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markfrankel18

Every TV news report on the economy - 0 views

kottke.org/...-tv-news-report-on-the-economy

TOK economics Media News

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • From Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, here's how every single news report on the economy plays out:
Lawrence Hrubes

1,000-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...gland-nottinghamshire-32117815

science medicine observation history

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A 1,000-year-old treatment for eye infections could hold the key to killing antibiotic-resistant superbugs, experts have said.Scientists recreated a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon remedy using onion, garlic and part of a cow's stomach.
  • The leechbook is one of the earliest examples of what might loosely be called a medical textbookIt seems Anglo-Saxon physicians may actually have practised something pretty close to the modern scientific method, with its emphasis on observation and experimentation.
  • Dr Lee said there are many similar medieval books with treatments for what appear to be bacterial infections.She said this could suggest people were carrying out detailed scientific studies centuries before bacteria were discovered.
Lawrence Hrubes

Hellhole - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hellhole

ethics justice psychology torture emotion SocialScience human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?
  • Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.
Lawrence Hrubes

Germanwings 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...logy-and-the-question-of-trust

technology decision making emotion trust

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • The U.S. military appears to be moving in the direction of eliminating pilots, albeit tentatively. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have long operated unmanned drones, including the Predator, which are used for reconnaissance and bombing missions. In 2013, the U.S Air Force successfully tested the QF-16 fighter-bomber, which is practically identical to the F-16, except that it doesn’t have a pilot onboard. The plane is flown remotely. Earlier this year, Boeing, the manufacturer of the QF-16, delivered the first of what will be more than a hundred QF-16s to the Air Force. Initially, the planes will be used as flying targets for F-16 pilots to engage during training missions. But at least some military observers expect the QF-16 to end up being used in attack missions.
  • Until now, most executives in the airline industry have assumed that few people would be willing to book themselves and their families on unmanned flights—and they haven’t seriously considered turning commercial aircraft into drones or self-operating vehicles. By placing experienced fliers in the cockpit, the airlines signal to potential customers that their safety is of paramount importance—and not only because the crew members are skilled; their safety is at stake, too. In the language of game theory, this makes the aircraft’s commitment to safety more credible. Without a human flight crew, how could airlines send the same signal?
Lawrence Hrubes

Eleven Atlanta teachers in mass cheating scandal - BBC News - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-32156570

ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Eleven former school teachers have been convicted for their involvement in a scheme to falsify student test scores.They changed wrong answers to demonstrate student progress, and some received performance-related bonuses.
Lawrence Hrubes

Russian Artists Face a Choice: Censor Themselves, or Else - NYTimes.com - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...censor-themselves-or-else.html

arts ethics censorship

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • After a law went into effect last summer banning obscenities in public performances, the playwright and director Ivan Vyrypaev excised the curse words from one of his plays, “The Drunks,” for its Russian debut at the prestigious Moscow Art Theater. Some actors played the new version straight, he said, while others winked to make clear what was cut.
  • During Soviet times, “At least we knew the rules,” said Irina Prokhorova, a publisher and vocal critic of the government. “This is a little bit different, because there are no rules, no official censorship.” Ms. Prokhorova likened the climate to the 1930s, when the Nazis labeled art degenerate. “This is aesthetic fundamentalism,” she said. The law on religious believers is particularly slippery. “Who are those believers? What do they believe in? No one talks about this,” she added.
  • Unlike the average English-language expletive thrown into everyday conversation, in Russian, cursing resonates as extremely crude; it has its own grammar and is never used in polite conversation. It is not uncommon for some older theatergoers to gasp when curses are uttered onstage.
markfrankel18

Stanford psychologist: People from different cultures express sympathy differently - 0 views

news.stanford.edu/...fferences-sympathy-032525.html

TOK emotion

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Stanford psychologist Jeanne Tsai found that Americans tend to focus on the positive in expressions of sympathy while Germans focus on the negative. The research showed that how much people wanted to avoid negative emotion influenced their expressions of sympathy more than how negative they actually felt.
Lawrence Hrubes

