appropriate response. I suppose they're lucky that they were in school and not outside a convenience store. Anyway, don't watch the video if you do not want to see a man shot to death for stealing two sodas.