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Lawrence Hrubes

What is history? A critical review of E. H. Carr | DIBAJ - 0 views

uloom.com/131110501

history bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • E. H. Carr in 1961 delivered a series of six lectures at Cambridge University examining the question “What is history?”
  • He, however, argues that historians are susceptible to bias since every person is born into a society and invariably they are moulded by it through its environment and language as such their interpretation of history will be subjective to meet the criteria of their own culture; hence, Carr describes the historian as “the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the society to which he belongs.” Consequently, it is argued history is perceived through the environment in which the historian lives.
  • However, Carr differs from his predecessors in his definition of what constitutes as historical facts. He claims in his book that facts only become historical facts when the historian selects it to be as such.
Lawrence Hrubes

Full Exposure - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...diane-arbus-at-the-met-breuer

arts ethics photography

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 May 16 - No Cached
  • Female impersonators, midgets, hermaphrodites, tattooed (all over) men, an albino sword swallower, a human pincushion, a Jewish giant: “Characters in a Fairy Tale for Grown Ups” is the way Diane Arbus once described her subjects—“people who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do,” she also said, “invented by belief.”
  • She needed to get closer, physically and emotionally. So she asked permission, got to know people, listened to their stories; some relationships went on for years.
  • enrolled in a course with the photographer Lisette Model, who recalled that her main task was urging her nerve-racked student to overcome the fear that photographing her fairy-tale characters was “evil.” In fact, Arbus never entirely lost her qualms about the role she played in other people’s often painfully damaged lives.
Lawrence Hrubes

'Trust Your Gut' Might Actually Be Profitable Advice on Wall Street, Study Says - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-wall-street-study-says.html

intuition economics money

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • What attributes make for a successful trader? Is it comprehensive knowledge of an industry? The ability to read the markets? Luck?Or might it be something subtler and seemingly unrelated — namely, an awareness of one’s own heartbeat?
  • Mr. Coates set out to try to identify whether “gut feelings” were merely the stuff of myth, or something real and measurable.
  • And among the traders, more accurate heartbeat awareness was correlated with profitability. That is, the better a trader was at sensing his own heart rate, the more successful he was at high-frequency trading. Advertisement Continue reading the main story What is more, the longer an employee of the hedge fund had been working as a trader, the more accurate he was at counting his heart rate.
Lawrence Hrubes

You're an Adult. Your Brain, Not So Much. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lt-your-brain-not-so-much.html

brain science definitions children

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Leah H. Somerville, a Harvard neuroscientist, sometimes finds herself in front of an audience of judges. They come to hear her speak about how the brain develops.It’s a subject on which many legal questions depend. How old does someone have to be to be sentenced to death? When should someone get to vote? Can an 18-year-old give informed consent?
  • Eventually this reshaping slows, a sign that the brain is maturing. But it happens at different rates in different parts of the brain.The pruning in the occipital lobe, at the back of the brain, tapers off by age 20. In the frontal lobe, in the front of the brain, new links are still forming at age 30, if not beyond.“It challenges the notion of what ‘done’ really means,” Dr. Somerville said.
markfrankel18

How To Make Your Face (Digitally) Unforgettable : All Tech Considered : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-face-digitally-unforgettable

perception digital face

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Thanks to new research out of MIT, you might one day be able to subtly manipulate your picture to make it more memorable — meaning that people should be more likely to remember your face. According to the research article: "One ubiquitous fact about people is that we cannot avoid evaluating the faces we see in daily life ... In this flash judgment of a face, an underlying decision is happening in the brain — should I remember this face or not? Even after seeing a picture for only half a second we can often remember it." There are subjective factors affecting how a face sticks in your memory — for example, if you know someone else who looks similar, you might find a new face more familiar. But researchers found that there is also a strong universal component to memorability. Some faces are just consistently more easily remembered.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - How to learn like a memory champion - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...w-to-learn-like-a-memory-champ

TOK memory learning education technology brain

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind.
  • Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school's iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's understanding of the grammar.Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They're constantly trying to work out whose voice they're hearing,” he says. “So they're giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't be overstated," Birch says.
Lawrence Hrubes

Can Writing on a College Entrance Exam Be Properly Assessed? - Room for Debate - NYTime... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ance-exam-be-properly-assessed

literature SAT testing writing assessment subjectivity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • n revamping its SAT test for college admission, the College Board is making the essay portion optional. The written assessment was controversial since it was introduced in 2005, with some college officials expressing little confidence in what it demonstrated or how it was scored. But since an increasing number of college students are taking remedial reading and writing classes, shouldn’t the essay be mandatory? Is the bigger question, how can, or should, writing be judged?
markfrankel18

