Stressati dalla rete

by Mauro Scanu | Jun 17, 2010 in Science | Leave A Comment

Alcune ricerche scientifiche cominciano gettare luce su cosa succede al nostro cervello quando navighiamo in Rete: quando le nostre aspettative non sono soddisfatte il livello di stress aumenta!

Sovraccarico di Information Overload

by Mauro Scanu | May 28, 2010 in Science | Leave A Comment

Mauro considera la quantità di stimoli che ci bombardano ogni giorno e cita recenti studi su come affrontarli. Ma ha trovato una soluzione?

Mauro considers the amount of data overload we face on a daily basis and surveys recent studies on the matter. Does he come up with a solution?

@ Moma

by Mauro Scanu | May 11, 2010 in Design, Science | 1 Comment

Parliamo del simbolo @ che ha fatto parlare di sé visto che il Dipartimento di Architettura e Design del Moma di New York lo ha inserito nella sua collezione…

The @ symbol recently made the news as it entered the Moma collection… here’s why and a little history.

Margherita Hack shares memories of Florence in FFF Magazine

by Alexandra M. Korey | Feb 15, 2010 in Science | 1 Comment

Margherita Hack, the renowned astrophysicist who was interviewed in issue #10 Nomadic knowledge shares her memories of Florence, where she spent her first 32 years, in the new magazine FFF (Firenze Fast Forward). Written in Italian and edited by two architects (Gianni Sinni of Social Design Zine and Marco Brizzi of Image), FFF is in its second issue after issue “0″ created positive buzz last summer. Each issue is illustrated by a different artist. Articles are strongly tied to the local scene; in Florence it’s an important contribution to the city’s renewal in the urban and cultural sphere.

That’s why it’s significant that the magazine collects observations on the changed city by Margherita Hack, who has lived away from Florence since she was transfered for work first to Brera and then to Trieste in 1954. In a return visit, she’s amazed by the urban sprawl, the crowds, and the line to get into the Duomo, which she used to use as a shortcut (in through one side door, out through the other!) to get to school. She recalls her first years at the University of Florence, starting in 1940, when girls studying physics were decidedly a minority.

This interview is not about the big world of the stars, but rather the smaller but essential world of one’s city in the context of a magazine that searches for local solutions in an elegant manner. Sometimes it’s good to concentrate on the small things: Hack herself, in her 2004 interview for Illywords,says,

[I encourage] promoting an extensive general knowledge that permits the development of an understanding for what goes on about us and a skill for screening information and sorting out what’s essential. It’s what endows an individual with sufficient mental flexibility to conceive different possible solutions.

The big to understand the small – in the end, that’s a practical approach.

For more information and purchase locations see www.firenzefastforward.it.

A day at the races

by Mauro Scanu | Jan 18, 2010 in Science | Leave A Comment

In 1986 Stephen Ceci and Jeffrey Liker, two American psychologists, published a study on expert racetrack handicappers. Success predicting odds at the racetrack is an ability comparable with that of financial brokers since that expert handicappers use complex models involving multiple interactions effects. Simple models fail to account for the complexity of their decisions.

Moreover Ceci and Liker showed that expertise in betting on horse races had zero correlation with IQ, the best single measure that psychologists have because it correlates with so many cognitive capacities. So thinking about risk and uncertainty needs a special kind of intelligence.

in 2008 Dylan Evans, a British scientist, made the hypothesis that there is a special purpose skill-set at the core of which is the ability to estimate probabilities accurately: this is called “risk intelligence”. So Evans and Benjamin Jakobus, a German computer programmer, decided to launch Projection Point, a private, independent, non-profitmaking project aimed to gather information about this form of intelligence. Projection Point was officially launched in the early hours of Friday 1 January 2010. By the following day, over 1000 people had visited the site, of whom 300 had chosen to take part in the study. About 50 of these participants were derivatives traders and other finance professionals, and some of their results are quite impressive.

If you want to test your risk intelligence you can visit the project website.

I bet you will try…