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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Lawrence Hrubes

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Lawrence Hrubes

Should a Sibling Be Told She's Adopted? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ling-be-told-shes-adopted.html

ethics family biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • My sister is the greatest blessing in my life. My parents and I were at the hospital when her birth mother went into labor, so she has been with us for her entire life. My parents never told her that she was adopted, and they asked me not to say anything. They planned on telling her when she was old enough to understand, but they kept putting it off. They know that I believe they have done her a serious disservice.
  • I think she suspects she’s different. She asks me sometimes why she’s so much shorter than the rest of us, for example. I do my best to deflect her questions, but it hurts every time. My sister and I are very close, and we see each other often. Keeping this lie feels like a giant burden, but, at this point, I don’t know that it would do her any good to know the truth. She was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has been working hard to keep her life balanced. Finding out now that she’s adopted could throw her into a depression. I fear, however, that with the mail-in DNA tests available these days, or should a medical emergency arise, she’ll find out the truth and she won’t forgive me.
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

'Son of Saul,' Kierkegaard and the Holocaust - The New York Times - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...-kierkegaard-and-the-holocaust

holocaust arts ethics philosophy subjectivity objectivity science film history

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The spectacular success of science in the past 300 years has raised hopes that it also holds the key to guiding human beings towards a good life. Psychology and neuroscience has become a main source of life advice in the popular media. But philosophers have long held reservations about this scientific orientation to how to live life.
  • The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, for instance, famously pointed out, no amount of fact can legislate value, moral or otherwise. You cannot derive ought from is.
  • Science is the best method we have for approaching the world objectively. But in fact it is not science per se that is the problem, from the point of view of subjectivity. It is objectivizing, in any of its forms. One can frame a decision, for example, in objective terms. One might decide between career choices by weighing differences in workloads, prestige, pay and benefits between, say, working for an advanced technology company versus working for a studio in Hollywood. We are often encouraged to make choices by framing them in this way. Alternatively, one might try to frame the decision more in terms of what it might be like to work in either occupation; in this case, one needs to have the patience to dwell in experience long enough for one’s feelings about either alternative to emerge. In other words, one might deliberate subjectively.
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  • Most commonly, we turn our back on subjectivity to escape from pain. Suffering, one’s own, or others’, might become bearable, one hopes, when one takes a step back and views it objectively, conceptually, abstractly. And when it comes to something as monumental as the Holocaust, one’s mind cannot help but be numbed by the sheer magnitude of it. How could one feel the pain of all those people, sympathize with millions? Instead one is left with the “facts,” the numbers.
Lawrence Hrubes

New Critique Sees Flaws in Landmark Analysis of Psychology Studies - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-reproducibility-project.html

psychology reproducibility replicability statistics human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • A landmark 2015 report that cast doubt on the results of dozens of published psychology studies has exposed deep divisions in the field, serving as a reality check for many working researchers but as an affront to others who continue to insist the original research was sound. On Thursday, a group of four researchers publicly challenged the report, arguing that it was statistically flawed and, as a result, wrong.The 2015 report, called the Reproducibility Project, found that less than 40 studies in a sample of 100 psychology papers in leading journals held up when retested by an independent team. The new critique by the four researchers countered that when that team’s statistical methodology was adjusted, the rate was closer to 100 percent.
Lawrence Hrubes

'Cheating watches' warning for exams - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...education-35716523

ethics cheating education

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Teachers have complained about "cheating watches" being sold online to give students an unfair advantage in exams.These digital watches include an "emergency button" to quickly switch from hidden text to a clock face.The watches hold data or written information which can be read in exams.But a deputy head from Bath has warned about the scale of this "hidden market" and says it could tempt stressed students into cheating.
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

BBC - Earth - Black holes made simple with Stephen Hawking - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...n-anything-escape-a-black-hole

science physics cosmology astronomy space universe

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Fact can be stranger than fiction. This is especially true of black holes, as Prof Stephen Hawking explains.For instance as soon as you entered the black hole, reality would split in two. "In one, you would be instantly incinerated, and in the other you would plunge on into the black hole utterly unharmed," as we have previously explored.In the 2016 Reith lectures broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Prof Hawking further examines and challenges the latest scientific thinking about black holes.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Ethical Quandaries You Should Think About The Next Time You Look At Your Phone | Fa... - 3 views

