"How do you know where you are? What room you're in ? What town you're in and what state you're in? And how do you go from your house to the grocery store? How do you move through the physical environment?"
"Because we take it for granted. It's only a problem when it goes wrong. But when it goes wrong it can be quite distressing and it can be lethal. I mean if you're really lost and you're in some some wilderness or something like that, it can be really bad. "
You Are Here - Home | Ideas with Paul Kennedy | CBC Radio - 0 views
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One of the best radio shows there is!
The Assassination of Boris Nemtsov - The New Yorker - 3 views
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Then why was he killed? Without knowing who gave the orders, it’s possible to understand that the current political environment allowed for this to happen. Over the past year, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, Russia has seen the rise of a new, much coarser and more doctrinaire political language. During the first decade of Putin’s rule, the Kremlin depicted its opponents as freaks or idiots, but now they are portrayed as outright enemies of their country. In a triumphant address to parliament last March, as Russia was formalizing its takeover of Crimea, Putin warned of “a fifth column,” a “disparate bunch of national traitors” determined to sow discord inside the country. Its members were obvious, if at first unmentioned: people like Navalny, an anti-corruption activist who had become the most popular leader in the country’s fractured opposition; Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, a long-beleaguered radio station that is one of the last homes for critical and liberal voices; and of course Nemtsov, a recognizable facefrom all his years in politics, and a favorite opponent of pro-Kremlin activists and propagandists.
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How can we judge historical motives?
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Assassination tactic in Russian politics linked to your Nicholas II presentation (and what we have just done re Alexander II and III...)...unfortunately some things have yet to change :-(
A Gaza Artist Creates 100 Square Feet of Beauty, and She's Not Budging - NYTimes.com - 3 views
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Alienated by Gaza’s restrictive religiosity and constant conflict with Israel, Ms. Badwan, 27, has hardly left the room for more than a year. Within its walls she has created her own world, and a striking set of self-portraits that are at once classical and cutting-edge.
Why Are Certain Smells So Hard to Identify? - The New Yorker - 0 views
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A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities. Last spring, an article in the journal Science reported that we are capable of discriminating more than a trillion different odors. (A biologist at Caltech subsequently disputed the finding, arguing that it contained mathematical errors, though he acknowledged the “richness of human olfactory experience.”) Whence, then, our bumbling translation of scent into speech?
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That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of inscent?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”
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But difficulty with talking about smell is not universal. Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the organizer of the A.A.A.S. symposium, studies a group of around a thousand hunter-gatherers in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand who speak a language called Jahai. In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents. At the symposium, Majid presented new research involving around thirty Jahai and thirty Dutch people. In that study, the Jahai named smells in an average of two seconds, whereas the Dutch took thirteen—“and this is just to say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ ” Majid joked onstage.
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BBC News - Are humans getting cleverer? - 0 views
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The researchers - Peera Wongupparaj, Veena Kumari and Robin Morris at Kings College London - did not themselves ask anyone to sit an IQ test, but they analysed data from 405 previous studies. Altogether, they harvested IQ test data from more than 200,000 participants, captured over 64 years and from 48 countries. Focusing on one part of the IQ test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, they found that on average intelligence has risen the equivalent of 20 IQ points since 1950. IQ tests are designed to ensure that the average result is always 100, so this is a significant jump.
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The new research is further confirmation of a trend that scientists have been aware of for some time. In 1982, James Flynn, a philosopher and psychologist based at the University of Otago in New Zealand, was looking through old American test manuals for IQ tests. He noticed that when tests were revised every 25 years or so, the test-setters would get a panel to sit both the old test and the new one. "And I noticed in all the test manuals, in every instance, those who took the old test got a higher score than they did on the new test," says Flynn. In other words, the tests were becoming harder. This became known as the Flynn Effect, though Flynn stresses he was not the first to notice the pattern, and did not come up with the name. But if the tests were getting harder, and the average score was steady at 100, people must have been getting better at them. It would seem they were getting more intelligent. If Americans today took the tests from a century ago, Flynn says, they would have an extraordinarily high average IQ of 130. And if the Americans of 100 years ago took today's tests, they would have an average IQ of 70 - the recognised cut-off for people with intellectual disabilities. To put it another way, IQ has been rising at roughly three points per decade.
The Secret History of Knock-Knock Jokes - 3 views
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Knock. Knock. Who's there? Joe King. Joe King who? Joking like this used to be considered a sickness by some people. The knock-knock joke has been a staple of American humor since the early 20th century. With its repetitive set-up and wordplay punchline, the form has been invoked - and understood - by people of all ages and sensibilities.
How to Acknowledge a Shameful Past - The Atlantic - 2 views
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the best of what America offers are owning up to shameful pasts, from slavery to the mistreatment of Native Americans. In some cases, the institutions are apologizing for past moral failings, as Longwood has in Prince Edward County. Others are going even further, with faculty incorporating the long-overlooked histories into their instruction and administrators reaching out to disenfranchised communities that were once excluded from campus life.
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"Ignoring our history doesn’t make it go away. It always ends up bubbling back up to the top at some point," Allen said. "It may be squished down for a while but it will always come up in different ways."
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This move prompted new academic programs at the university and, according to at least one advocate, served as a tipping point in the national trend toward confronting shameful pasts.
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Why People "Fly from Facts" - Scientific American - 1 views
Is stealing from a small shop worse than from a chain? | Clare Carlisle | Comment is fr... - 0 views
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David Lammy has raised interesting questions on how we judge a crime like theft. Moral absolutism and monetary value are more compatible than you think
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Our justice system, like our personal moral intuitions, combines a commitment to the absolute wrongness of certain actions – theft, murder, and rape, for example – with the recognition that different contexts make some such actions worse than others. The more absolute judgment focuses on the action itself, while the secondary judgment about a crime’s severity takes motivations and consequences into account.
