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Lawrence Hrubes

Ninth Planet May Exist in Solar System Beyond Pluto, New Evidence Suggests - The New Yo... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...solar-system-beyond-pluto.html

science astronomy models observation planet reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet
  • Rather, in a paper published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin lay out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet’s existence in what astronomers have observed — a half-dozen small bodies in distant, highly elliptical orbits.
  • This would be the second time that Dr. Brown has upended the map of the solar system. In January 2005, he discovered a Pluto-size object, now known as Eris, in the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt.A year and a half later, the International Astronomical Union placed Pluto in a new category, “dwarf planet,” because it had not “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”In the view of the astronomical union, a full-fledged planet must be, in essence, the gravitational bully of its orbit, and Pluto was not.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “The theorists didn’t really take it seriously,” he said. “They figured it was all some observational effect. The observers didn’t take it seriously, because they figured it was all some theoretical thing they couldn’t understand.”
Lawrence Hrubes

The Responsibility of Knowledge: Developing Holocaust Education for the Third... - 2 views

www.humanityinaction.org/...ation-for-the-third-generation

TOK history memory holocaust education ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • In a radio address in 1966 the prominent German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, declared his dissatisfaction with the state of Holocaust consciousness. He claimed that ignorance of the barbarity of the Holocaust is “itself a symptom of the continuing potential for its recurrence as far as peoples’ conscious and unconscious is concerned.” (Adorno, Education After Auschwitz). It is for this reason that he envisioned education as the institution which would be most responsible for instilling values in the masses so that they have the agency to oppose barbarism.  Adorno spoke not only of education in childhood, but “then the general enlightenment that provides an intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible.” Almost 40 years later, the Holocaust education is still important, not only to combat another genocide but also to provide a consciousness of human rights necessary in a world where such standards are becoming commonplace. Holocaust education is in a state of constant evolution. As generations grow up and new ones are born, as distance from the Holocaust increases, it is necessary to reform the methods in which its history is taught. As survivors die and the third generation slowly drifts out of the Holocaust’s shadow, education must be buttressed with an understanding of the applicable lessons and principles that may derive from the Holocaust. For this education to have any meaning, those mechanisms that allowed the Holocaust to take place must be fully understood. History must empower pupils with the understanding of various choices they must make and their ultimate impact on society. 
adamdrazsky

Exploring the Ethics of 'Designer Babies' - Huffington Post - 2 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...designer-babies_n_4966189.html

science ethics psychology emotion reason intuition technology genetics biology engineering design genetic modification implications

shared by adamdrazsky on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • adamdrazsky on 04 Dec 14
     
    By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer Published: 03/13/2014 02:18 PM EDT on LiveScience Creating designer babies who are free from disease and super athletic or smart may finally be around the corner.
markfrankel18

Remembrance of News Past - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-news-thats-fit-to-forget.html

psychology Memory TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • It won’t surprise you to learn that the very recent news events are the ones we remember best. The Japanese psychologist Terumasa Kogure found sharp drops in recollection at four years and eight years after an event, but sometimes we’ll remember the details of far older news stories. Indeed, recent psychological research shows that our memory for news is not as straightforward as we might think — and the reasons offer insight into how the mind works.
markfrankel18

Links 2013 - 1 views

worrydream.com/Links2013

books arts science ethics language perception human sciences reason emotion psychology models paradigm math digital

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 10 Jan 14
     
    I love his Reading Tips in the sidebar!
markfrankel18

Scientific Pride and Prejudice - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tific-pride-and-prejudice.html

TOK psychology bias science arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The natural sciences often offer themselves as a model to other disciplines. But this time science might look for help to the humanities, and to literary criticism in particular.A major root of the crisis is selective use of data. Scientists, eager to make striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions
  • Despite the popular belief that anything goes in literary criticism, the field has real standards of scholarly validity.
  • In his 1960 book “Truth and Method,” the influential German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that an interpreter of a text must first question “the validity — of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.” However, “this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self.” Rather, “the important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias.” To deal with the problem of selective use of data, the scientific community must become self-aware and realize that it has a problem. In literary criticism, the question of how one’s arguments are influenced by one’s prejudgments has been a central methodological issue for decades.
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  • Perhaps because of its self-awareness about what Austen would call the “whims and caprices” of human reasoning, the field of psychology has been most aggressive in dealing with doubts about the validity of its research.
markfrankel18

Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...he_real_reason_for_brains.html

TOK science brain neurology

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility of human motion.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Missing Malaysia plane: 10 theories examined - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-26609687

TOK reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As the search for Malaysia Airlines missing Boeing 777 moves into its 11th day, a multitude of theories about the plane's fate are circulating on forums and social media. Here, former pilots and aviation experts look at some of those theories.
  • As the search for Malaysia Airlines missing Boeing 777 moves into its 11th day, a multitude of theories about the plane's fate are circulating on forums and social media. Here, former pilots and aviation experts look at some of those theories.
Lawrence Hrubes

Philosophy Bites: Michael Sandel - 0 views

philosophybites.com/sandel

TOK ethics reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel in conversation with Nigel Warburton outlines 3 answers to the question 'What is Justice?', Jeremy Bentham's, Immanuel Kant's, and Aristotle's. Listen to Michael Sandel on Justice Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Mar 14
     
    links to sites and videos dealing with moral, philosophical, social and justice issues
markfrankel18

When are you dead? - 2011 SPRING - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University Sch... - 0 views

stanmed.stanford.edu/...article5.html

ToK psychology Science consciousness death medicine

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery. Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.
markfrankel18

Theory of mind and the belief in God. - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/...e_god_its_me_brain.single.html

TOK mind god belief science

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Sep 13 - Cached
  • As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the importance of our theory-of-mind skills in that process, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving—or misbehaving—people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our incompetent computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states—indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intent—but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.
markfrankel18

On the Face of It: How We Vote : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-the-psychology-of-voting.html

ToK psychology human sciences voting

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - Cached
  • In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.
  • Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.
markfrankel18

Rational Disagreement: Arguing Your Way to the Right Decision | Big Think Edge | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...your-way-to-the-right-decision

ToK reason disagreement

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When you find yourself in a disagreement with someone - whether you are discussing politics or football - you probably tend to view the experience as a waste of time. Humans are stubborn creatures because we need to validate our own egos. That means no one wants to "give in." We all want to "win" the argument. However, as Julia Galef, President of the Center for Applied Rationality, demonstrates in today's lesson, if you are simply out to "win" an argument and validate your ego, you really aren't winning much of anything. You are actually missing out on an opportunity for learning and personal growth.  In the video below, derived from a lesson on Big Think Edge, the only forum on YouTube designed to help you get the skills you need to be successful in a rapidly changing world, Galef shows how one can disagree productively:
markfrankel18

Correlation is not causation | OUPblog - 0 views

blog.oup.com/...correlation-is-not-causation

ToK correlation science reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A famous slogan in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation. We know that there is a statistical correlation between eating ice cream and drowning incidents, for instance, but ice cream consumption does not cause drowning. Where any two factors –  A and B – are correlated, there are four possibilities: 1. A is a cause of B, 2. B is a cause of A, 3. the correlation is pure coincidence and 4., as in the ice cream case, A and B are connected by a common cause. Increased ice cream consumption and drowning rates both have a common cause in warm summer weather.
  • We know that smoking causes cancer. But we also know that many people who smoke don’t get cancer. Causal claims are not falsified by counterexamples, not even by a whole bunch of them. Contraceptive pills have been shown to cause thrombosis, but only in 1 of 1000 women. Following Popper, we could say that for every case where the cause is followed by the effect there are 999 counterexamples. Instead of falsifying the hypothesis that the pill causes thrombosis, however, we list thrombosis as a known side-effect. Causation is still very much assumed even though it occurs only in rare cases.
  • One could understand a cause, for instance, as a tendency towards its effect. Smoking has a tendency towards cancer, but it doesn’t guarantee it.. Contraception pills have a tendency towards thrombosis but a relatively small one. However, being hit by a train strongly tends towards death. We see that tendencies come in degrees, as do causes, some strongly tending towards their effect and some only weakly.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Correlation does not imply causation. At best it might be taken as indicative or symptomatic of it. And perfect correlation, if this is understood along the lines of Hume’s constant conjunction, does not indicate causation at all but probably something quite different.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The unwinnable game - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-25032298

