Teaching kids code not computers, but to other levels as well

" Starting in primary school, children from all backgrounds and every part of the UK should have the opportunity to: learn some of the key ideas of computer science; understand computational thinking; learn to program; and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of excellence in these activities.
We'll get to why this is important and necessary in a moment, but first we need to face up to a painful fact. It is that almost everything we have done over the last two decades in the area of ICT education in British schools has been misguided and largely futile. Instead of educating children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training them to use obsolescent software products. And we did this because we fell into what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle would have called a "category mistake" – an error in which things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another. We made the mistake of thinking that learning about computing is like learning to drive a car, and since a knowledge of internal combustion technology is not essential for becoming a proficient driver, it followed that an understanding of how computers work was not important for our children"
A radical manifesto for teaching computing | Education | The Observer

Overall of course I agree with this, since perhaps the most notable feature of modern technology, is how little specialized skill is needed to use them. Motion sensors, voice recognition and touch screens mean even the input mechanisms are almost "natural" and one barely needs to be able to use even a keyboard and mouse any more. This trend indicates the real need will not be training in tools, since the tools require training less and less,  but education about the tools,  their hidden internal structures,  not only to foster an environment to develop more and better tools, but to maintain an independence from them, since a common downside of ease of use is over reliance and too much trust. The less we have to think about using the tools, the less able we are to handle situations where they go wrong, or , more importantly, even spot when they might.
The only reservation I have is that while incredibly useful, computational, algorithmic thinking can also be restrictive, and am always wary of it being exalted as the paradigm of "intelligence",  and there is a risk that introducing these skills early, without appropriate balance, may have limiting effects on creative development. The point is just as  education should focus on the structures behind the tools, it must also include an analysis of the foundations of those very structures themselves. Education not only go beyond the how to the why, but to the why not as well.

A heathen manifesto

Atheists are too often portrayed as bishop-bashing extremists and any meaningful debate with the religious becomes impossible. How can this be remedied? At the Guardian Open Weekend, Julian Baggini presented his 12 rules for heathens:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/25/atheists-please-read-heathen-manifesto

1 Why we are heathens
2 Heathens are naturalists
3 Our first commitment is to the truth
4 We respect science, not scientism
5 We value reason as precious but fragile
6 We are convinced, not dogmatic
7 We have no illusions about life as a heathen
8 We are secularists
9 Heathens can be religious
10 Religion is often our friend
11 We are critical of religion when necessary
12 This manifesto is less concerned with distinguishing heathens from others than forging links between us and others

"It has long been recognised that the term "atheist" has unhelpful connotations. It has too many dark associations and also defines itself negatively, against what it opposes, not what it stands for. "Humanist" is one alternative, but humanists are a subset of atheists who have a formal organisation and set of beliefs many atheists do not share. Whatever the intentions of those who adopt the labels, "rationalist" and "bright" both suffer from sounding too self-satisfied, too confident, implying that others are irrationalists or dim.
We need a name that shows that we do not think too highly of ourselves. This is no trivial point: atheism faces the human condition with honesty, and that requires acknowledging our absurdity, weakness and stupidity, not just our capacity for creativity, intelligence, love and compassion. "Heathen" fulfils this ambition. We are heathens because we have not been saved by God and because in the absence of divine revelation, we are in so many ways deeply unenlightened. The main difference between us and the religious is that we know this to be true of all of us, but they believe it is not true of them."

Inter generational fairness

Is the granny tax that unfair? | Money | The Guardian
But let's first ask why people in retirement are awarded better income tax breaks than those who are working? There was a fascinating analysis in the Financial Times last weekend of the economically "jinxed generation" – and they're not pensioners. It found that today's adults in their 20s will be the first generation who won't be better off than their parents. What's more, the disposable income of people in their 60s is now higher than people in their 20s, for the first time ever. We've created a society where the non-working retired earn more than working people – and that's before adding up the largely unearned wealth tied up in the houses of those in their 60s.

