How Tech Shapes Us as Well as Our World
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Post No.: 0480   Furrywisepuppy says:   We can have different kinds of relationships with tech – they can be in us (e.g. nanotechnology capsules), between us (e.g. phones when making calls), added to us (e.g. prosthetic limbs), be like … Read More

Ecological, External and Internal Validity
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Post No.: 0479   Furrywisepuppy says:   In science, ‘ecological validity’ is the degree to which the settings, materials, procedures, timescales, etc. of an experiment approximate the real world it’s trying to emulate. So when people criticise a laboratory-based experiment … Read More

Improving Your Ability to Make Better Forecasts
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Post No.: 0478   Furrywisepuppy says:   Many investors and businesses are more interested in hearing the forecasts they want to hear than understanding whether such forecasts are dependable or not – hence all these 2, 3, 5-year turnover and … Read More

A Supernatural Deterrence to Spur Ingroup Cohesion
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Post No.: 0477   Furrywisepuppy says:   Is religion an effective mechanism for encouraging more moral and pro-social behaviours and for enforcing compliance with the social rules or norms within a group?   Cooperation is the cornerstone for group cohesion … Read More

Negative and Positive Externalities
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Post No.: 0476   Furrywisepuppy says:   ‘Negative externalities’ occur when the production or consumption of something causes any kind of cost to be passed onto a third-party. A classic example is air, water, land, noise or light pollution. Meanwhile, … Read More

Ostracism, Isolation and Being Ignored
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Post No.: 0475   Furrywisepuppy says:   Pains, in particular, generally drive us to seek to belong to social groups for support, which makes being ignored, ostracised, isolated, solitarily confined, socially deprived or excluded one of the most doubly hurtful … Read More

More Trees for the Win!
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Post No.: 0474   Fluffystealthkitten says:   Although considered a ‘trace gas’ in the Earth’s atmosphere, there’s a lot of carbon dioxide in the air and depleting the amount of trees and forests on the ground is not a good … Read More

The Process for Obtaining the Best Truth We Can Say Right Now
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Post No.: 0473   Furrywisepuppy says:   The reason why the scientific process is the most reliable way to obtain the truth is because of the testing and challenging of beliefs and hypotheses, and the need for evidence. Things aren’t … Read More

Words, Meaning and Linguistics
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Post No.: 0472   Fluffystealthkitten says:   All words have a semantic meaning (a literal meaning) and a pragmatic meaning (why something was expressed, which will take into account the context it was expressed). Non-word utterances, like grunts, can have … Read More

Naïve Realism and Perceiving the World Objectively
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Post No.: 0471   Furrywisepuppy says:   When you know what the lyrics to a muffled phrase in a song are, or the words of a messily handwritten letter are, then those words will seem more crystal clear to you. … Read More

Facial Feedback and Communication
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Post No.: 0470   Furrywisepuppy says:   We are so innately primed for social interactions, relationships and working together that we will even perceive animated shapes as having intentions and whether we can trust them or not! Unless we’re relevantly … Read More

Having Too Much (Food) on Your Plate
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Post No.: 0469   Furrywisepuppy says:   Many scientific experiments over the years have investigated what can affect how much we eat. Here are a few of the findings…   A simple thing like using smaller crockery can help us … Read More

Balancing Work and Home Life
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Post No.: 0468   Furrywisepuppy says:   There’s far more to contributing to a relationship than who brings home the most money. Money is easy to quantify but housework, raising children and so forth (stuff that women traditionally do more … Read More

Carbon Offsetting in Practice
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Post No.: 0467   Fluffystealthkitten says:   Carbon offsetting strategies have their supporters and critics. For their supporters, it seems to make logical sense that it’s okay to release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, such as methane and … Read More

Genetic Heritability is not Necessarily Fixed
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Post No.: 0466   Furrywisepuppy says:   The interaction of both genetics and environmental factors – such as the amount of nutrition received when young or even when still in the womb, humans preferring to hunt larger prey to extinction, … Read More

Eating with our Eyes First and Stomachs Second
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Post No.: 0465   Furrywisepuppy says:   Lots of people will have made New Year’s resolutions about living more healthily after the indulgences of the festive season.   For parties and celebrations, we tend to lay out a varied spread … Read More

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