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Anyone can be trained to be creative: New program shows early success with U.S. Army, others -- ScienceDaily

The narrative method of training for creativity uses many of the techniques that writers use to create stories. One is to develop new worlds in your mind. For example, employees at a company might be asked to think about their most unusual customer -- then imagine a world in which all their customers were like that. How would that change their business? What would they have to do to survive? Another technique is perspective-shifting. An executive at a company might be asked to answer a problem by thinking like another member of their team. The point of using these techniques and others like them is not that the scenarios you dream up will actually happen, Fletcher said. "Creativity isn't about guessing the future correctly. It's about making yourself open to imagining radically different possibilities," he said. "When you do that, you can respond more quickly and nimbly to the changes that do occur."

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity | PNAS

For example, adults are better at remembering the letter string PBSBBCCNN after parsing it into three smaller units: the television acronyms PBS, BBC, and CNN. Is this chunking a learned strategy acquired through instruction? We explored the origins of this ability by asking whether untrained infants can use conceptual knowledge to increase memory. In the absence of any grouping cues, 14-month-old infants can track only three hidden objects at once, demonstrating the standard limit of working memory. In four experiments we show that infants can surpass this limit when given perceptual, conceptual, linguistic, or spatial cues to parse larger arrays into smaller units that are more efficiently stored in memory. This work offers evidence of memory expansion based on conceptual knowledge in untrained, preverbal subjects.

Light as a fairy tale: What makes a feel-good film feel good? First large-scale study of feel-good films and their audiences -- ScienceDaily

"In addition to an element of humor and the classic happy ending, feel-good films can be identified by certain recurring plot patterns and characters," explains study leader and first author Keyvan Sarkhosh. "Often these involve outsiders in search of true love, who have to prove themselves and fight against adverse circumstances, and who eventually find their role in the community." But feel-good films are characterized not just by romance and humor, but also by moments of drama, which usually have a strong emotional effect on viewers. At the same time, these features are often embedded in a fairy-tale setting, which is another typical aspect of the genre and contributes considerably to its perceived lightness. Not least, the mixture of all these elements can be considered constitutive of the feel-good film.

Teen Vogue Editor’s Tweets Aren’t the Whole Story | The New Republic

The danger is it’s the easy narratives—and they are so easy—that tend to catch fire. Cancel culture is quickly being made out to be the problem in society today, and it’s not by accident that the stories that get picked up and picked apart are those of campus activists or young staffers at a glossy magazine, who are easily painted as too privileged and too woke. And now the arguments have become so meaninglessly replicable that they’re echoed by the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump—some of the most powerful, most protected politicians in the country—as a defense when they are being held to account.

An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes's Theorem - LessWrong

The most effective presentation found so far is what’s known as natural frequencies—saying that 40 out of 100 eggs contain pearls, 12 out of 40 eggs containing pearls are painted blue, and 6 out of 60 eggs containing nothing are painted blue. A natural frequencies presentation is one in which the information about the prior probability is included in presenting the conditional probabilities. If you were just learning about the eggs’ conditional probabilities through natural experimentation, you would—in the course of cracking open a hundred eggs—crack open around 40 eggs containing pearls, of which 12 eggs would be painted blue, while cracking open 60 eggs containing nothing, of which about 6 would be painted blue. In the course of learning the conditional probabilities, you’d see examples of blue eggs containing pearls about twice as often as you saw examples of blue eggs containing nothing.

Why we're so bad at daydreaming, and how to fix it -- ScienceDaily

When we're nudged to think for fun instead of meaning, we tend to default to superficial pleasures like eating ice cream, which don't scratch the same itch as thoughts that are pleasant but also meaningful. But when Westgate provided participants with a list of examples that were both pleasant and meaningful, they enjoyed thinking 50% more than when they were instructed to think about whatever they wanted. That's knowledge you can harness in your everyday life by prompting yourself with topics you'd find rewarding to daydream about, like a pleasant memory, future accomplishment, or an event you're looking forward to, she says.

Alexander Korda: Churchill’s Man in Hollywood | Finest Hour 179

In Churchill’s George V screenplay, the following line appears: “In all her wars, England always wins one battle—the last.” In 1942, he delivered the same line to tremendous applause, in what he termed “The Bright Gleam of Victory” speech.

You Think We’re Self-Obsessed Now? The 19th Century Would Like A Word | FiveThirtyEight

After 14 years, Kaplan and his colleagues finally had their “Bibliography of American Autobiographies.” They ended up identifying 6,377 autobiographies published in the U.S. between 1675 and the 1940s, and their data shows the genre’s notable growth. Between 1800 and 1809, Americans published a total of just 27 autobiographies. One century later, during the decade between 1900 and 1909, that number had exploded to 569, easily outpacing population growth.