Questions for Google, no googling

Google interviews: would you get a job with the search giant? | Technology | The Guardian

Text Advertising Blindness: The New Banner Blindness?

Since I personally think I don't just ignore, but hardly even register (at least consciously) ads in google and facebook etc., then interesting to read about a paper which suggests this is a real psychological phenomenon (abstract here, full paper here)
This is not just relevant to advertisers, since a corrolary to this 'advertising blindness' is that real information might also be ignored if it is easily confused with being advertising, e.g. on the right hand side of the page where ads are often placed.
Some points from the study are :

• Users demonstrate text advertisement ?blindness? when viewing web pages. This means that information displayed in areas of the page dedicated to text ads (e.g., top of the page, right side) is generally ignored or viewed last.
• Users are less likely to find information on a web page if it is located on the right side of the page than on the top of the page if both areas resemble text ads. This is especially true when they are searching for specific information.
• When conducting an informational, or semantic, search, users have equal amount of difficulty finding information that is embedded in an ad either at the top or on the right side of the page.
• The perception of whether a region is perceived as advertising affects how web pages are searched. When a region is seen as advertisements, users will scan the area if it necessitates completing their task and will likely do so only after scanning other content areas. However, if the region is perceived as content, users will integrate the area into their search strategy, possibly as an expected location for their search goal or a location covered by a heuristic.
• Users typically associate the right side of a web page with text ads and consequently view this area of the page last or not at all. As a result, both designers and advertisers should use caution when placing content information on the right side of the page

Jonathan Haidt on 5 moral foundations, and political differences

Another fascinating TED lecture : Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.

Have encountered quite a few articles on this theme (e.g. those mentioned in previous blog post here) but Haidt presents not only some light liberal/conservative trait differences, but a concept for the underlying innate foundation of morality which these stand on.

So, in stark contrast to a 'blank slate' at birth, Hadit proposes we have a 'first draft' of morality, which he explains with a quote from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. "The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience."
Haidt wanted to determine what such a first draft would be, and since it would need to be universal, studied the literature on anthropology, culture variation in morality etc. i.e. as he says "What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines? That you find across cultures and even across species?"
As a result of this they identified 5 best matches, which they call the 5 foundations of morality, to quote (with some omissions) from the TED lecture:

1. harm/care. We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED.
2.  fairness/reciprocity. e.g. "The Golden Rule," and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED.
3. in-group/loyalty. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. (Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
4. authority/respect. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It's based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.
5. purity/sanctity. This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity's not just about suppressing female sexuality. It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.

Surveys of how people prioritized these values, showed reliable differences between liberals and conservatives, even in different countries. While all were agreed that harm/care and fairness were important, they were slightly more important to liberals than conservatives. Where there was much more difference however, was with respect to the other 3 foundations : in group loyalty, authority and purity. These were ranked significantly less than harm/care and fairness by liberals, but the more conservative the subject, the more important these pillars of morality became : 

                                       

The point being made is that all 5 elements are important to morality as resulting from our nature, so none can be dismissed, but people of different political stripe differ in their emphasis. This is not to be relativistic, since in certain times and certain societies some values maybe should take priority over others. Of course while it might be easy for liberals to point out how over adherence to in-group loyalty and authority might lead to things such as authoritarianism and xenophobia, it could also be argued that extreme fairness could be seen as the basis for forced communism, with disregard for individual rights. So these insights do not provide easy answers, but do suggest how we can work towards answers : namely to appreciate that all these strands are fundamental to our societies, and that we need to step back from our own personal convictions to see the whole picture, and properly evaluate the priorities of others. They may not be right, but then again we might not be either. 

