Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items tagged Ben

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Lawrence Hrubes

Ben Goldacre: Battling bad science | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...acre_battling_bad_science.html

TOK TEDTalk TED.com science badscience Ben Goldacre doctor pharmaceutical

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Sep 13
     
    "Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they're right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry. Ben Goldacre unpicks dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dubious government reports, pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks."
Lawrence Hrubes

Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It's Called, It's Going Out of Style - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...illennials-arent-using-it.html

language technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age
  • Increasingly, says Professor Crystal, whose books include “Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation,” the period is being deployed as a weapon to show irony, syntactic snark, insincerity, even aggression
  • At the same time, he said he found that British teenagers were increasingly eschewing emoticons and abbreviations such as “LOL” (laughing out loud) or “ROTF” (rolling on the floor) in text messages because they had been adopted by their parents and were therefore considered “uncool”
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Jun 16
     
    note: this article was written with an intentional lack of periods
markfrankel18

Meet the anti-Dr. Oz: Ben Goldacre - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...ben-goldacre

TOK science medicine pseudoscience

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Over the years, Goldacre has taken on everyone from sloppy journalists to pharmaceutical executives, vitamin proprietors, and disingenuous academics. He has illuminated the evidence, and lack thereof, behind detox footbaths, homeopathy, and ear candling. And, with every debunking, he has left behind lessons in the scientific method, epidemiology, and evidence-based medicine. His writing has changed policy and informed the public at a time when few in the media stand up for science in health.
  • Giving people a ten-point plan about how to spot bad science isn’t going to help those people because they probably don’t care about science. I don’t think you can reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.
Lawrence Hrubes

Vermont Proposes Official Latin Motto, Wingnuts Tell Vermont To Go Back To Mexico | Won... - 0 views

wonkette.com/...l-vermont-to-go-back-to-mexico

TOK language history politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Here’s a sweet little story of Democracy in Action. A bright eighth grader writes to her state legislator with an idea for a law: Vermont doesn’t have an official Latin motto, so why not adopt one? And for that matter, make it a reference to history? Neato! So state Sen. Joe Benning — a Republican who was actually trying to do a good thing, which he has probably learned to never try again — introduced a bill to adopt the motto “Stella quarta decima fulgeat.” — May the fourteenth star shine bright.” Because Vermont was the 14th state, see? Benning noted that when Vermont briefly minted its own currency, it was engraved with “Stella Quarta Deccima,” so the phrase had real historical cachet.ADVERTISEMENTAnd then Burlington TV station WCAX put the story on its Facebook page with the headline, “Should Vermont have an official Latin motto?” and all Stupid broke loose when morons thought that Vermont was knuckling under to a bunch of goddamned illegal immigrants. Charles Topher at “If you Only News” collected some of the worst of the over 600 comments from some of the geniuses worried about protecting ‘Merca from the invading Latin hordes:
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Feb 15
     
    Note: In addition to the article itself, see the comments from angry citizens.
markfrankel18

And the Word of the Year Is... Selfie! : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...selfie-word-of-the-year.html

ToK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Hold on to your monocles, friends—the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is “selfie.” It’s an informal noun (plural: selfies) defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” It was first used in 2002, in an Australian online forum (compare the Australian diminutives “barbie” for barbecue and “firie” for firefighter), and it first appeared as a hashtag, #selfie, on Flickr, in 2004.
  • The word “selfie” is not yet in the O.E.D., but it is currently being considered for future inclusion; whether the word makes it into the history books is truly for the teens to decide. As Ben Zimmer wrote at Language Log, “Youth slang is the obvious source for much of our lexical innovation, like it or not.” And despite its cloying tone, that Oxford Dictionaries blog post from August does allude to the increasingly important distinction between “acronym“ and “initialism”—either of which may describe the expression “LOL,” depending if you pronounce it “lawl” or “ell-oh-ell.” The kids are going to be all right. Not “alright.” But all right.
Lawrence Hrubes

Chinese teacher wakes up after stroke speaking English but no Chinese | Daily Mail Online - 2 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...eaking-English-no-Chinese.html

TOK language brain neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • However, she is not the only person to wake up from a coma speaking another language.Australian Ben McMahon woke up able to speak Mandarin after being involved in a car accident, while a 13-year-old Croatian girl woke up having replaced her fluency in her native language with speaking German. There was also the case of a U.S. navy veteran was found unconscious in a motel room who had no recollection of who he was and woke up speaking fluent Swedish. A Queensland Brain Institute neuroscientist suggested a possible explanation last year. Dr Pankaj Sah said the brain was made up of different circuits - which assist in language, breathing, speaking and thinking - similar to electronic circuits.According to him, it is possible in Ben's case that the parts of the brain which recalled English were damaged in the crash and those that retained Mandarin were activated when the 22-year-old woke up.Whether this is what happened to Ms Jieyu is not known. More commonly, people are known to have woken up with a different accent, like in the case of Kath Locket, who was born and bred in Stafford. But after she was rushed into hospital unable to speak or swallow, she developed a strong accent which was distinctly European.  WHAT IS FOREIGN ACCENT SYNDROME?
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page