Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items tagged modern

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Lawrence Hrubes

Modern psychology's God problem | GarethCook - 7 views

garethcook.net/modern-psychologys-god-problem

TOK psychology religion faith

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13
     
    "Modern psychology has a serious God problem. America is a deeply spiritual country. More than half of Americans say religion is "very important" to them, and more than 90 percent profess a belief in a higher power. Yet psychology, as a scientific endeavor, has done almost nothing to understand how spiritual beliefs shape psychological problems, or affect treatment. "
markfrankel18

The Return of History - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-return-of-history.html

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • That the Islamic State has made violent use of history shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps more surprising is that in all those places where a modern nation has been grafted onto an ancient culture, history has returned with a vengeance. From Confucian China to Buddhist Myanmar to Hindu India, history has become the source of a fierce new conservatism that is being used to curb freedoms of women and stoke hatred of minorities. As the ultimate source of legitimacy, history has become a way for modernizing societies to procure the trappings of modernity while guarding themselves from its values.
Lawrence Hrubes

Molly Crockett: Beware neuro-bunk | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...rockett_beware_neuro_bunk.html

TOK science neuro neurology neuroscience TEDTalk Molly Crockett badscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Sep 13
     
    "Brains are ubiquitous in modern marketing: Headlines proclaim cheese sandwiches help with decision-making, while a "neuro" drink claims to reduce stress. There's just one problem, says neuroscientist Molly Crockett: The benefits of these "neuro-enhancements" are not proven scientifically. In this to-the-point talk, Crockett explains the limits of interpreting neuroscientific data, and why we should all be aware of them."
Lawrence Hrubes

Damien Hirst - 1 views

www.damienhirst.com/...catalogue

TOK art Hirst ethics sculpture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13
     
    modern, often-controversial British artist's web site
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Democrac... - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/b03969vt

TOK arts judgment

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13
     
    "In the first of four lectures, recorded in front of an audience at Tate Modern in London, the artist Grayson Perry reflects on the idea of quality and examines who and what defines what we see and value as art. He argues that there is no empirical way to judge quality in art. Instead the validation of quality rests in the hands of a tightknit group of people at the heart of the art world including curators, dealers, collectors and critics who decide in the end what ends up in galleries and museums."
Lawrence Hrubes

Reading With Imagination - NYTimes.com - 2 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...reading-with-imagination

arts literature imagination

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Fiction, which I believe suffers most from modern readership, is by definition not factual. It may be about the real world and it may try to illuminate some facts about the real world or how real people behave in it or, as is so often the case in modern literature, it may also be about the impossibility of portraying any such reality since the very nature of art is artifice. Primarily, however, fiction (and biography, essay, history, memoir only perhaps to a lesser degree) is a creative act, an act of the author’s imagination and likewise, ideally, it should be read with imagination.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-24819441

arts TOK history painting abstract

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • This week it was revealed that a huge stash of modern art had been found in a flat in Munich. Many of the paintings were considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, who staged an exhibition especially to ridicule them. Why did Hitler hate abstract art so much?
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery - 1 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...p01j9rwb

TOK arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13
     
    Ironic drawings about art by modern British ceramic artist Grayson Perry, who gives a series of 3 entertaining and insightful lectures for the 2013 BBC Reith Lectures.
markfrankel18

We are more rational than those who nudge us - Steven Poole - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...tional-than-those-who-nudge-us

TOK economics bias rational reason Kahneman

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Sep 14 - Cached
  • We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?
  • A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.
  • Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The thorny question is whether these widespread departures from the economic definition of ‘rationality’ should be taken to show that we are irrational, or whether they merely show that the economic definition of rationality is defective.
  • During the development of game theory and decision theory in the mid-20th century, a ‘rational’ person in economic terms became defined as a lone individual whose decisions were calculated to maximise self-interest, and whose preferences were (logically or mathematically) consistent in combination and over time. It turns out that people are not in fact ‘rational’ in this homo economicus way,
  • There has been some controversy over the correct statistical interpretations of some studies, and several experiments that ostensibly demonstrate ‘priming’ effects, in particular, have notoriously proven difficult to replicate. But more fundamentally, the extent to which such findings can show that we are acting irrationally often depends on what we agree should count as ‘rational’ in the first place.
  • if we want to understand others, we can always ask what is making their behaviour ‘rational’ from their point of view. If, on the other hand, we just assume they are irrational, no further conversation can take place.
  • And so there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable. The dissenting critiques of the cognitive-bias literature argue that people are not, in fact, as individually irrational as the present cultural climate assumes. And proponents of debiasing argue that we can each become more rational with practice. But even if we each acted as irrationally as often as the most pessimistic picture implies, that would be no cause to flatten democratic deliberation into the weighted engineering of consumer choices, as nudge politics seeks to do. On the contrary, public reason is our best hope for survival.
Lawrence Hrubes

