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Lawrence Hrubes

The placebo effect: A new study underscores its remarkable power - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article16281897

TOK ethics science medicine placebo pain

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Jan 14
     
    "But according to new research, the therapeutic effects of a placebo are so powerful that an inert pill has a good chance of reducing symptoms - even if patients know they are taking a dummy pill."
Lawrence Hrubes

The New Science of Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-new-science-of-mind.html

TOK mind brain psychotherapy science psychiatry behaviour neurology biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13
     
    This new science of mind is based on the principle that our mind and our brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. It is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by our brain. The same principle of unity applies to mental disorders.
markfrankel18

Sea of Japan vs. East Sea: The school textbook change that has Japan furious at Virginia. - 1 views

www.slate.com/...ge_that_has_japan_furious.html

TOK textbook history language

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • he Washington Post reports that an “obscure textbook bill that elicited threats from Japan and drew busloads of Korean activists to the Capitol was headed Wednesday to Gov. Terry McAuliffe for his signature.” The bill requires all new Virginia textbooks to mention that the Sea of Japan is also known as the “East Sea.” McAuliffe promised to make the change on the campaign trail while attempting to win votes from Northern Virginia’s growing Korean community, who claim that the name was wrongly popularized while Korea was under Japanese occupation. It has predictably irritated Tokyo, with Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. warning that it could harm Japan-Virginia business relations. New York and New Jersey are reportedly considering similar bills.
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

Why Japan Surrendered | GarethCook - 1 views

garethcook.net/why-did-japan-surrender

TOK history revision evidence war Japan America WW2 ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13
     
    "In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan's surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion."
Lawrence Hrubes

Canada's Forced Schooling of Aboriginal Children Was 'Cultural Genocide,' Report Finds ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ral-genocide-report-finds.html

indigenous knowledge systems history ethics culture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Canada’s former policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families for schooling “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”
  • The schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches, were in operation for more than a century, from 1883 until the last one closed in 1998.The commission found that 3,201 students died while attending the schools, many of them because of mistreatment or neglect — the first comprehensive tally of such deaths.
  • Some of the former students the commission interviewed cited school sports, music and arts programs as bright spots in their lives. But those programs were not generally part of the system, and most former students, even those who were not physically or sexually harmed or neglected, told the commission that their daily lives were heavily regimented and lacked privacy and dignity. At many of the schools, students were addressed and referred to by number as if they were prisoners.“In the school, I didn’t have a name,” Lydia Ross, a former student, told the commission. “I had No. 51, No. 44, No. 32, No. 16, No. 11 and then finally No. 1, when I was just coming to high school.”
markfrankel18

Tiananmen Square 'Negatives': An Art Book or a Protest? - NYTimes.com - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...-an-art-book-or-a-protest.html

TOK arts history

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • “This is an art book,” said Mr. Xu, 60, who has more than 20 photography books to his name. “I have no interest in discussing what they mean.”But the simple act of publishing images of the protests that convulsed Beijing in the spring of 1989 is likely to be viewed as a provocation by the hard-liners who currently rule China. In the ensuing years they have tried, with much success, to impose a collective amnesia on the nation by censoring photos and news accounts that are part of the historical record in the rest of the world.
  • But the simple act of publishing images of the protests that convulsed Beijing in the spring of 1989 is likely to be viewed as a provocation by the hard-liners who currently rule China. In the ensuing years they have tried, with much success, to impose a collective amnesia on the nation by censoring photos and news accounts that are part of the historical record in the rest of the world.
Lawrence Hrubes

What Are We Smoking? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...what-are-we-smoking

science medicine drugs research ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 May 15 - No Cached
  • Today, nearly half of all states allow the medical use of marijuana, and several, led by Colorado, have legalized it completely. In many places, New York being one of them, you can get your pot delivered as easily and quickly as if it were a pizza. I would be happy with that if only I or anyone else knew what it meant to smoke it. But, largely as a result of our government’s refusal to support scientific research on the effects of marijuana, we know stunningly little about what happens when we drop those buds into our fancy new vaporizers. We know even less about the effect of what are called “edibles”—the gummy bears, chocolate truffles, lollipops, brownies, cookies, and other dishes, laced with pot, that are now so easily available to us and, no doubt, to our children. What do we know when we swallow a marijuana gummy bear? Is it like a hit of good pot? Is it like three? For that matter, is a hit of good pot like it was five decades, or five years ago? Or even five months ago? Nobody seems able to answer those basic questions.
Lawrence Hrubes