TOK reason technology games chess intelligence

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Nov 13
     
    "A commentator in the current Carlsen-Anand series used the phrase: "A very human move." The point is that humans make mistakes. The subtlest of mistakes, the "sub-optimal" moves, can create beautifully poised situations."
markfrankel18

From Quarks to Quasars » Correlation vs. Causation: The Analysis of Data - 0 views

www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/correlation-vs-causation

correlation ToK reason fallacy

shared by markfrankel18 on 25 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Between 1997 and 2007, the rate of autism and organic food sales has risen at the same rate. Obviously, this chart goes to prove that autism and eating organic foods are related to each other and you should avoid organics all together, right? Wrong. This chart is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen detailing how correlation and causation can have absolutely nothing to do with each other. In fact, in many cases, correlation and causation have nothing to do with each other – but what exactly does that mean?
  • In Latin, the phrase generally used is “cum hoc ergo propter hoc” which translates more literally to “With this therefore because of this.” The opposite, however, is true. Causation proves correlation, but not the other way around.
  • If a correlation is established, how can you determine causation? Are they caused by the same thing? Does one cause the other? Are they completely unrelated? In order for one event to cause another, they must be related. In other words, there must be some real mechanism connecting the two events (assuming the correlation isn’t completely coincidental). Here, the cause and effect mechanism must comply with the known laws of nature – this (at least) gives us somewhere to start.
markfrankel18

The Brain on Trial - Issue 5: Fame - Nautilus - 0 views

nautil.us/...the-brain-on-trial

ToK human sciences psychology brain consciousness bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Now we are regularly bombarded with new insights into how the unconscious guides our behavior. At the same time, neuroscience has largely debunked the idea of an autonomous self that has the final say in decisions; few science-savvy folks still believe there is a “ghost in the machine,” a little homunculus in the brain who is watching our perceptions or thinking our thoughts. Some philosophers even question whether the conscious mind plays any role in our thoughts. In short, present-day neuroscience has pulled the rug out from under the concept of “the rational man.”
  • If you are asked why you chose the violin, your answer is unlikely to be an accurate reflection of the unconscious competition that led to your choice. In effect, the decision happened to you. Your brain developed a “violin neural circuit” in the same way that fame makes some actors, musicians, and novelists superstars while others, for reasons that are never entirely clear, are relegated to obscurity.
  • Imagine that you are a juror assigned to the sentencing phase of a person convicted of first-degree murder. The defendant is a 33-year-old woman who has confessed to shooting her boyfriend in the head, then stabbing him nearly 30 times before unsuccessfully trying to decapitate him with a butcher knife. Initially she tells police she hadn’t been present, that her boyfriend had been killed by “unknown intruders.” When she can offer no evidence to substantiate her alibi, she then confesses, arguing self-defense and that her boyfriend had submitted her to prior physical and mental abuse. On a national TV news show, she predicts that no jury will find her guilty, yet after a several-month trial, you find her guilty of first-degree murder. It is now sentencing time. Your assignment is to determine whether the crime warrants the death penalty or a life sentence without parole, or a lesser sentence with the possibility of parole.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 3 views

www.motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion
    • Lawrence Hrubes
      Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Oct 13
       
      2 Ways of Knowing here, acting in combo
markfrankel18

English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281601

TOK language because

shared by markfrankel18 on 05 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Linguists are recognizing the delightful evolution of the word "because." 
  • he word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, "because" has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because [of the web]). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which "because" lends itself. I mention all that ... because language. Because evolution. Because there is another way to use "because." Linguists are calling it the "prepositional-because." Or the "because-noun." You probably know it better, however, as explanation by way of Internet—explanation that maximizes efficiency and irony in equal measure. I'm late because YouTube. You're reading this because procrastination. As the language writer Stan Carey delightfully sums it up: "'Because' has become a preposition, because grammar." 
markfrankel18

The Dangers of Pseudoscience - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-pseudoscience

TOK science pseudoscience

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Oct 13 - Cached
  • The borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience may be fuzzy, but this should be even more of a call for careful distinctions, based on systematic facts and sound reasoning. To try a modicum of turtle blood here and a little aspirin there is not the hallmark of wisdom and even-mindedness. It is a dangerous gateway to superstition and irrationality.
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