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markfrankel18

When are you dead? - 2011 SPRING - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University Sch... - 0 views

  • A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery. Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.
markfrankel18

Why we can 'see' the house that looks like Hitler | Science | The Observer - 0 views

  • had inadvertently rediscovered the remarkable human talent for perceiving meaning where there is none. Known as apophenia or pareidolia, it is something we all experience to some degree. We see faces in the clouds and animals in rock formations. We mishear our name being called in crowds and think our mobile phones are vibrating when it turns out to be nothing but the normal sensations of our own movement.
  • In many ways, this tendency is the basic ingredient of hallucination and it is present to a much stronger degree in people who have frank and striking hallucinations, most notably as part of the range of experiences that can accompany a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
  • Less clinically, the Swiss neuroscientist Peter Brugger has discovered that this tendency is raised in people who have greater numbers of supernatural beliefs and experiences but aren't unwell in any sense of the word. With increased apophenia, perhaps, the world just seems more imbued with meaning.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Face blindness: Seeing but not seeing - 0 views

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    "Imagine that suddenly you cannot recognise your mother, your partner, your child. You can see them but your brain cannot process the information - you don't know whether they are smiling, or understand their emotions."
Lawrence Hrubes

Raising a Moral Child - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited. That leaves a lot of room for nurture, and the evidence on how parents raise kind and compassionate children flies in the face of what many of even the most well-intentioned parents do in praising good behavior, responding to bad behavior, and communicating their values.
markfrankel18

Dehumanization and terrorism | Practical Ethics - 0 views

  • Most people would agree that terrorism is no good. The word itself is rich with moralized connotations. It is true that some have argued that terrorism might sometimes be justified, but in popular discourse, terrorism is typically deemed obviously horrible. What are the consequences of branding some action an act of terrorism, or of branding some group a terrorist group? Note, in connection with this question, the ratcheting up of rhetoric surrounding ‘cyberterrorism,’ with many government officials now listing it as a major ongoing threat (e.g., here and here). A recent study by Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely of the Michigan Institute of Technology found that describing a group of people as ‘terrorist’ had far-reaching results. In general, participants in their study were less willing to “understand the group’s grievances,” less willing to “negotiate with the group.” Further, participants in their study found violence directed towards a group described as terrorist more permissible, and perceived such a group as less rational when compared to a group not described as terrorist.
  • So it is important to be aware of the ways labels such as terrorist subtly influence the way we perceive other groups of people, and also of the way we perceive people we implicitly associate with such groups.
markfrankel18

The Limits of Friendship - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • The Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred and fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends—the people, say, you’d invite to a large party.
  • On an even deeper level, there may be a physiological aspect of friendship that virtual connections can never replace. This wouldn’t surprise Dunbar, who discovered his number when he was studying the social bonding that occurs among primates through grooming. Over the past few years, Dunbar and his colleagues have been looking at the importance of touch in sparking the sort of neurological and physiological responses that, in turn, lead to bonding and friendship. “We underestimate how important touch is in the social world,” he said.
  • So what happens if you’re raised from a young age to see virtual interactions as akin to physical ones? “This is the big imponderable,” Dunbar said. “We haven’t yet seen an entire generation that’s grown up with things like Facebook go through adulthood yet.”
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  • One concern, though, is that some social skills may not develop as effectively when so many interactions exist online. We learn how we are and aren’t supposed to act by observing others and then having opportunities to act out our observations ourselves. We aren’t born with full social awareness, and Dunbar fears that too much virtual interaction may subvert that education. “In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks sand in your face, you can’t get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, compromise,” he said. “On the internet, you can pull the plug and walk away. There’s no forcing mechanism that makes us have to learn.”
markfrankel18

Why Smart People Are Stupid - The New Yorker - 1 views

  • When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions.
  • Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves.
Lawrence Hrubes

