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Lawrence Hrubes

Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...erra-in-the-qatari-desert.html

arts TOK sculpture culture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Richard Serra’s new sculpture, “East-West/West-East,” is a set of four standing steel plates rolled in Germany, shipped via Antwerp, and offloaded, trucked, and craned into place in the middle of the western Qatari desert. It’s his second public commission in Qatar—the first, a towering sculpture titled “7,” is his tallest ever—and it is being unveiled, together with a new work, at the Al Riwaq exhibition space, in Doha. “East-West/West-East,” which spans the greatest area of any of Serra’s creations, is yet another grand piece of public art purchased by the Gulf nation. The Qatar Museums Authority is estimated to spend about a billion dollars per year on art. At its head is the young Sheikha al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a sister of the Emir of Qatar and a Duke University graduate, who was recently named the most powerful person in the art world by ArtReview.
sleggettisp

25 maps that explain the English language - 1 views

www.vox.com/...25-maps-that-explain-english

language perception history TOK

shared by sleggettisp on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • sleggettisp on 11 Mar 15
     
    English is the language of Shakespeare and the language of Chaucer. It's spoken in dozens of countries around the world, from the United States to a tiny island named Tristan da Cunha. It reflects the influences of centuries of international exchange, including conquest and colonization, from the Vikings through the 21st century.
Lawrence Hrubes

China's Tradition of Public Shaming Thrives - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-public-shaming-thrives.html

ethics culture China punishment emotion propaganda politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • From primary school to university, I witnessed countless such public humiliations: for fighting, cheating or petty misdemeanors. Caught committing any of these offenses and you may have to stand before the student body, criticizing your own “moral flaws,” condemning your character defects, showing yourself no mercy, even exaggerating your faults. Only those who have endured it can know the depth of shame one feels.
  • The leading media outlet CCTV has provided a platform for many of the public shamings, which have included those of business people, screenwriters, celebrities, editors and journalists — anyone deemed to be on the wrong side of the Communist Party’s latest self-serving campaign. They speak to us from behind bars, their prisoner status made clear from their uniforms and (sometimes) shaved heads, their serious expressions and tearful faces.
  • Socialist countries tend to emphasize national and collective interest ahead of individual rights and dignity. This has been a constant throughout 66 years of Communist rule in China, but in the past two years the tendency has become increasingly strident. Cases of public shaming show us how in the name of some great cause, individual rights, dignity and privacy can all be sacrificed.
markfrankel18

Yale's Unsafe Spaces - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...yales-unsafe-spaces

TOK ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • And so it’s not entirely surprising that minority students in Yale’s Silliman College were upset that their master, Nicholas Christakis, and his wife, Erika, the associate master, defended the rights of students to wear offensive costumes at a Halloween party, while counselling those bothered by such behavior to “look away.”
  • some of the tensions of the liberal-arts college’s role: namely, that they are not just heady intellectual spaces but also domestic spaces, where young people live in close contact and negotiate emotionally intricate issues, including racial hostility, sexual violence, and more. The whole point of the residential system—as distinct from Yale’s classrooms—is to be a safe space, or at least this is what Yale itself implies.
markfrankel18

'Son of Saul,' Kierkegaard and the Holocaust - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...-kierkegaard-and-the-holocaust

TOK philosophy ethics arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • There are generally two, radically different ways to relate to the world: objective and subjective. Objectivity is an orientation towards reality based on abstracting away, in various degrees, from subjective experience, and from individual points of view. A subjective orientation, on the other hand, is based on an attunement to the inner experience of feeling, sensing, thinking and valuing that unfolds in our day-to-day living. This distinction has been brought into contemporary philosophical discourse most notably by Thomas Nagel, in a number of his essays, most famously in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”The spectacular success of science in the past 300 years has raised hopes that it also holds the key to guiding human beings towards a good life. Psychology and neuroscience has become a main source of life advice in the popular media. But philosophers have long held reservations about this scientific orientation to how to live life. The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, for instance, famously pointed out, no amount of fact can legislate value, moral or otherwise. You cannot derive ought from is. But there is another, in some way more radical concern, expressed in Western philosophy most forcefully by Kierkegaard, and in literature by Dostoyevsky — two religiously inspired thinkers — namely that our experience of life matters in ineffable ways that no objective understanding of the world can capture.
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

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-build-the-perfect-team.html

human sciences psychology communication

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Languages: Why we must save dying tongues - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...y-we-must-save-dying-languages

