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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Lawrence Hrubes

Lawrence Hrubes

Banksy protest artwork unveiled in New York - BBC News - 2 views

  • Provocative artist Banksy has revealed a 20m high artwork in New York to draw attention to the imprisonment of Zehra Dogan, a Kurdish painter from Turkey.His image of her behind bars depicts the last bar as a pencil, and next to the mural is a call for her release. Dogan was jailed for two years and nine months last year in Turkey, for her painting of the Kurdish town Nusaybin. Her picture, copied from a newspaper photograph, showed the town reduced to rubble during conflict.
Lawrence Hrubes

What Does It Mean to Die? | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Thousands of lives were prolonged or saved every year because patients declared brain-dead—a form of death eventually adopted by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe—were now eligible to donate their organs. The philosopher Peter Singer described it as “a concept so desirable in its consequences that it is unthinkable to give up, and so shaky on its foundations that it can scarcely be supported.” The new death was “an ethical choice masquerading as a medical fact,” he wrote.
Lawrence Hrubes

As the World Melts, an Artist Finds Beauty in Ancient Ice | The New Yorker - 1 views

  • When the artist Peggy Weil first learned about the National Ice Core Laboratory, a few years ago, she was captivated. She contacted Geoffrey Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, and soon found herself inside a giant freezer, bundled in an Arctic-ready parka. (The temperature was minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.) With the help of lab assistants, she loaded up a cart with cannisters made of thick cardboard, each containing a small segment of a two-mile-long core from the Greenland ice sheet. Weil trundled her specimens to a cylindrical scanner and photographed them in high resolution. Eventually, she strung together eighty-eight scans, top to bottom. Then she animated them and added an accompanying score, creating a four-and-a-half-hour video, designed to be projected onto a wall.
Lawrence Hrubes

There's a morality test that evaluates utilitarianism better than the Trolley Problem -... - 3 views

  • Everyone likes to think of themselves as moral. Objectively evaluating morality is decidedly tricky, though, not least because there’s no clear consensus on what it actually means to be moral. A group of philosophers and psychologists from Oxford University have created a scale to evaluate one of the most clear-cut and well-known theories of morality: utilitarianism. This theory, first put forward by 18th century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, argues that action is moral when it creates the maximum happiness for the maximum number of people. Utilitarianism’s focus on consequences states that it’s morally acceptable to actively hurt someone if it means that, overall, more people will benefit as a result.
Lawrence Hrubes

Do 'Fast and Furious' Movies Cause a Rise in Speeding? - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Does bad behavior in movies or other media lead people to behave badly? There’s plenty of research on the link between onscreen media and risky behaviors like unprotected sex, binge drinking, fast driving and even violence. One large meta-analysis of such studies concluded that exposure to risk-glorifying media is associated with risky behaviors by people who consume that media. But causality issues plague most studies in this area: People who engage in risky behaviors may prefer to consume risk-glorifying media. These studies also tend to measure attitudes in controlled lab settings rather than in real life.
Lawrence Hrubes

When A Tattoo Literally Means Life Or Death : Shots - Health News : NPR - 2 views

  • The tattoo stretched across the man's chest. It said "Do Not Resuscitate." His signature was tattooed at the end. "We were shocked," remembers Holt. "We didn't know what to do." The tattoo, and the hospital's decision about what it required of them, has set off a conversation among doctors and medical ethicists around the country about how to express one's end-of-life wishes effectively, and how policymakers can make it easier.
Lawrence Hrubes

Is Your Child Lying to You? That's Good - The New York Times - 2 views

  • Kids discover lying as early as age 2, studies have found. In one experiment, children were asked not to peek at a toy hidden behind them while the researcher withdrew from the room under false pretenses. Minutes later, the researcher returned and asked the child if he or she peeked.
Lawrence Hrubes

This Cat Sensed Death. What if Computers Could, Too? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • So what, exactly, did the algorithm “learn” about the process of dying? And what, in turn, can it teach oncologists? Here is the strange rub of such a deep learning system: It learns, but it cannot tell us why it has learned; it assigns probabilities, but it cannot easily express the reasoning behind the assignment. Like a child who learns to ride a bicycle by trial and error and, asked to articulate the rules that enable bicycle riding, simply shrugs her shoulders and sails away, the algorithm looks vacantly at us when we ask, “Why?”
Lawrence Hrubes

Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself? - The New York Times - 1 views

  • As machine learning becomes more powerful, the field’s researchers increasingly find themselves unable to account for what their algorithms know — or how they know it.
Lawrence Hrubes

A Neuroscientist's Diary of a Concussion | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Then my head snapped back and slammed into the headrest a second time. I didn’t feel any pain at first, just a stunned sense of disruption.As a neuroscientist, I know a bit about traumatic brain injury and concussions. Sitting on the freeway, I went through a quick checklist in my mind:
Lawrence Hrubes

The Serial-Killer Detector | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • A former journalist, equipped with an algorithm and the largest collection of murder records in the country, finds patterns in crime.
Lawrence Hrubes

A Mass Shooting in Texas and False Arguments Against Gun Control | The New Yorker - 1 views

  • 5. The social science on gun violence is inconclusive.It will always be a given that it’s impossible to have real controlled experiments. The closest thing in this case would be to have two contiguous countries—both with similar “root” populations, and both subject to massive immigration from abroad.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why this man wants to take the words 'Allahu akbar' back from terrorists - Home | As It... - 1 views

  • Extremists on all sides not only hijack religion and identity and narratives, they also hijack language to rationalize their violent ideology and their violent actions. I want to take it back and say, "No. Allahu akbar means God is great. I use it in prayer."
Lawrence Hrubes

How Science Saved Me from Pretending to Love Wine | The New Yorker - 2 views

  • was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love wine. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses—not a difficult feat, since my father schooled my brother and me in the vocabulary of wine from an early age. Confronted with another Bordeaux or Burgundy, I could toss around the terms I had learned at the dinner table (Pétillant! Phylloxera! Jeroboam!), then painstakingly direct the wine straight down the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palate’s exposure to what it perceived as discomfiting intensity.
Lawrence Hrubes

Colin Kaepernick and a Landmark Supreme Court Case | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Kaepernick refused to stand as a form of political expression—to protest, he said, the oppression of African-Americans by the police and others. The Supreme Court case arose out of a related First Amendment right—to exercise the freedom of religion. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, the court heard a challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness family to the expulsion of their daughters, Marie and Gathie Barnette, from a school in West Virginia. The sisters had been punished for refusing to salute the flag and repeat the Pledge of Allegiance, something state law required of students.
Lawrence Hrubes

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

  • “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.”
Lawrence Hrubes

The A.I. "Gaydar" Study and the Real Dangers of Big Data | The New Yorker - 2 views

  • The researchers culled tens of thousands of photos from an online-dating site, then used an off-the-shelf computer model to extract users’ facial characteristics—both transient ones, like eye makeup and hair color, and more fixed ones, like jaw shape. Then they fed the data into their own model, which classified users by their apparent sexuality. When shown two photos, one of a gay man and one of a straight man, Kosinski and Wang’s model could distinguish between them eighty-one per cent of the time; for women, its accuracy dropped slightly, to seventy-one per cent.
Lawrence Hrubes

Historians respond to John F. Kelly's Civil War remarks: 'Strange,' 'sad,' 'wrong' - Th... - 1 views

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    "White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly was the guest for the premiere of Laura Ingraham's new show on Fox News Channel on Monday night. During the interview, he outlined a view of the history of the Civil War that historians described as "strange," "highly provocative," "dangerous" and "kind of depressing.""
Lawrence Hrubes

How 'The Good Place' Goes Beyond 'The Trolley Problem' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • How The Good Place Goes Beyond ‘The Trolley Problem’ In Season 2, the terrific NBC sitcom continues to explore ethics without sacrificing complexity or humor.
Lawrence Hrubes

Colin Kaepernick and a Landmark Supreme Court Case | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Kaepernick refused to stand as a form of political expression—to protest, he said, the oppression of African-Americans by the police and others. The Supreme Court case arose out of a related First Amendment right—to exercise the freedom of religion. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, the court heard a challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness family to the expulsion of their daughters, Marie and Gathie Barnette, from a school in West Virginia.
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