Scientists Consider New Names for Climate Change : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-names-for-climate-change.html

language emotion climate TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 May 14 - No Cached
  • After a report from the Yale Center on Climate Change Communication showed that the term “climate change” elicits relatively little concern from the American public, leading scientists are recommending replacing it with a new term: “You will be burnt to a crisp and die.”
Lawrence Hrubes

How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...accoon-became-an-aardvark.html

Wikipedia TOK science errors authority

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati. The coati, a member of the raccoon family, is “also known as … a Brazilian aardvark,” Breves wrote. He did not cite a source for this nickname, and with good reason: he had invented it. He and his brother had spotted several coatis while on a trip to the Iguaçu Falls, in Brazil, where they had mistaken them for actual aardvarks.
  • Over time, though, something strange happened: the nickname caught on. About a year later, Breves searched online for the phrase “Brazilian aardvark.” Not only was his edit still on Wikipedia, but his search brought up hundreds of other Web sites about coatis. References to the so-called “Brazilian aardvark” have since appeared in the Independent, the Daily Mail, and even in a book published by the University of Chicago. Breves’s role in all this seems clear: a Google search for “Brazilian aardvark” will return no mentions before Breves made the edit, in July, 2008. The claim that the coati is known as a Brazilian aardvark still remains on its Wikipedia entry, only now it cites a 2010 article in the Telegraph as evidence.
  • This kind of feedback loop—wherein an error that appears on Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original falsehood—is a documented phenomenon. There’s even a Wikipedia article describing it.
adamdrazsky

The Assassination of Boris Nemtsov - The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...assassination-in-moscow

shared by adamdrazsky on 28 Feb 15 - No Cached
sleggettisp liked it
  • Then why was he killed? Without knowing who gave the orders, it’s possible to understand that the current political environment allowed for this to happen. Over the past year, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, Russia has seen the rise of a new, much coarser and more doctrinaire political language. During the first decade of Putin’s rule, the Kremlin depicted its opponents as freaks or idiots, but now they are portrayed as outright enemies of their country. In a triumphant address to parliament last March, as Russia was formalizing its takeover of Crimea, Putin warned of “a fifth column,” a “disparate bunch of national traitors” determined to sow discord inside the country. Its members were obvious, if at first unmentioned: people like Navalny, an anti-corruption activist who had become the most popular leader in the country’s fractured opposition; Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, a long-beleaguered radio station that is one of the last homes for critical and liberal voices; and of course Nemtsov, a recognizable face​from all his years in politics, and a favorite opponent of pro-Kremlin activists and propagandists.
  • adamdrazsky on 28 Feb 15
     
    How can we judge historical motives?
  • sleggettisp on 01 Mar 15
     
    Assassination tactic in Russian politics linked to your Nicholas II presentation (and what we have just done re Alexander II and III...)...unfortunately some things have yet to change :-(
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Living with the J-word - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31765970

