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Migration and Morality - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...migration-and-morality.html ethics
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Eduardo Porter makes a persuasive economic argument for Europe to be more welcoming to immigrants fleeing Africa and the Middle East instead of erecting barriers and fences to those escaping. But there is also the moral argument.
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Effectiveness of Talk Therapy Is Overstated, a Study Says - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...for-depression-overstated.html TOK psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 02 Oct 15
     
    "Medical literature has overstated the benefits of talk therapy for depression, in part because studies with poor results have rarely made it into journals, researchers reported Wednesday."
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Teaching a Different Shakespeare Than the One I Love - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...peare-than-the-one-i-love.html arts literature poetry language
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Shakespeare has not lost his place in this new world, just as, despite the grim jeremiads of the cultural pessimists, he has not lost his place in colleges and universities. On the contrary, his works (and even his image) turn up everywhere, and students continue to flock to courses that teach him, even when those courses are not required. But as I have discovered in my teaching, it is a different Shakespeare from the one with whom I first fell in love. Many of my students may have less verbal acuity than in years past, but they often possess highly developed visual, musical and performative skills. They intuitively grasp, in a way I came to understand only slowly, the pervasiveness of songs in Shakespeare’s plays, the strange ways that his scenes flow one into another or the cunning alternation of close-ups and long views. When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden; when I ask them to analyze a film clip, perform a scene or make a video, I stand a better chance of receiving something extraordinary. A student with a beautiful voice performed Brahms’s Ophelia songs, with a piano accompaniment by another gifted musician. Students with a knack for creative writing have composed monologues in the voice of the villainous Iago, short stories depicting an awkward reunion of Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, or even additional scenes in Shakespearean verse.
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Corrupting the Chinese Language - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ting-the-chinese-language.html language ethics propaganda politics communism
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 May 15 - No Cached
  • The default lingo of high party officials, even on the most solemn occasions, includes banal aphorisms like, “to be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.” Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of “social harmony” and the “Chinese spirit.” In addition to promoting the “China Dream” and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”The government’s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: “Stop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.” Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, “dyed with martyr's blood,” and many grow up singing the young pioneers’ songs: “Always prepared, to perform noble feats, to wipe out our enemy.”
  • Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a “metaphysicist.”Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus, over the years, it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s fair to assume these two farmers didn’t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon. Other phrases like “idealist” and “petit bourgeois sentimentalist” have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.
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Iceland's tech imports are killing the Icelandic language - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...killing-the-icelandic-language TOK technology language
shared by markfrankel18 on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • “I think Icelandic is not going to last,” Jón Gnarr, comedian and former mayor of Reykjavik, tells PRI. “Probably in this century we will adopt English as our language. I think it’s unavoidable.”
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Why Has Columbia Rape Accuser Emma Sulkowicz Made a Sex Video? - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ulkowicz-made-a-sex-video.html TOK arts ethics
shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • But when you turn a personal experience into a public spectacle and declare it art, you invite criticism. Part of performing is being judged and critiqued on the merits and quality of that performance.Performance art pieces like Sulkowicz’s video often intend to make a statement, but they transcend art when the artist demands that there’s a right and wrong way to interpret her piece.
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Czech Reality TV Show Makes a Game of Life Under Nazi Rule - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...e-of-life-under-nazi-rule.html TOK history media
shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • “It has nothing to do with history or telling the stories of that time,” said Mikulas Kroupa, director of Post Bellum, a Prague-based nonprofit that records the memories of those who lived through the war. “It is just a game.”
  • And the idea that it showed how contemporary people would actually react to such a situation was preposterous, he said.“They know what the result of the war was,” he said. “They know they will not be killed. So they can play a part and cast themselves as the hero.”
  • Indeed, there are moments in the show when the family talks back to the Gestapo officers, something, the historians say, that would rarely have actually happened. The real consequences of such insolence were immediate and severe.