www.fastcompany.com/...bout-the-next-time-you-look-at

ethics technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • To what extent can we and should we aspire to create machines that can outthink us? For example, Netflix has an algorithm that can predict what movies you will like based on the ones you've already seen and rated. Suppose a dating site were to develop a similar algorithm—maybe even a more sophisticated one—and predict with some accuracy which partner would be the best match for you. Whose advice would you trust more? The advice of the smart dating app or the advice of your parents or your friends?
  • The question, it seems to me, is should we use new genetic technologies only to cure disease and repair injury, or also to make ourselves better-than-well. Should we aspire to become the masters of our natures to protect our children and improve their life prospects?AdvertisementAdvertisement This goes back to the role of accident. Is the unpredictability of the child an important precondition of the unconditional love of parents for children? My worry is that if we go beyond health, we run the risk of turning parenthood into an extension of the consumer society.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...462114

language human sciences SocialScience psychology linguistics bilingualism reproducibility replicability experiment brain neuroscience bias confirmation bias publication bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • It’s an intuitive claim, but also a profound one. It asserts that the benefits of bilingualism extend well beyond the realm of language, and into skills that we use in every aspect of our lives. This view is now widespread, heralded by a large community of scientists, promoted in books and magazines, and pushed by advocacy organizations.
  • But a growing number of psychologists say that this mountain of evidence is actually a house of cards, built upon flimsy foundations.
  • Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, was one of them. In two large studies, involving 360 and 504 children respectively, he found no evidence that Basque kids, raised on Basque and Spanish at home and at school, had better mental control than monolingual Spanish children.
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  • Similar controversies have popped up throughout psychology, fueling talk of a “reproducibility crisis” in which scientists struggle to duplicate classic textbook results. In many of these cases, classic psychological phenomena that seem to be backed by years of supportive evidence, suddenly become fleeting and phantasmal. The causes are manifold. Journals are more likely to accept positive, attention-grabbing papers than negative, contradictory ones, which pushes scientists towards running small studies or tweaking experiments on the fly—practices that lead to flashy, publishable discoveries that may not actually be true.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Wrong Way to Teach Math - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-wrong-way-to-teach-math.html

math education paradigm

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • HERE’S an apparent paradox: Most Americans have taken high school mathematics, including geometry and algebra, yet a national survey found that 82 percent of adults could not compute the cost of a carpet when told its dimensions and square-yard price.
  • In fact, what’s needed is a different kind of proficiency, one that is hardly taught at all. The Mathematical Association of America calls it “quantitative literacy.” I prefer the O.E.C.D.’s “numeracy,” suggesting an affinity with reading and writing.
  • Many students fall by the wayside. It’s not just the difficulty of the classes. They can’t see how such formulas connect with the lives they’ll be leading.
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  • Finally, we talk about how math can help us think about reorganizing the world around us in ways that make more sense. For example, there’s probably nothing more cumbersome than how we measure time: How quickly can you compute 17 percent of a week, calibrated in hours (or minutes, or seconds)? So our class undertook to decimalize time.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Excrement Experiment - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...excrement-experiment

science experiment research biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Crohn’s disease affects as many as seven hundred thousand Americans, but, like other autoimmune disorders, it remains poorly understood and is considered incurable. (Autoimmune disorders are thought to arise when the immune system attacks healthy tissue, mistaking it for a threat.) The standard treatments for Crohn’s often don’t work, or work only temporarily, and many have serious side effects.
  • His mother showed him an article from the Times about a man who had been nearly bedridden by ulcerative colitis—a condition related to Crohn’s—and who had largely recovered after a month or so of fecal transplants. Gravel found a how-to book on Amazon and bought the recommended equipment: a blender, a rectal syringe, saline solution, surgical gloves, Tupperware containers. His wife agreed to be his donor.
  • New research suggests that the microbes in our guts—and, consequently, in our stool—may play a role in conditions ranging from autoimmune disorders to allergies and obesity, and reports of recoveries by patients who, with or without the help of doctors, have received these bacteria-rich infusions have spurred demand for the procedure. A year and a half ago, a few dozen physicians in the United States offered FMT. Today, hundreds do, and OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank founded last year by graduate students at M.I.T., ships more than fifty specimens each week to hospitals in thirty-six states. The Cleveland Clinic named fecal transplantation one of the top ten medical innovations for 2014, and biotech companies are competing to put stool-based therapies through clinical trials and onto the market. In medicine, at any rate, human excrement has become a precious commodity.
Lawrence Hrubes

