For some reason, certain people just don't believe it's real. Even Scott Pruitt, the man President Trump named to head the Environmental Protection Agency, isn't steadfast about global warming and what causes it. But years of scientific study have shown the planet is getting warmer. According to Bill Nye, the answer is simple: cognitive dissonance. "People have a certain worldview; [then] they're confronted with evidence that conflicts with the worldview, so they have dissonance, conflict in their minds," Nye says.

Four months ago I attempted to synthesize Wikipedia's crazy list of cognitive biases, and after banging my head against the wall for weeks, came up with this Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet which John Manoogian III, beautifully organized into the above poster. Since then, I've started working on a book proposal ( get on the email list!) around these topics, and wanted to start by creating an actual cheat sheet that doesn't take so long to read. There are four qualities of the universe that limit our own intelligence and the intelligence of every other person, collective, organism, machine, alien, or imaginable god. All 200-ish of our known biases are attempts to work around these conundrums! The first conundrum is that there's too much information in the universe for any individual within the universe to process.

Americans born in the United States are more murderous than undocumented immigrants. After all, that's just what the numbers say. Still, be honest: you wouldn't linger over a story with that headline. Instead, you'll see two dozen reporters flock to a single burning trash can during an Inauguration protest. The aberrant occurrence is the story you'll read and the picture you'll see.

Psychological research was in a kind of rut in 1955 when George A. Miller, a professor at Harvard, delivered a paper titled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," which helped set off an explosion of new thinking about thinking and opened a new field of research known as cognitive psychology. The dominant form of psychological study at the time, behaviorism, had rejected Freud's theories of "the mind" as too intangible, untestable and vaguely mystical. Its researchers instead studied behavior in laboratories, observing and recording test subjects' responses to carefully administered stimuli. Dr. Miller, who died on July 22 at his home in Plainsboro, N.J., at the age of 92, revolutionized the world of psychology by showing in his paper that the human mind, though invisible, could also be observed and tested in the lab. "George Miller, more than anyone else, deserves credit for the existence of the modern science of mind," the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker said in an interview.

Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, a company that builds robots that mimic the movements of humans and animals with stunning dexterity and speed. "We are looking forward to this next chapter in robotics and in what we can accomplish as part of the Google team," Boston Dynamics co-founder Marc Raibert said via email. Boston Dynamics is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the past six months, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news on Friday. Earlier this month, the Times reported that Google has named former Android chief Andy Rubin as the company's lead for its robotics projects. On its YouTube channel, Boston Dynamics has videos of its impressive robots, including WildCat, a four-legged robot designed to run fast in all terrains, Cheetah, which tops 28 miles-per-hour, and Petman, a human-like robot that balances himself as he walks, squats and does calisthenics, and simulates human physiology by controlling its temperature, humidity and sweating, according to the company.

When Kenneth Wayne Jennings, noted for holding the record for the longest winning streak of 74 games on the U.S. syndicated game show, bowed to IBM's Watson as the new "Jeopardy!" That was probably one small step for a computer but a giant leap for computing. It's ironic to say that Watson's dominance on the game show didn't come out of the blue. The result was a culmination of over a decade of IBM's research. "It opened up a new chapter in information technology called cognitive computing--based on the idea of a natural interaction between systems and people," says Zachary (Zach) Lemnios, vice president of strategy for IBM Research.

Cognitive modeling is an area of computer science that deals with simulating human problem solving and mental task processes in a computerized model. Such a model can be used to simulate or predict human behavior or performance on tasks similar to the ones modeled. Cognitive modeling is used in numerous artificial intelligence ( AI) applications, such as expert system s, natural language programming, and neural network s, and in robotics and virtual reality applications. Cognitive models are also used to improve products in manufacturing segments such as human factors engineering, and computer game and user interface design. Research into cognitive modeling is currently being conducted by academic and industry groups, including MIT, IBM, and Sandia National Laboratories.

Using humanoid robots to study human behavior.

An important problem for HCI researchers is to estimate the parameter values of a cognitive model from behavioral data. This is a difficult problem, because of the substantial complexity and variety in human behavioral strategies. We report an investigation into a new approach using approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) to condition model parameters to data and prior knowledge. As the case study we examine menu interaction, where we have click time data only to infer a cognitive model that implements a search behaviour with parameters such as fixation duration and recall probability. Our results demonstrate that ABC (i) improves estimates of model parameter values, (ii) enables meaningful comparisons between model variants, and (iii) supports fitting models to individual users. ABC provides ample opportunities for theoretical HCI research by allowing principled inference of model parameter values and their uncertainty.

Machine learning is on the rise due to the technological convergence of the growth of big data, decreasing data storage costs, increasing computing power, improved artificial intelligence algorithms and acceleration of cloud computing. Machine learning is the ability for computers to learn without explicit programming. It's analogous to the human ability to identify an octopus based on the set of data input that goes to the brain, such as eight arms, tentacles, lack of skeleton and other characteristics, without having prior knowledge of every type of cephalopod mollusk in existence. However, human decision-making is subject to numerous cognitive biases that can easily distort judgement. For example, iconoclastic author Tom Peters highlights 159 cognitive biases that impact management decision-making (Peters, Tom.