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markfrankel18

Why the One Appealing Part of Creationism Is Wrong : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...t-of-creationism-is-wrong.html

TOK science creationism prediction

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • In the first place, science doesn’t involve merely telling stories about history. If it did, scientific explanations might not have any claim to a higher level of veracity than religious stories. The stories that science does tell have empirical consequences, and make physical predictions that can be tested. In this sense, all science is historical science. We make observations about past events, based on everything from data gathered in the laboratory yesterday to remnants of phenomena, like meteor impacts or stellar explosions, which may have happened billions of years ago. We then use them to make predictions about the future, about experiments or observations that have not yet taken place. To quibble about how long ago the original data was generated is to miss the point
markfrankel18

In Defense of Psychology : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-conceptually-messy-psychology

ToK psychology Human Sciences

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 27 Aug 13
     
    "There's a natural back and forth: we think about things a particular way, which motivates experiments, which in turn provide data, which leads us to refine and revise the way we conceptualize phenomena and theoretical entities. This dance between theory and experimentation is common to all science. In the case of psychology, it is a particularly young field. It's early days for the empirical study of many core psychological phenomena, including happiness."
markfrankel18

On the Face of It: How We Vote : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-the-psychology-of-voting.html

ToK psychology human sciences voting

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - Cached
  • In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.
  • Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.
markfrankel18

And the Word of the Year Is... Selfie! : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...selfie-word-of-the-year.html

ToK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Hold on to your monocles, friends—the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is “selfie.” It’s an informal noun (plural: selfies) defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” It was first used in 2002, in an Australian online forum (compare the Australian diminutives “barbie” for barbecue and “firie” for firefighter), and it first appeared as a hashtag, #selfie, on Flickr, in 2004.
  • The word “selfie” is not yet in the O.E.D., but it is currently being considered for future inclusion; whether the word makes it into the history books is truly for the teens to decide. As Ben Zimmer wrote at Language Log, “Youth slang is the obvious source for much of our lexical innovation, like it or not.” And despite its cloying tone, that Oxford Dictionaries blog post from August does allude to the increasingly important distinction between “acronym“ and “initialism”—either of which may describe the expression “LOL,” depending if you pronounce it “lawl” or “ell-oh-ell.” The kids are going to be all right. Not “alright.” But all right.
markfrankel18

Elizabeth Loftus: The fiction of memory | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...tus_the_fiction_of_memory.html

memory TOK psychology consciousness

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 23 Sep 13
     
    "Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics, and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider. Memory-manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus explains how our memories might not be what they seem -- and how implanted memories can have real-life repercussions."
Michael Peters

Increasing Number Of Men Pressured To Accept Realistic Standards Of Female Beauty | The... - 0 views

www.theonion.com/...ressured-to-accept-reali,35685

digital citizenship body image gender beauty photoshop

shared by Michael Peters on 02 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Michael Peters on 02 Apr 14
     
    Satire, but totally on-point.
markfrankel18

Anne Curzan: What makes a word "real"? | Talk Video | TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/..._curzan_what_makes_a_word_real

TOK language slang

shared by markfrankel18 on 22 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • One could argue that slang words like ‘hangry,’ ‘defriend’ and ‘adorkable’ fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language, even if they don't appear in the dictionary. After all, who actually decides which words make it into those pages? Language historian Anne Curzan gives a charming look at the humans behind dictionaries, and the choices they make.
markfrankel18

Iggy Azalea and Realness in Hip-Hop - 4 views

www.newyorker.com/...realest

TOK arts authenticity realness

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • realness in hip-hop has a slippery definition, related to the everyday sense of the word but not synonymous with it. 
  • Artists of all kinds feel obliged to establish authenticity. Bob Dylan was a refugee from middle-class Minnesota, but his gnomic responses to interview questions allowed him to brand himself as a rambling countercultural troubadour. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s reputation as a formerly homeless autodidact helped endear him to gallerists who prized edginess. But the problem of authenticity was particularly acute in early hip-hop, which had a dual mandate—fictional in some ways, journalistic in others. “Rap is CNN for black people,” Chuck D is often alleged to have said. What he actually said was, “Rap is black America’s TV station. It gives a whole perspective of what exists and what black life is all about.”
  • A few years ago it was revealed that Ross had actually been a correctional officer. No one seemed to mind. If a Jew wrote “White Christmas” and a prep-school graduate wrote “Scarface,” why shouldn’t a former cop make the best narco-trafficking anthems of his generation?
markfrankel18

Being Good Isn't Zero Sum : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...being-good-isnt-zero-sum

