Learn about the replication crisis facing researchers in the social and life sciences from a special guest: Professor Joseph M. Reagle Jr., author of the new book “Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents.” You’ll also learn why squinting helps you see. Get your copy of “Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents” on Amazon: https://amazon.com Publications and additional resources from Joseph M. Reagle, Jr.: “Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents” — https://amazon.com “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” — https://amazon.com “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia” — https://amazon.com Official website — https://reagle.org/joseph/ Follow @jmreagle on Twitter — https://twitter.com/jmreagle MIT Press — https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/joseph-m-reagle-jr If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about the replication crisis facing researchers in the social and life sciences from a special guest: Professor Joseph M. Reagle Jr., author of the new book “Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents.” You’ll also learn why squinting helps you see.
Get your copy of “Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents” on Amazon: https://amazon.com
Publications and additional resources from Joseph M. Reagle, Jr.:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/sciences-replication-crisis-w-joseph-m-reagle-jr-and-why-squinting-helps-you-see
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn why squinting helps you see. But first, you’ll learn about a problem that a lot of researchers are dealing with these days, with some help from academic and author Joseph Reagle.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Hacking Thursdays - Joseph Reagle Clip 1 - What is the Replicability Crisis? (4:00) (Cody)
CODY: Social and life sciences are facing a crisis. It goes by a few names: the replicability crisis, or the replication crisis, or the reproducability crisis. Whatever you call it, it’s something you’re gonna learn about in a minute with today’s guest, Joseph Reagle. He’s an associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and the author of the new book “Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents.” Here’s our exchange about the replicability crisis, and how scientists are addressing it.
[CLIP 3:58]
CODY: Now look: your takeaway from this shouldn’t be that science doesn’t have any answers, because it totally does. The takeaway is that a lot of times, science is just more complicated than having clean, crystal clear takeaways. There are a LOT of variables in the world we live in, after all. And that’s why you might want to be skeptical if a product or service guarantees that it has a definitive answer or it’s a hard-and-fast quick fix for something, because that’s not usually how life works. Having said all that, you know we love our life hacks on this show. And that’s why next week, you’re gonna hear once again from Professor Joseph Reagle. Remember, he’s the author of the new book “Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents,” and we haven’t even gotten around to the part of our conversation where we talked about life hacks yet! Tune in for the next few weeks to hear our “Hacking Thursdays” mini-series to learn how you can live an optimized life, what that means, and the difference between a hacked life and a meaningful one.
[NHTSA]
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is paid for by NIT-suh.
CODY: Does this sound familiar? “I’m not going very far.”
ASHLEY: “I’m in a rush.”
CODY: “It’s too uncomfortable.”
ASHLEY: “Sometimes I just forget.”
CODY: Don’t kid yourself, there’s no such thing as a good excuse for not buckling up.
If you’ve used any of these excuses or any others, you’re putting yourself at risk
of injury or death.
ASHLEY: In 2017, more than ten thousand people were unbuckled when they were killed
in crashes. That’s 51 percent of people killed in motor vehicle crashes that were not wearing seat belts.
CODY: No matter what kind of vehicle you drive, wearing your seat belt is the best defense in a crash. Even when you sit in the backseat, you still need to buckle up. That goes for when you ride in taxis and use ride sharing services, too.
ASHLEY: Cops are on the lookout and writing tickets, so why take the risk? In 2017 alone, seat belts saved nearly fifteen thousand lives. So do the smart thing and buckle up every trip, day or night.
CODY: Click it or ticket. Paid for by NIT-suh.
Here's Why Squinting Helps You See — https://curiosity.im/2J8WzVM (Ashley)
Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Whatever it is, it's incredibly small and blurry, and you're probably squinting to get it in focus. But why is it that squinting helps you see? Well, it all comes down to how your eye focuses light. Here’s the science. Before you think about how your eyes see the world, let's think about how a camera sees the world. At its simplest, a film camera takes in light through a hole, or aperture, and exposes it onto light-sensitive film to create an image. Of course, if you just exposed film to light, you wouldn't actually get an image, because every light particle (aka photon) would strike every area of the film willy-nilly. That's why cameras also focus light. They do that by narrowing the aperture to let in less random light, and by adjusting the lens. A camera lens is a specially shaped piece of glass that bends the light waves that enter it so that they all converge on a single point. And your eye works very similarly to a camera. It has an aperture, which is your pupil; a light-sensitive surface, which is the layer of rod and cone cells in the back of your eye known as the retina; and a lens, which is, well… your lens. For both cameras and your eyes, most of the focusing happens in the lens. Your eyeballs actually contain a ring of muscle that helps to stretch and squish the lens into shape as you focus on things that are close up and far away. The lens helps to bend the light waves that enter your eye so they converge as a sharp image on the retina. And just like narrowing a camera's aperture can create a sharper image, narrowing your eyelids — that is, squinting — reduces the amount of light coming in from all over and only lets in a small, unidirectional quantity of light waves that pass closer to the center of the lens. Of course, squinting will only get you so far. If you find yourself squinting all the time, it might be a good idea to head to an optometrist and get fitted for glasses. [ad lib]
CODY: You don’t even have to squint, and you can SEE today’s stories and more on curiosity-dot-com!
ASHLEY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!