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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
markfrankel18

The Search for Our Missing Colors - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-search-for-our-missing-colors

TOK perception technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 May 16 - No Cached
  • But, no matter how closely you watched the news reports or ogled Pantone’s Web site, you never actually saw the color Emerald: the vast majority of televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices are unable to display it, as Jeff Yurek, a communications manager at Nanosys, a company that makes color-display technology, revealed in a blog post. That’s not the only color we’re missing. If you watched this year’s Super Bowl on television, you never really saw the true shade of the Broncos’ blue helmets (Pantone No. 289). And viewing online photos of London’s famous red double-decker buses (Pantone No. 485) while you plan your vacation falls far short of experiencing that color in person. It’s easy to assume that our constantly proliferating&nbsp;digital devices can easily generate any color we want. But, in fact, our screens paint from a depressingly small palette: most can only recreate about a third of all the colors that our eyes can perceive.
markfrankel18

Faking Cultural Literacy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faking-cultural-literacy.html

literacy TOK technology social media

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 May 14 - No Cached
  • It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them.
  • Who decides what we know, what opinions we see, what ideas we are repurposing as our own observations? Algorithms, apparently, as Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social media postindustrial complex rely on these complicated mathematical tools to determine what we are actually reading and seeing and buying.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story AdvertisementWe have outsourced our opinions to this loop of data that will allow us to hold steady at a dinner party, though while you and I are ostensibly talking about “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” what we are actually doing, since neither of us has seen it, is comparing social media feeds.
Lawrence Hrubes

Seeing and Hearing for the First Time, on YouTube - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-for-the-first-time-on-youtube

perception senses sensory perception emotion

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Truly new sensory experiences are rare. Perhaps for that reason, a whole genre of YouTube videos is dedicated to them. The videos of&nbsp;babies tasting lemons&nbsp;are merely heartwarming. Others—the ones showing deaf people&nbsp;activating their cochlear implants, for example, or blind people, after surgery,&nbsp;seeing for the first time—have a power that’s hard to overstate. (A video of Sarah Churman, a young woman from Texas, hearing her own voice has been viewed more than twenty-five million times.) That power flows from a number of sources. The videos are often filmed by family members who are themselves deeply moved. They involve us in a private, intimate, and life-changing moment. They are unusually frank documents of emotion: one doesn’t often see such extremes of surprise, fear, and joy flow so undisguised across an adult face. And, at the same time, they tell part of a larger, communal story about science and its possibilities. (Perhaps this is why patients and their families are so willing to share these otherwise private moments with the rest of us.)
Lawrence Hrubes

Germanwings 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...logy-and-the-question-of-trust

technology decision making emotion trust

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • hortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of&nbsp;“The Second Machine Age,”&nbsp;a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee,&nbsp;about the coming automation of many professions previously thought of as impervious to technological change, such as those of drivers, doctors, market researchers, and soldiers. With the advances being made in robotics, data analysis, and artificial intelligence, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, we are on the cusp of a third industrial revolution.
  • The U.S. military appears to be moving in the direction of eliminating pilots, albeit tentatively. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have long operated&nbsp;unmanned drones, including the Predator, which are used for reconnaissance and bombing missions.&nbsp;In 2013, the U.S Air Force successfully tested the QF-16&nbsp;fighter-bomber, which is practically identical to the F-16, except that it&nbsp;doesn’t have a pilot&nbsp;onboard. The plane is flown remotely. Earlier this year, Boeing, the manufacturer of the QF-16, delivered the first of what will be more than a hundred QF-16s to the Air Force. Initially, the planes will be used as flying targets for&nbsp;F-16 pilots to engage during training missions. But at least some military observers expect the QF-16 to end up being used in&nbsp;attack missions.
  • Until now, most executives in the airline industry have assumed that few people would be willing to book themselves and their families on unmanned flights—and they haven’t seriously considered turning commercial aircraft into drones or self-operating vehicles.&nbsp;By placing experienced fliers in the cockpit, the airlines signal to potential customers that their safety is of paramount importance—and not only because the crew members are skilled; their safety is at stake, too. In the language of game theory, this makes the aircraft’s commitment to safety more credible.&nbsp;Without a human flight crew, how could airlines send the same signal?
markfrankel18

The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/...science-one-agrees-color-dress

TOK perception color

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
sleggettisp liked it
  • sleggettisp on 01 Mar 15
     
    So what does this say about any eyewitness testimony that could convict them by placing a suspect at the scene of a crime based on the colour of what they are wearing? Why is that not being brought up in any of the discussions, I wonder?
Aidar Ulan

How the Color Red Influences Our Behavior - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...or-red-influences-our-behavior

