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markfrankel18

When are you dead? - 2011 SPRING - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University Sch... - 0 views

stanmed.stanford.edu/...article5.html

ToK psychology Science consciousness death medicine

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery. Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.
Lawrence Hrubes

How Social Media Is Changing Organ Donation : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ere-to-donate-your-kidney.html

TOK ethics organ donation medicine health

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Sep 13
     
    "How do we keep organ distribution from morphing into a popularity contest, where those with the most sympathetic stories win, or are allowed to change the rules? "
Lawrence Hrubes

How Judaism's definition of death can boost organ donations - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/health-38230114

religious knowledge systems ethics medicine death

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • When Robert Berman, an Orthodox Jew from the US, settled in Jerusalem, he was not prepared for the strong resistance to his argument for organ donation from some sections of the society. To advance his cause he has had to engage in the most profound and tricky discussions on religion and death.Many Orthodox rabbis have described the act of taking organs from a brain-dead person as retzicha - tantamount to murder.
markfrankel18

From Quarks to Quasars » Correlation vs. Causation: The Analysis of Data - 0 views

www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/correlation-vs-causation

correlation ToK reason fallacy

shared by markfrankel18 on 25 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Between 1997 and 2007, the rate of autism and organic food sales has risen at the same rate. Obviously, this chart goes to prove that autism and eating organic foods are related to each other and you should avoid organics all together, right? Wrong. This chart is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen detailing how correlation and causation can have absolutely nothing to do with each other. In fact, in many cases, correlation and causation have nothing to do with each other – but what exactly does that mean?
  • In Latin, the phrase generally used is “cum hoc ergo propter hoc” which translates more literally to “With this therefore because of this.” The opposite, however, is true. Causation proves correlation, but not the other way around.
  • If a correlation is established, how can you determine causation? Are they caused by the same thing? Does one cause the other? Are they completely unrelated? In order for one event to cause another, they must be related. In other words, there must be some real mechanism connecting the two events (assuming the correlation isn’t completely coincidental). Here, the cause and effect mechanism must comply with the known laws of nature – this (at least) gives us somewhere to start.
Elisabeth Gabalova

Genetically Modified Organisms: To Eat Or Not To Eat? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...organisms-to-eat-or-not-to-eat

GMO ToK ethics science

shared by Elisabeth Gabalova on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Elisabeth Gabalova on 01 Oct 13
     
    Genetically Modified Organisms: To eat or not to eat
markfrankel18

How Societies Should Organize: Balancing Freedom and Community | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ancing-freedom-and-community-2

TOK ethics community

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Now most people would probably agree that whatever is the greatest good for the greatest number of people is the right action. But what if you came in for a routine medical operation and they carved you up and gave your organs to those in need?! It's a problem called the Transplant Surgeon Objection and it demonstrates how tricky our beliefs can be when we're pressed to defend them.
Lawrence Hrubes

A New Form of Stem-Cell Engineering Raises Ethical Questions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-synthetic-embryos-sheefs.html

ethics science biology life research

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • As biological research races forward, ethical quandaries are piling up. In a report published Tuesday in the journal eLife, researchers at Harvard Medical School said it was time to ponder a startling new prospect: synthetic embryos.In recent years, scientists have moved beyond in vitro fertilization. They are starting to assemble stem cells that can organize themselves into embryolike structures.Soon, experts predict, they will learn how to engineer these cells into new kinds of tissues and organs. Eventually, they may take on features of a mature human being.
Lawrence Hrubes

The New Science of Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-new-science-of-mind.html

TOK mind brain psychotherapy science psychiatry behaviour neurology biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13
     
    This new science of mind is based on the principle that our mind and our brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. It is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by our brain. The same principle of unity applies to mental disorders.
Lawrence Hrubes

Michael Specter: Exploring the Human Microbiome : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...121022fa_fact_specter

TOK science biology germs

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Dec 13
     
    ""Germs make us sick," he said. "But everyone focusses on the harm. And it's not that simple, because without most of these organisms we could never survive.''"
Lawrence Hrubes