The schools that had cemeteries instead of playgrounds - BBC News - 0 views

  • Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has released its findings into more than a century of abuse in Indian Residential Schools. Between the 1880s and 1990s 150,000 aboriginal children were sent to institutions where they were stripped of their language and culture. Many faced emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
  • He said that seven generations of children were "stripped of the love of their families, their self-respect and … identity" over the course of a century.
  • He said there had been "discrimination, deprivation and all manner of physical, sexual, emotional and mental abuse".
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  • Then, with two words, he issued his damning verdict: "Cultural genocide."
Lawrence Hrubes

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

  • Truly new sensory experiences are rare. Perhaps for that reason, a whole genre of YouTube videos is dedicated to them. The videos of babies tasting lemons are merely heartwarming. Others—the ones showing deaf people activating their cochlear implants, for example, or blind people, after surgery, 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.)
markfrankel18

What Emotions Are (and Aren't) - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Analogously, emotion words like “anger,” “happiness” and “fear” each name a population of diverse biological states that vary depending on the context. When you’re angry with your co-worker, sometimes your heart rate will increase, other times it will decrease and still other times it will stay the same. You might scowl, or you might smile as you plot your revenge. You might shout or be silent. Variation is the norm.
  • The ease with which we experience emotions, and the effortlessness with which we see emotions in others, doesn’t mean that each emotion has a distinct pattern in the face, body or brain. Instead of asking where emotions are or what bodily patterns define them, we would do better to abandon such essentialism and ask the more revealing question, “How does the brain construct these incredible experiences?”
markfrankel18

The Morality of Robotic War - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Humans must ultimately bear moral responsibility and face the horror of war squarely — not outsource it to machines. And people must be able to remain in control of a weapon and manage its behavior. We cannot have weapons that are intrinsically uncontrollable or wildly unpredictable. After you fire a bullet, you can’t take it back, but its trajectory is predictable. The key is to ensure that future weapons that behave like self-steering bullets do not run amok.
Lawrence Hrubes

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

  • 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 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 & 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 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“ 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.
markfrankel18

Faking Cultural Literacy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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

We Know How You Feel - 0 views

  • Today, machines seem to get better every day at digesting vast gulps of information—and they remain as emotionally inert as ever. But since the nineteen-nineties a small number of researchers have been working to give computers the capacity to read our feelings and react, in ways that have come to seem startlingly human. Experts on the voice have trained computers to identify deep patterns in vocal pitch, rhythm, and intensity; their software can scan a conversation between a woman and a child and determine if the woman is a mother, whether she is looking the child in the eye, whether she is angry or frustrated or joyful. Other machines can measure sentiment by assessing the arrangement of our words, or by reading our gestures. Still others can do so from facial expressions. Our faces are organs of emotional communication; by some estimates, we transmit more data with our expressions than with what we say, and a few pioneers dedicated to decoding this information have made tremendous progress. Perhaps the most successful is an Egyptian scientist living near Boston, Rana el Kaliouby. Her company, Affectiva, formed in 2009, has been ranked by the business press as one of the country’s fastest-growing startups, and Kaliouby, thirty-six, has been called a “rock star.” There is good money in emotionally responsive machines, it turns out. For Kaliouby, this is no surprise: soon, she is certain, they will be ubiquitous.
adamdrazsky

The Assassination of Boris Nemtsov - The New Yorker - 3 views

  • Then why was he killed? Without knowing who gave the orders, it’s possible to understand that the current political environment allowed for this to happen. Over the past year, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, Russia has seen the rise of a new, much coarser and more doctrinaire political language. During the first decade of Putin’s rule, the Kremlin depicted its opponents as freaks or idiots, but now they are portrayed as outright enemies of their country. In a triumphant address to parliament last March, as Russia was formalizing its takeover of Crimea, Putin warned of “a fifth column,” a “disparate bunch of national traitors” determined to sow discord inside the country. Its members were obvious, if at first unmentioned: people like Navalny, an anti-corruption activist who had become the most popular leader in the country’s fractured opposition; Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, a long-beleaguered radio station that is one of the last homes for critical and liberal voices; and of course Nemtsov, a recognizable face​from all his years in politics, and a favorite opponent of pro-Kremlin activists and propagandists.
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    How can we judge historical motives?
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    Assassination tactic in Russian politics linked to your Nicholas II presentation (and what we have just done re Alexander II and III...)...unfortunately some things have yet to change :-(
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - France holds back the anti-smacking tide - 1 views

