Posts

July 28, 2012

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1:14 AM | Can Creativity be Automated? - Technology Review

Can Creativity be Automated? - Technology Review

July 25, 2012

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9:05 PM | Letting God do the punishment for you

There are lots of stereotypes about the attitudes of religious people to punishment. There is the one that says religious people are mild and meek, and turn the other cheek rather than seek revenge. Then there is the other one that says that religious people are full of fire and brimstone, demanding flogging and hanging for every misdemeanour. But which stereotype is most accurate? Kristin Laurin, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, sought to find out by looking at a behaviour known […]

July 24, 2012

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1:57 AM | Remove your name from Facebook social ads

Facebook might be using your “likes” in ads seen by others. There’s a privacy setting to prevent that from happening if social ads have been enabled in your regions. Login to Facebook and visit this privacy settings page: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social Make sure the dropdown menu choice for “Pair my social actions with adverts for” is set [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkRemove your name from Facebook social ads

July 19, 2012

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9:12 PM | Why do thoughts of death make people more religious?

Are there atheists in foxholes? It's another fascinating topic that has seen quite a lot of development over recent years. The study that kicked it all off was one by Ara Norenzayan and Ian Hansen, at the University of British Columbia. They found that subliminal reminders of death caused their subjects to report being more religious, which suggests that fear of death actually strengthens belief in God. Over the years, many people have used studies like this to suggest that everyone - atheists […]

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1:31 PM | Use an external drive with Mac or PC

External disk drives let you quickly move large files between computers without having to rely on email or cloud file sharing/storage services. But, if you’re a Mac user who needs to share files with a PC user, or vice versa you will no doubt have come up against the disk format problem. If you want [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkUse an external drive with Mac or PC

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12:19 PM | Chrome Web Lab en el The London Science Museum

Impresionante instalación de Tellart en el impresionante London Science Museum.Basta sólo mirar las etiquetas:Interactive Architecture - Arquitectura InteractivaInternet Of Things - Internet de las CosasPhysical Computing - Computación FísicaProjection - ProyecciónReactive Environments - Ambientes ReactivosWeb Lab

July 18, 2012

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1:38 PM | Significant Objects, un experimento literario y antropológico

http://significantobjects.com/

July 17, 2012

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8:06 PM | The pros and cons of teleworking

A recent survey by European social scientists highlights a stack of advantages to working from home, teleworking, or mobile working. The team found that whether or not individuals in the organisation surveyed took up the option to do telework did not depend on age, but was correlated with gender. Perhaps, surprisingly, contrary to what might [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkThe pros and cons of teleworking

Tremblay, D.G. (2012). Telework and mobile working: analysis of its benefits and drawbacks, Int. J. Work Innovation, 1 (1) 113. DOI:

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July 16, 2012

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3:41 PM | Poster: Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment in 18 OECD countries, 1975-1999

A poster version of my article “Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment in 18 OECD countries, 1975-1999” is now available from my website. Please click this link to get the poster (.PDF, 400Kb). The poster is called: “Combining Motherhood ...

July 15, 2012

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8:59 PM | Does education mean more or less religion? It depends on the country

The relationship between education, intelligence, and religion is endlessly fascinating. Previous studies have shown that nations with higher average IQ tend to be less religious, and this holds for individuals too - in a limited way. The question is, why might this be? Gerhard Meisenberg, at Ross University Medical School in Dominica, and colleagues have conducted a new analysis of world-wide data using a novel approach. Using data from the World Values Survey they showed that in all […]

July 13, 2012

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3:20 PM | influence.ME updated to version 0.9

Influence.ME is an R extension package for R that provides tools for detecting influential data in multilevel regression models. It is developed by Rense Nieuwenhuis (that’s me), Manfred te Grotenhuis, and Ben Pelzer. Recently, a new version (0.9) was uploaded ...

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1:01 PM | Virtual Bagel and Facebook fakers

Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC created an imaginary business called VirtualBagel to test the power of Facebook advertising. Within 24 hours, VirtualBagel had been “liked” more 1600 times, despite the page having no content and offering no products. Most of the likes were from India, Egypt, Indonesia and the Philippines, the BBC reports. The page [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkVirtual Bagel and Facebook fakers

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10:36 AM | We want answers from Facebook

There’s yet another downer on Facebook circulating right now. According to ZDNet and others, “you might be shocked to learn that Facebook is automatically publishing posts under your name and placing them at the top of the News feed for your friends.” This might include controversial political or other sensitive content that you would not [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkWe want answers from Facebook

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9:02 AM | Insights into my LinkedIn network

About a year ago, I saw a blog post about building one’s network on LinkedIn (free ebook), the aim, it seemed was to accrue as many valid contacts as possible to increase your opportunities for connecting with interesting people with whom you might usefully interact. It talked of the 500+ Club, a mythical status symbol [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkInsights into my LinkedIn network

July 12, 2012

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1:41 PM | Quick change passwords

A day doesn’t seem to go by without yet another site being hacked and everyone panicking to quickly change our passwords. But how do you quickly get to the change password page on any given site when you need to? Well, inspired by the My Permissions site (mentioned on Sciencetext a while ago), I’ve created [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkQuick change passwords

July 11, 2012

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9:04 PM | Different parts of the brain linked to religious practice, spirituality, and fundamentalism

One time-honoured way to try to work out the function of different parts of the brain is to study people with brain damage. If damage in a particular area is consistently associated with a particular psychological change, well then there probably is some kind of mechanistic link. There's been a couple of recent studies that have shed some of this particular light onto our religious drives. First, some background. In 2008 Brick Johnstone, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, found […]

July 10, 2012

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9:25 AM | Facebook Photo Fetcher

The Facebook Photo Fetcher WordPress plugin lets you quickly and automagically import photo albums from a Facebook account and display them in a nice array of thumbnails on a Page or Post. Click and image and the “Lightbox” functionality brings the image to the fore, full size and you can than move on to the [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkFacebook Photo Fetcher

July 08, 2012

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1:12 PM | Sobre ciudades y urbanismo

[Urban Networks, fuente]3 blogs que vale la pena seguir para los que amamos las ciudades (este es mi post sobre New York City):PD Smith.URBAGRAM.Bricoleurbanism.The Urbanophile.

