Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items tagged authority

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - More or Less, The death toll in Syria - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01fyvkc

TOK maths statistics SocialScience BBCRadioMoreOrLess podcast

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13
     
    As global leaders remain divided on whether to carry out a military strike against Syria in response to the apparent use of chemical weapons against its people, Tim Harford looks at the different claims made about how many people have been killed. The United States, the UK and France are sharing intelligence, but all quote different estimates of how many people they think died in the attack by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces. Tim speaks to Kelly Greenhill, a professor of political science at Tufts University in the US, and co-author of Sex, Drugs and Body Counts about why the numbers vary so widely. And he speaks to Megan Price from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, who has been trying to keep a tally of the deaths in Syria since the conflict began.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Capital - Trusting your gut: Smart management or a fool's errand? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...0923-should-you-trust-your-gut

TOK intuition hunch business management photography arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13
     
    ""A lot of people think intuition is general purpose, but intuition is actually domain specific," said Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at City University of New York, and author of Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life. "Intuition is the result of your subconscious brain picking up on clues and hints and calculating the situation for you, and that's based solely on experience.""
Lawrence Hrubes

Ai Weiwei Embraces the Political - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ei-embraces-the-political.html

TOK arts China politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • BERLIN — The “Evidence” from which the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau derives its name could be the displayed collection of hard drives, laptops and notebooks the Chinese authorities confiscated after arresting the artist in 2011 as he tried to board a plane. Or it could be the life-size replica of the cell where he was held under constant surveillance for 81 days following his detention. Or even the 6,000 wooden stools that fill the sunken atrium of the space, in a silent testimony to a lost way of life in the Chinese countryside.
  • Mr. Ai’s solo exhibition, which opened here on Thursday and runs through July 7, is the largest show of his works to date. It reflects both the current social upheaval in China, as well as the artist’s own experiences with repression. Organizers said they encouraged Mr. Ai, who has long angered the Chinese authorities through his outspoken opinions about censorship and art, to highlight the political element of his works in the show.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Forum, Advantage - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01ksh9h

TOK science SocialScience biology disability education success

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Nov 13
     
    "We explore what can confer advantage. Bridget Kendall talks to best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell about whether the power of the underdog has been under-estimated; psychologist Kathryn Asbury on why some kids start school with a biological advantage over their peers, and globalisation professor Ian Goldin on ensuring future generations' advantage now."
Lawrence Hrubes

The Allure of the Map : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-allure-of-the-map.html

TOK maps literature arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Jan 14
     
    "No map can be a perfect representation of reality; every map is an interpretation, which may be why writers are so drawn to them. Writers love maps: collecting them, creating them, and describing them. Literary cartography includes not only the literal maps that authors commission or make themselves but also the geographies they describe. The visual display of quantitative information in the digital age has made charts and maps more popular than ever, though every graphic, like every story, has a point of view."
Lawrence Hrubes

Michael Pollan: How Smart Are Plants? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...131223fa_fact_pollan

TOK science nature plants cognition neuroscience neurobiology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Dec 13
     
    "Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables-light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants-that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant's behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals."
markfrankel18

The Moral Instinct - New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...13Psychology-t.html

ethics TOK Pinker

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Mar 13 - Cached
  • It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense.
  • The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished.
  • Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.” At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
  • People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
  • Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.
  • The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
  • The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever? This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.
  • The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.
  • All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture.
  • By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness. The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.
  • Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
  • Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - India arrests hundreds over Bihar school cheating - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-31998343

ethics cheating

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • About 300 people have been arrested in the Indian state of Bihar, authorities say, after reports emerged of blatant cheating in school exams. Parents and friends of students were photographed climbing school walls to pass on answers. Many of those arrested were parents. At least 750 students have been expelled. An estimated 1.4m students are taking their school leaving exams in Bihar alone - tests seen as crucial for their chances of a successful career. The authorities have clearly been embarrassed by the cheating, the BBC's Jill McGivering says, with the episode prompting ridicule on social media.
markfrankel18

Science Is Not Religion | Jeff Schweitzer - 3 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...is-not-religion_b_3870282.html