Personally I find the whole area of moral psychology one of the most fascinating and challenging, since it cuts to the core of many of the most important issues, both at a personal and a cultural level - how we should live our lives and run our societies. As the ancient greek aphorism suggests, to know what to do, first know thyself, and these studies show science can help us in this, even in such seemingly unlikely and intangible fields as morality.

note : Haidt has an online website where you can complete a survey to determine one's own settings of these 5 moral channels : http://www.yourmorals.org/  

Screen vs. Paper, some information and thoughts

I had assumed the 'retina' (eye can't detect individual pixels at the normal usage distance) display on the latest ipad was really about more impressive graphics, i.e. for games and video playback, but was very interested to see the comment that such displays would make a difference to simple reading.

It seems that the low quality of electronic displays has been postulated to result in significantly slower reading speeds with respect to paper, and the idea is that such vastly improved screens will overcome this. The article linked above says that reading is about half as fast on a standard resolution kindle versus paper, but also that there has not been a lot of recent research on the topic, and one of the most important references is a paper from as far back as 2001 (which suggested 10-30% speed differences).

This is a fascinating area which I think is of increasing importance as screen input becomes more and more the default mechanism, not just for offices, but for schools, colleges and even hobby reading at home.

The 'google scholar' service is an excellent resource for the layman (like myself) to search for related papers, for example those on screen and paper reading differences . What follows are the results from a brief investigation of the topic; however this is something I must return to again, and deal with in more detail.

What the studies say 
One (more) recent (2008) paper  ("Computer- vs. paper-based tasks: Are they equivalent?" provides a nice overview of the state of the literature at that time. According to this paper, pre-1991 many studies indeed resulted in some indication that paper reading was better in terms of reading speed, accuracy and comprehension, but there were also in all areas studies which found no significant differences. One major issue with these old studies is the display technology involved at the time, which for a fact resulted in more tiredness for the eyes, which obviously would have been an influencing factor. Similary the level of competence and experience of subjects in those days, when computer use was much less prevalent, is also something which needs to be considered. In my own view, changes in technology and usage question to some extent, but not completely, the relevance of these old studies.

Of the 10 studies listed :

• 5 found reading slower on screen as compared to paper, 3 found no differences
• 2 found comprehension worse when using a screen, 4 found no differences

The paper goes on to say though that since 1992 studies have been more aware of the need to preserve equivalence between the screen and paper versions of the testing task, and thus less reliance on partial performance indicators such as reading speed. However although now considered of less interest, differences in reading speed have been suggested even in studies using modern technology.

Modern studies pay more attention to other areas. For example there is the theory that using a computer involves more 'cognitive load' than reading from paper, with one study reporting "Although they found no significant difference in the comprehension scores or the overall workload scores for the two media, significantly more workload was reported on the effort dimension for the computer-based task. This finding is interesting, since it suggests that individuals need to put more effort into the computer task:"

Of the 20 post-1992 studies listed, if considered in light of a general 'which is better screen or paper' (speed, comprehnsion, accuracy etc.) half reported no difference, while 4 suggested benefits to the electronic method, and the same number , 4, suggested the opposite, that paper was more advantageous.

Beyond the effect on the individuals behaviour in pursuit of their own private or professional goals, one very important issue mentioned in this paper is the equivalence of paper based tests versus an electronic version. Given the amount of such electronic testing that is now performed, in all kinds of areas, and while many studies have found no differences, some have, and this means equivalence probably cannot always be simply assumed, but needs to be established. The paper concludes " total equivalence
is not possible to achieve, although developments in computer technology, more
sophisticated comparative measures and more positive user attitudes have resulted in a
continuing move towards achieving this goal."


Overall it seems the evidence is inconclusive, with a slight balance in favour of paper versus screen in certain simple areas, such as speed. However, balanced against this are many advantages of electronic formats, for example ease of retrieval and search mechanisms. So while the reading of one particular document might be better done from hard copy, the overall exploration of a volume of information is greatly facillitated by it being in electronic format.


More than just reading
Another important point I think is that studies cannot just focus on limited screen vs. paper tasks performed in isolation, but must consider as well our overall behaviour when it comes to the different media. This is raised in this interesting blog post  which references the point that 'materiality matters' made by an Anne Mangen, who agured in a journal article : "The reading experience includes manual activities and haptic perceptions (what the skin and muscles and joints register), and so as activities and perceptions of that kind are changed from one kind of reading experience to another because of the object, the reading experience, too, will change."

