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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Caesium: A brief history of timekeeping - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-29476893

TOK science time relativity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The answer is that whenever you have a network operating over distance, accurate timekeeping is essential for synchronisation. And the faster the speed of travel, the more accurate the timekeeping must be. Hence in the modern world, where information travels at almost the speed of light down wires or through the air, accuracy is more important than ever. What caesium has done is to raise the standards for the measurement of time exponentially.
  • As the electron moves out into the wider orbit it absorbs energy, and as it jumps back in it releases it in the form of light, fluorescing very slightly. That means you can tell when you've hit the sweet spot of 9,192,631,770 Hz. It's because this transition frequency is so much higher than the resonant frequency of quartz that a caesium clock is so much more accurate. The caesium fountain at NPL, Szymaniec tells me proudly, is accurate to one second in every 158 million years. That means it would only be a second out if it had started keeping time back in the peak of the Jurassic Period when diplodocus were lumbering around and pterodactyls wheeling in the sky.
  • Now, if such insane levels of accuracy seem pointless, then think again. Without the caesium clock, for example, satellite navigation would be impossible. GPS satellites carry synchronised caesium clocks that enable them collectively to triangulate your position and work out where on earth you are. And the practical applications do not end there. Just ask Leon Lobo - he's in charge of time "dissemination" at NPL. His job is to tell the time to the UK. For a fee. NPL has just begun offering businesses standardised timekeeping accurate to the nearest microsecond - a millionth of a second. Mr Lobo is targeting a wide range of clients that all have one thing in common - they need to synchronise a network that operates at speeds far faster than any trains.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr Lobo's biggest target is the financial markets, which these days are dominated by computers programmed to place thousands of trades per second, transmitted down wires at almost the speed of light. In this world, the equivalent of a train crash would be ill-timed bets that rack up millions of dollars in losses, and might even briefly sink the market in the process. Unsurprisingly, financial regulators increasingly require a super-accurate timestamp on every transaction.
  • The switch to atomic time was for good reason. The rotation of the earth, it turned out, was not such a reliable measure of time. No day or year is exactly the same length.
  • Due to the earth's elliptical orbit, the sun can be as much as 16 minutes out of line with mean solar time. Add the distortion of time zones, which average time across huge regions, and the difference is far greater. China, which is almost 5,000km wide, has a single time zone spanning 1h40 of solar time. The decision of some countries to adjust the clocks twice a year as a "daylight saving" measure exaggerates the issue yet further.
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
Lawrence Hrubes

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

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

perception senses sensory perception emotion

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Truly new sensory experiences are rare. Perhaps for that reason, a whole genre of YouTube videos is dedicated to them. The videos of 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.)
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

How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...accoon-became-an-aardvark.html

Wikipedia TOK science errors authority

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati. The coati, a member of the raccoon family, is “also known as … a Brazilian aardvark,” Breves wrote. He did not cite a source for this nickname, and with good reason: he had invented it. He and his brother had spotted several coatis while on a trip to the Iguaçu Falls, in Brazil, where they had mistaken them for actual aardvarks.
  • Over time, though, something strange happened: the nickname caught on. About a year later, Breves searched online for the phrase “Brazilian aardvark.” Not only was his edit still on Wikipedia, but his search brought up hundreds of other Web sites about coatis. References to the so-called “Brazilian aardvark” have since appeared in the Independent, the Daily Mail, and even in a book published by the University of Chicago. Breves’s role in all this seems clear: a Google search for “Brazilian aardvark” will return no mentions before Breves made the edit, in July, 2008. The claim that the coati is known as a Brazilian aardvark still remains on its Wikipedia entry, only now it cites a 2010 article in the Telegraph as evidence.
  • This kind of feedback loop—wherein an error that appears on Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original falsehood—is a documented phenomenon. There’s even a Wikipedia article describing it.
markfrankel18

