Group items tagged

comparative psychology,

animal intelligence

mostly concerns mammals, especially primates, cetaceans, and elephants, as well as dogs, cats, and rodents.

and fish,

began in the late 1950s

John Lilly

other animals do have minds and that humans should approach the study of their cognition accordingly.

bottlenosed dolphins

particularly monkeys

Spatial cognition

The ability to properly navigate and search through the environment is a critical task for many animals.

Research in 2007 shows that chimpanzees in the Fongoli savannah sharpen sticks to use as spears when hunting, considered the first evidence of systematic use of weapons in a species other than humans.

Language

The modeling of human language in animals is known as animal language research.

Consciousness

The sense in which animals can be said to have consciousness or a self-concept has been hotly debated; it is often referred to as the debate over animal minds.

It has been suggested that metacognition in some animals provides some evidence for cognitive self-awareness.[11] The great apes, dolphins, and rhesus monkeys have demonstrated the ability to monitor their own mental states and use an "I don't know" response to avoid answering difficult questions. These species might also be aware of the strength of their memories.

This page was last modified on 26 November 2011 at 11:42.

exploring the effects of new media on society and culture

The knowledge is all around people and a lot of advanced technology is so ubiquitous that it makes connection, organising, sharing and learning easier than ever before

new culture and environment

they mediate relationships. Media changes, relationships change and the culture changes.

media helped the people there in a big way

Media is therefore not just tools and communication

Think about how we watch TV. We watch TV for the content, but the content drives relationships. We watch TV while at dinner, we congregate in groups to watch sport. These are the conversations that create our culture

a brief history of the phrase

it's a way for people to raise their personality and not be indistinguishable. More people want to be important today - more people want to be the new American Ido

We all need identity and recognition and the media keeps bombarding us with messages of the kind of people we should become. The search for the authentic self leads us towards self-centered modes of self-fulfillment and disagreement on several things - values, views, approaches. We're more disengaged and more fragmented. The new media revolution is creating the cultural background for this kind of a change.

micro-learning

She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language.

They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree.

many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought.

controversial.

How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking—that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?

Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and being creative.

chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task.

Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with us, often with impressive results.

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This is the

Colorism can occur within one’s own community, or across racial and ethnic groups

any other “racial” group.

Our more systematic historical research shows that the importance of skin color on life chances dates back at least to the nineteenth century.

it may emerge as an indirect effect of the person’s ability to take advantage of the higher social status that has accrued over many generations to light-skinned African-Americans

skin tone within a given race or ethnicity is associated with socioeconomic outcomes.

Being dark-skinned has psychological as well as economic, educational, and temporal costs.

people who suffer from discrimination may not protest it because they are unaware of their unfair treatment, because they perceive no alternatives, or because they see no means of effective protest. 

“colorism” may be a direct response to the behavior of or, more likely, the appearance of a person standing before the potential employer, judge, or teacher.

Light-skinned blacks tend to come from families with relatively high status on these dimensions, so skin tone affects educational attainment indirectly.

light- and medium-skinned blacks received shorter sentences for all crimes than the darkest category of blacks.  In every case except property crimes [i.e. for drug, personal, and miscellaneous crimes], the darkest group of blacks received higher sentences, on average, than whites

sentences are 2 percent shorter for light-skinned blacks compared with whites, 4 percent longer for medium-skinned blacks, and 2 percent longer for dark-skinned blacks. Those differences seem small, but 4 percent of a 2,560 day sentence (the average length for whites) is over three months of prison time.

light-skinned African Americans are relatively advantaged in the social and economic arenas,

light-skinned blacks as roughly analogous to middle-class Americans – certainly not at the top of the distribution, but enjoying enough benefits from the unfair structure that they would be hesitant to disrupt it too much.

Light-skinned blacks may be slightly more likely to perceive discrimination against other members of their race, and they are a little more likely to participate politically.

So why isn’t colorism an issue around which blacks organize politically?

Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from

a variety of relevant values and material interests

they have a similar advantage as voters and political actors, and that dark-skinned blacks perceive more discrimination.

he implication is that dark-skinned blacks ought to perceive that they are doubly maltreated, that skin color hierarchy is just as unfair as the racial hierarchy within which it nests, and that protest is warranted. 

the task is to understand their values on their own terms.

Applying this logic to the case of skin color discrimination yields several hypotheses.  Perhaps dark-skinned blacks are aware of their doubly unfair treatment, but choose to ignore it because they too care more about some other political value, such as racial solidarity or individual autonomy.

Similarly, light-skinned African Americans may recognize,

that “for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together,” but they too care more about racial solidarity than about either taking advantage of or fighting this internal division. 

in short, one form of unfairness may be worth accepting or ignoring publicly for the sake of fighting another, or simply pursuing some unrelated goal.

The deeply religious, in short, vote their values, not their interests.

At the turn of the twentieth century, both black and white media frequently used “mulatto” (and sometimes “quadroon” and “octoroon”) – sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably, but to a surprising degree simply as a common and unremarkable descriptor.

those descriptors were never used or were terms of opprobrium or shock.

one can explain the lack of collective attention to the unfairness of skin tone discrimination by pointing to the dissemination of and allegiance to other, apparently stronger values.

Racial nationalists have traditionally been hostile to black feminists or black Marxists who seek to draw attention to unfair practices within the black community

they are similarly hostile to any discussion of skin color differentiation because it appears to be a strategy of “divide and conquer.