The point, which I consider a very valid one, is that reading on a screen means more than just considering it as electronic paper; the screen is part of a particular world in which we have certain general behaviours.

For example, I personally think that reading documents online is at risk of being contaminated by other online reading habits we have, habits which are adapted to dealing with a torrent of often un/semi-interesting or relevant information. We are so used to scanning webpages, search results, chain emails that I think we have developed mechanisms to skip through them, our hands contsantly on the mouse, scrolling incessantly. This approach is so different to the way we handle paper information, devoting our mind and body completely to it, with relatively little opportunity for distraction, and even physically reading in a different way - moving our eyes across it, and only turning the page occasionally, as opposed to our eyes staying fixed while we scroll the text past them.  Of course we can skim hard copies as well, but I think the brute physical stability of it results in a difference to how we handle webpages, and electronic documents. The point is not that electronic reading is necessarily of lower quality than of hard copy, but that we need to handle different types of information in different ways, and bad habits from one area might infect another. We use computers for many things, and so performing a task with them in reality is going to involve the general habits, attitudes and dispositions we have in dealing with electronic media, and this is something which might not be considered when testing individual tasks in isolation in a laboratory. If someone is used to skimming a newspaper every morning online, then this might affect how they read an important document later in the day when sitting at the same computer in the same environment. In contrast, reading a document as part of a study would be to do so in a completely different psychological setting, and might well be done differently.

Relevant to this is the result in the 'Computer- vs. paper-based tasks' paper above that people reported a higher workload for performing a task on a computer than on paper. Simply the fact of using a computer for the test had a psychological effect on the subjects, and this has to do with how we use computers in general, and not the particular task being tested. Hence only if such background behavioural information is also studied and understood, can it be effectively compensated for in any particular task test.

Beyond the medium being the message, the medium shapes us, and hence pinpointing the differences between media, is never going to be a simple task.

Atheism - it's not because it's funny, it's because it's true.

Julian Baggini on Atheism : 

"Atheists have seemed rather keen in recent years to stress their jolly side.... Stressing the jolly side of atheism not only glosses over its harsher truths, it also disguises its unique selling point. The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy.""
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/09/life-without-god-bleak-atheism
Guess it goes back to the old Woody Allen question as to whether would rather be happy or right. The problem is of course those who just by their nature cannot see the universe otherwise don't really have this choice. But that doesn't mean we can't be happy and right. And since many people can obviously be miserable and wrong, at least we've got a head start, since (I'm sure!) are already halfway there...

belief and politics : making God in man's image

Always interesting to see cognitive dissonance at work, in this case in how both sides of the political divide interpret Jesus in line with their own biases. Of course like all scriptures the Bible is remarkably accomodating on that front, since between the slaughter-your-son-just-to-honour-me savagery of the old testament and the turn-the-other-cheek humility of the new, something for every stripe of philosophy.

"A study led by Lee Ross of Stanford University in California has found that the Jesus of liberal Christians is very different from the one envisaged by conservatives. 
The researchers discovered that conservatives believe Jesus would have prioritised the moral issues close to their own hearts, and that disparities in wealth or the treatment of illegal immigrants wouldn't have been high on his agenda. Liberals believed the opposite."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/mar/04/jesus-liberals-conservatives
However, overall the conclusion is quite depressing, given the role religion plays in US politics, then one might at least have hoped it might have provided some common ground for debates, but as this shows, belief is personal, and personally biased.

