Group items matching "i" in title, tags, annotations or url - TOK@ISPrague

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Most teachers are overlooking huge numbers of gifted black students - Vox - 0 views

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 16 - No Cached

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Why Marvel's Female Superheroes Look Like Porn Stars - The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...vel-a-force-female-superheroes arts ethics gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 May 15 - No Cached

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...-gay-marriage-study-went-wrong SocialScience human sciences bias confirmation bias statistics ethics belief

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Jun 15 - No Cached

ast December, Science published a provocative paper about political persuasion. Persuasion is famously difficult: study after study—not to mention much of world history—has shown that, when it comes to controversial subjects, people rarely change their minds, especially if those subjects are important to them. You may think that you’ve made a convincing argument about gun control, but your crabby uncle isn’t likely to switch sides in the debate. Beliefs are sticky, and hardly any approach, no matter how logical it may be, can change that. The Science study, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” seemed to offer a method that could work.
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In the document, “IrregularItIes In LaCour (2014),” Broockman, along wIth a fellow graduate student, Joshua Kalla, and a professor at Yale, Peter Aronow, argued that the survey data In the study showed multIple statIstIcal IrregularItIes and was lIkely “not collected as descrIbed.”
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If, In the end, the data do turn out to be fraudulent, does that say anythIng about socIal scIence as a whole? On some level, the case would be a statIstIcal fluke. DespIte what news headlInes would have you belIeve, outrIght fraud Is IncredIbly rare; almost no one commIts It, and almost no one experIences It fIrsthand. As a result, Innocence Is presumed, and the mIndset Is one of trust.
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There’s another issue at play: the nature of belief. As i’ve written before, we are far quicker to believe things that mesh with our view of how life should be. Green is a firm supporter of gay marriage, and that may have made him especially pleased about the study. (Did it have a similar effect on liberally minded reviewers at Science? We know that studies confirming liberal thinking sometimes get a pass where ones challenging those ideas might get killed in review; the same effect may have made journalists more excited about covering the results.)
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In short, confIrmatIon bIas—whIch Is especIally powerful when we thInk about socIal Issues—may have made the study’s shakIness easIer to overlook.
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