On the Face of It: How We Vote : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-the-psychology-of-voting.html

ToK psychology human sciences voting

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - Cached
  • In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.
  • Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.
markfrankel18

Are We Really Conscious? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...are-we-really-conscious.html

TOK consciousness perception brain science

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.
  • How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.
markfrankel18

The Berlin Wall's great human experiment - Ideas - The Boston Globe - 5 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

TOK history psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • But before it fell, the wall did something that most people never think of: It created a massive laboratory for studying human society.Imagine this: If you were a researcher trying to determine how a political system affects people’s values, beliefs, and behavior, you would ideally want to take two identical populations, separate them for a generation or two, and subject them each to two totally different kinds of government. Then you’d want to measure the results, the same way a medical researcher might give two sets of patients two different pills and then track their progress.Ethically, such a study would be unthinkable even to propose. But when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it created what London School of Economics associate professor Daniel Sturm calls a “perfect experiment.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Can You Spot the Liar? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...can-you-spot-the-liar.html

psychology TOK language body language lying

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Poker players might call it the “tell” — it’s the idea that your body language tells your questioners if the words you’re saying are actually true or false. These subjects in a University of Chicago study on body language and lying were asked several general questions — and then told off camera to lie or tell the truth when answering. Can you tell truth from falsehood?
markfrankel18

Is the Field of Psychology Biased Against Conservatives? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-psychology-biased-republicans

TOK psychology bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Perhaps even more potentially problematic than negative personal experience is the possibility that bias may influence research quality: its design, execution, evaluation, and interpretation. In 1975, Stephen Abramowitz and his colleagues sent a fake manuscript to eight hundred reviewers from the American Psychological Association—four hundred more liberal ones (fellows of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and editors of the Journal of Social Issues) and four hundred less liberal (social and personality psychologists who didn’t fit either of the other criteria). The paper detailed the psychological well-being of student protesters who had occupied a college administration building and compared them to their non-activist classmates. In one version, the study found that the protesters were more psychologically healthy. In another, it was the more passive group that emerged as mentally healthier. The rest of the paper was identical. And yet, the two papers were not evaluated identically. A strong favorable reaction was three times more likely when the paper echoed one’s political beliefs—that is, when the more liberal reviewers read the version that portrayed the protesters as healthier.
  • All these studies and analyses are classic examples of confirmation bias: when it comes to questions of subjective belief, we more easily believe the things that mesh with our general world view. When something clashes with our vision of how things should be, we look immediately for the flaws.
markfrankel18

Why Cameras on Police Officers Won't Save Us - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...a-police-officers-wont-save-us

TOK bias eyewitness perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The truth is that if the cameras do offer a benefit—and there is some, not a lot, of research showing that they do—it’s in influencing behavior before the fact, not providing evidence after it.
  • Maybe the bigger lesson is, again, that cameras won’t save us. Like photographs and like eyewitness testimony, video evidence is subject to differing interpretations, and to the prejudices and assumptions of individual viewers. We’ve known that for a long time; still, we can’t help hoping.
markfrankel18

The Irrationality Myth | Big Think | Praxis - 0 views

bigthink.com/...rationality-test

TOK reason Kahneman irrationality psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • There is indeed ample data that institutions and individuals can wreak havoc when they deviate from certain principles of logic and objectivity. There is also a good deal of dispiriting evidence about the rationality of voters that spurs questions about the effectiveness—and even the legitimacy—of democratic government. Yet much of the work of cognitive scientists—even fascinating Nobel Prize-winning research by Daniel Kahneman—leaves me edified but not alarmed. The human capacity for reason may be fragile and partial but it is not belied by studies in which large percentages of subjects answer a few tricky questions incorrectly.
  • My hypothesis is that while we love reading about humanity’s tendency toward the irrational, we take offense when light is thrown on our own individual incompetencies. 
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Does money make you mean? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31761576

ethics psychology experiment empathy altruism money

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • He's here to illustrate one of his more provocative experiments - who is more likely to stop for pedestrians, the rich or the poor?
  • "None of the drivers of the least expensive cars broke the law, while close to 50% of our most expensive car drivers broke the law," he says.
  • After nearly a decade researching this field, Piff has come to the controversial conclusion that being wealthy, rather than transforming you into a benevolent benefactor, can actually be rather bad for your moral fibre.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Psychology is a discipline fraught with difficulties. In real-world studies there are always confounding factors - does the person crossing the road step out more confidently in front of a cheaper car? Is the driver really wealthy or has he borrowed his uncle's BMW? Data from population surveys is hard to decipher. There's no way to tease apart cause and effect, and subjects who turn up to take part in lab studies give responses that may or may not bear any relation to real life. It's only when studies employing different methods repeatedly point in the same direction that the results are deemed significant.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - The last unmapped places on Earth - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...41127-the-last-unmapped-places

