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markfrankel18

With Naming Rights, 'Perpetuity' Doesn't Always Mean Forever - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...oesnt-always-mean-forever.html

TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • “I asked him, How long is ‘in perpetuity’?”“For you, 50 years,” Mr. de Montebello, the museum director, replied.
  • “Perpetuity is usually a matter of negotiation now,” said William D. Zabel, a lawyer representing the Fisher family, who had threatened to sue on their behalf 12 years ago when Lincoln Center considered changing the name at that time without its permission.“It’s like in ‘Alice in Wonderland’: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,’ ” he said.
Lawrence Hrubes

What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-change-whats-in-a-name.html

TOK language science climate skepticism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • People who reject the findings of climate science are dismissed as “deniers” and “disinformers.” Those who accept the science are attacked as “alarmists” or “warmistas. ” The latter term, evoking the Sandinista revolutionaries of Nicaragua, is perhaps meant to suggest that the science is part of some socialist plot.
  • The petition asks the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, “skeptic,” and call them “climate deniers” instead. By Degrees A column by Justin Gillis about our changing climate. 3.6 Degrees of Uncertainty DEC 15 A Tricky Transition From Fossil Fuel NOV 10 Shining Star Power on a Crucial Subject SEP 22 In the Ocean, Clues to Change AUG 11 Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils JUL 7 See More » Climate scientists are among the most vocal critics of using the term “climate skeptic” to describe people who flatly reject their findings. They point out that skepticism is the very foundation of the scientific method. The modern consensus about the risks of climate change, they say, is based on evidence that has piled up over the course of decades and has been subjected to critical scrutiny every step of the way.
  • In other words, the climate scientists see themselves as the true skeptics, having arrived at a durable consensus about emissions simply because the evidence of risk has become overwhelming. And in this view, people who reject the evidence are phony skeptics, arguing their case by cherry-picking studies, manipulating data, and refusing to weigh the evidence as a whole.The petition asking the media to drop the “climate skeptic” label began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, he said, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”
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.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...462114

language human sciences SocialScience psychology linguistics bilingualism reproducibility replicability experiment brain neuroscience bias confirmation bias publication bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • It’s an intuitive claim, but also a profound one. It asserts that the benefits of bilingualism extend well beyond the realm of language, and into skills that we use in every aspect of our lives. This view is now widespread, heralded by a large community of scientists, promoted in books and magazines, and pushed by advocacy organizations.
  • But a growing number of psychologists say that this mountain of evidence is actually a house of cards, built upon flimsy foundations.
  • Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, was one of them. In two large studies, involving 360 and 504 children respectively, he found no evidence that Basque kids, raised on Basque and Spanish at home and at school, had better mental control than monolingual Spanish children.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Similar controversies have popped up throughout psychology, fueling talk of a “reproducibility crisis” in which scientists struggle to duplicate classic textbook results. In many of these cases, classic psychological phenomena that seem to be backed by years of supportive evidence, suddenly become fleeting and phantasmal. The causes are manifold. Journals are more likely to accept positive, attention-grabbing papers than negative, contradictory ones, which pushes scientists towards running small studies or tweaking experiments on the fly—practices that lead to flashy, publishable discoveries that may not actually be true.
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.
Lawrence Hrubes

Angela Duckworth on Passion, Grit and Success - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...passion-grit-success.html

education success character human sciences SocialScience psychology children

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • So why is grit so important?My lab has found that this measure beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores, physical fitness and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations.
  • How can parents foster grit in their children?The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive. By this I don’t mean material things; I mean emotional support.
Lawrence Hrubes

'Trust Your Gut' Might Actually Be Profitable Advice on Wall Street, Study Says - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-wall-street-study-says.html

intuition economics money

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • What attributes make for a successful trader? Is it comprehensive knowledge of an industry? The ability to read the markets? Luck?Or might it be something subtler and seemingly unrelated — namely, an awareness of one’s own heartbeat?
  • Mr. Coates set out to try to identify whether “gut feelings” were merely the stuff of myth, or something real and measurable.
  • And among the traders, more accurate heartbeat awareness was correlated with profitability. That is, the better a trader was at sensing his own heart rate, the more successful he was at high-frequency trading. Advertisement Continue reading the main story What is more, the longer an employee of the hedge fund had been working as a trader, the more accurate he was at counting his heart rate.
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.
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  • “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

Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ects-consciousness-brains.html

science animals biology consciousness ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots?Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end?Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness.
Lawrence Hrubes

A New Form of Stem-Cell Engineering Raises Ethical Questions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-synthetic-embryos-sheefs.html

ethics science biology life research

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • As biological research races forward, ethical quandaries are piling up. In a report published Tuesday in the journal eLife, researchers at Harvard Medical School said it was time to ponder a startling new prospect: synthetic embryos.In recent years, scientists have moved beyond in vitro fertilization. They are starting to assemble stem cells that can organize themselves into embryolike structures.Soon, experts predict, they will learn how to engineer these cells into new kinds of tissues and organs. Eventually, they may take on features of a mature human being.
Lawrence Hrubes

Corrupting the Chinese Language - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ting-the-chinese-language.html

language ethics propaganda politics communism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 May 15 - No Cached
  • The default lingo of high party officials, even on the most solemn occasions, includes banal aphorisms like, “to be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.” Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of “social harmony” and the “Chinese spirit.” In addition to promoting the “China Dream” and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”The government’s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: “Stop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.” Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, “dyed with martyr's blood,” and many grow up singing the young pioneers’ songs: “Always prepared, to perform noble feats, to wipe out our enemy.”
  • Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a “metaphysicist.”Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus, over the years, it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s fair to assume these two farmers didn’t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon. Other phrases like “idealist” and “petit bourgeois sentimentalist” have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.
Lawrence Hrubes

How the Brain Stores Trivial Memories, Just in Case - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ial-memories-just-in-case.html

TOK memory brain emotion

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The surge of emotion that makes memories of embarrassment, triumph and disappointment so vivid can also reach back in time, strengthening recall of seemingly mundane things that happened just beforehand and that, in retrospect, are relevant, a new study has found.The report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that the television detective’s standard query — “Do you remember any unusual behavior in the days before the murder?” — is based on solid brain science, at least in some circumstances.The findings fit into the predominant theory of memory: that it is an adaptive process, continually updating itself according to what knowledge may be important in the future.The new study suggests that human memory has, in effect, a just-in-case file, keeping seemingly trivial sights, sounds and observations in cold storage for a time in case they become useful later on.
Lawrence Hrubes

Female Scientists Turn to Data to Fight Lack of Representation on Panels - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...as-scientific-conferences.html

science bias gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Among the defenders of the project, however, is Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies how people make decisions. In 2001, she started Anne’s List, a directory of 170 women in computational neuroscience, intended to silence claims that no good female scientists existed in that field.Her research suggests that someone you recently had lunch with or someone from your hometown might spring to mind when selecting a speaker, even though neither has anything to do with science.“It doesn’t feel like irrelevant information influences our judgment, but it does,” Dr. Churchland said.
Lawrence Hrubes

What's Behind Big Science Frauds? - NYTimes.com - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...behind-big-science-frauds.html

science ethics lies

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 May 15 - No Cached
  • Remember that study showing vaccines were linked to autism? The time scientists claimed to have cloned human embryonic stem cells? Or that simple, easy way that was supposed to revolutionize the creation of such stem cells?Those were all frauds published in the world’s top scientific journals — The Lancet, Science and Nature. The vaccine scare has been associated with a surge in cases of measles, some of them deadly.Every day, on average, a scientific paper is retracted because of misconduct. Two percent of scientists admit to tinkering with their data in some kind of improper way. That number might appear small, but remember: Researchers publish some 2 million articles a year, often with taxpayer funding. In each of the last few years, the Office of Research Integrity, part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, has sanctioned a dozen or so scientists for misconduct ranging from plagiarism to fabrication of results.
markfrankel18

Rich countries and the minorities they discriminate against, mapped - Quartz - 1 views

qz.com/...ey-discriminate-against-mapped

TOK bias economics minorities psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • So what do these findings really mean? Well there are a few different ways of thinking about the economics of discrimination in the workplace. One, known as taste-based discrimination, simply suggests that some employers have a preference against hiring minorities, even if they’re just as productive as other workers. Another, implicit discrimination, is thought to reflect attitudes that the people making discriminatory decisions they are themselves unaware of. Finally, there’s the notion of statistical discrimination, in which the person making the decision is relying not on the characteristics—for example the job skills—of the person in question, but rather some other notion of the “the average characteristics of the group” to which that person belongs. But really those are only elaborate ways of dressing up the obvious: discrimination is discrimination.
markfrankel18