Julian Baggini on secularism

Julian Baggini in the Guardian makes a valid point that secularism shouldn't ultimately be about stamping out religion, it's about moving it from the public, political sphere into the private. However since this  often requires the displacement of one particular religion from a priviledged position then this can make those of the related sect feel persecuted (with no sense of irony in the case of the catholic church, but then I guess no one expects the Spanish Inquisition :-). But preventing the views of one section of society from dominating the whole is not persecution, it is democratic tolerance, especially when most of the people labelled as belonging to that section don't seem to actually fully agree or take seriously the official beliefs ascribed to them. Which is why as he says "in theory, if not in practice, the United States is both culturally the most religious country in the developed west and constitutionally the most secular."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/14/is-religion-really-under-threat

In addition Baggini makes the importance case (originally fromJohn Rawls) that preventing religious beliefs from being grounds for action in modern democratic societies does not mean that they can't be acknowledged as motivations. People should be allowed believe what they want, but as in all areas, when it comes to the interaction with others (e.g. via the laws of that society) then other justifications are needed "If we're debating the ethics of abortion, for example, we'd get nowhere if some insisted their views rested on their Catholic faith whereas others took theirs to flow inexorably from their atheism. What we all need to do is provide reasons that have some purchase for other people in their capacity as fellow citizens, whatever their world-views. That doesn't mean denying or even covering up the fact that we have religious or other motivations for believing what we do. It is simply to acknowledge that we can't expect these to carry any weight with others."

(update 2012-02-19)
Related to this is the letter exchanged between Richard Dawkins and Will Hutton in this weeks Observer, sparked by the survey conducted by Dawkins' foundation which showed most people who would have registered themselves as 'Christian' in the latest UK senses, do so only on a very loose basis, and hence that it is unfair to use the census figure of 72% self-identified Christians to support the notion that the UK is an 'actively' Christian country.

debatable disgnoses...the new DSM

While I'm all for quantitative measuring methods, I too have serious concerns about the DSM, and while it is hard to generalize, would think that there can be too much 'medicalization' of mental problems.The dangers are (a) that some kind of amazing level of balanced happiness is then considered both normal and achievable and that (b) those who can't achieve it are then considered 'sick', which generally implies external remedies are necessary. This is I think detrimental to both the 'well' and the truly 'sick'.
But, it is a complicated area, since of course as a materialist I am fully convinced that all behaviours originate from the chemical/neuronal status of the brain, and from this perspective, any mood can be changed. The problem is to manually force a change is to intervene in an amazingly complex and normally efficiently self-regulating system, and while sometimes the situation merits this, until the techniques are more developed (and their mechanisms properly understood) then I think it is not appropriate unless the person involved has serious problems coping with daily life. Life shouldn't be hell,but there's no reason to think it should be all rosy either...

"Hundreds of thousands of people will be labelled mentally ill because of behaviour most people would consider normal, if a new edition of what has been termed the psychiatrists' diagnostic bible goes ahead, experts are warning."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/09/us-mental-health-manual

• Psychiatrists and psychologists in the UK are speaking out against the publishing of DSM-5, an updated version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that categorises every type of mental disorder, including some that the psychologists say should not exist. 
• Under the DSM-4, last revised 12 years ago, children who argue and refuse to obey parents can be classified as having oppositional defiant disorder."
•  "Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology at Kings College London, said: "The proposals in DSM-5 are likely to shrink the pool of normality to a puddle with more and more people being given a diagnosis of mental illness." "

John Gray on Alain de Botton's atheist temple

An interesting article by John Gray on de Botton's new Atheism, which provides some historical insight into the quest for something to capture what religion inspires, without accepting what it implies.

Alain de Botton's atheist temple is a nice idea, but a defunct one
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/02/alain-de-botton-atheist-temple-defunct

but as always the enduring role of religious art and structures as a focal point for human thoughts about existence was I think best put by Larkin in his poem Churchgoing :
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

SciAm : Thinking About Mortality Changes How We Act

"Psychological scientists Laura E. R. Blackie and Philip J. Cozzolino of the University of Essex in England have been exploring the idea that we are all governed by two disparate existential systems, each with its own distinct method of processing the idea of death. Both existential minds have the power to meaningfully change our attitudes and actions, but they work in very different—almost opposite—ways."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=two-faces-of-death&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120206

Socialists and conservatives may be born not made

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jan/31/socialists-conservatives-born-not-made

This is not the first study I've read about which correlates political leanings to certain dispositions, but it's one that fits into a pet (and half in jest!) stereotyping of mine that people on the right worry more about the undeserving being treated too fairly, and people on the left worry more about the deserving being treated unfairly.