TOK language indigenous knowledge systems culture diver

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Just as ecosystems provide a wealth of services for humanity – some known, others unacknowledged or yet to be discovered – languages, too, are ripe with possibility. They contain an accumulated body of knowledge, including about geography, zoology, mathematics, navigation, astronomy, pharmacology, botany, meteorology and more. In the case of Cherokee, that language was born of thousands of years spent inhabiting the southern Appalachia Mountains. Cherokee words exist for every last berry, stem, frond and toadstool in the region, and those names also convey what kind of properties that object might have – whether it’s edible, poisonous or has some medicinal value. “No culture has a monopoly on human genius, and we never know where the next brilliant idea may come from,” Harrison says. “We lose ancient knowledge if we lose languages.”
markfrankel18

Internet Makes Hypochondria Worse - 1 views

www.webmd.com/...ernet-makes-hypochondria-worse

TOK technology psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Thanks to the Internet, becoming a hypochondriac is much easier than it used to be. The easy availability of health information on the web has certainly helped countless people make educated decisions about their health and medical treatment, but it can be disastrous for people who are likely to worry. Hypochondriacs researching an illness used to have to scour books and ask doctors for information. Now a universe of information is available with a few mouse clicks. "For hypochondriacs, the Internet has absolutely changed things for the worse," says Brian Fallon, MD, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and the co-author of Phantom Illness: Recognizing, Understanding and Overcoming Hypochondria (1996). So far, no studies have been conducted on just how hypochondriacs use the Internet, Fallon says. But the phenomenon is common enough to have a snappy name -- "cyberchondria."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Should drug firms make payments to doctors? - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-26890072

science medicine economics ethics drugs health TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Using data from more than 330,000 doctors and 12 pharmaceutical firms, it identified 58% as having received payments. It found that payments were unlikely to represent significant opportunities to educate doctors about new drugs, and that financial gain appears to be an important motive for doctors. Daniel Carlat, director of the prescription project at the non-profit group Pew Trusts, says research to date shows that doctors who have dealings with drugs reps "tend to prescribe differently". "They prescribe more drugs, more expensive drugs, more brand-name drugs, and they're less likely to follow evidence-based practice guidelines in prescribing drugs.
Lawrence Hrubes

Remembering a Crime That You Didn't Commit - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...false-memory-crime

memory false memories psychology authority crime

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Earlier this year, two forensic psychologists—Julia Shaw, of the University of Bedfordshire, and Stephen Porter, of the University of British Columbia—upped the ante. Writing in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, they described a method for implanting false memories, not of getting lost in childhood but of committing a crime in adolescence. They modelled their work on Loftus’s, sending questionnaires to each of their participant’s parents to gather background information. (Any past run-ins with the law would eliminate a student from the study.) Then they divided the students into two groups and told each a different kind of false story. One group was prompted to remember an emotional event, such as getting attacked by a dog. The other was prompted to remember a crime—an assault, for example—that led to an encounter with the police. At no time during the experiments were the participants allowed to communicate with their parents.
  • What Shaw and Porter found astonished them. “We thought we’d have something like a thirty-per-cent success rate, and we ended up having over seventy,” Shaw told me. “We only had a handful of people who didn’t believe us.” After three debriefing sessions, seventy-six per cent of the students claimed to remember the false emotional event; nearly the same amount—seventy per cent—remembered the fictional crime. Shaw and Porter hadn’t put undue stress on the students; in fact, they had treated them in a friendly way. All it took was a suggestion from an authoritative source, and the subjects’ imaginations did the rest. As Münsterberg observed of the farmer’s son, the students seemed almost eager to self-incriminate.
  • Kassin cited the example of Martin Tankleff, a high-school senior from Long Island who, in 1988, awoke to find his parents bleeding on the floor. Both had been repeatedly stabbed; his mother was dead and his father was dying. He called the police. Later, at the station, he was harshly interrogated. For five hours, Tankleff resisted. Finally, an officer told him that his father had regained consciousness at the hospital and named him as the killer. (In truth, the father died without ever waking.) Overwhelmed by the news, Tankleff took responsibility, saying that he must have blacked out and killed his parents unwittingly. A jury convicted him of murder. He spent seventeen years in prison before the real murderers were found. Kassin condemns the practice of lying to suspects, which is illegal in many countries but not here. The American court system, he said, should address it. “Lying puts innocent people at risk, and there’s a hundred years of psychology to show it,” he said.
markfrankel18

Norway to restage 1914 'human zoo' that exhibited Africans as inmates | World news | th... - 2 views

www.theguardian.com/...-human-zoo-africans-as-inmates

TOK arts ethics history

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • As part of mammoth celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Norway’s constitution, the government is funding two artists to re-enact a "human zoo", which will open to the public on 15 May. Oslo’s original human zoo or Kongolandsbyen was central to Norway’s world fair in 1914. The artists claim that the new project, which they named European Attraction Limited, is meant to provoke a discussion on colonialism and racism in a post-modern world, engaging with Norway’s racist past in the process. Some anti-racism organisations and commentators have labelled the project offensive and racist. Is there any artistic value in the re-enactment of such a dehumanising spectacle, especially in a world not yet fully healed of racism? Is this an abuse of art? Or will the re-enactment reverse the modest gains of the equality struggles, especially when the world engages with the subject of race so superficially?
Lawrence Hrubes