How Should Artists Like Ai Weiwei Address Human Rights? - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...521520

arts ethics emotion refugees

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Last month marked six years since the start of the Syrian war, which has forced millions of people to flee their homes in one of the largest humanitarian crises in modern history. Perhaps the artist who has most visibly used his work to draw attention to the conflict is Ai Weiwei, whose political activism has earned him a reputation as China’s foremost creative dissident. Ai has made works focused on the refugee crisis for years, but lately his projects have taken on a greater sense of urgency. His newest exhibit, Law of the Journey, was recently unveiled at the National Gallery in Prague and features a massive inflatable lifeboat with 258 faceless, rubber figures on board—evoking the treacherous journey some refugees make to Europe.
  • Last month marked six years since the start of the Syrian war, which has forced millions of people to flee their homes in one of the largest humanitarian crises in modern history. Perhaps the artist who has most visibly used his work to draw attention to the conflict is Ai Weiwei, whose political activism has earned him a reputation as China’s foremost creative dissident. Ai has made works focused on the refugee crisis for years, but lately his projects have taken on a greater sense of urgency. His newest exhibit, Law of the Journey, was recently unveiled at the National Gallery in Prague and features a massive inflatable lifeboat with 258 faceless, rubber figures on board—evoking the treacherous journey some refugees make to Europe. Earlier this week, the Public Art Fund announced Ai would build more than 100 fence-themed installations in New York across multiple boroughs, asking the city’s inhabitants to reflect on the ideas of barriers, nationhood, and security.
markfrankel18

BBC News - Why modern maps put everyone at the centre of the world - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-19908848

science maps bbc

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • As a curious race we have always liked to know where we are, but it is now almost impossible not to know - our phones, computers and sat navs keep us continually co-ordinated, and through them we are involuntarily tracked ourselves. Once the preserve and privilege of the rich and influential, maps and accurate wayfinding have suddenly come to feel like a birthright
  • But these days we are all really at the centre of our maps, which is both a useful and egocentric thing. A thousand years ago Jerusalem stood at the centre of the Christian world view, or if you lived in China it was Youzhou. But now it is us, a throbbing green dot on our handhelds. We no longer travel from A to B but from Me to B, and we spread out maps on the floor or on our laps in a car only with wistful nostalgia.
  • It is still too early to say whether a lessening in our spatial ability and perspective, and our ability to remember landmarks, will decrease that area in our hippocampus that serves as the engine room for such skills, but it is highly likely. An examination of the brains of cab drivers has shown a great expansion in that area due, it is thought, to the retention of many miles of street plans.
markfrankel18

Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...map-emotions-through-a-century

emotions TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • "In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bentley says.
  • Which brings us to the most surprising finding of the study: We think of modern culture — and often ourselves — as more emotionally open than people in the past. We live in a world of reality television and blogs and Facebook — it feels like feelings are everywhere, displayed to a degree that they never were before. But according to this research, that's not so.
markfrankel18

Debate Erupts in California Over Curriculum on India's History - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...-india-history-curriculum.html

history TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 May 16 - No Cached
  • Victors are said to write history. But in California, history is being written by a committee that is at the center of a raging debate over how to tell the story of South Asia as it tries to update textbooks and revise curriculums for Grades 6 and 7.The dispute centers on whether the region that includes modern-day India, Pakistan and Nepal should be referred to as India or as South Asia, to represent the plurality of cultures there — particularly because India was not a nation-state until 1947. It also touches on how the culture of the region is portrayed, including women’s role in society and the vestiges of the caste system.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - English has 3,000 words for being drunk - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...has-3000-words-for-being-drunk

language culture slang

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • ‘Booze’ was once a popular term in the slang or ‘cant’ of the criminal underworld, which may explain its rebellious overtones today. But whether formally or informally, when it comes to alcohol, English has been hard at work for centuries.  ‘Alcohol’ itself is 800 years old, taken from the Spanish Arabic al-kuḥul which meant ‘the kohl’, linking it with the same black eye cosmetic you’ll find on any modern make-up counter.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hy-nothing-is-truly-alive.html

science TOK classification life biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • What is life? Science cannot tell us. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life. To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.
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.
markfrankel18

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hy-nothing-is-truly-alive.html

TOK science models language

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • What is life? Science cannot tell us. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life. To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.
  • Life is a concept, not a reality.
markfrankel18

Tennessee Pastor Disputes Wildlife Possession Charge by State - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ossession-charge-by-state.html

ToK religion ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • In a mix of old-time religion, modern media and Tennessee law, a 22-year-old preacher who has become a reality television star because of his experience in handling poisonous snakes pleaded not guilty on Friday to illegally keeping dozens of them that he and his congregants routinely touch during worship services.
  • “We don’t allow anybody other than a permitted individual to possess venomous snakes,” said Matthew Cameron, a spokesman for the wildlife agency. “We don’t view him as any different from anyone else in the general public who has a king cobra in his room.”
  • “This ain’t no longer just a fight for snake handling,” Mr. Hamblin, the father of five, told a group of supporters wearing red — to symbolize the blood of Christ — before his arraignment on a misdemeanor wildlife possession charge. “This is a fight for freedom of religion.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But to Mr. Hamblin and his supporters, the case is little more than state-instigated discrimination against a religious practice that has been present in East Tennessee for more than a century. “When those officers entered the house of God, that cooked it with me,” said James Slusher, who attends Mr. Hamblin’s church but said he does not handle snakes.
1 - 20 of 43 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page