TOK science religion

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Author Christine Ma-Kellams recently told HuffPost Science that, "In many ways, science seems like a 21st Century religion. It's a belief system that many wholeheartedly defend and evolve their lives around, sometimes as much as the devoutest of religious folk." Nothing could be further from the truth. Science is not a "belief system" but a process and methodology for seeking an objective reality. Of course because scientific exploration is a human endeavor it comes with all the flaws of humanity: ego, short-sightedness, corruption and greed. But unlike a "belief system" such as religion untethered to an objective truth, science is over time self-policing; competing scientists have a strong incentive to corroborate and build on the findings of others; but equally, to prove other scientists wrong by means that can be duplicated by others.
Lawrence Hrubes

What's in a Brand Name? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...whats-in-a-brand-name

language emotion economics linguistic determinism connotation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • There are various ways a corporate name can seem apposite. In the case of existing words, connotations are crucial: a Corvette is a light, speedy attack ship; Tesla was an inventor of genius. Made-up names often rely instead on resonances with other words: Lexus evokes luxurious; Viagra conjures virility and vitality. Bad names bring the wrong associations to consumers’ minds. In the nineteen-eighties, United Airlines tried to turn itself into a diversified travel company called Allegis. The move was a fiasco. No less an authority than Donald Trump (whose faith in brand-name power is total) said that the name sounded “like the next world-class disease.”
  • A philosopher called Hermogenes argues that the relationship between a word and its meaning is purely arbitrary; Cratylus, another philosopher, disagrees; and Socrates eventually concludes that there is sometimes a connection between meaning and sound. Linguistics has mostly taken Hermogenes’ side, but, in the past eighty years, a field of research called phonetic symbolism has shown that Cratylus was on to something.
  • Remarkably, some of these phonemic associations seem to be consistent across many languages. That’s good news for multinationals: research shows that if customers feel your name is a good fit they’ll remember it better and even like it more.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Over time, corporate naming has developed certain conventions: alliteration and vowel repetition are good. “X” and “z” are held to be memorable and redolent of speed and fluidity. The letter “x” occurs sixteen times as often in drug names as in other English words; “z” occurs eighteen times as often.
Lawrence Hrubes

Muslim Boys at a Swiss School Must Shake Teachers' Hands, Even Female Ones - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hool-migrants-shake-hands.html

ethics religious knowledge systems culture customs Islam

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • When two Syrian immigrant brothers refused to shake their female teacher’s hand this year, it ignited national outrage in Switzerland.This week, the authorities in the northern canton of Basel-Landschaft ruled that the students, who studied at a public school in the small town of Therwil, could not refuse to shake their teacher’s hand on religious grounds. They said that parents whose children refused to obey the longstanding tradition could be fined up to 5,000 Swiss francs, about $5,050.Shaking a teacher’s hand before and after class is part of Switzerland’s social fabric, and is considered an important sign of politeness and respect.
Lawrence Hrubes

Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize for literature | Entertainment & Showbiz from CTV News - 0 views

www.ctvnews.ca/...prize-for-literature-1.1491581

TOK art literature NobelPrize judgment criteria value Munro

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13
     
    ""I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way -- what happens to somebody -- but I want that 'what happens' to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing -- not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.""
Lawrence Hrubes

The Surprising Science Behind Why and When We Yawn : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-we-yawn.html

science psychology yawning SocialScience biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Yawning is one of the first things we learn to do. “Learn” may not even be quite the right word. Johanna de Vries, a professor of obstetrics at Vrije University Amsterdam, has discovered that the human fetus yawns during its first trimester in the womb. And, unless we succumb to neurodegenerative disease, yawning is something we keep doing throughout our lives. “You don’t decide to yawn,” Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and the author of “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond,” told me. “You just do it. You’re playing out a biological program.” We yawn unconsciously and we yawn spontaneously. We can’t yawn on command—and we sometimes can’t stop ourselves from letting out a big yawn, even at the most inopportune times. (Case in point: Sasha Obama’s infamous yawn during her father’s 2013 Inaugural Address.) But what, precisely, are we accomplishing with all this yawning?
Lawrence Hrubes

Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians - The British Library - 1 views

www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians

literature arts authors

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 May 14 - No Cached
  • Discover 1,200 Romantic and Victorian literary treasures, new insights by 60 experts, 25 documentary films, 30 inspirational teachers’ notes and more.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 22 May 14
     
    connections to ISP: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Jane Austen; Charles Dickens
markfrankel18

