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Video: APS Panel Discusses Nexus of Impact and Life
Can social science’s impact be boiled down to improving and enriching lives? In recent years, there has been an uptake in requirements from funders across the globe to prove impact of scholarly work, and simultaneously, intensified scrutiny about the value of social and behavioral science.
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You 2.0: Rebel With A Cause
A few years ago, social scientist Francesca Gino was browsing the shelves at a bookstore when she came across an unusual-looking book in the cooking section: Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef by Massimo Bottura. The recipes in it were playful, quirky — and improbable. Snails were paired with coffee sauce, veal tongue with charcoal powder. Francesca, who is Italian, says remixing classic recipes like this is a kind of heresy in Italian cooking. "We really cherish the old way," she says.
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‘Mind in Motion’ Review: No Ideas but in Things
How are we to think of how we think? Are our minds a separate internal world in which we manipulate mere proxies—symbols, ideas, representations—for real things? Are they software running in the brain whose connection to the real, “external” world is then a further mystery in need of explanation? Or is it rather that we are embodied all the way down, such that even our most abstract thoughts—about mathematics, say, or relations between ideas—are still creatures of our creaturely nature? In “Mind in Motion,” the distinguished cognitive scientist Barbara Tversky makes the case that our embodiment as living, acting creatures is no mere add-on to our problem-solving cognitive capacities.
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Fake News Can Lead to False Memories
Voters may form false memories after seeing fabricated news stories, especially if those stories align with their political beliefs, a study shows.
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How Child Passengers Can Distract Drivers
Since emerging as a fad in the 1980s, “Baby on Board” stickers have persisted as a staple of rear windshields and bumpers on cars and minivans. According to urban legend, the death of an infant
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AI ‘EMOTION RECOGNITION’ CAN’T BE TRUSTED
As artificial intelligence is used to make more decisions about our lives, engineers have sought out ways to make it more emotionally intelligent. That means automating some of the emotional tasks that come naturally to humans — most notably, looking at a person’s face and knowing how they feel. To achieve this, tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon all sell what they call “emotion recognition” algorithms, which infer how people feel based on facial analysis. For example, if someone has a furrowed brow and pursed lips, it means they’re angry. If their eyes are wide, their eyebrows are raised, and their mouth is stretched, it means they’re afraid, and so on.
