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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
Philip Drobis

Imitation is what makes us human and creative - Kat McGowan - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...hat-makes-us-human-and-creativ

TOK Imitation WeAreCopycats aeon perception psychology intuition science

shared by Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Throughout human history, innovation – including the technological progress we cherish – has been fuelled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones, from digging sticks to crops that manufacture their own pesticides.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      Imitation is the source for technological advance --by copying others inventions we can add our own potentially benefit to them, thus providing a small contribution to its advancement
  • advances happen largely through tinkering, when somebody recreates a good thing with a minor upgrade that makes it slightly better.
  • When Isaac Newton talked about standing on the shoulders of giants, he should have said that we are dwarves, standing atop a vast heap of dwarves.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      Ties to our ability to observe and remember what we see. That we can then build off of that and improve it
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Lots of copying means that many minds get their chance at the problem; imitation ‘makes the contents of brains available to everyone’, writes the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello in the Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999). Tomasello, who is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, calls the combination of imitation and innovation the ‘cultural ratchet’. It is like a mechanical ratchet that permits motion in only one direction – such as winding a watch, or walking through a turnstile. Good ideas push the ratchet forward one notch. Faithful imitation keeps the ratchet from slipping backward, protecting ideas from being forgotten or lost and keeping knowledge alive for the next round of improvement.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      Multiple minds are essentially key as the cumulative opportunities of each individual given a chance at the issue can lead to one finding something prosperous 
  • In the 1930s, a pair of psychologists raised an infant chimp alongside their own baby in an attempt to understand both species better. The chimp raised in this family (and others in other such experiments later in the century) never behaved much like a human. The human child, on the other hand, soon began knuckle-walking, biting, grunting and hooting – just like his new sibling.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      We copy to survive. Only we humans actually have the 'push' or are gullible enough to not realize as the Chimp example above proposes. -Ties to a biological and/or physiological connection in terms of behavior 
  • Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
     
    How we are imitators from childbirth 
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.
Lawrence Hrubes

Elizabeth Kolbert: Why Are We So Busy? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...140526crbo_books_kolbert

economics human sciences SocialScience wealth leisure TOK gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 May 14 - No Cached
  • n the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.
  • According to Keynes, the nineteenth century had unleashed such a torrent of technological innovation—“electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production”—that further growth was inevitable. The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century, and this, in concert with ever greater “technical improvements,” would usher in the fifteen-hour week.
  • Four-fifths of the way through Keynes’s century, half of his vision has been realized. Since “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” was published, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of sixteen, and G.D.P. per capita by a factor of six. And what holds for the United States goes for the rest of the world, too: in the past eighty years, the global economy has grown at a similar rate.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But if we have become, in aggregate, as rich as Keynes imagined, this wealth has not translated into leisure. (When was the last time someone you know complained about having too little to do?) In terms of economic theory, this is puzzling. In terms of everyday life, it’s enough to, well, induce a nervous breakdown.
Lawrence Hrubes

Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...130729fa_fact_gawande

TOK science medicine childbirth paradigm idea ideas health innovation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Jan 14
     
    "The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can't take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven't spread."
markfrankel18

What's a Metaphor For? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...128079

TOK Language metaphor

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • "Metaphorical thinking—our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another—shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. ... Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of a metamorphosis. For centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to 'normal' thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways." Geary further unpacks metaphor's influence in his foreword: "Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions."
  • The upshot of the boom in metaphor studies, Geary makes clear, is the overturning of that presumption toward literalism: Nowadays, it's believers in a literalism that goes all the way down (so to speak) who are on the defensive in intellectual life, and explorers of metaphor who are on the ascendant. As a result, Geary hardly feels a need to address literalism, devoting most of his book to how metaphor connects to etymology, money, mind, politics, pleasure, science, children, the brain, the body, and such literary forms as the proverb and aphorism.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Excrement Experiment - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...excrement-experiment

science experiment research biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Crohn’s disease affects as many as seven hundred thousand Americans, but, like other autoimmune disorders, it remains poorly understood and is considered incurable. (Autoimmune disorders are thought to arise when the immune system attacks healthy tissue, mistaking it for a threat.) The standard treatments for Crohn’s often don’t work, or work only temporarily, and many have serious side effects.
  • His mother showed him an article from the Times about a man who had been nearly bedridden by ulcerative colitis—a condition related to Crohn’s—and who had largely recovered after a month or so of fecal transplants. Gravel found a how-to book on Amazon and bought the recommended equipment: a blender, a rectal syringe, saline solution, surgical gloves, Tupperware containers. His wife agreed to be his donor.
  • New research suggests that the microbes in our guts—and, consequently, in our stool—may play a role in conditions ranging from autoimmune disorders to allergies and obesity, and reports of recoveries by patients who, with or without the help of doctors, have received these bacteria-rich infusions have spurred demand for the procedure. A year and a half ago, a few dozen physicians in the United States offered FMT. Today, hundreds do, and OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank founded last year by graduate students at M.I.T., ships more than fifty specimens each week to hospitals in thirty-six states. The Cleveland Clinic named fecal transplantation one of the top ten medical innovations for 2014, and biotech companies are competing to put stool-based therapies through clinical trials and onto the market. In medicine, at any rate, human excrement has become a precious commodity.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Ethical Quandaries You Should Think About The Next Time You Look At Your Phone | Fa... - 3 views

www.fastcompany.com/...bout-the-next-time-you-look-at

ethics technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • To what extent can we and should we aspire to create machines that can outthink us? For example, Netflix has an algorithm that can predict what movies you will like based on the ones you've already seen and rated. Suppose a dating site were to develop a similar algorithm—maybe even a more sophisticated one—and predict with some accuracy which partner would be the best match for you. Whose advice would you trust more? The advice of the smart dating app or the advice of your parents or your friends?
  • The question, it seems to me, is should we use new genetic technologies only to cure disease and repair injury, or also to make ourselves better-than-well. Should we aspire to become the masters of our natures to protect our children and improve their life prospects?AdvertisementAdvertisement This goes back to the role of accident. Is the unpredictability of the child an important precondition of the unconditional love of parents for children? My worry is that if we go beyond health, we run the risk of turning parenthood into an extension of the consumer society.
markfrankel18

Shock Me if You Can - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...shock-me-if-you-can.html

TOK arts schock

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Oct 13 - Cached
  • Shock long ago went mainstream, raising a question: Can art still shock today? Nudity and raw language are no longer scandalous, and decades of Modernist assaults on formal constraints have dissolved the boundary between art and not-art, high and low. The outcry over “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Tropic of Cancer” seems downright quaint at a moment when millions of suburban mothers are devouring the sadomasochistic fantasy “50 Shades of Grey.”
  • Today shock can seem indistinguishable from scandal, less a side effect of artistic innovation than a ploy ginned up by self-promoting artists and public scolds. But many artists say that generating shock remains the duty of anyone who aims to reflect the real world back at itself. Audiences may be more sophisticated, and jaded, but it is still possible to show them something they may not want to see.
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