What Elvish, Klingon, and Dothraki Reveal about Real Language & the Essence of Human Co... - 1 views

www.brainpickings.org/...john-mcwhorter-ted-ed

TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Language, Darwin believed, was not a conscious invention but a phenomenon “slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps.” But what makes a language a language? In this short animation from TED Ed, linguist John McWhorter, author of the indispensable The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (public library), explores the fascinating world of fantasy constructed languages — known as conlangs — from Game of Thrones’ Dothraki to Avatar’s Na’vi to Star Trek’s Klingon to Lord of the Rings’ Elvish. Though fictional, these conlangs reveal a great deal about the fundamentals of real human communication and help us understand the essential components of a successful language — extensive vocabulary, consistent grammar rules but peppered with exceptions, and just the right amount of room for messiness and evolution.
Lawrence Hrubes

Five bizarre 'lessons' in Indian textbooks - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-india-34336826

education history authority errors

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • India, which has a literacy level well below the global average, has intensified its efforts in the field of education. In 2012 the country passed the Right to Education act which guarantees free and compulsory education for all children until the age of 14.However, some of the "facts" that have been found in textbooks around the country have given rise to speculation over what exactly passes for "education" in India.Glaring mistakes, downright lies and embellishments in textbooks are often featured in local media. A trend that is all the more worrying, given that India's education system promotes rote learning at the cost of analytical thinking.
markfrankel18

Language and Morality: How Foreign Speech Influences Choice - 4 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...n-speech-influences-choice.htm

TOK ethics language

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A recent study shows that using a foreign language can help many take a more utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas
  • According to research conducted by psychologists at the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, they discovered that many who regularly use a foreign language also take a relatively utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas. Even more interesting, researchers discovered that this same response held true when an emotionally difficult outcome was involved--one that could even involve the sacrifice of another life or the person making the decision.
  • "People are less afraid of losses, more willing to take risks and much less emotionally-connected when thinking in a foreign language," said co-author Sayuri Hayakawa, a UChicago doctoral student in psychology, via the release. She concludes the study by stressing on the importance of language. "You learn your native language as a child and it is part of your family and your culture," she said. "You probably learn foreign languages in less emotional settings like a classroom and it takes extra effort. The emotional content of the language is often lost in translation."
Lawrence Hrubes

Maya Angelou and the Internet's Stamp of Approval - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...he-internets-stamp-of-approval