TOK maps bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Today it is safe to say there are no unknown territories with dragons. However, it’s not quite true to say that every corner of the planet is charted. We may seem to have a map for everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they are complete, accurate or even trustworthy.For starters, all maps are biased toward their creator’s subjective view of the world. As Lewis Carroll famously pointed out, a perfectly objective and faithful 1:1 representation of the world would literally have to be the same size as the place it depicted. Therefore, mapmakers must make sensible design decisions in order to compress the physical world into a much smaller, flatter depiction. Those decisions inevitably introduce personal biases, however, such as our tendency to place ourselves at the centre of the world. “We always want to put ourselves on the map,” says Jerry Brotton, a professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary University London, and author of A History of the World in 12 Maps. “Maps address an existential question as much as one that’s about orientation and coordinates.“We want to find ourselves on the map, but at the same time, we are also outside of the map, rising above the world and looking down as if we were god,” he continues. “It’s a transcendental experience.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Why do people cough during concerts? - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...entertainment-arts-21242727

TOK arts science human sciences SocialScience music

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Many concert-goers are often frustrated by the sound of people coughing during classical music performances. These coughers have now become the subject of an academic paper concerning "the economics of concert etiquette", which analyses a stark fact: people appear to cough more in concerts than in they do in normal life. The German economist Andreas Wagener told the Today programme: "The statistics indicate people cough during concerts twice as much as they do in normal life." Concert pianist Susan Tomes said: "I certainly do notice it, but I think it has something to do with the fact that people have gotten so used to hearing music amplified. "Many types of music are so loud, but classical music is not, and when you go to a classical concert, you forget how quiet acoustic instruments are." First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme on Monday 28 January 2012.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Big lives, small feet: Photographing China's bound women - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-china-31964279

culture China ethics beauty

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Decades after foot-binding was outlawed in China, a British photographer has met some of the last women subjected to the practice. It was with a sense of pride that Su Xi Rong revealed her feet to British photographer Jo Farrell. Her feet, bound from the age of seven, were so small that she had been renowned for their beauty. The 75-year-old is among the last remaining women in China to bear the effects of foot-binding, a practice first banned in 1912. Farrell met more than 50 of them over an eight-year period, and says she was surprised to find stories of pride and empowerment. Her book about the women is being launched at the British Council in Hong Kong on Monday. Foot-binding was believed to create a more beautiful foot and promote obedience.
Lawrence Hrubes

Hellhole - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hellhole

ethics justice psychology torture emotion SocialScience human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?
  • Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.
markfrankel18

Creativity Creep - The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...creativity-creep

creativity TOK arts language

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Sep 14 - Cached
  • How did we come to care so much about creativity? The language surrounding it, of unleashing, unlocking, awakening, developing, flowing, and so on, makes it sound like an organic and primordial part of ourselves which we must set free—something with which it’s natural to be preoccupied. But it wasn’t always so; people didn’t always care so much about, or even think in terms of, creativity.
  • It was Romanticism, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which took the imagination and elevated it, giving us the “creative imagination.”
  • How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing? The answer, essentially, is that it became a scientific subject, rather than a philosophical one.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • All of this measuring and sorting has changed the way we think about creativity. For the Romantics, creativity’s center of gravity was in the mind. But for us, it’s in whatever the mind decides to share—that is, in the product. It’s not enough for a person to be “imaginative” or “creative” in her own consciousness. We want to know that the product she produces is, in some sense, “actually” creative; that the creative process has come to a workable conclusion. To today’s creativity researchers, the “self-styled creative person,” with his inner, unverifiable, possibly unproductive creativity, is a kind of bogeyman; a great deal of time is spent trampling on the scarf of the lone, Romantic genius. Instead, attention is paid to the systems of influence, partnership, power, funding, and reception that surround creativity—the social structures, in other words, that enable managers to reap the fruits of creative labor. Often, this is imagined to be some sort of victory over Romanticism and its fusty, pretentious, élitist ideas about creativity.
  • But this kind of thinking misses the point of the Romantic creative imagination. The Romantics weren’t obsessed with who created what, because they thought you could be creative without “creating” anything other than the liveliness in your own head.
  • It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age
  • Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach.
  • Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity’s stillness. If you’re really creative, really imaginative, you don’t have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel.
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