Both of these concerns are valid, since the drives to support and help those we feel as part of our society, and the drives to punish those who we feel act against it, are both I think equally important (and necessary) strands in a moral community. Doing good is not enough, for the system to work we need to also act against 'the bad', and there seems to be a lot of evidence that we have been hard wired by evolution for both these dispositions. While most people will agree about the former (that some people will and should help others despite cost to themselves), it is perhaps less widely known that studies show people will also accept a cost to themselves just to punish other people, and from similar righteous reasons (the classic example of this is the 'ultimatum' game ).

For me it's a bit like worrying which is worse - that nine guilty men go free, or one innocent man goes to jail. My view is that a lot of right wing politics is focused most on the travesty of the nine guilty escaping punishment, or as is more likely the case, nine welfare cheats  getting away with excessive benefits. Of course no one can disagree with being angry about this, and these are real problems which society has to work on, but the question is how important they are. In contrast, I would think it a more left-wing approach to focus most instead on what happens the one innocent, or the deserving welfare recipient who might lose out due to new 'tough' policies.  Of course no one on the right disagrees with this either, the point is not that one side is 'nasty' or the other 'soft' , both agree in principle, but disagree in priority.

The study mentioned in this article seem to indicate that right-leaning/left-leaning people differ in the magnitude of their responses to negative and positive stimuli, and I think this fits in with the theory above, namely that if one gets more charged up about negative things, e.g. moral outrage about cheats, one is more likely to favour a conservative platform, since these issues provoke a deeper response, and hence raise their relative priority. The converse is harder to show, since it's not clear absence of unfair punishment is really a sort of 'positive' stimulus, but my impression is there is something valid in this direction as well.

Given how passionate people can be about politics then the more psychological information we can gather the better, and studies such as this provide promising initial insights.

extract:

"The results showed those with right-wing beliefs had a relatively increased response to disgust and threat, whereas those who vote left-of-centre had a relatively increased response to pleasurable images.

This suggests that left-wing people are relatively more responsive to appetitive than aversive stimuli and that people who are right-of-centre are more responsive to aversive stimuli. Put another way, conservatives are more responsive to negative stimuli whereas those on the left are more responsive to positive stimuli.
The implication is that the same stimuli will evoke polarised responses depending on where you are on the aversive-appetitive spectrum. These different reactions to shared experiences will mean those of politically opposing viewpoints will automatically judge the other as wrong, and no amount of arguing in the House of Commons can change that."

Gossip is good...

Interesting study on the social role of gossip, and how we are hard wired for it..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/29/gossip-good-research-robb-willer?mobile-redirect=false

Extract:
"[what do you mean by 'prosocial' gossip?]
It is a subset of gossip that involves warning other people about
untrustworthy others. We think it is pretty common. We find generous
people are more likely to engage in it and they report doing so out of a
motivation to help others. It is very different from malicious gossip, which might be driven by a desire to tarnish another's reputation or advance oneself."

Happiness, it's complicated...

In principle definitely good that David Cameron is making "happiness" a government target, since surely this is the end to which all policies are means, but as in everything, the devil is in the details, or more precisely, the definition. What kind of happiness is to be pursued? What is really meant by happiness? An unrealistic ideal or a solid, achievable state? So Labour's Andy Burnham is starting an important debate when he says:
"Cameron and Clegg have done this whole thing about happiness, and I am not against the principle, but I think that is the wrong word. There is a slight danger that it sets people up: 'You have got to be happy. If you are not happy, you are failing'," he said. "So talking about mental health in terms of happiness has become the modern way of talking about mental health: 'Mental health is happiness'. And I don't think it is. It is slightly in danger of being a middle-class construct there, builds a bit of materialism into it. I think what we are talking about is resilience. Are you coping? Are you getting by? That is the bottom line."