TOK ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • With so many pressing human needs, the logic goes, there's no room for compassionate action toward nonhuman animals. The underlying assumption is that being good is a zero-sum game, with gains for one cause — in this case, animal welfare — coming at the expense of another — in this case human welfare.
  • The zero-sum assumption may be compelling because it's buoyed by a few features of human psychology.
  • Doing something is better than doing nothing, even when that something is a small and imperfect step toward a tertiary goal.
markfrankel18

The Limits of Friendship - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...math-dunbar-number-friendships

TOK friendship psychology technology social media

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Oct 14 - Cached
  • 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.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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

N.Y. Judge Grants Legal Rights To 2 Research Chimps : The Two-Way : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...al-rights-to-2-research-chimps

TOK ethics animals science

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • A New York judge has granted two research chimps the writ of habeas corpus — a move that allows them to challenge their detention. The decision, says Science magazine, effectively recognizes chimps as legal persons, marking the first time in U.S. history that an animal has been given that right.
markfrankel18

Should Auschwitz Be a Site for Selfies? : The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...itz-be-a-site-for-selfies.html

TOK ethics technology history holocaust selfie

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • From the self-absorbed faux seriousness of some (meditating on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau!) to the jarring jokiness of others (hitching a ride by the train tracks!), the pictures have fed a perception of today’s youth as a bunch of technology-obsessed, self-indulgent narcissists. They also bring to mind the photos compiled in the popular Selfies at Funerals Tumblr blog. But if the “funeral selfie” kids were somehow hilarious in their inappropriateness, there’s nothing quite like seeing Israeli teens blowing kisses from the death camps of Poland to send you into a confusing and curious rage.
markfrankel18

The Psychology of Cheating : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...what-makes-people-cheat.html

psychology cheating TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 13
     
    "When a student sits down at a test, he knows how to cheat, in principle. But how does he decide whether or not he'll actually do it? Is it logic? An impulse? A subconscious reaction to the adrenaline in his blood and the dopamine in his brain? People cheat all the time. But why, exactly, do they decide to do it in the first place?"
markfrankel18

The Knoedler and Company Rothko Fake, and Why We Get Taken in by Forgeries : The New Yo... - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...r-and-company-rothko-fake.html

arts TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • “If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight,” the art critic Blake Gopnik wrote in an essay, “In Praise of Art Forgeries,” in the Times last Sunday. It’s a cute argument that I reject, but which gets me thinking.
  • Well, because it’s not a “work” at all but a pastiche whose one and only intention is to deceive. Its maker—reportedly, a guy in a garage on Long Island—wasn’t concerned with emulating the historical Rothko but, instead, with mirroring the taste of present-day Rothko fanciers. Fakes are contemporary portraits of past styles. No great talent is required, just a modicum of handiness and some art-critical acuity. A forger needn’t master the original artist’s skill, only the look of it. Indeed, especially in a freewheeling mode like Abstract Expressionism, a bit of awkwardness, incidental to the branded appearance, may impress a smitten chump as a marker of sincerity—even as something new and endearing about a beloved master. Time destroys fakes by revealing features of the era—the climate of taste—in which they were made.
Lawrence Hrubes

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

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

arts poetry internet media errors misinformation

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

Mapping Emotions On The Body: Love Makes Us Warm All Over : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...dy-love-makes-us-warm-all-over

TOK emotion maps

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Dec 13
     
    "When a team of scientists in Finland asked people to map out where they felt different emotions on their bodies, it found that the results were surprisingly consistent, even across cultures."
markfrankel18

Is the Field of Psychology Biased Against Conservatives? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-psychology-biased-republicans

TOK psychology bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Perhaps even more potentially problematic than negative personal experience is the possibility that bias may influence research quality: its design, execution, evaluation, and interpretation. In 1975, Stephen Abramowitz and his colleagues sent a fake manuscript to eight hundred reviewers from the American Psychological Association—four hundred more liberal ones (fellows of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and editors of the Journal of Social Issues) and four hundred less liberal (social and personality psychologists who didn’t fit either of the other criteria). The paper detailed the psychological well-being of student protesters who had occupied a college administration building and compared them to their non-activist classmates. In one version, the study found that the protesters were more psychologically healthy. In another, it was the more passive group that emerged as mentally healthier. The rest of the paper was identical. And yet, the two papers were not evaluated identically. A strong favorable reaction was three times more likely when the paper echoed one’s political beliefs—that is, when the more liberal reviewers read the version that portrayed the protesters as healthier.
  • All these studies and analyses are classic examples of confirmation bias: when it comes to questions of subjective belief, we more easily believe the things that mesh with our general world view. When something clashes with our vision of how things should be, we look immediately for the flaws.
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