Up All Night - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...up-all-night-2

science research sleep

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • In the nineteen-eighties, Allan Rechtschaffen and Bernard Bergmann, both, like Kleitman, sleep researchers at the University of Chicago, performed what is now considered to be one of the classic experiments in the field. It showed that rats, when totally deprived of sleep, would, after two or three weeks, drop dead. But Rechtschaffen and Bergmann could never figure out the precise cause of the rats’ deaths, and so, they wrote in a follow-up paper in 2002, even “that dramatic symptom did not tell us much about why sleep was necessary.” Rechtschaffen has observed that “if sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Teens do better in science when they know Einstein and Curie also struggled - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...stein-and-curie-also-struggled

science human sciences education motivation psychology children

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Students who learned that great scientists struggled, both personally and intellectually, outperformed those who learned only of the scientists’ great achievements, new research shows.
  • “In our culture we always say you don’t want to intimidate kids, you don’t want to tell them how hard the work is,” she noted. But the experiment showed the opposite strategy works better: Showing how great scientists had to muddle through lots of tough stuff made the subject matter real and allowed students to connect with them as people.
  • Some people learn better when the content has meaning to them. For those students, science comes to life more through personal stories than through the actual scientific content.
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  • And kids who learn that intellect is a malleable thing, something to be built rather than inherited, take more academic risks and perform better. The study adds to the growing body of research in favor of teaching this “growth mindset” or the belief that the brain, like other muscles in the body, can be strengthened and improved through struggle and hard work.
Lawrence Hrubes

"Books Smell Like Old People": Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...le-the-decline-of-teen-reading

literature education proof technology teens arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Lifetime readers know that reading literature can be transformative, but they can’t prove it. If they tried, they would have to buck the metric prejudice, the American notion that assertions unsupported with statistics are virtually meaningless. What they know about literature and its effects is literally and spiritually immeasurable. They would have to buck common marketplace wisdom, too: in an economy demanding “skill sets”—defined narrowly as technical and business skills—that deep-reading stuff won’t get you anywhere.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Science Hour, The Medical Scandal Engulfing Top Swedish University - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p03jdr3y

science prediction economics human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Predicting the Next Financial CrisisWhy do financial crises occur – and when will the next one come? In the past, economic theory has failed to answer these questions. In this week’s Science Journal Perspectives, economists, physicists, epidemiologists, climate scientists and ecologists call to establish a new early warning system to avoid future global financial crises. They argue that the methods used by scientists to predict weather, traffic or disease epidemics should be used to simulate the financial systems, which could help to avoid the failures we have seen in the past. Professor Doyne tells Jack how the analysis of complex networks could and should be applied to the economy.
Lawrence Hrubes

Complexity theory and financial regulation | Science - 0 views

science.sciencemag.org/...818.short

economics human sciences SocialScience prediction

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Traditional economic theory could not explain, much less predict, the near collapse of the financial system and its long-lasting effects on the global economy. Since the 2008 crisis, there has been increasing interest in using ideas from complexity theory to make sense of economic and financial markets.
Lawrence Hrubes

A mouse's house may ruin experiments : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...e-may-ruin-experiments-1.19335

science biology experiment replicability reproducibility validity models variables animals

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • It’s no secret that therapies that look promising in mice rarely work in people. But too often, experimental treatments that succeed in one mouse population do not even work in other mice, suggesting that many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.
Lawrence Hrubes

Karolinska Institute to cut ties with controversial surgeon : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...-controversial-surgeon-1.19315

science ethics medicine experiment biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The Karolinska Institute (KI) in Stockholm is ending its association with acclaimed but controversial surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who pioneered transplants of artificial windpipes but has been accused of ethical breaches in his work. 
  • Ethical questions The surgeon’s work was hailed as a game-changer in regenerative medicine when, in 2011, he implanted a plastic artificial trachea, using bioengineered stem cells, into a patient whose own windpipe had been damaged. Over the next three years, he carried out seven more synthetic trachea implantations — two more at the Karolinska, one in Illinois and four in Russia, where he heads a tissue engineering project. Six of the eight patients have died (from causes unrelated to the transplants, Macchiarini says), and one has been in intensive care since the procedure.
Lawrence Hrubes

Tim Cook Opposes Order for Apple to Unlock iPhone, Setting Up Showdown - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-cook-fbi-san-bernardino.html

ethics technology law privacy government terrorism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Apple said on Wednesday that it would oppose and challenge a federal court order to help the F.B.I. unlock an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.
  • “We have made a solemn commitment to the victims and their families that we will leave no stone unturned as we gather as much information and evidence as possible. These victims and families deserve nothing less.”
  • Mr. Cook said the order would amount to creating a “back door” to bypass Apple’s strong encryption standards — “something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create.”
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  • “If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data.
Lawrence Hrubes

Nazi atrocities: Implying Polish guilt to become crime - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-35581708

history language ethics law

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The government of Poland plans to introduce a law making it a crime to imply the country bears any responsibility for atrocities carried out on Polish soil by Nazi Germany.
  • The bill would make it illegal to say that Poland "took part, organised or was co-responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich"
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