What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...ember-life-before-the-internet

TOK technology internet

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Aug 14 - No Cached
sleggettisp liked it
  • Harris takes a different path from those that have come before. Instead of a broad investigation into the effects on constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the “millennial” demographic coveted by advertisers and targeted by new media outlets.
  • It was neither better nor worse than the world we live in today. Like technology, it just was.
  • That means being able to notice things like the reduction of interactions to numbers, and how that translates into quantifications of human worth. “I think it has to do with this notion of online accountability. That is, noticing that you actually count seems to be related to a sense of self worth,” he says over the phone from Toronto, where he is based. “So it’s like if a tweet gets retweeted a couple of hundred times, that must mean that my thoughts are worthy. If my Facebook photo is ‘liked,’ that must mean I am good looking. One of the things that concerns me about a media diet that is overly online, is that we lose the ability to decide for ourselves what we think about who we are.” +
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  • Instead of wondering what should I do, we wonder what did I miss.
markfrankel18

The case for considering robots people - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...-for-considering-robots-people

TOK science law personhood classification technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • “If we are dealing with robots like they are real people, the law should recognize that those interactions are like our interactions with real people,” Weaver writes. “In some cases, that will require recognizing that the robots are insurable entities like real people or corporations and that a robot’s liability is self-contained.” + Here’s the problem: If we don’t define robots as entities with certain legal rights and obligations, we will have a very difficult time using them effectively. And the tool that we have for assigning those things is legal personhood.
markfrankel18

The cold, hard truth about the ice bucket challenge - Quartz - 2 views

qz.com/...about-the-ice-bucket-challenge

TOK ethics charity

shared by markfrankel18 on 15 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • People who had previously purchased a green product were significantly more likely to both lie and steal than those who had purchased the conventional product. Their demonstration of ethical behavior subconsciously gave them license to act unethically when the chance arose. + Amazingly, even just saying that you’d do something good can cause the moral self-licensing effect. In another study, half the participants were asked to imagine helping a foreign student who had asked for assistance in understanding a lecture. They subsequently gave significantly less to charity when given the chance to do so than the other half of the participants, who had not been asked to imagine helping another student.
markfrankel18

The reason every book about Africa has the same cover-and it's not pretty - Quartz - 3 views

qz.com/...-same-cover-and-its-not-pretty

TOK Africa arts orientalism history

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both. + “In short,” the post said, “the covers of most novels ‘about Africa’ seem to have been designed by someone whose principal idea of the continent comes from The Lion King.”
Lawrence Hrubes

How Children Learn To Read - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...how-children-learn-read

TOK education language writing science neuroscience brain causation correlation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history. We know that it’s not just about raw intelligence, nor is it wholly about repetition and dogged persistence. We also know that there are some conditions that, effort aside, can hold a child back. Socioeconomic status, for instance, has been reliably linked to reading achievement. And, regardless of background, children with lower general verbal ability and those who have difficulty with phonetic processing seem to struggle. But what underlies those differences? How do we learn to translate abstract symbols into meaningful sounds in the first place, and why are some children better at it than others?
  • When Hoeft took into account all of the explanatory factors that had been linked to reading difficulty in the past—genetic risk, environmental factors, pre-literate language ability, and over-all cognitive capacity—she found that only one thing consistently predicted how well a child would learn to read. That was the growth of white matter in one specific area of the brain, the left temporoparietal region. The amount of white matter that a child arrived with in kindergarten didn’t make a difference. But the change in volume between kindergarten and third grade did.
  • She likens it to the Dr. Seuss story of Horton and the egg. Horton sits on an egg that isn’t his own, and, because of his dedication, the creature that eventually hatches looks half like his mother, and half like the elephant. In this particular case, Hoeft and her colleagues can’t yet separate cause and effect: Were certain children predisposed to develop strong white-matter pathways that then helped them to learn to read, or was superior instruction and a rich environment prompting the building of those pathways?
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