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markfrankel18

Why Free Markets Make Fools of Us by Cass R. Sunstein | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...why-free-markets-make-fools-us

TOK psychology economics

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Very few economists foresaw the great recession of 2008–2009. Why not? Economists have long assumed that human beings are “rational,” but behavioral findings about human fallibility have put a lot of pressure on that assumption. People tend to be overconfident; they display unrealistic optimism; they often deal poorly with risks; they neglect the long term (“present bias”); and they dislike losses a lot more than they like equivalent gains (“loss aversion”). And until recent years, most economists have not had much to say about the problem of inequality, which seems to be getting worse.
  • By emphasizing human fallibility, the group of scholars known as behavioral economists has raised a lot of doubts about this view. Their catalog of errors on the part of consumers and investors can be taken to identify a series of “behavioral market failures,” each of them calling for some kind of government response (such as information campaigns to promote healthy eating or graphic warnings to discourage smoking). But George Akerlof and Robert Shiller want to go far beyond behavioral economics, at least in its current form. They offer a much more general, and quite damning, account of why free markets and competition cause serious problems.
Lawrence Hrubes

Believe in animal rights? Be prepared to go pet-free - Home | The 180 with Jim Brown | ... - 1 views

www.cbc.ca/...pared-to-go-pet-free-1.3765424

ethics animals

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • If we want to achieve true animal rights, we need to stop having pets.  That's according to Gary Francione, a law professor who deals with animal rights, and a longtime vegan. He says keeping pets is just another way of exploiting animals.  And he says pets shouldn't exist.
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 News - French veil law: Muslim woman's challenge in Strasbourg - 2 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-europe-25118160

TOK ethics religion culture rights law Islam gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Nov 13
     
    ""Wearing the full veil not only makes it difficult to identify a person, it makes her indistinguishable from other full veil wearers and effectively erases the woman who wears it," she told the court. Ramby de Mello, a British lawyer representing the unnamed woman, said the law violated his client's religious, free speech and privacy rights and made her feel "like a prisoner in her own country"."
markfrankel18

The End Of Rational Vs. Emotional: How Both Logic And Feeling Play Key Roles In Marketi... - 2 views

www.fastcocreate.com/...ay-key-roles-in-marketing-and-

ToK psychology reason Emotions

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 May 13 - No Cached
  • Douglas Van Praet argues that while decision making is governed by our emotions, brands should still provide people with a logical lifeline (but they should steer clear of research that lets the post-rationalizing tail wag the emotional dog).
  • One of the longest-running debates in marketing is whether to use a rational or emotional advertising approach in marketing--but cognitive science says that argument is pointless. While emotions overwhelmingly drive behavior, it is misguided to believe that thinking and feeling are somehow mutually exclusive. Emotion and logic are intertwined. Behavioral science is now telling us that we don’t really have “free will.” We have “free won’t.” We can give in to the visceral impulses that drive us or choose to apply the brakes of rational restraint. While we can’t choose our emotions because they originate unconsciously, we can choose our conscious response to our feelings. This is essentially what consciousness is--a series of critical reflections and interpretations about how we are feeling.
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

List of topics characterized as pseudoscience - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...characterized_as_pseudoscience

TOK pseudoscience science skepticism

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 18 Sep 13
     
    "[106]"
Lawrence Hrubes

Most People Can’t Multitask, But a Few Are Exceptional. : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...multitask-masters.html

TOK psychology neuroscience cognition exceptions assumptions

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 May 14 - No Cached
  • In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone. Over the course of a decade, he and his colleagues had demonstrated that drivers using cell phones—even hands-free devices—were at just as high a risk of accidents as intoxicated ones. Reaction time slowed, attention decreased to the point where they’d miss more than half the things they’d otherwise see—a billboard or a child by the road, it mattered not.
  • What, then, was going on here in the London lab? The woman he was looking at—let’s call her Cassie—was an exception to what twenty-five years of research had taught him. As she took on more and more tasks, she didn’t get worse. She got better. There she was, driving, doing complex math, responding to barking prompts through a cell phone, and she wasn’t breaking a sweat. She was, in other words, what Strayer would ultimately decide to call a supertasker.
  • Cassie in particular was the best multitasker he had ever seen. “It’s a really, really hard test,” Strayer recalls. “Some people come out woozy—I have a headache, that really kind of hurts, that sort of thing. But she solved everything.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Their task was simple: keep your eyes on the road; keep a safe difference; brake as required. If they failed to do so, they’d eventually collide with their pace car. Then came the multitasking additions. They would have to not only drive the car but follow audio instructions from a cell phone. Specifically, they would hear a series of words, ranging from two to five at a time, and be asked to recall them in the right order. And there was a twist. Interspersed with the words were math problems. If they heard one of those, the drivers had to answer “true,” if the problem was solved correctly, or “false,” if it wasn’t. They would, for instance, hear “cat” and immediately after, “is three divided by one, minus one, equal to two?” followed by “box,” another problem, and so on. Intermittently, they would hear a prompt to “recall,” at which point, they’d have to repeat back all the words they’d heard since the last prompt. The agony lasted about an hour and a half.
Lawrence Hrubes

Lawsuit Filed Today on Behalf of Chimpanzee Seeking Legal Personhood : The Nonhuman Rig... - 0 views

www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/...anzee-seeking-legal-personhood

