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markfrankel18

Angela Merkel: internet search engines are 'distorting perception' | World news | The G... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-are-distorting-our-perception

TOK technology perception filter bubble

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Angela Merkel has called on major internet platforms to divulge the secrets of their algorithms, arguing that their lack of transparency endangers debating culture. The German chancellor said internet users had a right to know how and on what basis the information they received via search engines was channelled to them. Speaking to a media conference in Munich, Merkel said: “I’m of the opinion that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’. “Algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they can shrink our expanse of information.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Google Employees Protest Secret Work on Censored Search Engine for China - The New York... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...est-search-censored-china.html

ethics technology information censorship

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company’s decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.
feliepdissenha

Robert Shiller: is economics a science? | Business | theguardian.com - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...omics-a-science-robert-shiller

economics business perception TOK

shared by feliepdissenha on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • focused on policy, rather than discovery of fundamentals
  • We judge economics by what it can produce
  • feliepdissenha on 02 Dec 14
     
    Economics is rather more like engineering than physics, more practical than spiritual.
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

Pawan Sinha: How brains learn to see | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...n_how_brains_learn_to_see.html

TOK perception vision senses neuroscience blindness brain learning

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Sep 13 - Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Sep 13
     
    "Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - Hardtalk, Medical Ethicist - Julian Savulescu - 1 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01lqqv5

TOK ethics science medicine

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Nov 13
     
    "From genetic engineering to bioscience, human beings are close to acquiring the ability not just to combat disease, but to enhance and perfect our species. But should we seek to do it, or should we shy away from a path that led to Nazi eugenics? Hardtalk speaks to the Australian born, Oxford based medical ethicist Julian Savulescu. Can we trust ourselves to be wise masters of our own biology?"
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - The greatest mistranslations ever - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-greatest-mistranslations-ever

TOK language translation history culture politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15
     
    "Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "
markfrankel18

BBC News - Why modern maps put everyone at the centre of the world - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-19908848

science maps bbc

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • As a curious race we have always liked to know where we are, but it is now almost impossible not to know - our phones, computers and sat navs keep us continually co-ordinated, and through them we are involuntarily tracked ourselves. Once the preserve and privilege of the rich and influential, maps and accurate wayfinding have suddenly come to feel like a birthright
  • But these days we are all really at the centre of our maps, which is both a useful and egocentric thing. A thousand years ago Jerusalem stood at the centre of the Christian world view, or if you lived in China it was Youzhou. But now it is us, a throbbing green dot on our handhelds. We no longer travel from A to B but from Me to B, and we spread out maps on the floor or on our laps in a car only with wistful nostalgia.
  • It is still too early to say whether a lessening in our spatial ability and perspective, and our ability to remember landmarks, will decrease that area in our hippocampus that serves as the engine room for such skills, but it is highly likely. An examination of the brains of cab drivers has shown a great expansion in that area due, it is thought, to the retention of many miles of street plans.
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

A Push for Diesel Leaves London Gasping Amid Record Pollution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...london-smog-air-pollution.html

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The current problem is, in part, an unintended consequence of previous efforts to aid the environment.The British government provided financial incentives to encourage a shift to diesel engines because laboratory tests suggested that would cut harmful emissions and combat climate change. Yet, it turned out that diesel cars emit on average five times as much emissions in real-world driving conditions as in the tests, according to a British Department for Transport study.
Lawrence Hrubes

Eight (No, Nine!) Problems With Big Data - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ne-problems-with-big-data.html

technology TOK data correlation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Is big data really all it’s cracked up to be? There is no doubt that big data is a valuable tool that has already had a critical impact in certain areas. For instance, almost every successful artificial intelligence computer program in the last 20 years, from Google’s search engine to the I.B.M. “Jeopardy!” champion Watson, has involved the substantial crunching of large bodies of data. But precisely because of its newfound popularity and growing use, we need to be levelheaded about what big data can — and can’t — do.The first thing to note is that although big data is very good at detecting correlations, especially subtle correlations that an analysis of smaller data sets might miss, it never tells us which correlations are meaningful.
markfrankel18

Teaching robots right from wrong -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...140509073929.htm

TOK robots ethics technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 May 14 - No Cached
  • In a project funded by the Office of Naval Research and coordinated under the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, scientists will explore the challenges of infusing autonomous robots with a sense for right, wrong, and the consequences of both. "Moral competence can be roughly thought about as the ability to learn, reason with, act upon, and talk about the laws and societal conventions on which humans tend to agree," says principal investigator Matthias Scheutz, professor of computer science at Tufts School of Engineering and director of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory (HRI Lab) at Tufts. "The question is whether machines -- or any other artificial system, for that matter -- can emulate and exercise these abilities." One scenario is a battlefield, he says. A robot medic responsible for helping wounded soldiers is ordered to transport urgently needed medication to a nearby field hospital. En route, it encounters a Marine with a fractured leg. Should the robot abort the mission to assist the injured? Will it? If the machine stops, a new set of questions arises. The robot assesses the soldier's physical state and determines that unless it applies traction, internal bleeding in the soldier's thigh could prove fatal. However, applying traction will cause intense pain. Is the robot morally permitted to cause the soldier pain, even if it's for the soldier's well-being?
Lawrence Hrubes