There is no language instinct - Vyvyan Evans - Aeon - 0 views

aeon.co/...there-is-no-language-instinct

TOK language chomsky

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Chomsky’s idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong.
  • How much sense does it make to call whatever inborn basis for language we might have an ‘instinct’? On reflection, not much.
  • If our knowledge of the rudiments of all the world’s 7,000 or so languages is innate, then at some level they must all be the same. There should be a set of absolute grammatical ‘universals’ common to every one of them. This is not what we have discovered.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In a 2002 version, Chomsky and colleagues at Harvard proposed that perhaps all that is unique to the human language capability is a general-purpose computational capacity known as ‘recursion’.
  • While the human brain does exhibit specialisation for processing different genres of information, such as vision, there appears not to be a dedicated spot specialised just for language.
  • And indeed, we now believe that several of Chomsky’s evolutionary assumptions were incorrect.
  • we don’t have to assume a special language instinct; we just need to look at the sorts of changes that made us who we are, the changes that paved the way for speech.
markfrankel18

Whole Foods is taking heat for selling rabbit - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...g-heat-for-selling-rabbit-meat

ethics animals pets classification

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • But worrying about data is probably just a distraction, because, ultimately,&nbsp;“pet” is a relative term—there are&nbsp;more fish&nbsp;in our home aquariums than there are pet dogs, and any category that lumps the two together feels inadequate.
  • Rabbits, as this passer-by is implying,&nbsp;are widely consumed in other countries. Western Europeans love rabbit sausage,&nbsp;slow-cooked rabbit stews, and braised bunny dishes, while the Chinese—who account for 30% of global rabbit consumption—consider rabbit’s head a delicacy. + Rabbit was even a staple of the American diet at one time. It helped sustain the European transplants&nbsp;who migrated west across the frontier, and during World War II, eating rabbit was promoted as an act of patriotism akin to growing a victory garden. But as small farms gave way to large-scale operations, rabbit meat’s popularity melted away and other meats took over.
  • Herzog started thinking about this 20 years ago, when he was sitting in a hotel bar having a beer with the psychologist and animal rights activist, Ken Shapiro. Herzog&nbsp;knew Shapiro was a vegan; Shapiro&nbsp;knew Herzog ate meat. Both men had read all of the same psychology and animal-rights literature, and both spent a lot of time working through the same philosophical questions. But somehow, they came to different conclusions about how to live their lives. + “Hal, I don’t get it: why aren’t you like us?” Shapiro suddenly asked. Herzog didn’t have an answer. He still doesn’t. + “I’ve been struggling with this for a long time,” Herzog says. “I can handle moral ambiguity.&nbsp;I can deal with it. So I don’t have that need for moral consistency that animal activists do.” He laughs a little.&nbsp;“And I know that their logic is better than mine, so I don’t even try arguing with them. They win in these arguments.” +
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Outside of the Union Square store, the activists are talking to a small crowd.&nbsp;“They refuse to test products on the very animals they turn around and sell as meat,” says a man wearing fuzzy bunny ears and holding a big sign. + This inconsistency presents a valid question:&nbsp;If I decide there is something ethically wrong with dripping chemicals into a rabbit’s eye to test its toxicity, is it hypocritical&nbsp;to eat that animal? + Hal Herzog talks about the relative ability of an individual to live with moral inconsistency, but perhaps the rabbit debate is less about morality and instead has to do with the categorical boundaries we use to talk about the debate in the first place.
markfrankel18

Is Atheism Irrational? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...is-atheism-irrational

TOK atheism religious knowledge systems philosophy

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right
  • In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism.
  • You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Nimrud: Outcry as IS bulldozers attack ancient Iraq site - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-31760656

history memory religious knowledge systems archeology culture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Archaeologists and officials have expressed outrage about the bulldozing of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud by Islamic State militants in Iraq.
  • IS says ancient shrines and statues are "false idols" that have to be smashed. "They are erasing our history," said Iraqi archaeologist Lamia al-Gailani.
  • Profile of Nimrud Ancient Assyrian city on the River Tigris Capital of Assyria for about 150 years First excavations in modern times undertaken by Europeans starting in the 1840s Treasures unearthed included sections of royal palaces, individual statues and smaller artefacts Investigations stopped for decades but in 1949 Sir Max Mallowan (husband of writer Agatha Christie) began fresh excavations Extensive photographic record of remaining treasures made in the 1970s
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "There is absolutely no political or religious justification for the destruction of humanity's cultural heritage." Dr Gailani told the BBC:"Nimrud for us in Iraq and for me as an archaeologist is one of the most important [sites]. There are still quite a lot of things that are standing - the reliefs and the statues, the famous winged bulls. "They are erasing our history. I wish it was a nightmare and I could wake up."
Lawrence Hrubes

