Invisible harm: science, subjectivity and the things we cannot see

Do we see things better when we know grammar?

Language affects perception. But how? Recent findings (Boutonnet & Lupyan, 2015; Bocanegra, Poletiek & Zwaan, submitted) suggest a dissociation between perception that is mediated as compared to not mediated by language. One explanation is that language –that is combinatorial in naturestresses the separate features of objects. We investigated the effect of combinatorial (two words) and non-comb...

See What You Cannot See

DU. A national study of chronic disease prevalence and access to care in uninsured U. Engelgau MM. Self-management education for adults with type 2 diabetes: A meta-analysis of the effect on glycemic control. The health status of patients of a student-run free medical clinic in inner-city Buffalo, NY. Insuring the uninsured: A student-run initiative to improve access to care in an urban communi...

On science and subjectivity

How Many Pixels Do We Need to See Things?

Today’s computer display devices normally provide more information than we need. In this paper, the author presents an empirical model that shows minimal pixel requirements for computer users to recognize things from digital photos under different contextual conditions. It is found that face recognition alone needs far fewer pixels than people normally thought. However, more pixels are needed f...

Some Things Algorithms Cannot Do

A new, ‘behavioral’ theory of algorithms, intending to capture algorithms at their intended abstraction level, has been developed in this century in a series of papers by Y. Gurevich, A. Blass and others, motivated initially by the goal of establishing the ASM thesis. A viable theory of algorithms must have its limitative results, algorithms, however abstract, cannot do just anything. We establ...