What is the role of memory in a digital age? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...education-32623794

memory technology brain

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 May 15 - No Cached
  • The digital age is also raising broader philosophical questions about memory. How much do we need to remember when it can be effortlessly recalled for us by a machine? If the use of search engines for retrieving facts is allowed at some point in the future, exams themselves might have to change.
Philip Drobis

BBC News - A Point Of View: What is history's role in society? - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-19844685

bbc news history view TOK

shared by Philip Drobis on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • ostering innovation and helping people to think analytically,
  • Called simply Bronze, it celebrates a metal so important it has its own age of history attached to it, and so responsive to the artist's skill that it breathes life into gods, humans, mythological creatures and animals with equal success.
  • It is remarkable to think that had Bronze been mounted say 15 years ago, the portrait of the past that it delivered would have been subtly different. History is very far from a done deal.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Historians are always rewriting the past. The focus on what is or is not important in history, is partly determined by the time they themselves live in and therefore the questions that they ask.
  • practise of micro-history for example - the way you could construct pictures of forgotten communities or individual lives from state, parish or court records proved breath-taking.
  • man claiming to be him walks back into both. But is he really Martin Guerre? With no images or mirrors in such places (how does that affect memory, and the construction of identity?) no-one can be sure. Except, surely, his wife?
  • he study of history, English, philosophy or art doesn't really help anyone get a job and does not contribute to the economy to the same degree that science or engineering or business studies obviously do. Well, let's run a truck though that fast shall we? The humanities, alongside filling one in on human history, teach people how to think analytically while at the same time noting and appreciating innovation and creativity. Not a bad set of skills for most jobs wouldn't you say? As for the economy - what about the billion pound industries of publishing, art, television, theatre, film - all of which draw on our love of as well as our apparently insatiable appetite for stories, be they history or fiction?
  • No-one would dare to mess with science in the way they mess with history.
  • but larger topics such as emotions or physical pain - their role and changing meanings within history - are very much up for grabs with big studie
  • Philip Drobis on 09 Mar 15
     
    -ties in with what we have been discussing
Diana Shafran

Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...gative-emotions-key-well-being

TOK emotion psychology sadness happiness

shared by Diana Shafran on 28 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Diana Shafran on 28 Feb 15
     
    Feeling sad, mad, critical or otherwise awful? Surprise: negative emotions are essential for mental health. In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment. "Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being," says psychologist Jonathan M. Adler of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
markfrankel18

BBC News - How random is random on your music player? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...technology-31302312

TOK math perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • "Our brain is an excellent pattern-matching device," said Babar Zafar, a lead developer at Spotify, in an interview for Tech Tent on the BBC World Service. "It will find patterns where there aren't any."
  • "The problem is that, to humans, truly random does not feel random," said Mattias Johansson, a Spotify software engineer, in a response on the question-and-answer site Quora.
Lawrence Hrubes

What If We Lost the Sky? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-if-we-lost-the-sky

science human sciences emotion beauty imagination global warming

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • What is the sky worth? This sounds like a philosophical question, but it might become a more concrete one. A report released last week by the National Research Council called for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. Such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. If albedo modification were actually implemented, Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers, told Joel Achenbach at The Washington Post: “You’d get whiter skies. People wouldn’t have blue skies anymore.” And, he added, “astronomers wouldn’t be happy, because you’d have a cloud up there permanently. It’d be hard to see the Milky Way anymore.”
  • Losing the night sky would have big consequences, said Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent work looks at the health effects of the emotion of awe. In a study published in January in the journal Emotion, he and his team found that people who experienced a great deal of awe had lower levels of a marker of inflammation that has been linked to physical and mental ailments. One major source of awe is the natural world. “When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger,” said Dr. Keltner, “there’s clearly a neurophysiological basis for that.” And, he added, looking up at a starry sky provides “almost a prototypical awe experience,” an opportunity to feel “that you are small and modest and part of something vast.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Problems Too Disgusting to Solve - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ater-problems-disgusting-solve