Google says it acknowledges some people want 'right to be forgotten' - 2 views
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When put into a situation when many people want to have information to have information, that might be false or outdated, removed from the google search engine, google has decided to out of over 220,000 requests to decline this to about 60% of the people. Was that the right thing to do?
The Power of Touch - The New Yorker - 0 views
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At a home in the Romanian city of Iași, Carlson measured cortisol levels in a group of children ranging from two months to three years old. The caregiver-to-child ratio was twenty to one, and most of the children had experienced severe neglect and sensory deprivation. Multiple times a day, Carlson took saliva samples, tracking how cortisol levels fluctuated in response to stressful events. The children, she found, were hormonally off kilter. Under normal conditions, cortisol peaks just before we wake up and then tapers off; in the leagăne infants, it peaked in the afternoon and remained elevated. Those levels, in turn, correlated with faltering performance on numerous cognitive and physical assessments. Then Carlson tried an intervention modelled on the work of Joseph Sparling, a child-development specialist, and the outcomes changed. When half of the orphans received more touching from more caregivers—an increase in hugs, holding, and the making of small adjustments to clothes and hair—their performance markedly improved. They grew bigger, stronger, and more responsive, both cognitively and emotionally, and they reacted better to stress.
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Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the human infant, and it remains perhaps the most emotionally central throughout our lives. While many researchers have appreciated its power, others have been more circumspect. Writing in 1928, John B. Watson, one of the originators of the behaviorist school of psychology, urged parents to maintain a physical boundary between themselves and their children: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job on a difficult task.” Watson acknowledged that children must be bathed, clothed, and cared for, but he believed that excessive touching—that is, caressing—would create “mawkish” adults. An untouched child, he argued, “enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.” Now we know that, to attain that result, he should have suggested the opposite: touch, as frequent and as caring as possible
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And yet touch is rarely purely physical. Field’s more recent work has shown that the brain is very good at distinguishing an emotional touch from a similar, but non-emotional, one. A massage chair is not a masseuse. Certain touch receptors exist solely to convey emotion to the brain, rather than sensory information about the external environment. A recent study shows that we can identify other people’s basic emotions based on how they touch us, even when they are separated from us by a curtain. And the emotions that are communicated by touch can go on to shape our behavior. One recent review found that, even if we have no conscious memory of a touch—a hand on the shoulder, say—we may be more likely to agree to a request, respond more (or less) positively to a person or product, or form closer bonds with someone.
BBC News - Stalin wiped from Soviet Gulag prison museum - 9 views
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The director of a Russian museum at a Stalin-era prison camp says local officials have taken over the site and removed references to the Soviet dictator's crimes.
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Millions of Soviet citizens were sent to labour camps in the notorious Gulag system, or shot, during Joseph Stalin's hardline communist rule. The worst repressions took place in the 1930s.
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Portraits of Stalin - taboo after the scale of his crimes was revealed - have become more common since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Surveys indicate that many Russians now regard Stalin as a hero.
Proposed Texas textbooks are inaccurate, biased and politicized, new report finds - 3 views
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A number of U.S. history textbooks evidence a general lack of attention to Native American peoples and culture and occasionally include biased or misleading information.
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a bid to calling the United States’ hideous slave trade history as the “Atlantic triangular trade.”
Remembering a Crime That You Didn't Commit - The New Yorker - 1 views
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Earlier this year, two forensic psychologists—Julia Shaw, of the University of Bedfordshire, and Stephen Porter, of the University of British Columbia—upped the ante. Writing in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, they described a method for implanting false memories, not of getting lost in childhood but of committing a crime in adolescence. They modelled their work on Loftus’s, sending questionnaires to each of their participant’s parents to gather background information. (Any past run-ins with the law would eliminate a student from the study.) Then they divided the students into two groups and told each a different kind of false story. One group was prompted to remember an emotional event, such as getting attacked by a dog. The other was prompted to remember a crime—an assault, for example—that led to an encounter with the police. At no time during the experiments were the participants allowed to communicate with their parents.
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What Shaw and Porter found astonished them. “We thought we’d have something like a thirty-per-cent success rate, and we ended up having over seventy,” Shaw told me. “We only had a handful of people who didn’t believe us.” After three debriefing sessions, seventy-six per cent of the students claimed to remember the false emotional event; nearly the same amount—seventy per cent—remembered the fictional crime. Shaw and Porter hadn’t put undue stress on the students; in fact, they had treated them in a friendly way. All it took was a suggestion from an authoritative source, and the subjects’ imaginations did the rest. As Münsterberg observed of the farmer’s son, the students seemed almost eager to self-incriminate.
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Kassin cited the example of Martin Tankleff, a high-school senior from Long Island who, in 1988, awoke to find his parents bleeding on the floor. Both had been repeatedly stabbed; his mother was dead and his father was dying. He called the police. Later, at the station, he was harshly interrogated. For five hours, Tankleff resisted. Finally, an officer told him that his father had regained consciousness at the hospital and named him as the killer. (In truth, the father died without ever waking.) Overwhelmed by the news, Tankleff took responsibility, saying that he must have blacked out and killed his parents unwittingly. A jury convicted him of murder. He spent seventeen years in prison before the real murderers were found. Kassin condemns the practice of lying to suspects, which is illegal in many countries but not here. The American court system, he said, should address it. “Lying puts innocent people at risk, and there’s a hundred years of psychology to show it,” he said.
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