The Art of Dying | The New Yorker

Closeness is impossible between an artist and a critic. Each wants from the other something—the artist’s mojo, the critic’s sagacity—that belongs strictly to the audiences for their respective work. It’s like two vacuum cleaners sucking at each other.

How a data detective exposed suspicious medical trials

After seeing so many cases of fraud, alongside typos and mistakes, Carlisle has developed his own theory of what drives some researchers to make up their data. “They think that random chance on this occasion got in the way of the truth, of how they know the Universe really works,” he says. “So they change the result to what they think it should have been.”

Finding the 'Goldilocks' level of enthusiasm for business pitches -- ScienceDaily

They found that, generally speaking, the higher the peak level of enthusiasm, the more likely the entrepreneur was to receive funding, after controlling for differences in the products and business ideas. But there was a bell curve in the results, where the likelihood of funding tended to fall as "peak joy" levels went on for too long. "Although a higher level of peak joy displayed by entrepreneurs during their pitches leads to better funding performance over time, prolonged display of peak joy seemed to undermine funding performance," Liu said. "Another possible interpretation is that investors may believe the entrepreneur is acting and the pitch is manipulative. Maybe they feel the entrepreneur is using his or her excitement to manipulate the investors' perceptions in hopes of increasing the odds of getting funding."

Game Of Thrones brutally asserts that the game in question will have no winner (experts)

It’s not that the final season is failing to live up to my specific expectations of what was supposed to happen, which I avoided having for that reason. It’s that the final season is failing to live up to what I believe a final season should do: enriching the show that came before it. And while the notion that power corrupts has always been at the heart of this story, the way it manifests here feels like a simplification of the show and its ideas, as opposed to a culmination of its larger journey.

Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future? - The Atlantic

One subgroup of scholars, however, did manage to see more of what was coming. Unlike Ehrlich and Simon, they were not vested in a single discipline. They took from each argument and integrated apparently contradictory worldviews. They agreed that Gorbachev was a real reformer and that the Soviet Union had lost legitimacy outside Russia. A few of those integrators saw that the end of the Soviet Union was close at hand and that real reforms would be the catalyst. The integrators outperformed their colleagues in pretty much every way, but especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Eventually, Tetlock bestowed nicknames (borrowed from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin) on the experts he’d observed: The highly specialized hedgehogs knew “one big thing,” while the integrator foxes knew “many little things.”

Perseverance toward life goals can fend off depression, anxiety, panic disorders: Looking on the bright side also acts as a safeguard, according to 18-year study -- ScienceDaily

At each interval, participants were asked to rate their goal persistence (e.g., "When I encounter problems, I don't give up until I solve them"), self-mastery (e.g., "I can do just anything I really set my mind to") and positive reappraisal (e.g., "I can find something positive, even in the worst situations"). Diagnoses for major depressive, anxiety and panic disorders were also collected at each interval. People who showed more goal persistence and optimism during the first assessment in the mid-1990s had greater reductions in depression, anxiety and panic disorders across the 18 years, according to the authors.

April Fools hoax stories could offer clues to help identify 'fake news' -- ScienceDaily

The researchers found that April fools hoax stories, when compared to genuine news: Are generally shorter in length Use more unique words Use longer sentences Are easier to read Refer to vague events in the future Contain more references to the present Are less interested in past events Contain fewer proper nouns Use more first person pronouns

Thanking and apologizing: Talk that isn't cheap -- ScienceDaily

The researchers proposed that, for the communicator, all four types of communications involve a trade-off between projecting competence and projecting warmth. Thanking and apologizing make the speaker appear caring or generous, but usually at the cost of seeming incompetent or weak. The opposite is true of bragging and blaming, which can bolster the speaker's perceived competence and status, but at the cost of seeming selfish or inconsiderate. The recipient of the communication experiences a different impact on their image: Thanking and apologizing elevate both perceived competence and warmth for the recipient, while bragging and blaming decrease both.

First evidence for necessary role of human hippocampus in planning -- ScienceDaily

The work centers on the hippocampal "cognitive map," the brain's spatial localization system discovered by University College of London's John O'Keefe, who was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The hippocampal cognitive map has been long thought to allow us to "mentally simulate" the future outcomes of our actions as we plan into the future. However, there had previously been no direct evidence in humans that the hippocampus is actually necessary for planning. "Our results show that both goal-directed planning and remembering locations in space depend on the human hippocampus" says Oliver Vikbladh, a doctoral candidate at New York University's Center for Neural Science and the paper's lead author. "By clarifying the scope of hippocampal contributions to behavior, the study may have implications for diseases that affect the hippocampus, such as epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease."