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Maya Angelou and the Internet's Stamp of Approval - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...he-internets-stamp-of-approval arts poetry internet media errors misinformation
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • his week, the United States Postal Service came in for a full news cycle’s worth of ridicule after it was&nbsp;pointed out, by the Washington&nbsp;Post, that the agency’s new Maya Angelou stamp featured a quotation that the late poet and memoirist didn’t write. The line—“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”—has been widely attributed to Angelou. And it seems like something she might have written, perhaps as a shorthand explanation for the title of her most famous book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” But the line, in a slightly different form, was originally published in a poetry collection from 1967 called “A Cup of Sun,” by Joan Walsh Anglund. The&nbsp;Post&nbsp;reported this on Monday. By Tuesday, when such luminaries as First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey stood onstage in front of a giant reproduction of the Angelou stamp at the official unveiling, everyone knew that the words behind them belonged to someone else. According to the U.S.P.S., more than&nbsp;eighty million Angelou stamps were produced, and there are no plans to retract them. <!doctype html>div,ul,li{margin:0;padding:0;}.abgc{height:15px;position:absolute;right:16px;text-rendering:geometricPrecision;top:0;width:15px;z-index:9010;}.abgb{height:100%;}.abgc img{display:block;}.abgc svg{display:block;}.abgs{display:none;height:100%;}.abgl{text-decoration:none;}.cbc{background-image: url('http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/images/x_button_blue2.png');background-position: right top;background-repeat: no-repeat;cursor:pointer;height:15px;right:0;top:0;margin:0;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:16px;z-index:9010;}.cbc.cbc-hover {background-image: url('http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/images/x_button_dark.png');}.cbc > .cb-x{height: 15px;position:absolute;width: 16px;right:0;top:0;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg{background-color: lightgray;position:absolute;}.cbc.cbc-hover > .cb-x > .cb-x-svg{background-color: #58585a;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-path{fill : #00aecd;}.cbc.cbc-hover > .cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-path{fill : white;}.cb-x > .cb-x-svg > .cb-x-svg-s-path{fill : white;} .ddmc{background:#ccc;color:#000;padding:0;position:absolute;z-index:9020;max-width:100%;box-shadow:2px 2px 3px #aaaaaa;}.ddmc.left{margin-right:0;left:0px;}.ddmc.right{margin-left:0;right:0px;}.ddmc.top{bottom:20px;}.ddmc.bottom{top:20px;}.ddmc .tip{border-left:4px solid transparent;border-right:4px solid transparent;height:0;position:absolute;width:0;font-size:0;line-height:0;}.ddmc.bottom .tip{border-bottom:4px solid #ccc;top:-4px;}.ddmc.top .tip{border-top:4px solid #ccc;bottom:-4px;}.ddmc.right .tip{right:3px;}.ddmc.left .tip{left:3px;}.ddmc .dropdown-content{display:block;}.dropdown-content{display:none;border-collapse:collapse;}.dropdown-item{font:12px Arial,sans-serif;cursor:pointer;padding:3px 7px;vertical-align:middle;}.dropdown-item-hover{background:#58585a;color:#fff;}.dropdown-content > table{border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:0;}.dropdown-content > table > tbody > tr > td{padding:0;}Ad covers the pageStop seeing this ad.feedback_container {width: 100%;height: 100%;position: absolute;top:0;left:0;display: none;z-index: 9020;background-color: white;}.feedback_page {font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;;font-size: 13px;margin: 16px 16px 16px 16px;}.feedback_title {font-weight: bold;color: #000000;}.feedback_page a {font-weight: normal;color: #3366cc;}.feedback_description {color: #666666;line-height: 16px;margin: 12px 0 12px 0;}.feedback_closing {color: #0367ff;line-height: 16px;margin: 12px 0 12px 0;}.feedback_logo {position: absolute;right: 0;bottom: 0;margin: 0 12px 9px 0;}.feedback_logo img {height: 15px;}.survey_description {color: #666666;line-height: 17px;margin: 12px 0 10px 0;}.survey {color: #666666;line-height: 20px;}.survey_option input {margin: 0;vertical-align: middle;}.survey_option_text {margin: 0 0 0 5px;line-height: 17px;vertical-align: bottom;}.survey_option:hover {background-color: lightblue;cursor: default;}It&amp;#39;s gone. UndoWhat was wrong with this ad?InappropriateRepetitiveIrrelevantThanks for the feedback! BackWe’ll review this ad to improve your
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BBC - Future - The invisible downside of cheating in life - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...expected-downside-for-cheaters TOK ethics psychology cheating
shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The implication is that people in Chance's experiment – people very much like you and me – had tricked themselves into believing they were smarter than they were. There may be benefits from doing this – confidence, satisfaction, or more easily gaining the trust of others – but there are also certainly disadvantages. Whenever circumstances change and you need to accurately predict how well you'll do, it can cost to believe you're better than you are.
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The Timekeeper: Behind the Scenes of Humanity's Most Accurate Atomic Clocks, Which Dict... - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...eeper-video-demetrios-matsakis TOK time perception technology
shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • In this fascinating micro-documentary, Dr. Demetrios Matsakis, chief scientist for Time Services at the U.S. Naval Observatory — the same federal agency that hired astronomer Maria Mitchell as the first woman employed by the government — takes us on a tour of the USNO’s 100 atomic clocks, where the time on your iPhone originates. Dr. Matsakis explains how these atomic clocks — which won’t fall behind or race forward by a single second in 300 million years, rendering them the most accurate measuring devices ever created by humanity — also synchronize GPS, coordinate military operations, dictate financial transactions, and orchestrate internet communication. He then peers into the future to imagine the time-accuracy that is to come, as well as the dark side of such precision.
