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markfrankel18

Our Biased Brains - NYTimes.com - 4 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...kristof-our-biased-brains.html

TOK bias perception psychology race

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 May 15 - No Cached
  • The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face. Brain scans show that even when people are told to sort people by gender, the brain still groups people by race.
  • White American kids disproportionately judged that the people who were smiling were white and that those who were frowning were Asian. When the experiment was conducted in Taiwan with exactly the same photos, Taiwanese children thought that the faces when smiling were Asian, when frowning were white.
Lawrence Hrubes

Should Patients Be Allowed to Choose - or Refuse - Doctors by Race or Gender? - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...doctors-by-race-or-gender.html

ethics medicine racism gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Everyone knows that doctors must not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, religion or national origin when they select or treat patients: It’s an obligation they accepted when they entered the health care profession. (That doesn’t mean they have to take all comers; they can turn away patients for various other reasons.) But should patients be able to choose clinicians on the basis of such attributes? The answer is: It depends.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - The greatest mistranslations ever - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-greatest-mistranslations-ever

TOK language translation history culture politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15
     
    "Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Marvel's Female Superheroes Look Like Porn Stars - The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...vel-a-force-female-superheroes

arts ethics gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 May 15 - No Cached
  • Last week, Marvel launched a new Avengers movie, “Age of Ultron,” and this month it’s launching a new comic book, “A-Force.” Ultron is a robot with artificial intelligence who believes that the only way to achieve peace on earth is to exterminate the human race. The A-Force is a race of lady Avengers, led by She-Hulk, who come from a “feminist paradise,” but I don’t know what that could possibly mean, because they all look like porn stars.
markfrankel18

When Whites Just Don't Get It, Part 6 - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-just-dont-get-it-part-6.html

TOK bias race perception psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Why do we discriminate? The big factor isn’t overt racism. Rather, it seems to be unconscious bias among whites who believe in equality but act in ways that perpetuate inequality.
  • That’s why it’s so important for whites to engage in these uncomfortable discussions of race, because we are (unintentionally) so much a part of the problem. It’s not that we’re evil, but that we’re human. The challenge is to recognize that unconscious bias afflicts us all — but that we just may be able to overcome it if we face it.
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. 
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.
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.
markfrankel18

The Timekeeper: Behind the Scenes of Humanity's Most Accurate Atomic Clocks, Which Dict... - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...eeper-video-demetrios-matsakis

TOK time perception technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • In this fascinating micro-documentary, Dr. Demetrios Matsakis, chief scientist for Time Services at the U.S. Naval Observatory — the same federal agency that hired astronomer Maria Mitchell as the first woman employed by the government — takes us on a tour of the USNO’s 100 atomic clocks, where the time on your iPhone originates. Dr. Matsakis explains how these atomic clocks — which won’t fall behind or race forward by a single second in 300 million years, rendering them the most accurate measuring devices ever created by humanity — also synchronize GPS, coordinate military operations, dictate financial transactions, and orchestrate internet communication. He then peers into the future to imagine the time-accuracy that is to come, as well as the dark side of such precision.
Lawrence Hrubes

Interview: Edet Belzberg, Director Of 'Watchers Of The Sky' : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ent-his-life-trying-to-stop-it

TOK language history ethics emotion

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The world has grown far too familiar with genocide; as mass killings have claimed countless lives, the word has become ingrained into our vocabularies. But the term didn't exist until 1943, when Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it — pairing the Greek "genos," meaning race or family, with the Latin "-cidere," for killing. Lemkin, who witnessed the massacres of the early 20th century, spent his life campaigning to make the world acknowledge and prosecute the crime. A new documentary, Watchers of the Sky, tells his story. Once he'd established the word, Lemkin worked persistently in the then-newly-formed United Nations, hounding delegates to discuss his new word and acknowledge the issue.
markfrankel18