TOK ethics animals rights science law

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The Nonhuman Rights Project is the only organization working toward actual LEGAL rights for members of species other than our own. Our mission is to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere “things,” which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to “persons,” who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them. Our first cases were filed in 2013.
  • The legal cause of action that we are using is the common law writ of habeas corpus, through which somebody who is being held captive, for example in prison, seeks relief by having a judge call upon his captors to show cause as to why they have the right to hold him. More specifically, our suits are based on a case that was fought in England in 1772, when an American slave, James Somerset, who had been taken to London by his owner, escaped, was recaptured and was being held in chains on a ship that was about to set sail for the slave markets of Jamaica. With help from a group of abolitionist attorneys, Somerset’s godparents filed a writ of habeas corpus on Somerset’s behalf in order to challenge Somerset’s classification as a legal thing, and the case went before the Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield. In what became one of the most important trials in Anglo-American history, Lord Mansfield ruled that Somerset was not a piece of property, but instead a legal person, and he set him free.
Lawrence Hrubes

Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics - Practical Ethics Bites - 0 views

www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/...practicalethicsbites

TOK ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Practical Ethics Bites is a series of audio podcasts on practical ethics targeted specifically at pupils studying philosophy or religious studies at A level in UK schools. It is produced by the team behind the popular podcast Philosophy Bites, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton.  Philosophy Bites has had over 21 million downloads.  David Edmonds is a Senior Research Associate at Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and all the interviewees are academics linked to the Uehiro Centre. The series aims to be an educational resource for teachers as well as students.  Each interview is around 20 minutes long. The interviews will be posted below and will also be available on iTunesU. They will be released on a weekly basis over September and October 2014.  They are completely free to listen to.
Petr Dimitrov

Stephen Fry Explains Humanism in 4 Animated Videos: Happiness, Truth and the Meaning of... - 0 views

www.openculture.com/...nism-in-4-animated-videos.html

shared by Petr Dimitrov on 12 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Petr Dimitrov on 12 Oct 14
     
    Answers to life's big questions don't come cheap, but they very often come free, or at least we feel they should. Which answers you find compelling among your available options is up to you.
Lawrence Hrubes

Laïcité and the Skirt - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...laicite-and-the-skirt.html

ethics culture fashion religious knowledge systems

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 May 15 - No Cached
  • In most Western democracies, separation of church and state generally means that the government leaves people free to observe their religion’s traditions, diets or dress codes, so long as they do no harm to other groups. In France, however, the stern code of secularism known as laïcité often seems to cross from protecting religious expression into imposing a state-defined secular behavior — most often on the country’s sizable Muslim population. The latest example came when a school in northeastern France twice sent a 15-year-old Muslim girl home for wearing a skirt that was deemed too long.
markfrankel18

A photograph seen once, long ago, haunted me - and taught me to distrust memo... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...hen-you-try-to-enlist-the-past

TOK memory history photography

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • When I tracked down a Nazi soldier’s snapshot of an execution, it reminded me how warily you must tread when you try to enlist the past, however good your intentions
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Startups Love Moleskines - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-startups-love-moleskines

technology imagination memory writing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Digital note-taking apps also leave their users only a finger-swipe away from e-mail or Candy Crush. An article on digital distraction in the June issue of The Harvard Business Review cites an estimate, by the Information Overload Research Group, that the problem is costing the U.S. economy nine hundred and ninety-seven billion dollars a year. “The digital world provides a lot of opportunity to waste a lot of time,” Allen said. A paper notebook, by contrast, is a walled garden, free from detours (except doodling), and requiring no learning curve. A growing body of research supports the idea that taking notes works better on paper than on laptops, in terms of comprehension, memorization, and other cognitive benefits.
markfrankel18

Economics jargon promotes a deficit in understanding | Media | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...tes-a-deficit-in-understanding

TOK economics language

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • There’s no Rosetta Stone for scientific translation. It’s quite simple really. The first step is getting rid of the technical language.
  • This sounds like a straightforward instruction, but many enormously intelligent people fail to follow it. The trick they fail to master is to train their brains to think in two ways. One, like a scientist; and two, like someone with no scientific training whatsoever.
  • And whenever I see or hear journalists or politicians discussing a particularly important social science – economics – I just don’t see them making the same efforts of jargon removal and technical translation. Whether it’s discussion of debt, or the argument for austerity, it’s hard to find good economics communication, where the language is rinsed free of jargon.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • All of this is worrying because it represents a genuine threat to democracy. If we can’t fully comprehend the decisions that are made for us and about us by government then how we can we possibly revolt or react in an effective way? Yes, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves more on the big issues,
Lawrence Hrubes

Five bizarre 'lessons' in Indian textbooks - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-india-34336826

education history authority errors

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • India, which has a literacy level well below the global average, has intensified its efforts in the field of education. In 2012 the country passed the Right to Education act which guarantees free and compulsory education for all children until the age of 14.However, some of the "facts" that have been found in textbooks around the country have given rise to speculation over what exactly passes for "education" in India.Glaring mistakes, downright lies and embellishments in textbooks are often featured in local media. A trend that is all the more worrying, given that India's education system promotes rote learning at the cost of analytical thinking.
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