Labour scorns Cameron's 'happiness' agenda | Society | The Observer

Divine prejudice

Unfortunately it seems people assume not believing a in deity watching over us makes atheists less trustworthy.  But the article mentions some interesting experiments examining this, not only because the distrust could be reduced (reminding people of secular authorities such as the police made them seemingly more open to the idea that people didn't need a holy policeman) but also seem to provide some insights into how different societies might be more or less condusive to atheism.
In Atheists We Distrust: Scientific American

When people look back on their life in their 30s, 40s and older what are some common regrets they have?

(what follows is a reposting fom Quora, but related is my own blog post on regret HERE) 

QUORA :

From Bradley Voytek, BA in psychology and PhD in neuroscience":

110 votes by Laura Copeland, Emily Altman, Monika Kothari, (more)

In 2011 there was a large, national survey of Americans across all age groups that looked at just this. The paper was called Regrets of the Typical American published by Roese and Morrison in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2...

Here's the main finding, outlined by Vaughan Bell over on the Mind Hacks blog:
http://mindhacks.com/2011/03/27/...


The main sources of regret were, in order:

1. romance
2. family
3. education
4. career
5. finance
6. parenting
7. health
8. "other"
9. friends
10. spirituality
11. community
12. leisure
13. self

They also looked at differences between sexes:

Women, who tend to value social relationships more than men, have more regrets of love (romance, family) compared to men. Conversely, men were more likely to have work-related (career, education) regrets. Those who lack either higher education or a romantic relationship hold the most regrets in precisely these areas.


Americans with high levels of education had the most career-related regrets. Apparently, the more education obtained, the more acute may be the sensitivity to aspiration and fulfillment. Moreover, the youngest and least-educated people in our sample, who most likely possess the greatest capability of fixing their regrets, were indeed the most likely to provide fixable regrets.

Vaughan also has some great insight into this work:

The study also found that regrets about things you haven’t done were equally as common as regrets about things you have, no matter how old the person.


The difference between the two is often a psychological one, because we can frame the same regret either way – as regret about an action: 'If only I had not dropped out of school'; or as a regret about an inaction: 'If only I had stayed in school'.


Despite the fact that they are practically equivalent, regrets framed as laments about actions were more common and more intense than regrets about inactions, although inaction regrets tended to be longer lasting.

This was the easiest source to find, but from what I recall from psychology courses, for older adults without children, not having a family is the primary regret, which is corroborated by #2 from the larger group in this study.

update 10 April 2011 : 
another related article is Top 5 Regrets of the dying

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. 
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings 
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends 
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

 

Atheism 2.0

I've often felt that even if one doesn't accept the mysterious supernatural tenets of religions, they are such developed and functional institutions that there is a lot to be reclaimed from then. Not only because religions have arisen and persisted because they tap into important elements of our nature, feelings of community and awe etc., but also because they have perfected many techniques that means they can harnass significant power to have an effect (albeit for bad as well as good) on the world. As this lecture discusses, this is in stark contrast to their generally individual and uncoordinated secular counterparts (artists, philosophers, even film makers) who also try to provide comment and guidance about 'higher' things, but often with much less effect.  As de Botton says, there is a lot secular society can learn, and religion is too important to be left to the religious...

TED: Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0 - Alain de Botton (2011)

Claiming success....

Interesting survey on country differences on the question of fatalism...or how much success is determined by forces outside our control :

"Just 36 percent of Americans believe in this fatalistic statement, while the vast majority of their compatriots are greater believers in self-determination. Put another way, Americans are (not surprisingly) more likely to believe in the American dream.
Americans with less education are more fatalistic..."


http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/fatalism-and-the-american-dream/