It seems that getting end-of-life patients and their families to endorse “do not resuscitate” orders has been challenging. To many ears, “D.N.R.” sounds a little too much like throwing Grandpa under the bus. But according to a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics, when the orders are reworded to say “allow natural death,” patients and family members and even medical professionals are much more likely to give their consent to what amounts to exactly the same protocols.
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Why 'Natural' Doesn't Mean Anything Anymore - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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So does this mean that, when it comes to saying what’s natural, anything goes? I don’t think so. In fact, I think there’s some philosophical wisdom we can harvest from, of all places, the Food and Drug Administration. When the federal judges couldn’t find a definition of “natural” to apply to the class-action suits before them, three of them wrote to the F.D.A., ordering the agency to define the word. But the F.D.A. had considered the question several times before, and refused to attempt a definition. The only advice the F.D.A. was willing to offer the jurists is that a food labeled “natural” should have “nothing artificial or synthetic” in it “that would not normally be expected in the food.” The F.D.A. states on its website that “it is difficult to define a food product as ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth,” suggesting that the industry might not want to press the point too hard, lest it discover that nothing it sells is natural.
When behavioral economics meets a $700M Powerball jackpot - 2 views
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Business Insider went out onto the streets of NYC and tried to buy people’s just-purchased Powerball tickets ahead of the $700 million drawing. They did not get many takers, even when offering twice the price they paid (which meant they could just go and buy double the number of tickets and slash their odds of winning). The video says this is an example of regret avoidance.
Should We See Everything a Cop Sees? - The New York Times - 2 views
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Much of the moral case for bodycams, that they reduce police violence, rests on a single experiment: the 2012 Rialto study
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The data from nearly 1,000 shifts and 50,000 hours of police-public interactions showed that when officers wore bodycams, they were less likely to use batons, Tasers, firearms and pepper spray or to have confrontations that resulted in police-dog bites, and they were far less likely to receive civilian complaints about their conduct.
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In an essay published shortly after the White House announced its $75 million in bodycam funding in 2014, two authors of the study, Barak Ariel and Alex Sutherland, hypothesized that it was not cameras alone that drove the positive results; it was the fact that before every interaction with a citizen, officers in the trial were required to announce that they were recording. There may have been a “self-awareness effect”: Both parties were reminded at the moment of contact that they were under surveillance and that they should behave accordingly. One question was whether the effect would hold up if officers did not announce the cameras’ presence. Another was whether it would hold up when the cameras lost their novelty.
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Is Your Child Lying to You? That's Good - The New York Times - 2 views
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Kids discover lying as early as age 2, studies have found. In one experiment, children were asked not to peek at a toy hidden behind them while the researcher withdrew from the room under false pretenses. Minutes later, the researcher returned and asked the child if he or she peeked.
What Does It Mean to Die? | The New Yorker - 0 views
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Thousands of lives were prolonged or saved every year because patients declared brain-dead—a form of death eventually adopted by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe—were now eligible to donate their organs. The philosopher Peter Singer described it as “a concept so desirable in its consequences that it is unthinkable to give up, and so shaky on its foundations that it can scarcely be supported.” The new death was “an ethical choice masquerading as a medical fact,” he wrote.
Neuroscience and Moral Responsibility - The New York Times - 2 views
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ARE you responsible for your behavior if your brain “made you do it”?Often we think not. For example, research now suggests that the brain’s frontal lobes, which are crucial for self-control, are not yet mature in adolescents. This finding has helped shape attitudes about whether young people are fully responsible for their actions. In 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, its decision explicitly took into consideration that “parts of the brain involved in behavior control continue to mature through late adolescence.”
The A.I. "Gaydar" Study and the Real Dangers of Big Data | The New Yorker - 2 views
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The researchers culled tens of thousands of photos from an online-dating site, then used an off-the-shelf computer model to extract users’ facial characteristics—both transient ones, like eye makeup and hair color, and more fixed ones, like jaw shape. Then they fed the data into their own model, which classified users by their apparent sexuality. When shown two photos, one of a gay man and one of a straight man, Kosinski and Wang’s model could distinguish between them eighty-one per cent of the time; for women, its accuracy dropped slightly, to seventy-one per cent.
Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational | Wired Science | Wired.com - 5 views
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To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.
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it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation. Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.
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The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.
The Primitive Streak - Radiolab - 0 views
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Last May, two research groups announced a breakthrough: they each grew human embryos, in the lab, longer than ever before. In doing so, they witnessed a period of human development no one had ever seen. But in the process, they crashed up against something called the '14-day rule,' a guideline set over 30 years ago that dictates what we do, and possibly how we feel, about human embryos in the lab. On this episode, join producer Molly Webster as she peers down at our very own origins, and wonders: what do we do now?
Acupuncture Is Sham Medicine - But Has It Led Researchers to a Chronic Pain Treatment? ... - 0 views
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One of the more benign aspects of Chinese medicine is acupuncture, a practice deemed superstitious in China in the 17th century until Mao Zedong reemployed it for political purposes in the fifties. Two decades later it infiltrated the American imagination. A myth was reborn. As Jeneen Interlandi writes, research results have been murky at best—one 2013 report of over 3,000 studies showed acupuncture to be no more effective than placebos.
Henry Marsh's "Do No Harm" - The New Yorker - 1 views
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Marsh, who is now sixty-five, is one of Britain’s foremost neurosurgeons. He is a senior consultant at St. George’s Hospital, in London, and he helped to pioneer a kind of surgery in which patients are kept awake, under local anesthesia, so that they can converse with their surgeons while they operate, allowing them to avoid damaging what neurosurgeons call “eloquent,” or useful, parts of the brain. Marsh has been the subject of two documentary films. Still, he writes, “As I approach the end of my career I feel an increasing obligation to bear witness to past mistakes I have made.” A few years ago, he prepared a lecture called “All My Worst Mistakes.” For months, he lay awake in the mornings, remembering the patients he had failed. “The more I thought about the past,” he recalls in his book, “the more mistakes rose to the surface, like poisonous methane stirred up from a stagnant pond.”
They Hunt. They Gather. They're Very Good at Talking About Smells. - The New York Times - 0 views
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What makes one human better at talking about odors than another? Are English speakers flawed smellers, or are the hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula exceptional? Advertisement Continue reading the main story The answer might come down partly to culture, suggests a study published Thursday in Current Biology.
The Mystery of S., the Man with an Impossible Memory | The New Yorker - 0 views
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The researcher who met with S. that day was twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Luria, whose fame as a founder of neuropsychology still lay before him. Luria began reeling off lists of random numbers and words and asking S. to repeat them, which he did, in ever-lengthening series. Even more remarkably, when Luria retested S. more than fifteen years later, he found those numbers and words still preserved in S.’s memory. “I simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,” Luria writes in his famous case study of S., “The Mind of a Mnemonist,” published in 1968 in both Russian and English.
All the explanations you've heard so far about Laurel vs. Yanny are probably wrong. - 0 views
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"major celebrities chiming in"
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