Prison Architecture and the Question of Ethics - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-the-question-of-ethics.html

TOK ethics arts architecture death

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Today, prison design is a civic cause for some architects who specialize in criminal justice and care about humane design. There is a lot of research documenting how the right kinds of design reduce violence inside prisons and even recidivism. Architects can help ensure that prisons don’t succumb to our worst instincts — that they are not about spending the least amount of money to create the most horrendous places possible, in the name of vengeance — but promote rehabilitation and peace.Designing execution chambers is something else. They require their own deathly architecture. If architects refuse to design them, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be built, any more than the refusal by doctors and pharmaceutical companies to participate in executions has stopped executions from happening. But Ms. Dreiling said it herself: “Many, if not most, architects enter this profession because it is a calling. They believe they can make the world a better place, they believe they can enhance the lives of people on a daily basis, where they live, work and play.”
Lawrence Hrubes

After 70 years living as a black woman, Verda Byrd discovered she was white - Home | Ou... - 2 views

www.cbc.ca/...overed-she-was-white-1.3763416

race identity ethics family perception

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • For almost all her life, Verda Byrd has lived as a black women. She was raised by black parents, married a black man, attended black churches, and even frequented black hair salons. But two years ago, she learned from her adoption papers that she was actually white.  Verda was legally born Jeanette Beagle, daughter to a poor white woman named Daisy Beagle, who struggled to raise several kids in the 1940's.  She was put into a children's home after her biological mother was injured in an accident. A few years later, Jeanette was adopted by a black couple  — and she became Verda.  Although her adopted parents told Verda she wasn't biologically theirs, they never told her that she was white. The discovery prompted Verda to reunite with her biological sisters. Through the reconnection, she learned that her perspective of race was far different from theirs. 
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - The language rules we know - but don't know we know - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know

language intuition

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • “Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”
  • You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of it. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language.
  • It’s astonishing quite how expert you are at the English language. There are so many tenses you can use without even thinking about it, and almost certainly without being able to name them. It depends how you count them, but there are about 20 that you deploy faultlessly.
onlinejobstudy

http://onlinejobstudy.com/shekhawati-university-ma-final-result/ - 0 views

University Result 2017 -Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Shekhawati University (PDUSU), Sikar Post Graduate examination is over and students are searching BA, MA, MSC, MCOM BSC, BCom (Bachelor of Arts) A...

#online_colleges #online_college_degree #online_college_classes #online_degrees #online_degree_programs #college_online #associate_degree_online #online_college_courses

started by onlinejobstudy on 08 Jul 17 no follow-up yet
markfrankel18

Trading One Bad Map for Another? - Atlas Obscura - 0 views

www.atlasobscura.com/...mercator-peters-boston-map

TOK maps

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • “News of Boston public schools’ decision to go with the Peters projection has gone viral over the past week, and my teeth have not stopped itching,” Jonathan Crowe writes on his blog, The Map Room. “It is incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded to say it should be one or the other,” says Mark Monmonier, author of Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Even Ronald Grim, curator of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, had concerns: “In my mind, both the Mercator and the Peters are controversial projections,” he says in a phone interview. “But we were not asked to be part of the decision.” Choosing between map projections is a necessarily difficult task. The Earth is resolutely three-dimensional, and any attempts to smooth it out are going to add a certain amount of warping. It’s a balancing act: the more accurate you make the continents’ relative area, the more you have to distort their shapes, and vice versa. The art of cartography lies in choosing to privilege one or another of these accuracies—or finding a sweet spot between them that serves your particular purpose.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Family That Built an Empire of Pain | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...y-that-built-an-empire-of-pain

science ethics pain advertising drugs philanthropy

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • “It’s a parallel to what the tobacco industry did,” Mike Moore told me. “They got caught in America, they saw their market share decline, so they export it to places with even fewer regulations than we have.” He added, “You know what’s going to happen. You’re going to see lots and lots of death.” In May, several members of Congress wrote to the World Health Organization, urging it to help stop the spread of OxyContin, and mentioning the Sackler family by name. “The international health community has a rare opportunity to see the future,” they wrote. “Do not allow Purdue to walk away from the tragedy they have inflicted on countless American families simply to find new markets and new victims elsewhere.”
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