  • Turn on the radio in France in 1951 and you might have heard contributors extol the benefits of parents smacking their children. "I don't like slapping the face," one commentator says. "Slapping can harm the ears and the eyes, especially if it's violent. But everybody knows that smacking the bottom is excellent for the circulation of the blood." At the time, few would have seen that advice as abusive. It was another three decades before Sweden became the first European country to make smacking children illegal. More than 20 others have followed suit, but France has held out against the changing tide of parenting, with staunch resolve. In the wake of the European ruling this week, articles have appeared in the French media with titles such as "Smacking: A French Passion", and contributors have lined up on online forums to advocate the benefits of "la fessee", as it's known here. "We were really surprised by the response," says Christine Hernandez, a writer for France's most popular parenting magazine, Parents. "Many of our readers said that smacking is part of educating children. It's astonishing that parents still think that it's a good way to teach children how to behave. They think they have to impose their authority on children from time to time - it's part of French traditional upbringing."
Lawrence Hrubes

Teaching Doubt - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • “Non-overlapping magisteria” has a nice ring to it. The problem is that there are many religious claims that not only “overlap” with empirical data but are incompatible with it. As a scientist who also spends a fair amount of time in the public arena, if I am asked if our understanding of the Big Bang conflicts with the idea of a six-thousand-year-old universe, I face a choice: I can betray my scientific values, or encourage that person to doubt his or her own beliefs. More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.
  • Doubt about one’s most cherished beliefs is, of course, central to science: the physicist Richard Feynman stressed that the easiest person to fool is oneself. But doubt is also important to non-scientists. It’s good to be skeptical, especially about ideas you learn from perceived authority figures. Recent studies even suggest that being taught to doubt at a young age could make people better lifelong learners. That, in turn, means that doubters—people who base their views on evidence, rather than faith—are likely to be better citizens.
  • Science class isn’t the only place where students can learn to be skeptical. A provocative novel that presents a completely foreign world view, or a history lesson exploring the vastly different mores of the past, can push you to skeptically reassess your inherited view of the universe. But science is a place where such confrontation is explicit and accessible. It didn’t take more than a simple experiment for Galileo to overturn the wisdom of Aristotle. Informed doubt is the very essence of science.
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  • Some teachers shy away from confronting religious beliefs because they worry that planting the seeds of doubt will cause some students to question or abandon their own faith or the faith of their parents. But is that really such a bad thing? It offers some young people the chance to escape the guilt imposed upon them simply for questioning what they’re told. Last year, I received an e-mail from a twenty-seven-year-old man who is now studying in the United States after growing up in Saudi Arabia. His father was executed by family members after converting to Christianity. He says that it’s learning about science that has finally liberated him from the spectre of religious fundamentalism.
markfrankel18

A picture-perfect nose job: how the selfie is boosting demand for plastic surgery - Quartz - 0 views

  • An annual study released earlier this year by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery showed that one in three surveyed doctors have seen an increase in requests for surgery due to patients’ dissatisfaction with their image on social media.
  • Doctors say patients come to them with selfies they took to show where they think they need improvement. Some surgeons point out that with the selfie’s characteristically distorted angle, it does not provide an accurate representation of one’s face.
markfrankel18

A quick history of why Asians wear surgical masks in public - Quartz - 0 views

  • The bottom line is that in East Asia, the predilection toward using face-coverings to prevent exposure to bad air is something that predates the germ theory of disease, and extends into the very foundations of East Asian culture. In recent years, however, mask-wearing has become rooted in new and increasingly postmodern rationales.
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