TOK science perception emotion behvior

shared by Aidar Ulan on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • red regularly sways behavior.
  • Red is a powerful color
  • It means luck in China, where bridal wear is red, mourning in parts of Africa and sex in Amsterdam's red-light district.
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  • Charged with social and cultural meanings
  • Whereas humans are trichromats—meaning that we have three types of retinal cones sensitive to long (red), medium (green) and short (blue) wavelengths—cattle are dichromats: they possess only two kinds of cones.
markfrankel18

Psychiatry's Mind-Brain Problem - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...iatrys-mind-brain-problem.html

TOK psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Recently, a psychiatric study on first episodes of psychosis made front-page news. People seemed quite surprised by the finding: that lower doses of psychotropic drugs, when combined with individual psychotherapy, family education and a focus on social adaptation, resulted in decreased symptoms and increased wellness.
  • Recently, a psychiatric study on first episodes of psychosis made front-page news. People seemed quite surprised by the finding: that lower doses of psychotropic drugs, when combined with individual psychotherapy, family education and a focus on social adaptation, resulted in decreased symptoms and increased wellness. But the real surprise — and disappointment — was that this was considered so surprising.
  • But the real surprise — and disappointment — was that this was considered so surprising.
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  • Unfortunately, Dr. Kane’s study arrives alongside a troubling new reality. His project was made possible by funding from the National Institute of Mental Health before it implemented a controversial requirement: Since 2014, in order to receive the institute’s support, clinical researchers must explicitly focus on a target such as a biomarker or neural circuit. It is hard to imagine how Dr. Kane’s study (or one like it) would get funding today, since it does not do this. In fact, psychiatry at present has yet to adequately identify any specific biomarkers or circuits for its major illnesses.
  • Unfortunately, Dr. Kane’s study arrives alongside a troubling new reality. His project was made possible by funding from the National Institute of Mental Health before it implemented a controversial requirement: Since 2014, in order to receive the institute’s support, clinical researchers must explicitly focus on a target such as a biomarker or neural circuit. It is hard to imagine how Dr. Kane’s study (or one like it) would get funding today, since it does not do this. In fact, psychiatry at present has yet to adequately identify any specific biomarkers or circuits for its major illnesses.
Lawrence Hrubes

How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...-gay-marriage-study-went-wrong

SocialScience human sciences bias confirmation bias statistics ethics belief

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • ast December, Science published a provocative paper about political persuasion. Persuasion is famously difficult: study after study—not to mention much of world history—has shown that, when it comes to controversial subjects, people rarely change their minds, especially if those subjects are important to them. You may think that you’ve made a convincing argument about gun control, but your crabby uncle isn’t likely to switch sides in the debate. Beliefs are sticky, and hardly any approach, no matter how logical it may be, can change that. The Science study, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” seemed to offer a method that could work.
  • In the document, “Irregularities in LaCour (2014),” Broockman, along with a fellow graduate student, Joshua Kalla, and a professor at Yale, Peter Aronow, argued that the survey data in the study showed multiple statistical irregularities and was likely “not collected as described.”
  • If, in the end, the data do turn out to be fraudulent, does that say anything about social science as a whole? On some level, the case would be a statistical fluke. Despite what news headlines would have you believe, outright fraud is incredibly rare; almost no one commits it, and almost no one experiences it firsthand. As a result, innocence is presumed, and the mindset is one of trust.
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  • There’s another issue at play: the nature of belief. As I’ve written before, we are far quicker to believe things that mesh with our view of how life should be. Green is a firm supporter of gay marriage, and that may have made him especially pleased about the study. (Did it have a similar effect on liberally minded reviewers at Science? We know that studies&nbsp;confirming liberal thinking sometimes get a pass where ones challenging those ideas might get killed in review; the same effect may have made journalists more excited about covering the results.)
  • In short, confirmation bias—which is especially powerful when we think about social issues—may have made the study’s shakiness easier to overlook.
markfrankel18

Disputing Korean Narrative on 'Comfort Women,' a Professor Draws Fierce Backlash - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-comfort-women-park-yu-ha.html

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • women” in 2013, Park Yu-ha wrote that she felt “a bit fearful” of how it might be received. After all, she said, it challenged “the common knowledge” about the wartime sex slaves.But even she was not prepared for the severity of the backlash.In February, a South Korean court ordered Ms. Park’s book, “Comfort Women of the Empire,” redacted in 34 sections where it found her guilty of defaming former comfort women with false facts. Ms. Park is also on trial on the criminal charge of defaming the aging women, widely accepted here as an inviolable symbol of Korea’s suffering under colonial rule by Japan and its need for historical justice, and she is being sued for defamation by some of the women themselves.
markfrankel18

This Is Not Yellow | Big Think TV | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...this-is-not-yellow