Ceres, Pluto, and the War Over Dwarf Planets - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...dawn-ceres-pluto-dwarf-planets

science language classification astronomy

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Whatever the probes find, it probably won’t help untangle the tortuous reasoning that led to Pluto and Ceres being labelled as dwarf planets in the first place. That happened in 2006, a few months after New Horizons launched and about a year before Dawn did, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, the organization that is in charge of classifying and naming celestial objects. The I.A.U. defines a dwarf planet according to four criteria: it must orbit the sun, it must be spherical, it must not be a satellite of another planet, and it must not have “cleared the neighborhood” of other objects of comparable size. Ceres has a diameter of fewer than six hundred miles, Pluto of about fourteen hundred miles. By comparison, Mercury, now the smallest official planet in our solar system, is more than three thousand miles across. So it’s not unreasonable, Stern says, to call Pluto both a planet and a dwarf, provided that one doesn’t cancel out the other. “I’m the one who originally coined the term ‘dwarf planet,’ back in the nineteen-nineties,” he told me. “I’m fine with it. But saying a dwarf planet isn’t a planet is like saying a pygmy hippopotamus isn’t a hippopotamus. It’s scientifically indefensible.”
  • Why, then, did the I.A.U. demote Pluto? As David Spergel, the head of the astrophysics department at Princeton University, explained to me, once scientists discovered the Kuiper Belt, which includes several Pluto look-alikes, and once they discovered Eris, a dead ringer for Pluto, the organization became worried about a slippery slope. If Pluto was a planet, Eris would have to be, too, along with any number of Kuiper Belt objects. Things risked getting out of hand. Fifteen or twenty or fifty planets was too many—who would be able to remember them all? That last question may sound absurd, but in a debate held last year at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Gareth Williams, the astronomer representing the I.A.U.’s position, couldn’t come up with a better argument. “You’d need a mnemonic to remember the mnemonic,” he said. “We really want to keep the number of planets low.” He lost the debate on the merits, but the demotion had already been won.
markfrankel18

How Much for a Kidney? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...how-much-for-a-kidney

ethics TOK science organs

shared by markfrankel18 on 22 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The demand for transplantable organs far exceeds the supply. That has led to an increase in the illegal trafficking of kidneys, which represent the majority of living-donor transplants because a person can live with only one. Should people in need of a kidney transplant be allowed to pay someone to donate one of theirs, or would that let the rich exploit the poor?
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Forum, A Leap of Faith: Finding common ground between Science a... - 1 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p039mhnt

religion science

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The Forum @ CERN: A Leap of Faith: Finding Common Ground Between Science and Theology. Promoting a dialogue between science and religion has long been a challenging task- the two communities of thought often seem far apart. The Forum explores the challenge in a discussion recorded at CERN in Switzerland and asks not only why this dialogue is important but how it is working and where it might lead. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research where physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universeWith Bridget Kendall to discuss common ground between science and religion are:Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, a German particle physicist and the Director General of the European Organization of Nuclear Research, or CERN, since 2009.Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College who specialises in cosmology, nonlinear physics and astrobiology. Dr. Kusum Jain, a renowned Indian scholar of Jain Philosophy and Director of the Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. She has published extensively on such topics as human rights, the roots of terrorism, and bio-ethics.Monsignor Tomasz Trafny, Head of Science and Faith, Vatican City State.And there is poetry, especially written for the programme, by British poet Murray Lachlan Young.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Dec 15
     
    This is a 41-minute broadcast from 8 Dec 2015.
Lawrence Hrubes

Banksy Finds a Canvas and a New Fanbase in Gaza's Ruins - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ew-fanbase-in-gazas-ruins.html

arts graffiti empathy war

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 May 15 - No Cached
  • GAZA — Very little of Abu Shadi Shenbari’s family home remains in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip. Only a concrete bathroom wall was left standing when Israeli forces flattened the neighborhood near the border with Israel during the war with Hamas last summer.Though Mr. Shenbari had all but abandoned that last panel of erect concrete, in recent days he began building a wood and wire-mesh fort with a flimsy nylon roof to protect the bombed-out bathroom wall, which is now home to a 10-foot-tall depiction of a kitten.The spray-painted mural was created by the elusive British graffiti artist Banksy, who slipped in and out of Gaza in February, leaving his mark on three slabs of rubble left from Israel’s 50-day fight with Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza.
Lawrence Hrubes

Stalin, Russia's New Hero - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-vladimir-putins-russia.html

history memory politics nationalism bias ethics propaganda

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Polls show a gradual improvement in perceptions of Stalin, who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. A survey released on March 1 by the Levada Center, a research organization based in Moscow, found that 40 percent of Russians thought the Stalin era brought “more good than bad,” up from 27 percent in 2012. In an annual Levada survey published in January 2015, a majority of Russians (52 percent) said Stalin “probably” or “definitely” played a positive role in the country.
  • School textbooks and state television programs, even if they briefly mention his human rights abuses, celebrate Stalin as a great leader.
  • Why is Stalin now gaining popularity? For one, people remember less and less about his purges and prison camps — which in Russia began to be thoroughly investigated and openly discussed only in the 1980s. As the sharp edges of Stalin’s image have gone out of focus, he has become what Ilya Budraitskis, a leftist thinker and activist, described to me as an “empty shell that can be filled with different meanings.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Same but Different - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...breakthroughs-in-epigenetics

