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Enter your household income and see how you rank in 344 zones across the country.

Instead of teaching physics or mathematics as we teach second languages, then blaming the victims for not doing well, and expecting them to internalize the blame, why not use physics and mathematics to ask and answer questions about the world?

An interactive Flash application that allows you to trace through the history of electronic music as it evolved into many genres. It plays looping samples of each of the many sub-genres to exemplify the aura they create.

Social groups can be remarkably smart and knowledgeable when their averaged judgements are compared with the judgements of individuals. This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows. In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks. The “social influence effect” diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis.

(Source: Ars Technica)

This review (warning: link has spoilers) nails many of the exact critiques I had been thinking about while playing Portal 2, while still giving it credit where credit is due. It is very refreshing given the one-sided praise in nearly all other reviews I’ve read.

Foremost on my mind: “With the original Portal, I could solve some of the puzzles in my own way. In fact, [challenge levels] explicitly required you to devise new solutions. The puzzle chambers allowed experimentation … But with the richer capabilities of the new game, I never had that same sense … The puzzles required careful use of the tools provided, and as a result, I felt that the game was on rails. The puzzles could be solved the right way, the way that the developers had intended, or not at all. The experimental, exploratory nature of the first game was missing … We were given all these great toys, and yet the game never actually gave us a good chance to play with them. Each tool was to be used for its own narrow purpose within each puzzle, and that was that. The whole approach of solving problems was different … With physics as mind-bending as Portal has, [experimentation] is a great scheme.”

The Misconception: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value.

The Truth: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.