Slashdot Mirror
Web Users Judge Sites Instantly
Ant writes "This Nature.com news article reports that potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds: 'Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer, the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions...'"
Quoth TFA "Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny."
.25 seconds. This study erronseously assumes that the judgement is made during the time the image is displayed - of course, the image retention time on the eye end the lasting photographic imprint on the memory means that the judgement can happen well after the image is gone.
The human reaction time is about
What you're referring to is prejudice, or prejudgement. Racism, as defined on wikipedia, is: Racism refers to beliefs, practices, and institutions that discriminate against people based on their perceived or ascribed "race". Primarily, it refers to an assumption that the human species can meaningfully be divided into races, together with hostility to people of certain races or a belief, conscious or unconscious, that people of different races differ in value. Some people whose thinking about others uses racial categories believe that different races can be placed on a ranked, hierarchical scale.
While prejudice on the other hand is: Prejudice is, as the name implies, the process of "pre-judging" something. It implies coming to a judgment on a subject before learning where the preponderance of evidence actually lies, or forming a judgment without direct experience. Holding a politically unpopular view is not in itself prejudice, and politically popular views are not necessarily free of prejudice. When applied to social groups, prejudice generally refers to existing biases toward the members of such groups, often based on social stereotypes; and at its most extreme, results in groups being denied benefits and rights unjustly or, conversely, unfairly showing unwarranted favor towards others.
My page.
Malcolm Gladwell in, "Blink." See, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316172324/sr=1-1 /qid=1137394659/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-1304227-3896858?_ encoding=UTF8/
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Psychology
Bayes rules
Jan 5th 2006
From The Economist print edition
A once-neglected statistical technique may help to explain how the mind works
[IMAGE]
SCIENCE, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was born in 1702 and died in 1761. His ideas about the prediction of future events from one or two examples were popular for a while, and have never been fundamentally challenged. But they were eventually overwhelmed by those of the “frequentist” school, which developed the methods based on sampling from a large population that now dominate the field and are used to predict things as diverse as the outcomes of elections and preferences for chocolate bars.
Recently, however, Bayes's ideas have made a comeback among computer scientists trying to design software with human-like intelligence. Bayesian reasoning now lies at the heart of leading internet search engines and automated “help wizards”. That has prompted some psychologists to ask if the human brain itself might be a Bayesian-reasoning machine. They suggest that the Bayesian capacity to draw strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation, and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds.
These researchers have conducted laboratory experiments that convince them they are on the right track, but only recently have they begun to look at whether the brain copes with everyday judgments in the real world in a Bayesian manner. In research to be published later this year in Psychological Science, Thomas Griffiths of Brown University in Rhode Island and Joshua Tenenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put the idea of a Bayesian brain to a quotidian test. They found that it passes with flying colours.
Prior assumptions
The key to successful Bayesian reasoning is not in having an extensive, unbiased sample, which is the eternal worry of frequentists, but rather in having an appropriate “prior”, as it is known to the cognoscenti. This prior is an assumption about the way the world works--in essence, a hypothesis about reality--that can be expressed as a mathematical probability distribution of the frequency with which events of a particular magnitude happen.
The best known of these probability distributions is the “normal”, or Gaussian distribution. This has a curve similar to the cross-section of a bell, with events of middling magnitude being common, and those of small and large magnitude rare, so it is sometimes known by a third name, the bell-curve distribution. But there are also the Poisson distribution, the Erlang distribution, the power-law distribution and many even weirder ones that are not the consequence of simple mathematical equations (or, at least, of equations that mathematicians regard as simple).
With the correct prior, even a single piece of data can be used to make meaningful Bayesian predictions. By contrast frequentists, though they deal with the same probability distributions as Bayesians, make fewer prior assumptions about the distribution that applies in any particular situation. Frequentism is thus a more robust approach, but one that is not well suited to making decisions on the basis of limited information--which is something that people have to do all the time.
Dr Griffiths and Dr Tenenbaum conducted their experiment by giving individual nuggets of information to each of the participants in their study (of which they had, in an ironically frequentist way of doing things, a total of 350), and asking them to draw a general conclusion. For example, many of the participants were told the amount of money that a film had supposedly earn
W3C never did any such thing. In order for the BLINK tag to be deprecated, it would have had to be part of the HTML specification at some point in time, which it never was.
That's the good news. The bad news is here.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Actually, the goatse.ca mirror is incomplete. It lacks a great deal of content that goatse.cx (and goat.cx) had. The most complete goatse mirror you are likely to find is goatse.ragingfist.net
Santa's suicide mission go!
Hint for Firefox users... about:config -> browser.blink_allowed
Set it to false. It unfortunately defaults to true, at least on 1.0.7.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
as a funny offtopic info. apparently playboy mirrors files for eclipse, apache, freebsd, and some other stuff! coolness. I fuond this out in some other article clicking around. look for yourself
When you get warning about missing plugins, you can see that the site is using Flash or another technique -- which should almost NEVER be used on the first page of a site.....
I think he prefers BBC News instead. We all do.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'