Different rules apply | MZS | Roger Ebert - 0 views

www.rogerebert.com/...ilege-really-means-an-anecdote

TOK Ferguson race sociology

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • I want to tell you a story about the difference between knowing and understanding.
  • All of which is a wind-up to say: having grown up in a mostly black neighborhood near Love Field airport in Dallas, and having been a diligent liberal for most of my adult life, I already knew there was such a thing as white privilege, and was properly horrified by it, but I didn't truly understand what it meant, on a deep level, until one summer night in 2006, when I was spared arrest or worse thanks to the color of my skin.
  • I went home. The other guy didn't. That's white privilege.White privilege sent me home to my kids.White privilege is the reason I've never told this story publicly.Extenuating personal circumstances, aside, I did something that I should not have done, and I escaped the consequences of my actions by accepting a benefit that never should have been bestowed.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • So much of the crosstalk, the shouting, the debate over Ferguson stems, I believe, from an inability to admit this fact of life, which was illustrated so plainly to me that night in front of the deli. I've never been profiled. I've never been stopped and frisked. I've never experienced anything of the sort because of the gift that my parents gave me, and that my son's parents gave him: white skin.
  • I already knew this stuff. But after that night in front of the deli, I understood it.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Living with the J-word - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31765970

ethics language racism antisemitism identity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Thankfully, most of this Jew-targeted hatred takes the form of verbal aggression rather than physical violence. But because many critics of Israel make no distinction between citizens of the Jewish state and the worldwide Jewish community, the J-word has been the focus. You won't see "Kill Israelis" scrawled on London synagogue walls. What you see on walls is "Kill the Jews", and on banners "Hitler was Right". And this brings me back to the point about the complexity of anti-Semitism today. It is always around and in the end it is focused primarily on the J-word, in the same way that another form of racism is focused on the N-word. Those on the receiving end find their lives shaped by it. Certainly my life, my sense of myself, has been shaped by the casual anti-Semitism that I have encountered for more than half a century. The first time I was called a "Jew" with malicious intent was September 1958 in the playground of Belmont Hills Elementary School, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It came as a surprise. I was eight years old and up until that time had been living in New York City where everyone I encountered was Jewish. Until that moment, the word "Jew" had simply been one of the words and phrases - like "Mike", "son" and "114 East 90th Street" - whose meanings were slowly building up into a sense of who I was.
  • Throughout the 19th Century, "Israelite" or "Hebrew" or "follower of Moses" supplanted "Jew" as the politically correct way to refer to the community. It was a process analogous to the way "black" and then "African-American" or "person of colour" replaced "Negro" in polite discourse after the Civil Rights era.
  • Thirty years later, a new word for this hatred was coined - "anti-Semitism". This was a time when race science was all the rage. Anti-Semitism avoided the connotation of pure hatred against individuals which is, after all, irrational. It focused scientifically on the supposed racial and social characteristics of a group, the Jews, without mentioning them by name. From there it was easy to start a political movement - based on scientific "facts" - to rein in a people who clearly were alien.
markfrankel18

Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants? | Global Development Pr... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...le-expats-immigrants-migration

TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races’.
markfrankel18

We have the Woodrow Wilson/P.C. debate all backwards: Protesters are forcing a debate P... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...on_has_whitewashed_for_decades

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Too often in our debates about freedom of speech, we assume that it already exists and that it is campus activists, particularly over questions of race, who threaten it. But what Princeton’s students have shown is that, before they came along, there was in fact precious little speech about figures like Wilson, and what speech there was, was mostly bland PR for tourists and prospective students. Even more important, Princeton’s students have shown us that it is precisely the kinds of actions they have taken — which are uncivil, frequently illegal and always unruly — that produce speech.
  • While my general approach to history is one of modulation — past imperfect, always — I’m leery of those who would say, against the students, don’t erase the past. I’m leery of these critics’ timing: if there’s any erasing going on here, it’s in the daily practices of Princeton. In those campus tours, those campus addresses, the general celebration of the man. Why haven’t we heard criticism of how the past is being erased by Princeton’s celebration of Wilson?I’m also leery of these critics’ assumptions that removing a name from a building is about erasing the past. As if once the name is gone, all conversation stops, all memory disappears.
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

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

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture | The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...iteness-in-classical-sculpture

arts perception race racism sculpture culture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • if you were looking at an ancient Greek or Roman sculpture up close, some of the pigment “was easy to see, even with the naked eye.” Westerners had been engaged in an act of collective blindness. “It turns out that vision is heavily subjective,” he told me. “You need to transform your eye into an objective tool in order to overcome this powerful imprint”—a tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to see color as alien, sensual, and garish.
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