Friday, July 23, 2010

On average..

"Announcing that on average, people have an average intelligence is kind of boring. What's interesting about intelligence and what is interesting about things like personality is the variation around the mean and the explanation about that variation. And that's what we need to start talking about now.

Oh, btw. well, it is, of course, by definition the case, that on average, people have average intelligence, they don't believe it. If you ask people "Do you think that you are more intelligent, less intelligent or about of average intelligence compared to the rest of the population, you'll get some distribution around that, too. But you'll find that the average perception of intelligence is that we're all above average.

This goes for a variety of other questions like "How good looking are you? Above average, below average or average?". Well, we're all little above average there, too. It turns out, that there is one group that gets the answer correct. And if you ask this group of people on average "Are you brighter or dumber than average, they'll come out in the middle. Asked "Are you cuter or uglier than average?", they'll come out, you know, average. Anybody knows who that group is? ….. Yes, it's the depressed. Depressed people have an accurate assessment of their own intelligence and good looks. In fact, it has been seriously argued, that part of what keeps us undepressed is an unrealistic assessment of the world. Right? We're smart, we're good looking … if we knew the truth, we all will be depressed. But that's a topic for another date. …."

Extracted from the Jeremy Wolfe's lecture "Intelligence: How do we know you are smart?"

Sunday, July 18, 2010

from A to B losing time T

Traveling from point A to point B means losing time t. Say, knowing the distance and your speed, you can proudly calculate the time you gonna lose. :) This, however doesn't solve your problem.

Happily, we live in a wonderful world (what have our poor parents done without the magic devices we own?!? ) and now we are able to graduate MIT without leaving our dens. :) Check what I found here. Amazing, wonderful, funny, especially this lecture dedicated to the subject of "behavioral psychology" is the perfect stuff to entertain you on your way to work or university or in the train/plane/car/whatever. Why we stop inserting a coin in the cola vending machine when it stops giving us cola but we don't if we gamble? How can you implant and modify false memories in somebody's mind. Or how every cell of our brain is mapped to a small areas of our bodies.. Really interesting stuff. :)

Oh, and last week we won the "KIT Company of the year award", part of the simulation we did during the previous semester in the "Business Leadership" course. The prize itself is not important, but the fact, that we almost believed ourselves in having the future in our hands and knowing what we want and wanting all that so much… :) (btw, we stands for 3D Innovations: Diana, Christian, me and Martin)

What else… what else.. Tomorrow I have to get the chips from the custom office. I also have to fight again with the bureaucracy in Deutsche Bank to get my bank statement letter translated in English. Firefox has a new version 4. The rechargeable battery of my macbook was almost up to explode. "But the wind still blows over Savannah and in the Spring the turkey buzzard struts and flounces before his hens." ;)