science biology genetics nature DNA ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Why are identical twins alike? In the late nineteen-seventies, a team of scientists in Minnesota set out to determine how much these similarities arose from genes, rather than environments—from “nature,” rather than “nurture.” Scouring thousands of adoption records and news clips, the researchers gleaned a rare cohort of fifty-six identical twins who had been separated at birth. Reared in different families and different cities, often in vastly dissimilar circumstances, these twins shared only their genomes. Yet on tests designed to measure personality, attitudes, temperaments, and anxieties, they converged astonishingly. Social and political attitudes were powerfully correlated: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. The same went for religiosity (or its absence), even for the ability to be transported by an aesthetic experience. Two brothers, separated by geographic and economic continents, might be brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne, as if responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes.
  • It’s one thing to study epigenetic changes across the life of a single organism, or down a line of cells. The more tantalizing question is whether epigenetic messages can, like genes, cross from parents to their offspring.
  • The most suggestive evidence for such transgenerational transmission may come from a macabre human experiment. In September, 1944, amid the most vengeful phase of the Second World War, German troops occupying the Netherlands banned the export of food and coal to its northern parts. Acute famine followed, called the Hongerwinter—the hunger winter. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children died of malnourishment; millions suffered it and survived. Not surprisingly, the children who endured the Hongerwinter experienced chronic health issues. In the nineteen-eighties, however, a curious pattern emerged: when the children born to women who were pregnant during the famine grew up, they had higher rates of morbidity as well—including obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. (Malnourishment in utero can cause the body to sequester higher amounts of fat in order to protect itself from caloric loss.) Methylation alterations were also seen in regions of their DNA associated with growth and development. But the oddest result didn’t emerge for another generation. A decade ago, when the grandchildren of men and women exposed to the famine were studied, they, too, were reported to have had higher rates of illness. (These findings have been challenged, and research into this cohort continues.) “Genes cannot change in an entire population in just two generations,” Allis said. “But some memory of metabolic stress could have become heritable.”
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

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 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

Placebo-philes - Anxious Machine - 1 views

www.anxiousmachine.com/...placibo-philes

TOK placebo perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • It's easy to sneer at the placebo effect, or to feel ashamed of it when you're its victim. And that's precisely why I found Felix Salmon's piece revelatory, because instead of sneering at the placebo effect of fancy wine, its marketing, and its slightly higher prices, he thinks we should take advantage of it. If the placebo effect makes us happy, why not take advantage of that happiness?
  • n a recent article for the Atlantic, David H. Freedman argues that there's virtually no scientific evidence that alternative medicine (anything from chiropractic care to acupuncture) has any curative benefit beyond a placebo effect. And so many scientists are outraged that anyone takes alternative medicine seriously. However, there is one area where alternative medicine often trumps traditional medicine: stress reduction. And stress reduction can, of course, make a huge impact on people's health. The Atlantic article quotes Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “We tend to forget how powerful an organ the brain is in our biology,” Blackburn told me. “It’s the big controller. We’re seeing that the brain pokes its nose into a lot of the processes involved in these chronic diseases. It’s not that you can wish these diseases away, but it seems we can prevent and slow their onset with stress management.” Numerous studies have found that stress impairs the immune system, and a recent study found that relieving stress even seems to be linked to slowing the progression of cancer in some patients. Perhaps not surprisingly, a trip to the chiropractor or the acupuncturist is much more likely to reduce your stress than a trip to the doctor. If anything, a trip to the doctor makes you more anxious.
Lawrence Hrubes

Ai Weiwei Embraces the Political - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ei-embraces-the-political.html

TOK arts China politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • BERLIN — The “Evidence” from which the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau derives its name could be the displayed collection of hard drives, laptops and notebooks the Chinese authorities confiscated after arresting the artist in 2011 as he tried to board a plane. Or it could be the life-size replica of the cell where he was held under constant surveillance for 81 days following his detention. Or even the 6,000 wooden stools that fill the sunken atrium of the space, in a silent testimony to a lost way of life in the Chinese countryside.
  • Mr. Ai’s solo exhibition, which opened here on Thursday and runs through July 7, is the largest show of his works to date. It reflects both the current social upheaval in China, as well as the artist’s own experiences with repression. Organizers said they encouraged Mr. Ai, who has long angered the Chinese authorities through his outspoken opinions about censorship and art, to highlight the political element of his works in the show.
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