Ai Weiwei at the Venice Biennale

At the world’s biggest art event this summer, the Venice Biennale, the world’s most famous imprisoned artist, Ai Weiwei, was not exactly neglected—but his case received virtually no official acknowledgment

Moving ahead by thinking backwards: Cognitive skills, personality, and economic preferences in collegiate success

We collected personality (Big Five) and demographic characteristics, and ran incentivized experiments measuring cognitive skills (non-verbal IQ, numeracy, backward induction/planning), and economic (time, risk) preferences, with 100 students at a small public undergraduate liberal arts college in the Midwestern US as part of a larger study that collected the same measures from 1,065 trainee truckers. Using standardized (z-score) versions of our variables we analyze their relative power to predict (1) timely graduation (four years or less), (2) graduation in six years or less, and (3) final GPA. The proactive aspect of Conscientious (but not the inhibitive one) has a large and robust positive effect on all three outcomes, and Agreeableness has a robust negative effect on both graduation outcomes, but not on GPA. Economic time preferences predict graduation in four years, and GPA. Cognitive skill measures predict as expected if entered individually in a multivariate model, but when all variables compete it is only our backward induction measure ("Hit15") that weakly predicts graduation in four years, and strongly predicts graduation in six years. Trainee truckers work in a different vocational setting and their results are appropriately different, but there is a common element: Hit15 also predicts job success (completing a one year employment contract that makes training free). We interpret Hit15 as capturing a specific part of the cognitive skills required for selfmanagement in non-routine settings - thinking backward from future goals to make the best current choice - that is not well measured by existing instruments, and suggest this deserves further scientific and institutional scrutiny

Moving Ahead by Thinking Backwards: Cognitive Skills, Personality, and Economic Preferences in Collegiate Success

We collected personality (Big Five) and demographic characteristics, and ran incentivized experiments measuring cognitive skills (non-verbal IQ, numeracy, backward induction/ planning), and economic (time, risk) preferences, with 100 students at a small public undergraduate liberal arts college in the Midwestern US as part of a larger study that collected the same measures from 1,065 trainee truckers. Using standardized (z-score) versions of our variables we analyze their relative power to predict (1) timely graduation (four years or less), (2) graduation in six years or less, and (3) final GPA. The proactive aspect of Conscientious (but not the inhibitive one) has a large and robust positive effect on all three outcomes, and Agreeableness has a robust negative effect on both graduation outcomes, but not on GPA. Economic time preferences predict graduation in four years, and GPA. Cognitive skill measures predict as expected if entered individually in a multivariate model, but when all variables compete it is only our backward induction measure (Hit15) that weakly predicts graduation in four years, and strongly predicts graduation in six years. Trainee truckers work in a different vocational setting and their results are appropriately different, but there is a common element: Hit15 also predicts their job success (completing a one year employment contract that makes training free). We interpret Hit15 as capturing a specific part of the cognitive skills required for self-management in non-routine settings thinking backward from future goals to make the best current choice that is not well measured by existing instruments, and suggest this deserves further scientific and institutional scrutiny

Teaching Access, or Freedom of Information Law

Based on the author\u27s experience developing and administering the course and materials, this article provides an introduction and resources to teach a graduate journalism or professional law school course on access to government, commonly called freedom of information law , which may be constructed as a capstone course in law school. The appendices provide supporting material and references

Sight and sound out of synch: Fragmentation and renormalisation of audiovisual integration and subjective timing

The sight and sound of a person speaking or a ball bouncing may seem simultaneous, but their corresponding neural signals are spread out over time as they arrive at different multisensory brain sites. How subjective timing relates to such neural timing remains a fundamental neuroscientific and philosophical puzzle. A dominant assumption is that temporal coherence is achieved by sensory resynchronisation or recalibration across asynchronous brain events. This assumption is easily confirmed by estimating subjective audiovisual timing for groups of subjects, which is on average similar across different measures and stimuli, and approximately veridical. But few studies have examined normal and pathological individual differences in such measures. Case PH, with lesions in pons and basal ganglia, hears people speak before seeing their lips move. Temporal order judgements (TOJ) confirmed this: voices had to lag lip-movements (by ~200ms) to seem synchronous to PH. Curiously, voices had to lead lips (also by ~200ms) to maximise the McGurk illusion (a measure of audiovisual speech integration). Thus PH’s timing was still veridical on average across measures. Similar kinds of discrepancies were also found in age-matched control participants. Most surprisingly, normal individual differences in TOJ and McGurk timing correlated negatively: subjects needing an auditory lag for subjective simultaneity needed an auditory lead for maximal McGurk, and vice versa. This generalised to the Stream-Bounce illusion. Such antagonism seems opposed to good sensory resynchronisation, yet average timing across tasks was still near-veridical. Our findings reveal surprising disunity of subjective timing within and between subjects. To account for this we propose that the neural timing within different mechanisms is perceived relative to the average timing across mechanisms. Such renormalisation fully explains the curious antagonistic relationship between disparate timing estimates in PH and healthy participants, and how they can still perceive the timing of external events correctly, on average

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Ai Weiwei at the Venice Biennale

At the world’s biggest art event this summer, the Venice Biennale, the world’s most famous imprisoned artist, Ai Weiwei, was not exactly neglected—but his case received virtually no official acknowledgment

University of California Press eScholarship editions

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld - along with almost 200 other pages - on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth , 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available - complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format.Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and - in some cases - the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges.Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it