Tag: perception

Joseph Plateau’s spinning disc illusions were the forerunner of cinema

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was a Belgian physicist whose research on visual perception laid the foundations of film, television and animated gifs Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2219777-joseph-plateaus-spinning-disc-illusions-were-the-forerunner-of-cinema/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Cows Painted Like Zebras Attract Fewer Flies

Slashdot reader ClickOnThis writes: An article on CNN reports results from a team of Japanese researchers who discovered that painting cows to look like zebras makes them less attractive to biting flies. I think they’re a shoo-in for a 2020 Ig Nobel Prize. From the article: “A team of Japanese researchers recruited six cows and gave them each black-and-white stripes, black…

Apple Neutered Ad Blockers In Safari, But Unlike Chrome, Users Didn’t Say a Thing

sharkbiter shares a report from ZDNet: Over the course of the last year and a half, Apple has effectively neutered ad blockers in Safari, something that Google has been heavily criticized all this year. But unlike Google, Apple never received any flak, and came out of the whole process with a reputation of caring about users’ privacy, rather than attempting to…

Exploring curiosity with Simon Brown, Chief Learning Officer at Novartis

Coursera sits down with Novartis’ Chief Learning Officer, Simon Brown, to learn how he and his team are fostering curious minds and a desire to learn across 130,000 employees in pharmaceutical and healthcare. Coursera: What drew Novartis to Coursera as a preferred learning solution? Simon: At Novartis our mission is to reimagine medicine, and we […]
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PayPal Builds ‘Zoid’ JavaScript Library To ‘Make IFrames Cool Again’

“Earlier this year I gave a talk at FullStack conference in London about making iFrames cool again,” writes a lead engineer at PayPal. In a nutshell: iframes let you build user experiences into embeddable ‘cross-domain components’, which let users interact with other sites without being redirected. There are a metric ton of awesome uses for that other than tracking and advertizing….

Is The Internet Making Us Better Writers?

The New Yorker reviews linguist Gretchen McCulloch new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language For McCulloch, the primary feat of the digital writer has been to enlist typography to convey tone of voice. We’ve used technology to “restore our bodies to writing”: to infuse language with extra-textual meaning, in the same way that we might wave our hands…

A New Study Uses Camera Footage To Track the Frequency of Bystander Intervention

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CityLab: It’s one of the most enduring urban myths of all: If you get in trouble, don’t count on anyone nearby to help. Research dating back to the late 1960s documents how the great majority of people who witness crimes or violent behavior refuse to intervene. Psychologists dubbed this non-response as the “bystander effect”…

Will California’s New Bot Law Strengthen Democracy?

On July 1st, California became the first state in the nation to try to reduce the power of bots by requiring that they reveal their “artificial identity” when they are used to sell a product or influence a voter. Violators could face fines under state statutes related to unfair competition. From a report: Just as pharmaceutical companies must disclose that the…

edX Announces Results Of New Survey On Reskilling Trends

Reskilling is a clear necessity for the future of work, and at edX, we are committed to helping learners gain the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the modern workplace. Today, we’re pleased to announce the results of a new survey of 1,000 consumers aged 18+ on reskilling trends, with 917 employed or previously employed respondents. Our survey found…