ethics language racism antisemitism identity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Thankfully, most of this Jew-targeted hatred takes the form of verbal aggression rather than physical violence. But because many critics of Israel make no distinction between citizens of the Jewish state and the worldwide Jewish community, the J-word has been the focus. You won't see "Kill Israelis" scrawled on London synagogue walls. What you see on walls is "Kill the Jews", and on banners "Hitler was Right". And this brings me back to the point about the complexity of anti-Semitism today. It is always around and in the end it is focused primarily on the J-word, in the same way that another form of racism is focused on the N-word. Those on the receiving end find their lives shaped by it. Certainly my life, my sense of myself, has been shaped by the casual anti-Semitism that I have encountered for more than half a century. The first time I was called a "Jew" with malicious intent was September 1958 in the playground of Belmont Hills Elementary School, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It came as a surprise. I was eight years old and up until that time had been living in New York City where everyone I encountered was Jewish. Until that moment, the word "Jew" had simply been one of the words and phrases - like "Mike", "son" and "114 East 90th Street" - whose meanings were slowly building up into a sense of who I was.
  • Throughout the 19th Century, "Israelite" or "Hebrew" or "follower of Moses" supplanted "Jew" as the politically correct way to refer to the community. It was a process analogous to the way "black" and then "African-American" or "person of colour" replaced "Negro" in polite discourse after the Civil Rights era.
  • Thirty years later, a new word for this hatred was coined - "anti-Semitism". This was a time when race science was all the rage. Anti-Semitism avoided the connotation of pure hatred against individuals which is, after all, irrational. It focused scientifically on the supposed racial and social characteristics of a group, the Jews, without mentioning them by name. From there it was easy to start a political movement - based on scientific "facts" - to rein in a people who clearly were alien.
markfrankel18

Timeline Outline View : HistoryofInformation.com - 1 views

www.historyofinformation.com/index.php

TOK information timeline

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 29 Jul 14
     
    While the explosion of information resulting from the Internet is undoubtedly compounding an old problem, the Internet has also brought us new tools to explore both the rapidly expanding universe of information and the history of information. Using these new tools, HistoryofInformation.com is designed to help you follow the development of information and media, and attitudes about them, from the beginning of records to the present.
Andrea Barlien

The Truth Wears Off - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-truth-wears-off

shared by Andrea Barlien on 13 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 13 Nov 14
     
    On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.
  • Andrea Barlien on 13 Nov 14
     
    On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The blind breast cancer detectors - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31552562

science health medicine statistics probability tests math

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Gerd Gigerenzer's test In 2006 and 2007 Gigerenzer gave a series of statistics workshops to gynaecologists, and kicked off every session with the same question: A 50-year-old woman, no symptoms, participates in routine mammography screening. She tests positive, is alarmed, and wants to know from you whether she has breast cancer for certain or what the chances are. Apart from the screening results, you know nothing else about this woman. How many women who test positive actually have breast cancer? What is the best answer? nine in 10 eight in 10 one in 10 one in 100 Gigerenzer then supplied the doctors with data about Western women of this age. (His figures were based on US studies from the 1990s, rounded up or down for simplicity - recent stats from Britain's National Health Service are slightly different.) The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 1% ("prevalence") If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she tests positive is 90% ("sensitivity") If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is 9% ("false alarm rate") In one session, almost half the gynaecologists said the woman's chance of having cancer was nine in 10. Only 21% said that the figure was one in 10 - which is the correct answer.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - US Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic leads school to apologise - 0 views

www.bbc.com/31989874

language culture diversity ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A school in New York state has apologised after receiving complaints because a student recited the US Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic. The school's foreign language department arranged for the pledge to be read in a different language each day for a week. Complaints were received from people who lost family in Afghanistan and from Jewish parents, an official said. Neither the US nor New York state has an official language.
markfrankel18

Every TV news report on the economy - 0 views

kottke.org/...-tv-news-report-on-the-economy

TOK economics Media News

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • From Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, here's how every single news report on the economy plays out:
Lawrence Hrubes

A mouse's house may ruin experiments : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...e-may-ruin-experiments-1.19335

science biology experiment replicability reproducibility validity models variables animals

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • It’s no secret that therapies that look promising in mice rarely work in people. But too often, experimental treatments that succeed in one mouse population do not even work in other mice, suggesting that many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.
markfrankel18

The Return of History - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-return-of-history.html

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • That the Islamic State has made violent use of history shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps more surprising is that in all those places where a modern nation has been grafted onto an ancient culture, history has returned with a vengeance. From Confucian China to Buddhist Myanmar to Hindu India, history has become the source of a fierce new conservatism that is being used to curb freedoms of women and stoke hatred of minorities. As the ultimate source of legitimacy, history has become a way for modernizing societies to procure the trappings of modernity while guarding themselves from its values.
Lawrence Hrubes

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-build-the-perfect-team.html

human sciences psychology communication

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
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