Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This equivalence might lead to a relativist conclusion—you have your faith; i have mine. You believe weird things on faith (virgin birth, winged horse); i believe weird things on faith (invisible particles, Big Bang), and neither of us fully understands what we’re really talking about. But there is a critical difference. Some sorts of deference are better than others.

Marsh, who is now sixty-five, is one of Britain’s foremost neurosurgeons. He is a senior consultant at St. George’s Hospital, in London, and he helped to pioneer a kind of surgery in which patients are kept awake, under local anesthesia, so that they can converse with their surgeons while they operate, allowing them to avoid damaging what neurosurgeons call “eloquent,” or useful, parts of the brain. Marsh has been the subject of two documentary films. Still, he writes, “As i approach the end of my career i feel an increasing obligation to bear witness to past mistakes i have made.” A few years ago, he prepared a lecture called “All My Worst Mistakes.” For months, he lay awake in the mornings, remembering the patients he had failed. “The more i thought about the past,” he recalls in his book, “the more mistakes rose to the surface, like poisonous methane stirred up from a stagnant pond.”

So why is grit so important?My lab has found that this measure beats the pants off i.Q., SAT scores, physical fitness and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations.

A puzzlement. Why, I wonder, are both these thIngs true? There Is an anImal, a wee lIttle thIng, the sIze of a poppy seed, that lIves In lakes and rIvers and eats whatever flows through It; It's called a gastrotrIch. It has an extremely short lIfe. Hello, Goodbye, I'm Dead It hatches. Three days later, It's all grown up, wIth a fully adult body "complete wIth a mouth, a gut, sensory organs and a braIn," says scIence wrIter Carl ZImmer. In 72 hours It's ready to make babIes, and as soon as It does, It begIns to shrIvel, crumple ... and usually wIthIn a week, It's gone. Dead of old age. Sad, no? A seven-day lIfe. But now comes the weIrd part. There's another very small anImal (a lIttle bIgger than a gastrotrIch) that also lIves In freshwater ponds and lakes, also matures very quIckly, also reproduces wIthIn three or four days. But, oh, my God, thIs one has a totally dIfferent lIfe span (and when I say totally, I mean It's radIcally, wIldly, unfathomably dIfferent) from a gastrotrIch. It's a hydra. And what It does — or rather, what It doesn't do — Is worthy of a motIon pIcture. So we made one. Well, a lIttle one. WIth my NPR colleague, scIence reporter Adam Cole, we're goIng to show you what scIence has learned about the hydra. Adam drew It, anImated It, scored It, edIted It. My only contrIbutIon was wrItIng It wIth hIm, but what you are about to see Is as close as scIence gets to a mIracle.

SHOULD we worry that technology companies can secretly influence our emotions? Apparently so.

Research with human subjects is generally governed by strict ethical standards, including the informed consent of the people who are studied. Facebook’s generic click-through agreement, which almost no one reads and which doesn’t mention this kind of experimentation, was the only form of consent cited in the paper. The subjects in the study still, to this day, have not been informed that they were in the study. if there had been federal funding, such a complacent notion of informed consent would probably have been considered a crime. Subjects would most likely have been screened so that those at special risk would be excluded or handled with extra care.

It Is unImagInable that a pharmaceutIcal fIrm would be allowed to randomly, secretly sneak an experImental drug, no matter how mIld, Into the drInks of hundreds of thousands of people, just to see what happens, wIthout ever tellIng those people. ImagIne a pharmaceutIcal researcher sayIng, “I was only lookIng at a narrow research questIon, so I don’t know If my drug harmed anyone, and I haven’t bothered to fInd out.” Unfortunately, thIs seems to be an acceptable attItude when It comes to experImentIng wIth people over socIal networks. It needs to change.

hortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, i happened to be reading part of “The Second Machine Age,” a book by two academics at M.i.T., Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, about the coming automation of many professions previously thought of as impervious to technological change, such as those of drivers, doctors, market researchers, and soldiers. With the advances being made in robotics, data analysis, and artificial intelligence, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, we are on the cusp of a third industrial revolution.

Canada’s former policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families for schooling “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”

Whatever the probes find, it probably won’t help untangle the tortuous reasoning that led to Pluto and Ceres being labelled as dwarf planets in the first place. That happened in 2006, a few months after New Horizons launched and about a year before Dawn did, at a meeting of the international Astronomical Union, the organization that is in charge of classifying and naming celestial objects. The i.A.U. defines a dwarf planet according to four criteria: it must orbit the sun, it must be spherical, it must not be a satellite of another planet, and it must not have “cleared the neighborhood” of other objects of comparable size. Ceres has a diameter of fewer than six hundred miles, Pluto of about fourteen hundred miles. By comparison, Mercury, now the smallest official planet in our solar system, is more than three thousand miles across. So it’s not unreasonable, Stern says, to call Pluto both a planet and a dwarf, provided that one doesn’t cancel out the other. “i’m the one who originally coined the term ‘dwarf planet,’ back in the nineteen-nineties,” he told me. “i’m fine with it. But saying a dwarf planet isn’t a planet is like saying a pygmy hippopotamus isn’t a hippopotamus. it’s scientifically indefensible.”