science psychology emotion human sciences perception reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
  • In the first series of studies, the group asked adults in five cities about their backgrounds, their political and personal views, and, most important, their view on the concept of “recycled water.” On average, everyone was uncomfortable with the idea—even when they were told that treated, recycled water is actually safer to drink than unfiltered tap water. That discomfort, Rozin found, was all about disgust. Twenty-six per cent of participants were so disgusted by the idea of toilet-to-tap that they even agreed with the statement, “It is impossible for recycled water to be treated to a high enough quality that I would want to use it.” They didn’t care what the safety data said. Their guts told them that the water would never be drinkable. It’s a phenomenon known as contagion, or, as Rozin describes it, “once in contact, always in contact.” By touching something we find disgusting, a previously neutral or even well-liked item can acquire—permanently—its properties of grossness.
  • eelings of disgust are often immune to rationality. And with good reason: evolutionarily, disgust is an incredibly adaptive, life-saving reaction. We find certain things instinctively gross because they really can harm us. Human secretions pass on disease. Noxious odors signal that your surroundings may be unsafe. If something feels slimy and sludgy, it’s likely a moisture-rich environment where pathogens may proliferate. Disgust is powerful, in short, because it often signals something important. It’s easy, though, to be disgusted by things that aren’t actually dangerous. In a prior study, Rozin found that people were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a “fully sterilized” cockroach had been dipped. Intellectually, they knew that the drink was safe, but they couldn’t get over the hump of disgust. In another experiment, students wouldn’t eat chocolate that had been molded to look like poop: they knew that it was safe—tasty, even—but its appearance was too much to handle. Their response makes no logical sense. When it comes to recycled water, for instance, Rozin points out that, on some level, all water comes from sewage: “Rain is water that used to be in someone’s toilet, and nobody seems to mind.” The problem, he says, has to do with making the hidden visible. “If it’s obvious—take shit water, put it through a filter—then people are upset.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Disgust has deep psychological roots, emerging early in a child’s development. Infants and young toddlers don’t feel grossed out by anything—diapers, Rozin observes, are there in part to stop a baby “from eating her shit.” In the young mind, curiosity and exploration often overpower any competing instincts. But, at around four years old, there seems to be a profound shift. Suddenly, children won’t touch things that they find appalling. Some substances, especially human excretions of any sort, are seen as gross and untouchable all over the world; others are culturally determined. But, whether universal or culturally-specific, the disgust reactions that we acquire as children stay with us throughout our lives. If anything, they grow stronger—and more consequential—with age.
Lawrence Hrubes

Solving an Unsolvable Math Problem - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...pursuit-beauty

math maths mathematics beauty intuition

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • From Amie I first heard about Yitang Zhang, a solitary, part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who received several prizes, including a MacArthur award in September, for solving a problem that had been open for more than a hundred and fifty years. The problem that Zhang chose, in 2010, is from number theory, a branch of pure mathematics. Pure mathematics, as opposed to applied mathematics, is done with no practical purposes in mind. It is as close to art and philosophy as it is to engineering. “My result is useless for industry,” Zhang said. The British mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940 that mathematics is, of “all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote.” Bertrand Russell called it a refuge from “the dreary exile of the actual world.” Hardy believed emphatically in the precise aesthetics of math. A mathematical proof, such as Zhang produced, “should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation,” he wrote, “not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.” Edward Frenkel, a math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says Zhang’s proof has “a renaissance beauty,” meaning that though it is deeply complex, its outlines are easily apprehended. The pursuit of beauty in pure mathematics is a tenet. Last year, neuroscientists in Great Britain discovered that the same part of the brain that is activated by art and music was activated in the brains of mathematicians when they looked at math they regarded as beautiful.
markfrankel18

We are more rational than those who nudge us - Steven Poole - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...tional-than-those-who-nudge-us

TOK economics bias rational reason Kahneman

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Sep 14 - Cached
  • We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?
  • A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.
  • Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The thorny question is whether these widespread departures from the economic definition of ‘rationality’ should be taken to show that we are irrational, or whether they merely show that the economic definition of rationality is defective.
  • There has been some controversy over the correct statistical interpretations of some studies, and several experiments that ostensibly demonstrate ‘priming’ effects, in particular, have notoriously proven difficult to replicate. But more fundamentally, the extent to which such findings can show that we are acting irrationally often depends on what we agree should count as ‘rational’ in the first place.
  • During the development of game theory and decision theory in the mid-20th century, a ‘rational’ person in economic terms became defined as a lone individual whose decisions were calculated to maximise self-interest, and whose preferences were (logically or mathematically) consistent in combination and over time. It turns out that people are not in fact ‘rational’ in this homo economicus way,
  • if we want to understand others, we can always ask what is making their behaviour ‘rational’ from their point of view. If, on the other hand, we just assume they are irrational, no further conversation can take place.
  • And so there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable. The dissenting critiques of the cognitive-bias literature argue that people are not, in fact, as individually irrational as the present cultural climate assumes. And proponents of debiasing argue that we can each become more rational with practice. But even if we each acted as irrationally as often as the most pessimistic picture implies, that would be no cause to flatten democratic deliberation into the weighted engineering of consumer choices, as nudge politics seeks to do. On the contrary, public reason is our best hope for survival.
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