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Meet Dan Barber: America's next foodie-in-chief - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/..._americas_next_foodie_in_chief environment food economics ecology science TOK ethics
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 May 14 - No Cached
  • As the unofficial spokespeople for our organic-eating, Food Network-watching ways, when chefs talk, Americans tend to listen. And Dan Barber — the farm-to-table icon behind restaurants Blue Hill in New York City&nbsp;and Blue Hill Stone Barns in Tarrytown — isn’t wasting his platform.Barber has given a wildly popular TED talk, been counted among TIME’s 100 most influential people, been appointed to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports &amp; Nutrition and, as of last week, authored a nearly 500-page book laying out a radical new vision for the future of food.So when Barber came out last weekend with a New York Times op-ed&nbsp;detailing the shortcomings of the farm-to-table movement he had previously helped promote, people paid attention. While we like to pat ourselves on the back for eating seasonally and locally, Barber’s contentious argument went, the foodie fad that grew to become the face of sustainable eating has failed to bring about the promised revolution. Industrial agriculture still rules, Barber argued. And as it keeps growing, more and more small farms and native prairie disappear under Big Ag’s plow.If we really care about changing our food system (as anyone who hopes to feed our growing world should), Barber believes we’re going to need a true revolution. And “The Third Plate“&nbsp;is his thesis, over a decade in the works, for what that change must look like.Among other things, change means thinking holistically, embracing diversity in ingredient choice and cuisine, and shifting meat over from its vaulted place at the center of the dinner plate. But while the solutions Barber describes are frighteningly extensive, they also, in his telling, sound delicious. That, more than any warning about the consequences of continuing along with the status quo, could be thing that ends up making a difference.
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Faking Cultural Literacy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faking-cultural-literacy.html literacy TOK technology social media
shared by markfrankel18 on 27 May 14 - No Cached
  • It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them.
  • Who decides what we know, what opinions we see, what ideas we are repurposing as our own observations? Algorithms, apparently, as Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social media postindustrial complex rely on these complicated mathematical tools to determine what we are actually reading and seeing and buying.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story AdvertisementWe have outsourced our opinions to this loop of data that will allow us to hold steady at a dinner party, though while you and I are ostensibly talking about “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” what we are actually doing, since neither of us has seen it, is comparing social media feeds.
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BBC News - Great miscalculations: The French railway error and 10 others - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-27509559 errors measurement assumptions technology science TOK
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • The discovery by the French state-owned railway company SNCF that 2,000 new trains are too wide for many station platforms is embarrassing, but far from the first time a small mis-measurement or miscalculation has had serious repercussions.
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Elizabeth Kolbert: Why Are We So Busy? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...140526crbo_books_kolbert economics human sciences SocialScience wealth leisure TOK gender
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 May 14 - No Cached
  • n the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.
  • According to Keynes, the nineteenth century had unleashed such a torrent of technological innovation—“electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production”—that further growth was inevitable. The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century, and this, in concert with ever greater “technical improvements,” would usher in the fifteen-hour week.
  • Four-fifths of the way through Keynes’s century, half of his vision has been realized. Since “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” was published, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of sixteen, and G.D.P. per capita by a factor of six. And what holds for the United States goes for the rest of the world, too: in the past eighty years, the global economy has grown at a similar rate.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But if we have become, in aggregate, as rich as Keynes imagined, this wealth has not translated into leisure. (When was the last time someone you know complained about having too little to do?) In terms of economic theory, this is puzzling. In terms of everyday life, it’s enough to, well, induce a nervous breakdown.
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Obama says ISIL. The Media say ISIS. What's Up with that? Power of a name - 3 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...156924 language history bias religious knowledge systems TOK
shared by sleggettisp on 15 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • sleggettisp on 15 Sep 14
     
    Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2014 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved. This article was first published by National Review Online and at Daniel Pipes's Blog.
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Adapting Real-Life Events Like Klinghoffer's Death - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-like-klinghoffers-death.html TOK arts history ethics
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • 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,&nbsp;Saturday&nbsp;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.
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Want to spin your data? Five Ways to Lie with Charts - 0 views

nautil.us/...five-ways-to-lie-with-charts TOK bias data math statistics
shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • In the right (or wrong) hands, bar graphs and pie charts can become powerful agents of deception, tricking you into inferring trends that don’t exist, mistaking less for more, and missing alarming facts. The best measure of a chart’s honesty is the amount of time it takes to interpret it, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology perceptual scientist Ruth Rosenholtz: “A bad chart requires more cognitive processes and more reasoning about what you’ve seen.”
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5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think | TED Blog - 3 views

blog.ted.com/...ak-can-affect-the-way-we-think TOK language psychology economics perception
shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decIsions? Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in thIs blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to hIs results, it does — big time.
  • Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers.
  • But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
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