Around The Blogosphere -- So Much Better Than The NY Times -- June 13, 2020

So, compared to The New York Times, so how much time do you spend on other blogs? I don't think I've read a NYT article in months. 

Watts Up With That?  Stories that caught my interest today --

• EU agrees to weaken climate change rules for aviation
• EU rubber stamped airline industry proposals for deferred climate action
• protests reveal little threat of Wuhan flu in outside air
• why is Seattle restricting park access?
• the brain uses minimum effort to look for key information in text: see below
• why oceans really aren't "acidifying"
• the term is being abused by science and media [I'm shocked! Shocked!]
• study: coral reef islands grow with rising sea level
• white surface Tesla crash in Taiwan
• Lancet, New England Journal retract Covid-9 studies
• including one that raised concerns about malaria drugs
• never mind ... maybe hydroxychloroquine not so bad after all 
• another Canadian polar bear sub-population is increasing

Of all the recent articles linked over at Watts Up With That, I found this one most interesting: the brain uses minimum effort to look for key information in text. Was a study really needed? Common sense would explain that. Whatever.

Link here. This goes a long way explaining much of what we all seem to experience when reading:

A recently completed study indicates that the human brain avoids taking unnecessary effort. When a person is reading, she strives to gain as much information as possible by dedicating as little of her cognitive capacity as possible to the processing.

According to the study, the brain is processing information by taking into account the relative importance of the content that is being read. When the brain is interpreting the meaning of the words being read, it attempts to allocate resources to interpreting the words that provide as much information as possible on the content of the text.

Previous studies have shown that word length and frequency, as well as syntactic and semantic errors included in sentences in sentences affect brain activity to language.

In the recently published study, the perspective was expanded to the level above individual sentences, the discourse level.

[The discourse level] was studied using six-sentence paragraphs. At this level, the relationship between words becomes increasingly complex, and the significance of context in interpreting individual words is increased. On the discourse level, very little about information processing by the brain has been known so far.

Among so many things, this might explain:

• why when I read, I tend to skip over new words; I have to make a conscious effort to look for new words
• why Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations are so effective (at least based on their popularity)

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From Power Lines Weekend Edition 

My two favorite, and it was very, very hard today to decide. Link here.