Category: Learned Today

This doesn’t make much sense at first sight but the mind works in mysterious ways. People know there are others who think the same way they do and if people like them don’t vote then their candidate is unlikely to win. Therefore they need to vote themselves.
It sounds like a twisted kind of logic but Quattrone & Tversky found some evidence for it in a study following on from the one they did about self-deception (see the connection?!). They found that in a simulated voting situation participants behaved as though they believed that their own vote actually caused other people to vote in the same way they did.
In other words, people seem to behave as though their own behaviour is diagnostic of other people who think the same way.
This is another neat demonstration of our powers of self-deception and one reason self-deception can work to society’s advantage. Democracies generally view voting as a good thing (with some notable exceptions!) and try to encourage it, yet people rationally understand that their individual vote makes practically no difference. But when we see our vote as signalling how others will behave, it becomes much more important.
via Why Do People Bother Voting? | PsyBlog.

Wow this is enlightening. Some people really do get of at pissing other people off. Lesson learned , if someone you are irritated with actually gets of at pissing people off,  well its time to be that person nobody can seem to piss off!

Participants who had higher testosterone levels responded better to angry faces than to neutral ones, even though the faces were on screen too briefly to identify. Michelle Wirth, who led the study, explained how this can possibly be correlated to other testing methods:
“Better learning of a task associated with anger faces indicates that the anger faces were rewarding, as in a rat that learns to press a lever in order to receive a tasty treat. In that sense, anger faces seemed to be rewarding for high-testosterone people, but aversive for low-testosterone people.”
So the next time it seems like that person is trying to piss you off, reward them with a knuckle sandwich.
via Getting a rise out of getting a rise.

I use to believe in the Learning Styles theory, but based on my sample of One (me), You learn when you need to and/or you want to , when these are both true you really learn, when only one is true you tend to have incomplete learning on a subject matter.

This is not to say that all kids are the same, or that all kids should be taught the same way. But it does help us to understand what the source of these differences might be.
Consider this analogy. Watch kids on a museum field trip and you’ll notice that they stop to look at different paintings: some like cubism, some like impressionism, some like the Old Masters, and so on.
You would not conclude that these kids have different visual systems. You’d figure that these differences were due to the children’s backgrounds, their personalities, tastes, and so on.
The same seems to be true of learning.
Some lessons click with one child and not with another, but not because of an enduring bias or predisposition in the way the child learns. The lesson clicks or doesn’t because of the knowledge the child brought to the lesson, his interests, or other factors.
When you think about it, the theory of learning styles doesn’t really celebrate the differences among children: On the contrary, the point is to categorize kids.
via The Answer Sheet – Willingham: Student “Learning Styles” Theory Is Bunk.

Cool Code!

Mathematical investigations ————————— It is proved that for the Dual-Pivot Quicksort the average number of comparisons is 2*n*ln(n), the average number of swaps is 0.8*n*ln(n), whereas classical Quicksort algorithm has 2*n*ln(n) and 1*n*ln(n) respectively. Full mathematical proof see in attached proof.txt and proof_add.txt files. Theoretical results are also confirmed by experimental counting of the operations.
via gmane.comp.java.openjdk.core-libs.devel.