To Pi and Beyond - The New Yorker - 0 views

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

math mathematics beauty technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Entertaining the idea of a peculiar long number such as pi puts me in mind of its cousins twice removed, prime numbers, which have so many strange properties. Prime numbers are those numbers, such as 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on, that can be cleanly divided only by one and themselves. Primes and pi suggest a benign infinity, a pleasing order—pi because of its endlessness and its relation to the circle, and primes because no matter how far you travel on the number line you will always encounter a prime, as Euclid proved in 300 B.C. Recently, Yitang Zhang solved a problem involving prime numbers called bounded gaps that had been open for more than a hundred years. Zhang proved that no matter how far you go on the number line, even to the range where the numbers would fill many books, there will, on an infinite number of occasions, be two prime numbers within seventy million places of each other. (Other mathematicians have reduced this gap to two hundred and forty six.) Before, it had not been known whether any such range applied to prime numbers, which seem to behave, especially as they get larger, as if they appear at random.
  • Number theory is a discipline done for no purpose. It is practiced by people who believe that numbers have properties that exemplify an orderliness and beauty in the universe. The story of numbers is a story of creation not directly contained in the Scriptures, but if a divinity didn’t create numbers and their properties, what accounts for them? The necessity of counting doesn’t entirely explain pi or primes. A breakthrough in number theory is called a discovery, not an invention. There isn’t yet any explanation for the properties of pi or for primes. There is only the sense of wonder that the world contains such extravagant mysteries so close at hand.
markfrankel18

How Culture Shapes Our Senses - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...culture-shapes-our-senses.html

perception TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific.
  • Recently, a team of anthropologists and psychologists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University, both in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, set out to discover how language and culture affected sensory awareness. Under the leadership of Asifa Majid and Stephen C. Levinson, they made up a kit of systematic stimuli for the traditional five senses: for sight, color chips and geometric forms; for hearing, pitch, amplitude and rhythm variations; for smell, a set of scratch-and-sniff cards; and so forth. They took these kits to over 20 cultural groups around the world. Their results upend some of our basic assumptions.
Lawrence Hrubes

Doctors in Denmark want to stop circumcision for under-18s | The Independent - 1 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ildren-under-18s-a7459291.html

ethics culture religious knowledge systems medicine doctors circumcision

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The Danish Medical Association said it had considered suggesting a legal ban on the procedure for children under the age of 18, because it believed circumcision should be “an informed, personal choice” that young men make for themselves.ADVERTISINGinRead invented by Teads When parents have their sons circumcised, it robs boys of the ability to make decisions about their own bodies, and choose their cultural and religious beliefs for themselves, the organisation said.
Lawrence Hrubes

Neuroscience and Moral Responsibility - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...-and-moral-responsibility.html

ethics science neuroscience neurology brain free will teens morality moral knowledge

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • ARE you responsible for your behavior if your brain “made you do it”?Often we think not. For example, research now suggests that the brain’s frontal lobes, which are crucial for self-control, are not yet mature in adolescents. This finding has helped shape attitudes about whether young people are fully responsible for their actions. In 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, its decision explicitly took into consideration that “parts of the brain involved in behavior control continue to mature through late adolescence.”
markfrankel18

Nuremberg Nazi Site Crumbles, but Tricky Questions on Its Future Persist - The New York... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ons-on-its-future-persist.html

TOK history ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Should public money be spent to preserve these crumbling sites? Is controlled decay an option for anything associated with the Nazis? Or have Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, locked future generations into a devilish pact that compels Germans not only to teach the history of the Thousand Year Reich the Nazis proclaimed here but also to adapt it for each new era?Several dozen experts — and some curious citizens — gathered for a weekend recently to ponder such questions at a forum titled “Preserve. For what?”
markfrankel18

Many scientific "truths" are, in fact, false - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...tific-truths-are-in-fact-false

