Searching for explanations: How the Internet inflates estimates of internal knowledge.
Abstract: As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge “in the head,” even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images.
The truth is, the war on cancer has been one of the most successful government programmes ever. But we have outgrown the original act, and we need a new one, with a new organisation, to finish the job.
42 percent of New York Times Magazine readers would kill a baby.
Raiders of the Lost Web: If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can.
“Here is a design guideline: If you run a publishing platform and you decide to change your site design, have the design team take all their existing articles and rewrite them to use the new tools and layout. Does it look as good? If no, retry.”
Annoyed by loud chewing? Unable to stand noisy eaters?
Dan Perjovschi, cartoonist (via austinkleon.com).
A different spin on the global village.
“In some ways, when it comes to bullying, the Internet has made the world more rural. Before the Internet, bullying ended when you withdrew from whatever environment you were in. But now, the bullying dynamic is harder to contain and harder to ignore.”
Get in line people of color. Wait for (white) women to get theirs, then we’ll get to you.
Hoist.io: Trigger code on events in your favorite web services.