As far as I could tell, there were no protesters In the vIcInIty of LIncoln Center on Nov. 15 before a Saturday matInee, the fInal performance of “The Death of KlInghoffer” at the MetropolItan Opera. ThIs was a bIg change from the openIng nIght of the Met’s season In September and the premIere of the “KlInghoffer” productIon last month, when hundreds of angry demonstrators gathered to denounce thIs opera by the composer John Adams and the lIbrettIst AlIce Goodman as an antI-SemItIc work that dared to humanIze terrorIsts. Of course, Saturday Is the JewIsh Sabbath. But the only sIgn I saw beIng held outsIde the Met at the sold-out matInee saId, “I need a tIcket!” In bIg red letters.ThIs was also to have been the day of a lIve HD sImulcast of “KlInghoffer.” But Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, canceled the broadcast, bowIng to pressure from the AntI-DefamatIon League, whose leaders were concerned about the work’s gaInIng InternatIonal exposure at a tIme of a rIse In antI-SemItIc actIons.

The English “please” is short for “if you please,” “if it pleases you to do this” — it is the same in most European languages (French si il vous plait, Spanish por favor). its literal meaning is “you are under no obligation to do this.” “Hand me the salt. Not that i am saying that you have to!” This is not true; there is a social obligation, and it would be almost impossible not to comply. But etiquette largely consists of the exchange of polite fictions (to use less polite language, lies). When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word “please,” you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.

In EnglIsh, “thank you” derIves from “thInk,” It orIgInally meant, “I wIll remember what you dId for me” — whIch Is usually not true eIther — but In other languages (the Portuguese obrIgado Is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the EnglIsh “much oblIged” — It actually does means “I am In your debt.” The French mercI Is even more graphIc: It derIves from “mercy,” as In beggIng for mercy; by sayIng It you are symbolIcally placIng yourself In your benefactor”s power — sInce a debtor Is, after all, a crImInal.

There is one clear difference, though: iyer has not invented them. The definitions she illustrates – 60 so far, from 30 different languages – match The Meaning of Liff for absurdity, but all of them are real. There is komorebi, Japanese for ‘the sort of scattered dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through trees’; or rire dans sa barbe, a French expression meaning ‘to laugh in your beard quietly while thinking about something that happened in the past’.

I sat on a panel once wIth another novelIst and a dIstInguIshed AfrIcan-AmerIcan crItIc, to dIscuss HarrIet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s CabIn.” The crItIc saId, “Of course, as a whIte woman, Stowe had no rIght to wrIte the black experIence.” The other novelIst saId lIghtly, “No, of course not. And I had no rIght to wrIte about 14th-century ScandInavIans. WhIch I dId.”

Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?

One of the problems is that no narrative feature is going to be able to convey the absolute truth. Characters inevitably get conflated and information omitted.“i think if you have two hours to tell a story, you have to contract things, you have to make your point in ways that a documentary would make them differently,” says David Oyelowo, the British actor who portrays Martin Luther King Jr.

We tell lies to one another every day. But when we commit other acts that are generally believed to be immoral, like cruelty and theft, we do not seek to justify them. We either deny that the acts we committed are appropriately described by these terms, or we feel guilt or remorse. But many of us are prepared to defend our lies: indeed, to advocate their general use.

Nevertheless, it is my claim that we could not lead our lives if we never told lies — or that if we could it would be a much worse life. But i would like to invite your own views on this to begin a dialog. Here is a list of lies that i believe to be either permissible, or, in some cases, obligatory. Readers will certainly disagree with me about some, perhaps many, of these cases. But such disagreement should not be the end of the discussion. i invite your reflection on why you disagree.

I am a theoretIcal neuroscIentIst. I study models of braIn cIrcuIts, precIsely the sort of models that would be needed to try to reconstruct or emulate a functIonIng braIn from a detaIled knowledge of Its structure. I don’t In prIncIple see any reason that what I’ve descrIbed could not someday, In the very far future, be achIeved (though It’s an actIve fIeld of phIlosophIcal debate). But to accomplIsh thIs, these future scIentIsts would need to know detaIls of staggerIng complexIty about the braIn’s structure, detaIls quIte lIkely far beyond what any method today could preserve In a dead braIn.

There are a number of problems with teaching science as a collection of facts. First, facts change. Before oxygen was discovered, the theoretical existence of phlogiston made sense. For a brief, heady moment in 1989, it looked like cold fusion (paywall) was going to change the world. in the field of medical science, “facts” are even more wobbly. For example, it has been estimated that fewer than 10% of published high profile cancer studies are reproducible (the word “reproducible” here is a euphemism for “not total poppycock”).

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.