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Lawrence Hrubes

Do 'Fast and Furious' Movies Cause a Rise in Speeding? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cause-a-rise-in-speeding.html

science SocialScience human sciences correlation causation psychology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Does bad behavior in movies or other media lead people to behave badly? There’s plenty of research on the link between onscreen media and risky behaviors like unprotected sex, binge drinking, fast driving and even violence. One large meta-analysis of such studies concluded that exposure to risk-glorifying media is associated with risky behaviors by people who consume that media. But causality issues plague most studies in this area: People who engage in risky behaviors may prefer to consume risk-glorifying media. These studies also tend to measure attitudes in controlled lab settings rather than in real life.
markfrankel18

How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rnet-could-change-history.html

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly.
  • But there’s still a low-grade urgency to save our social media for posterity — and it’s particularly urgent in cases in which social media itself had a profound influence on historic events.
  • Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians. Such an abundance presents a logistical challenge (the total number of tweets ever written is nearing half a trillion) as well as an ethical one (will people get to opt out of having ephemeral thoughts entered into the historical record?). But this plethora of new media and materials may function as a totally new type of archive: a multidimensional ledger of events that academics, scholars, researchers and the general public can parse to generate a more prismatic recollection of history.
Lawrence Hrubes

Rehana the 'Angel of Kobani': Social Media Myths in the War Against Isis Terror - 0 views

www.ibtimes.co.uk/ar-against-isis-terror-1472167

TOK myth news war propaganda media social media history

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The old saying "truth is the first casualty of war" springs to mind with the story of Kurdish jihadi-slayer "Rehana" - a woman who reportedly killed 100 Islamic State (IS) fighters but who may well be a ghost.
markfrankel18

Faking Cultural Literacy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faking-cultural-literacy.html

literacy TOK technology social media

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 May 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
markfrankel18

Twitter histories of events are vanishing - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/...corded_on_twitter_is_vanishing

twitter ToK History

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 May 13 - Cached
  • Nowadays, we’re very good at telling history in real time. Live-tweeting, livestreaming, Instagraming, link sharing, instant commenting — everyday lives and major events are recorded and narrated from every angle as they happen. A new study has found, however, that these minutes-old histories may not be built to last.
  • As the Technology Review reported:A significant proportion of the websites that this social media [around the Arab Spring] points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising. In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.
  • So it seems that social media sites like Twitter do not remain as fecund a resource over time as they do in real time. But no historian has ever worked on the assumption that all, or even most, information about an event is preserved, let alone even recorded. Not even Twitter has changed that.
Lawrence Hrubes

Fighting ISIS With an Algorithm, Physicists Try to Predict Attacks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ts-try-to-predict-attacks.html

science math human sciences SocialScience prediction terrorism social networks

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • And with the Islamic State’s prolific use of social media, terrorism experts and government agencies continually search for clues in posts and Twitter messages that appear to promote the militants’ cause.A physicist may not seem like an obvious person to study such activity. But for months, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami, led a team that created a mathematical model to sift order from the chaotic pro-terrorism online universe.
  • The tracking of terrorists on social media should take a cue from nature, Dr. Johnson said, where “the way transitions happen is like a flock of birds, a school of fish.”
  • The researchers also said there might be a spike in the formation of small online groups just before an attack takes place.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Both Mr. Berger and Ms. Patel noted a tricky question raised by the research: When is it best to try to suppress small groups so they do not mushroom into bigger groups, and when should they be left to percolate? Letting them exist for a while might be a way to gather intelligence, Ms. Patel said.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Truths Behind 'Dr. Strangelove' : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...strangelove-for-real.html

TOK history arts film nuclear ColdWar

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Jan 14
     
    "In retrospect, Kubrick's black comedy provided a far more accurate description of the dangers inherent in nuclear command-and-control systems than the ones that the American people got from the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Missing Malaysia plane: 10 theories examined - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-26609687

TOK reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As the search for Malaysia Airlines missing Boeing 777 moves into its 11th day, a multitude of theories about the plane's fate are circulating on forums and social media. Here, former pilots and aviation experts look at some of those theories.
  • As the search for Malaysia Airlines missing Boeing 777 moves into its 11th day, a multitude of theories about the plane's fate are circulating on forums and social media. Here, former pilots and aviation experts look at some of those theories.
Michael Peters

How Blogging And Twitter Are Making Us Smarter : All Tech Considered : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-twitter-are-making-us-smarter

blogging npr

shared by Michael Peters on 23 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Michael Peters on 23 Apr 14
     
    The nuturing effect of social media networks.
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

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,
markfrankel18

What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...ember-life-before-the-internet

