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markfrankel18

Have 1,200 World Cup workers really died in Qatar? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-33019838

TOK math human sciences soccer FIFA

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • But the Indian Government says in a press release: "Considering the large size of our community, the number of deaths is quite normal."The point officials are making is that there are about half a million Indian workers in Qatar, and about 250 deaths per year - and this, in their view, is not a cause for concern. In fact, Indian government data suggests that back home in India you would expect a far higher proportion to die each year - not 250, but 1,000 in any group of 500,000 25-30-year-old men. Even in the UK, an average of 300 for every half a million men in this age group die each year.Tim Noonan from the ITUC believes the comparison is misleading. The migrant workers in Qatar are not only young, they are fit. "Qatar requires them to be given a medical examination to screen them for pre-existing conditions, so this is comparing apples and pears," he says. Of course, India is a very poor country and Qatar is a very rich country - the richest in the world in terms of GDP per capita - so it's perfectly reasonable to say that Qatar should do better by its migrant workers. But then it is. So is the figure of 1,200 Qatar World Cup deaths just meaningless? No, says Tim Noonan. He denies the ITUC came up with the figure just to get headlines. In fact he thinks the real figure may well be higher. "To describe a problem is the correct thing to do," he says. "And we believe we've described it accurately and conservatively."
Lawrence Hrubes

My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rancium-and-it-killed-her.html

TOK science chemistry physics ethics health

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • There is a common narrative in science of the tragic genius who suffers for a great reward, and the tale of Curie, who died from exposure to radiation as a result of her pioneering work, is one of the most famous. There is a sense of grandeur in the idea that paying heavily is a means of advancing knowledge. But in truth, you can’t control what it is that you find — whether you’ve sacrificed your health for it, or simply years of your time.
  • How quickly an element decayed and how it did so — meaning which of its component parts it shed — became the focus of researchers in radioactivity. Apart from purely scientific insights, there was a hope that radiation could lead to something marvelous. X-rays, a kind of radiation discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen and produced by accelerated electrons, had already been hailed as a major medical breakthrough and, in addition to showing doctors their patients’ insides, were being investigated as a treatment for skin lesions from tuberculosis and lupus. In her 1904 book “Investigations on Radioactive Substances,” Marie Curie wrote that radium had promise, too — diseased skin exposed to it later regrew in a healthy state. Radium’s curious ability to destroy tissue was being turned against cancer, with doctors sewing capsules of radium into the surgical wounds of cancer patients (including Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are used today in research). This enthusiasm for radioactivity was not confined to the doctor’s office. The element was in face creams, tonics, even candy. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article that Curie and her daughter wrote on radium in 1926, preliminary experiments suggested that radium could even improve the quality of soil.
  • Perhaps the most tragic demonstration of this involved workers at the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, N.J., which in 1917 began hiring young women to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The workers were told that the paint was harmless and were encouraged to lick the paintbrushes to make them pointy enough to inscribe small numbers. In the years that followed, the women began to suffer ghoulish physical deterioration. Their jaws melted and ballooned into masses of tumors larger than fists, and cancers riddled their bodies. They developed anemia and necrosis. The sensational court case started — and won — by the dying Radium Girls, as they were called, is a landmark in the history of occupational health. It was settled in June 1928, four months before Marguerite Perey arrived at the Radium Institute to begin a 30-year career of heavy exposure to radiation.
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  • We know now that alpha and beta particles emitted in radiation attack DNA and that the mutations they cause can lead to cancer. Ingested radioactive elements can concentrate in the bones, where they continue their decay, in effect poisoning someone for as long as that person lives. By the time Perey made her discovery, she was already heavily contaminated. She spent the last 15 years of her life in treatment for a gruesome bone cancer that spread throughout her body, claiming her eyesight, pieces of her hand and most of the years in which she had planned to study francium. As the disease progressed, she warned her students of the horrible consequences of radiation exposure. Francis, my grandfather, says he recalls hearing that when she walked into labs with radiation counters in her later years, they would go off.
  • Over the years, historians have pondered what drove the Curies to throw caution so thoroughly to the wind. Perhaps it was inconceivable to them that the benefits of their research would not outweigh the risks to themselves and their employees. In a field in which groundbreaking discoveries were being made and the competition might arrive there first, speed was put above other concerns, Rona noted. But you almost get the impression that in the Curie lab, dedication to science was demonstrated by a willingness to poison yourself — as if what made a person’s research meaningful were the sacrifices made in the effort to learn something new.
Lawrence Hrubes