arts poetry internet media errors misinformation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • his week, the United States Postal Service came in for a full news cycle’s worth of ridicule after it was&nbsp;pointed out, by the Washington&nbsp;Post, that the agency’s new Maya Angelou stamp featured a quotation that the late poet and memoirist didn’t write. The line—“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”—has been widely attributed to Angelou. And it seems like something she might have written, perhaps as a shorthand explanation for the title of her most famous book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” But the line, in a slightly different form, was originally published in a poetry collection from 1967 called “A Cup of Sun,” by Joan Walsh Anglund. The&nbsp;Post&nbsp;reported this on Monday. By Tuesday, when such luminaries as First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey stood onstage in front of a giant reproduction of the Angelou stamp at the official unveiling, everyone knew that the words behind them belonged to someone else. According to the U.S.P.S., more than&nbsp;eighty million Angelou stamps were produced, and there are no plans to retract them. <!doctype html>div,ul,li{margin:0;padding:0;}.abgc{height:15px;position:absolute;right:16px;text-rendering:geometricPrecision;top:0;width:15px;z-index:9010;}.abgb{height:100%;}.abgc img{display:block;}.abgc svg{display:block;}.abgs{display:none;height:100%;}.abgl{text-decoration:none;}.cbc{background-image: url('http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/images/x_button_blue2.png');background-position: right top;background-repeat: no-repeat;cursor:pointer;height:15px;right:0;top:0;margin:0;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:16px;z-index:9010;}.cbc.cbc-hover {background-image: url('http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/images/x_button_dark.png');}.cbc > .cb-x{height: 15px;position:absolute;width: 16px;right:0;top:0;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg{background-color: lightgray;position:absolute;}.cbc.cbc-hover > .cb-x > .cb-x-svg{background-color: #58585a;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-path{fill : #00aecd;}.cbc.cbc-hover > .cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-path{fill : white;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-s-path{fill : white;} .ddmc{background:#ccc;color:#000;padding:0;position:absolute;z-index:9020;max-width:100%;box-shadow:2px 2px 3px #aaaaaa;}.ddmc.left{margin-right:0;left:0px;}.ddmc.right{margin-left:0;right:0px;}.ddmc.top{bottom:20px;}.ddmc.bottom{top:20px;}.ddmc .tip{border-left:4px solid transparent;border-right:4px solid transparent;height:0;position:absolute;width:0;font-size:0;line-height:0;}.ddmc.bottom .tip{border-bottom:4px solid #ccc;top:-4px;}.ddmc.top .tip{border-top:4px solid #ccc;bottom:-4px;}.ddmc.right .tip{right:3px;}.ddmc.left .tip{left:3px;}.ddmc .dropdown-content{display:block;}.dropdown-content{display:none;border-collapse:collapse;}.dropdown-item{font:12px Arial,sans-serif;cursor:pointer;padding:3px 7px;vertical-align:middle;}.dropdown-item-hover{background:#58585a;color:#fff;}.dropdown-content > table{border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:0;}.dropdown-content > table > tbody > tr > td{padding:0;}Ad covers the pageStop seeing this ad.feedback_container {width: 100%;height: 100%;position: absolute;top:0;left:0;display: none;z-index: 9020;background-color: white;}.feedback_page {font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;;font-size: 13px;margin: 16px 16px 16px 16px;}.feedback_title {font-weight: bold;color: #000000;}.feedback_page a {font-weight: normal;color: #3366cc;}.feedback_description {color: #666666;line-height: 16px;margin: 12px 0 12px 0;}.feedback_closing {color: #0367ff;line-height: 16px;margin: 12px 0 12px 0;}.feedback_logo {position: absolute;right: 0;bottom: 0;margin: 0 12px 9px 0;}.feedback_logo img {height: 15px;}.survey_description {color: #666666;line-height: 17px;margin: 12px 0 10px 0;}.survey {color: #666666;line-height: 20px;}.survey_option input {margin: 0;vertical-align: middle;}.survey_option_text {margin: 0 0 0 5px;line-height: 17px;vertical-align: bottom;}.survey_option:hover {background-color: lightblue;cursor: default;}It&amp;#39;s gone. UndoWhat was wrong with this ad?InappropriateRepetitiveIrrelevantThanks for the feedback! BackWe’ll review this ad to improve your
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Artists 'have structurally different brains' - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-26925271

arts TOK brain neuroscience perception

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Artists have structurally different brains compared with non-artists, a study has found. Participants' brain scans revealed that artists had increased neural matter in areas relating to fine motor movements and visual imagery. The research, published in NeuroImage, suggests that an artist's talent could be innate. But training and environmental upbringing also play crucial roles in their ability, the authors report. As in many areas of science, the exact interplay of nature and nurture remains unclear.
Lawrence Hrubes

Meet Dan Barber: America's next foodie-in-chief - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/..._americas_next_foodie_in_chief

environment food economics ecology science TOK ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 May 14 - No Cached
  • As the unofficial spokespeople for our organic-eating, Food Network-watching ways, when chefs talk, Americans tend to listen. And Dan Barber — the farm-to-table icon behind restaurants Blue Hill in New York City&nbsp;and Blue Hill Stone Barns in Tarrytown — isn’t wasting his platform.Barber has given a wildly popular TED talk, been counted among TIME’s 100 most influential people, been appointed to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports &amp; Nutrition and, as of last week, authored a nearly 500-page book laying out a radical new vision for the future of food.So when Barber came out last weekend with a New York Times op-ed&nbsp;detailing the shortcomings of the farm-to-table movement he had previously helped promote, people paid attention. While we like to pat ourselves on the back for eating seasonally and locally, Barber’s contentious argument went, the foodie fad that grew to become the face of sustainable eating has failed to bring about the promised revolution. Industrial agriculture still rules, Barber argued. And as it keeps growing, more and more small farms and native prairie disappear under Big Ag’s plow.If we really care about changing our food system (as anyone who hopes to feed our growing world should), Barber believes we’re going to need a true revolution. And “The Third Plate“&nbsp;is his thesis, over a decade in the works, for what that change must look like.Among other things, change means thinking holistically, embracing diversity in ingredient choice and cuisine, and shifting meat over from its vaulted place at the center of the dinner plate. But while the solutions Barber describes are frighteningly extensive, they also, in his telling, sound delicious. That, more than any warning about the consequences of continuing along with the status quo, could be thing that ends up making a difference.
1 - 20 of 59 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page