Stone Age Cave Symbols May All Be Part of a Single Prehistoric Proto-Writing System

And when von Petzinger looked through archaeology papers for mentions or illustrations of symbols in cave art outside Europe, she found that many of her 32 signs were used around the world. There is even tantalising evidence that an earlier human, Homo erectus, deliberately etched a zigzag on a shell on Java some 500,000 years ago. “The ability of humans to produce a system of signs is clearly not something that starts 40,000 years ago. This capacity goes back at least 100,000 years,” says Francesco d’Errico from the University of Bordeaux, France.

Opinion: The Free Solo Documentary Addressed Some Uncomfortable Truths, But Ignored Others - Climbing Magazine

The filmmakers do a good job of questioning Honnold leading up to the ascent, which is why it's so jarring when they stop. After Honnold tops out, the ambiguity disappears and it becomes a wild celebration of an athletic achievement, complete with triumphant guitar riffs. It’s as though the filmmakers believe that since Honnold succeeded, it was a good idea all along, and we were wrong to ever doubt him; victory silences scrutiny.

This hyperlocal news site in San Francisco is reinventing itself with an automated local news wire » Nieman Journalism Lab

“There are so many stories news organizations could potentially do, that nobody can afford to, because it’s expensive and time-consuming to have that many people on the ground,” Eldon sad. “We’re starting with the simple stuff right now: New business openings, rental price trends — simple story types that we can produce using data sets that cover a lot of geographical places and then distribute to a lot of people. Over time, we’ll want to get more sophisticated with how we analyze the data we have.”

Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling - MIT Technology Review

The idea behind sentiment analysis is that words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity of a story at each instant and how it changes. Reagan and co do this by analyzing the emotional polarity of “word windows” and sliding these windows through the text to build up a picture of how the emotional valence changes. They performed this task on over 1,700 English works of fiction that had each been downloaded from the Project Gutenberg website more than 150 times.

Life's transitions easier with a sense of a well-rounded ending -- ScienceDaily

"Starting a new life phase in a positive and constructive way is often challenging, so we examined methods that could help people find a good start to a new job, a new relationship, or a new home," explains Gabriele Oettingen, a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Motivation Science. "We observed that how people end their previous life periods makes a difference. In fact, the more people feel that they have done everything they could have done, that they have completed something to the fullest, and that all loose ends are tied up, the happier they are later on, the less they are plagued by regrets, and the more constructively they enter the next life phase."

The music of conversing

He knew an Irish composer who lived in Paris and who noticed a pattern at his local boulangerie. Customers who said “Bonjour!” in an ascending line, with two notes a sixth apart, got served first. English has similar patterns, studies have found. We use minor thirds when telling sad stories and major thirds when telling happy ones. We match pitches with those we admire and expect the same of those who admire us. We harmonize when we agree—starting our sentences a perfect fifth or an octave from where the last sentence left off—and grow dissonant when we disagree. Our arguments are full of tritones. Whether we know it or not, Wells said, we’re always singing.

Pitch perfect: Strategic language use maximizes the chances of influencing an audience: Researcher determines pitching strategies used by influential entrepreneurs -- ScienceDaily

"In our paper we call it a logical time gap, which basically refers to the idea that if someone pitches an idea to you and you start thinking about how it plays out in the future, then these things don't match because you don't know what the future looks like," Dr van Werven said. "But if you talk about the future in terms of the present, both the evidence and the claim are in the same time and space.

Pitch perfect: Strategic language use maximizes the chances of influencing an audience: Researcher determines pitching strategies used by influential entrepreneurs -- ScienceDaily

The study found that entrepreneurs who successfully influenced their audience often implied a point without actually making it when talking about the future; they encouraged their audience to fill in the blanks. "The audience becomes engaged, they start becoming a part of the argument, they actually even complete it, so they're more likely to be convinced by it," Dr van Werven said.

How the Surprise Interactive 'Black Mirror' Came Together | WIRED

The magic of combinatorial math means that there are technically more than a trillion paths through the story, though in reality the number is much smaller. But "much smaller" is still pretty huge: There are five main endings, with multiple variants of each—though upon reaching an ending, Netflix will also helpfully bring you back to pivotal decision points so that you can ease your FOMO and try the path not traveled. In a visit to Netflix's headquarters in Los Gatos, California, I had about 75 minutes to make my way through it, and was only able to trigger three endings. Suffice it to say that the Branch Manager visualization of Bandersnatch looks a little bit like Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean trying to eat an entire bowl of spaghetti at once. Todd Yellin thinks the end result will provide anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes of entertainment for most people. Sure, if you don't touch the remote—or tablet, or keyboard, or phone, or game controller—it'll choose for you, and curate your experience down to a 90-minute default. But that won't be the best one, not by a long shot