TOK perception color

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Your retina does not have individual cells programmed to see yellow. Then how can it tell your brain that you're seeing the color? It turns out that it's easy to lie to the brain. Our friends at VSauce explain how.
Lawrence Hrubes

Daniel Tammet: Different ways of knowing | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...different_ways_of_knowing.html

TOK synesthesia perception senses maths numeracy language colour

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Sep 13
     
    "Daniel Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia -- meaning that his perception of words, numbers and colors are woven together into a new way of perceiving and understanding the world."
Lawrence Hrubes

Poetry on Film: Robert Pinsky's "Shirt" - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...etry-film-robert-pinskys-shirt

arts film poetry history

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • he poem “Shirt,” by Robert Pinsky, first appeared in the pages of&nbsp;The New Yorker in 1989. In it, the speaker merges descriptions of garment manufacturing with the social and personal histories of the workers who create the items he buys and wears.
  • Twenty-five years later, “Shirt” has been brought to the medium of film, as the first installment of The Nantucket Poetry Project, an initiative by the Harvard professor Elisa New and the Nantucket Project to disseminate poetry through video and other multimedia platforms. In this visualization of the poem, several people read the text—including Kate Burton, Nas, and Pinsky himself—while the camera captures the details of stitching and fabric, spinning and sewing, and nods to the poem’s account of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in Manhattan.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Danger Artist - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...danger-artist-chris-burden

arts ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 May 15 - No Cached
  • It’s not true that Chris Burden, the profoundly satirical Los Angeles artist who died last week, of cancer, at sixty-nine, had himself shot in the arm for the performance work “Shoot,” in 1971. Rather, he was shot by a friend whose claim to be a marksman proved an overstatement. The .22 bullet was supposed to only graze Burden. The shooter missed. So Burden told me, years ago. He shared with others that he had been frightened of having himself crucified on a Volkswagen, for “Trans-Fixed” (1974), but was pleasantly surprised by how painlessly the thin nails passed through his hands. He went to extremes, but he wasn’t nuts. When, nearly naked and holding his hands behind him, he wriggled across fifty feet of broken glass in “Through the Night Softly” (1973), the glass was the crumbled safety kind—not that that made for comfort. He said that he liked how the scattered bits, glittering on the asphalt of a parking lot, in the black-and-white film of the event, resemble a starry sky.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Startups Love Moleskines - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-startups-love-moleskines

technology imagination memory writing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Digital note-taking apps also leave their users only a finger-swipe away from e-mail or Candy Crush. An article on digital distraction in the June issue of The Harvard Business Review cites an estimate, by the Information Overload Research Group, that the problem is costing the U.S. economy nine hundred and ninety-seven billion dollars a year. “The digital world provides a lot of opportunity to waste a lot of time,” Allen said. A paper notebook, by contrast, is a walled garden, free from detours (except doodling), and requiring no learning curve. A growing body of research supports the idea that taking notes works better on paper than on laptops, in terms of comprehension, memorization, and other cognitive benefits.
Lawrence Hrubes

The My Lai Massacre - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...i-coverup

history war ColdWar

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Credit Illustration by Nicole Rifkin Early on March 16, 1968, a company of soldiers in the United States Army’s Americal Division were dropped in by helicopter for an assault against a hamlet known as My Lai 4, in the bitterly contested province of Quang Ngai, on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam.
Lawrence Hrubes

To Pi and Beyond - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...pi-prime-numbers-cybersecurity

math mathematics beauty technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Entertaining the idea of a peculiar long number such as pi puts me in mind of its cousins twice removed, prime numbers, which have so many strange properties. Prime numbers are those numbers, such as 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on, that can be cleanly divided only by one and themselves. Primes and pi suggest a benign infinity, a pleasing order—pi because of its endlessness and its relation to the circle, and primes because no matter how far you travel on the number line you will always encounter a prime, as Euclid proved in 300 B.C. Recently, Yitang Zhang solved a problem involving prime numbers called bounded gaps that had been open for more than a hundred years. Zhang proved that no matter how far you go on the number line, even to the range where the numbers would fill many books, there will, on an infinite number of occasions, be two prime numbers within seventy million places of each other. (Other mathematicians have reduced this gap to two hundred and forty six.) Before, it had not been known whether any such range applied to prime numbers, which seem to behave, especially as they get larger, as if they appear at random.
  • Number theory is a discipline done for no purpose. It is practiced by people who believe that numbers have properties that exemplify an orderliness and beauty in the universe. The story of numbers is a story of creation not directly contained in the Scriptures, but if a divinity didn’t create numbers and their properties, what accounts for them? The necessity of counting doesn’t entirely explain pi or primes. A breakthrough in number theory is called a discovery, not an invention. There isn’t yet any explanation for the properties of pi or for primes. There is only the sense of wonder that the world contains such extravagant mysteries so close at hand.
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