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In 1956, George Miller, one of the founders of the then nascent field of cognitive psychology, wrote a rather peculiar paper. Perhaps indicative of the mores of the time, the paper starts off with a zany, sardonic paragraph that is a far cry from the kind of dry, soulless, prosaic prose that journal editors and cranky reviewers force us to write today: “My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. … There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing...... Read Full article on HadNews

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching. Title of course: “Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming” What prompted the idea for the course? Generative AI is really good at computer programming – to the point where the way we teach and assess students who are learning to program must change. We used to give students dozens or hundreds of small targeted programming tasks, drilling each aspect of the syntax – the words and symbols – of programming. That worked well as a starting ...... Read Full article on HadNews

Music’s power over your brain, explained | Michael Spitzer Humans have been making music and learning to recognize it from the moment our species learned to walk on two legs and create a predictable beat. Michael Spitzer, a music expert and professor of music at the University of Liverpool, explains in a video titled "Music’s power over your brain, explained" that humans are musical animals 4 million years in the making. The rhythm of walking has stamped human music, forging links between the brain, muscular exertion, and sound. Music reflects walking, and this gives humans a fascination with the metaphor that music moves. The video delves i...... Read Full article on HadNews

When I visited Buenos Aires last year, I thought the six semesters of Spanish I took in school would pay dividends. The fast flow of Spanish from Argentinians quickly killed that delusion. I realized I had forgotten most conjugation rules and vocabulary, and I was able to formulate only simple, stilted sentences: “I can have a beer?”  So it was admittedly encouraging to hear that Arieh Smith, a New York City-based polyglot who runs the popular language-learning YouTube channel Xiaomanyc, didn’t leave his first foreign language classes with much proficiency either. “In high school, I was actually terrible at learning languages,” he said....... Read Full article on HadNews