TOK science psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 25 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Each scientific field must adopt its own methods of ensuring accuracy. But ultimately, this self-reflection is a key part of the scientific process. As Bishop notes, “Science has proved itself to be an incredibly powerful method.” And yet there’s always room for further advancement. “There’s never an end point,” says Bishop. “We’re always groping towards the next thing. Sometimes science does disappear down the wrong path for a bit before it corrects itself.” For Nosek, who led the re-testing of 100 psychology papers, the current focus on reproducibility is simply part of the scientific process. “Science isn’t about truth and falsity, it’s about reducing uncertainty,” he says. “Really this whole project is science on science: Researchers doing what science is supposed to do, which is be skeptical of our own process, procedure, methods, and look for ways to improve.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Same but Different - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...breakthroughs-in-epigenetics

science biology genetics nature DNA ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Why are identical twins alike? In the late nineteen-seventies, a team of scientists in Minnesota set out to determine how much these similarities arose from genes, rather than environments—from “nature,” rather than “nurture.” Scouring thousands of adoption records and news clips, the researchers gleaned a rare cohort of fifty-six identical twins who had been separated at birth. Reared in different families and different cities, often in vastly dissimilar circumstances, these twins shared only their genomes. Yet on tests designed to measure personality, attitudes, temperaments, and anxieties, they converged astonishingly. Social and political attitudes were powerfully correlated: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. The same went for religiosity (or its absence), even for the ability to be transported by an aesthetic experience. Two brothers, separated by geographic and economic continents, might be brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne, as if responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes.
  • It’s one thing to study epigenetic changes across the life of a single organism, or down a line of cells. The more tantalizing question is whether epigenetic messages can, like genes, cross from parents to their offspring.
  • The most suggestive evidence for such transgenerational transmission may come from a macabre human experiment. In September, 1944, amid the most vengeful phase of the Second World War, German troops occupying the Netherlands banned the export of food and coal to its northern parts. Acute famine followed, called the Hongerwinter—the hunger winter. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children died of malnourishment; millions suffered it and survived. Not surprisingly, the children who endured the Hongerwinter experienced chronic health issues. In the nineteen-eighties, however, a curious pattern emerged: when the children born to women who were pregnant during the famine grew up, they had higher rates of morbidity as well—including obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. (Malnourishment in utero can cause the body to sequester higher amounts of fat in order to protect itself from caloric loss.) Methylation alterations were also seen in regions of their DNA associated with growth and development. But the oddest result didn’t emerge for another generation. A decade ago, when the grandchildren of men and women exposed to the famine were studied, they, too, were reported to have had higher rates of illness. (These findings have been challenged, and research into this cohort continues.) “Genes cannot change in an entire population in just two generations,” Allis said. “But some memory of metabolic stress could have become heritable.”
Lawrence Hrubes

The New Science of Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-new-science-of-mind.html

TOK mind brain psychotherapy science psychiatry behaviour neurology biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13
     
    This new science of mind is based on the principle that our mind and our brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. It is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by our brain. The same principle of unity applies to mental disorders.
Lawrence Hrubes

Would You Lie for Me? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...would-i-lie-for-you.html

TOK ethics lying

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Feb 14
     
    "WHAT is the chance that you could get someone to lie for you? What about vandalizing public property at your suggestion? Most of us assume that others would go along with such schemes only if, on some level, they felt comfortable doing so. If not, they'd simply say "no," right? Yet research suggests that saying "no" can be more difficult than we believe - and that we have more power over others' decisions than we think."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - How to learn like a memory champion - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...w-to-learn-like-a-memory-champ

TOK memory learning education technology brain

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind.
  • Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school's iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's understanding of the grammar.Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They're constantly trying to work out whose voice they're hearing,” he says. “So they're giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't be overstated," Birch says.
markfrankel18

Why is the 'mor' in 'Voldemort' so evil-sounding? - The Week - 0 views

theweek.com/...-in-voldemort-so-evil-sounding

TOK language literature

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • So what's the deal with "mor"? Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy? We have to be careful here. There are more words out there that have "mor" that don't carry such dark tones. The names Morgan, Maureen, and Maurice aren't so sinister (well, possibly excepting the case of Piers Morgan), and people just wanted more and more of Mork from Ork. So we can't say that this "mor" sound carries darkness and death wherever it goes. But we can say that it has some dark associations available if we want to use them. For starters, the Latin "mor" root (as in moribund and mortal and French words such as morte) refers to death; there is an old Germanic root mora for darkness, which shows up in words such as murky; our modern word murder comes from an Old English word morth for the same; and, of course, a morgue is a place where dead bodies are kept. That's enough to give a familiar ring. And every evil name that has "mor" in it adds to the weight of the association, especially when they're famous evil names. In fact, "mor" may be what is sometimes called a phonestheme: a part of a word that tends to carry a certain connotation not because of etymology or formal definition but just by association.
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