TOK technology internet

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Aug 14 - No Cached
sleggettisp liked it
  • Harris takes a different path from those that have come before. Instead of a broad investigation into the effects on constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the “millennial” demographic coveted by advertisers and targeted by new media outlets.
  • It was neither better nor worse than the world we live in today. Like technology, it just was.
  • That means being able to notice things like the reduction of interactions to numbers, and how that translates into quantifications of human worth. “I think it has to do with this notion of online accountability. That is, noticing that you actually count seems to be related to a sense of self worth,” he says over the phone from Toronto, where he is based. “So it’s like if a tweet gets retweeted a couple of hundred times, that must mean that my thoughts are worthy. If my Facebook photo is ‘liked,’ that must mean I am good looking. One of the things that concerns me about a media diet that is overly online, is that we lose the ability to decide for ourselves what we think about who we are.” +
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Instead of wondering what should I do, we wonder what did I miss.
markfrankel18

Facebook psychology: How social media changes the way we mourn. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...s_the_way_we_mourn.single.html

TOK emotion technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Facebook allows us to be public about our sorrows, but to be heard they must sound some joyous note. Research suggests that social media is uncommonly good at making us miserable. The irony may be that Facebook itself is also making us more reluctant to voice that misery.
markfrankel18

Timeline Outline View : HistoryofInformation.com - 1 views

www.historyofinformation.com/index.php

TOK information timeline

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 29 Jul 14
     
    While the explosion of information resulting from the Internet is undoubtedly compounding an old problem, the Internet has also brought us new tools to explore both the rapidly expanding universe of information and the history of information. Using these new tools, HistoryofInformation.com is designed to help you follow the development of information and media, and attitudes about them, from the beginning of records to the present.
Vicki Close

Science Shows Something Surprising About People Who Still Read Fiction - Mic - 0 views

mic.com/...eople-who-love-reading-fiction

TOK arts emotion language

shared by Vicki Close on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Literary fiction enhanced participants' empathy because they had to work harder at fleshing out the characters. The process of trying to understand what those characters are feelings and the motives behind them is the same in our relationships with other people. 
  • Vicki Close on 02 Dec 14
     
    Brain research finds that readers of literary fiction demonstrate increased levels of empathy over readers of non-fiction, social media and popular fiction.
Lawrence Hrubes

What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-change-whats-in-a-name.html

TOK language science climate skepticism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • People who reject the findings of climate science are dismissed as “deniers” and “disinformers.” Those who accept the science are attacked as “alarmists” or “warmistas. ” The latter term, evoking the Sandinista revolutionaries of Nicaragua, is perhaps meant to suggest that the science is part of some socialist plot.
  • The petition asks the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, “skeptic,” and call them “climate deniers” instead. By Degrees A column by Justin Gillis about our changing climate. 3.6 Degrees of Uncertainty DEC 15 A Tricky Transition From Fossil Fuel NOV 10 Shining Star Power on a Crucial Subject SEP 22 In the Ocean, Clues to Change AUG 11 Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils JUL 7 See More » Climate scientists are among the most vocal critics of using the term “climate skeptic” to describe people who flatly reject their findings. They point out that skepticism is the very foundation of the scientific method. The modern consensus about the risks of climate change, they say, is based on evidence that has piled up over the course of decades and has been subjected to critical scrutiny every step of the way.
  • In other words, the climate scientists see themselves as the true skeptics, having arrived at a durable consensus about emissions simply because the evidence of risk has become overwhelming. And in this view, people who reject the evidence are phony skeptics, arguing their case by cherry-picking studies, manipulating data, and refusing to weigh the evidence as a whole.The petition asking the media to drop the “climate skeptic” label began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, he said, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The blind breast cancer detectors - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31552562

science health medicine statistics probability tests math

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Gerd Gigerenzer's test In 2006 and 2007 Gigerenzer gave a series of statistics workshops to gynaecologists, and kicked off every session with the same question: A 50-year-old woman, no symptoms, participates in routine mammography screening. She tests positive, is alarmed, and wants to know from you whether she has breast cancer for certain or what the chances are. Apart from the screening results, you know nothing else about this woman. How many women who test positive actually have breast cancer? What is the best answer? nine in 10 eight in 10 one in 10 one in 100 Gigerenzer then supplied the doctors with data about Western women of this age. (His figures were based on US studies from the 1990s, rounded up or down for simplicity - recent stats from Britain's National Health Service are slightly different.) The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 1% ("prevalence") If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she tests positive is 90% ("sensitivity") If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is 9% ("false alarm rate") In one session, almost half the gynaecologists said the woman's chance of having cancer was nine in 10. Only 21% said that the figure was one in 10 - which is the correct answer.
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