Poetry on Film: Robert Pinsky's "Shirt" - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...etry-film-robert-pinskys-shirt

arts film poetry history

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • he poem “Shirt,” by Robert Pinsky, first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in 1989. In it, the speaker merges descriptions of garment manufacturing with the social and personal histories of the workers who create the items he buys and wears.
  • Twenty-five years later, “Shirt” has been brought to the medium of film, as the first installment of The Nantucket Poetry Project, an initiative by the Harvard professor Elisa New and the Nantucket Project to disseminate poetry through video and other multimedia platforms. In this visualization of the poem, several people read the text—including Kate Burton, Nas, and Pinsky himself—while the camera captures the details of stitching and fabric, spinning and sewing, and nods to the poem’s account of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in Manhattan.
markfrankel18

What Emotions Are (and Aren't) - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...at-emotions-are-and-arent.html

TOK emotions psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Analogously, emotion words like “anger,” “happiness” and “fear” each name a population of diverse biological states that vary depending on the context. When you’re angry with your co-worker, sometimes your heart rate will increase, other times it will decrease and still other times it will stay the same. You might scowl, or you might smile as you plot your revenge. You might shout or be silent. Variation is the norm.
  • The ease with which we experience emotions, and the effortlessness with which we see emotions in others, doesn’t mean that each emotion has a distinct pattern in the face, body or brain. Instead of asking where emotions are or what bodily patterns define them, we would do better to abandon such essentialism and ask the more revealing question, “How does the brain construct these incredible experiences?”
Lawrence Hrubes

The Search for Silence - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ff-the-search-for-silence.html

TOK sensory perception sound design senses

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • We hear the thrum of urban life, overhear the neighbors arguing next door; we eavesdrop, whether we want to or not, on the conversations of co-workers. In medical waiting rooms or hospitals, we’re often privy to nurses and doctors discussing a patient (or, worse, as I experienced recently, to the decidedly un-relaxing sounds of Southern country rock blaring in a mammography clinic). These are things we often don’t want to hear, and with smarter design we shouldn’t have to.Continue reading the main story All of ARUP’s offices have a resource — the Sound Lab — that allows clients to listen to the soundscape of an environment or the acoustics of a space at the early design stages, before that environment or space even exists.
markfrankel18

Rich countries and the minorities they discriminate against, mapped - Quartz - 1 views

qz.com/...ey-discriminate-against-mapped

TOK bias economics minorities psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • So what do these findings really mean? Well there are a few different ways of thinking about the economics of discrimination in the workplace. One, known as taste-based discrimination, simply suggests that some employers have a preference against hiring minorities, even if they’re just as productive as other workers. Another, implicit discrimination, is thought to reflect attitudes that the people making discriminatory decisions they are themselves unaware of. Finally, there’s the notion of statistical discrimination, in which the person making the decision is relying not on the characteristics—for example the job skills—of the person in question, but rather some other notion of the “the average characteristics of the group” to which that person belongs. But really those are only elaborate ways of dressing up the obvious: discrimination is discrimination.
markfrankel18

The Knowledge, London's Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS - 2 views

tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/...london-taxi-test-knowledge

TOK knowledge london biology education

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The examination to become a London cabby is possibly the most difficult test in the world — demanding years of study to memorize the labyrinthine city’s 25,000 streets and any business or landmark on them. As GPS and Uber imperil this tradition, is there an argument for learning as an end in itself?
  • Which is where the Knowledge comes in. It is a weird city’s weird solution to the riddle of itself, a municipal training program whose graduates are both transit workers and Gnostics: chauffeurs taught by the government to know the unknowable.
  • The brains of London taxi drivers have attracted scholarly attention. Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, has spent 15 years studying cabbies and Knowledge boys. She has discovered that the posterior hippocampus, the area of the brain known to be important for memory, is bigger in London taxi drivers than in most people, and that a successful Knowledge candidate’s posterior hippocampus enlarges as he progresses through the test.
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

Watch Out Workers, Algorithms Are Coming to Replace You - Maybe - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...q-and-a-yuval-harari.html

technology ethics intelligence computers

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In Israel, for instance, we have one of the largest laboratories for A.I. surveillances in the world — it’s called the Occupied Territories. In fact, one of the reasons Israel is such a leader in A.I. surveillance is because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Explain this a bit further.Part of why the occupation is so successful is because of A.I. surveillance technology and big data algorithms.
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