July 06, 2012

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8:48 PM | Wars increasingly involve religion, but it's not a clash of civilisations

Jonathan Fox, a Political Scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, has reviewed data on conflicts worldwide since 1960, and found not only that there are currently more religious conflicts that there were in the 60s, but that religion now plays a role in over half of all conflicts. By 'religious conflict' he doesn't mean one that is just about religion - such conflicts are few and far between. Rather, he means one in which religion is a significant factor, meeting at least one […]

July 03, 2012

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7:55 AM | Don’t unfollow your Twitter lurkers

Some of those twitter cleanup apps (like The TwitCleaner) tell you when followers have been inactive for a month or more and suggest you unfollow to somehow “clean up” your following…pointless and potentially harmful. The biggest reason to value your listeners on Twitter, is not because they add to your reach, but because they’re people. [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkDon’t unfollow your Twitter lurkers

July 02, 2012

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9:02 PM | What sort of religious person believes in meddling spirits?

Human beings are inclined to see spirits and supernatural beings behind random acts of nature. Because spotting people (or animals) who are actively doing things in our environment is critical to survival, we've evolved to be super-sensitive to any evidence of them. It's said that we humans have a Hyperactive Agency Detector (HAD). Now, for obvious reasons it's frequently assumed that HAD has something to do with why so many people believe in supernatural beings. And yet what's also clear is […]

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8:46 PM | FTPBox private alternative to Dropbox for backup

Do you have access to FTP storage? Most hosted websites come with several gigabytes of free space that stay mostly unused forever, which you could easily use as an alternative to DropBox, Wuala or other cloud storage services. Obviously, it won’t come with the bells and whistles and apps etc, but could be good enough [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkFTPBox private alternative to Dropbox for backup

June 28, 2012

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7:48 PM | Does belief in a compassionate god increase murder rates?

Azim Shariff, who's now at the University of Oregon in the USA, has taken a look at how belief in heaven and hell relates to crime rates around the world. The basic approach was dead simple. Using data from the World Values Survey, he subtracted the proportion of people who believe in hell from the proportion that believes in heaven. Then he took a bunch of crime stats provided by the UN (homicide, rape , kidnapping, assault, theft, drug crime, auto theft, burglary, and human trafficking), […]

June 27, 2012

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10:23 AM | Avoid embarrassment on Facebook with UnclickIt

UnclickIt is a Chrome extension (and soon a Firefox addon) that allows you to read what your Facebook friends link to without having to go through annoying and frustrating apps that are tied to their links. You can just hope straight to the destination link without having to sign up for anything and without risking [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkAvoid embarrassment on Facebook with UnclickIt

June 23, 2012

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8:53 PM | Religious people give to religious charities

The link between religion and charity is a fascinating one - not least because the assumption that the religious not only give more to charity but are more 'generous' as a result really does beg the question. Even if they report giving more to charity, which charities are they giving to, and why? Ben Johnson, a masters student at the University of North Carolina, USA, used data from a nationally representative sample of 5,000 families. He crunched these through some fairly hefty statistics to […]

June 22, 2012

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6:59 AM | To follow whom?

I was searching for a Chrome extension to allow me to add filtering to Twitter when up popped an extension that purportedly corrects the “Who to follow” to “Whom to follow. WTF? “Who to follow” is not wrong. If they wanted to be pedantic they should replace the phrase with: “Suggestions as to whom you [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkTo follow whom?

June 20, 2012

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3:56 PM | Will Partisan Polarization get in the way of Obama’s Second Term?

I just realized that Obama’s chances of being re-elected might be seriously compromised. Not because of any of the policies he did (or did not) implement, but because of polarization of America Public opinion. The New Yorker has a piece ...

Carmines & Woods (2002). The role of party activists in the evolution of the abortion issue, Political Behavior, 24 (4) 361-377.

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10:38 AM | Why do Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria?

It’s obvious in retrospect, but Microsoft has now come up with a logical analysis to explain why we get so many scam emails and spam claiming to be from Nigeria. Most of us recognise the far-fetched tales of West African riches just waiting to be released to our welcoming bank accounts as comical and either [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkWhy do Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria?

June 17, 2012

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4:20 PM | Attending the WFRN – Day 3

Wow, final day of the WFRN in New York already! Some of my impressions and experiences of this great conference. I attended a session on using social media, a poster session, a round-table conversation on international insights, and so much more.

June 16, 2012

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11:58 AM | Attending the WFRN – Day 2

Did I mention my first day at the work and family researchers’ network was great? The second day was even more interesting, with a program of thirteen (!!) hours to enjoy. In a session on motherhood in the workplace, Jocelyn ...

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