Watching Them Turn Off the Rothkos - The New Yorker - 4 views

www.newyorker.com/...hing-them-turn-off-the-rothkos

arts ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Mainly, I think, the restoration story gets people hooked because it raises ancient and endlessly fascinating philosophy-of-art questions. In this respect, the restored murals are really a new work, a work of conceptual art. To look at them is to have thoughts about the nature of art. When I was a student, I went to a class taught by the art historian Meyer Schapiro. There were lots of people in the room; I think it was supposed to be his last class. (This was at Columbia, where Schapiro had been, as a student and a professor, since 1920.) He devoted the entire opening lecture to forgeries. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to hear him talk about paintings, not fakes. I didn’t go back.
  • Which shows how clueless I was, even then. Forgery is important because it exposes the ideological character of aesthetic experience. We’re actually not, or not only, or never entirely, responding to an art object via its physical attributes. What we’re seeing is not just what we see. We bring with us a lot of non-sensory values—one of which is authenticity.
  • We’re not absolutists about it. Authenticity is a relative term. Most people don’t undergo mild epistemological queasiness while they’re looking at a conventionally restored Rothko. We look at restored art in museums all the time, and we rarely worry that it’s insufficiently authentic. In the case of the Harvard Rothkos, though, the fact that the faded painting and the faked painting are in front of us at the same time somehow makes for a discordant aesthetic experience. It’s as though, at four o’clock every day, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes turned into the ordinary Brillo cartons of which they were designed to be simulacra. You would no longer be sure what you were looking at.
markfrankel18

Overpopulation, overconsumption - in pictures | Global Development Professionals Networ... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-over-consumption-in-pictures

TOK arts development environment

shared by markfrankel18 on 05 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • How do you raise awareness about population explosion? One group thought that the simplest way would be to show people
Lawrence Hrubes

The man who missed killing Hitler by 13 minutes - BBC News - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-32160816

history ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • On 8 November 1939, Hitler was making his annual speech at a Munich beer hall. The event commemorated early Nazi struggles in the 1920s. This time Hitler used it to mock his international enemies, and boast about Germany's successful start to the war.But what neither Hitler nor the Nazi top brass and loyal audience realised was that, a few feet away from where the Fuehrer was standing, a bomb was about to go off . Its ticking timers carefully muffled in cork casing, it had been assembled and planted secretly over many weeks by Georg Elser. He had started making his plans the previous year, after deciding that, under Hitler, "war was unavoidable".Hitler began this speech at the same time every year, but on this occasion, eager to return to Berlin and his military planners, the Fuehrer left early.Thirteen minutes later, the bomb exploded, causing eight deaths and massive damage. The ceiling collapsed just above where Hitler had been standing.
markfrankel18

Should You Watch the Walter Scott Video? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...d-you-watch-walter-scott-video

TOK ethics Media

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • It is easy not to click on a video, easy to chose not to watch Walter Scott’s murder. But making that choice is now inescapable. So the questions that come with it are inescapable, too. For instance: If you’re being shown this video, what wouldn’t you be shown? And also: If you’re being shown this because black lives matter, should you decline to look because black deaths matter, too?
Lawrence Hrubes

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
markfrankel18

Setting Limits for Testing Brains - Atlantic Mobile - 0 views

m.theatlantic.com/...389880

TOK science ethics neuroscience

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • With progress, though, comes a whole new set of ethical questions. Can drugs used to treat conditions like ADHD, for example, also be used to make healthy people into sharper, more focused versions of themselves—and should they? Can a person with Alzheimer’s truly consent to testing that may help scientists better understand their disease? Can brain scans submitted as courtroom evidence reveal anything about a defendant’s intent? Can a person with Alzheimer’s truly consent to testing that may help scientists better understand their disease?To address these questions, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, an independent advisory group, recently released the second volume of a report examining the issues that may arise as neuroscience advances. The commission outlined three areas it deemed particularly fraught: cognitive enhancement, consent, and the use of neuroscience in the legal system.
markfrankel18

Turkey anger at Pope Francis Armenian 'genocide' claim - BBC News - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-32272604

TOK language history

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Turkey summoned the Vatican ambassador over Pope Francis's use of the word "genocide" to describe the mass killing of Armenians under Ottoman rule in WW1.
markfrankel18

Why don't our brains explode at movie cuts? - Jeff Zacks - Aeon - 1 views

aeon.co/...r-brains-explode-at-movie-cuts

perception psychology film

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Throughout evolutionary history, we never saw anything like a montage. So why do we hardly notice the cuts in movies?
  • Simply put, visual perception is much jerkier than we realise. First, we blink. Blinks happen every couple of seconds, and when they do we are blind for a couple of tenths of a second. Second, we move our eyes. Want to have a little fun? Take a close-up selfie video of your eyeball while you watch a minute’s worth of a movie on your computer or TV.
  • Between blinks and saccades, we are functionally blind about a third of our waking life.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Worse yet, even when your eyes are open, they are recording a lot less of the world than you realise.
  • Our brains do a lot of work to fill in the gaps, which can produce some pretty striking – and entertaining – errors of perception and memory.
  • That makes good evolutionary sense, doesn’t it? If your memory conflicts with what is in front of your eyeballs, the chances are it is your memory that is at fault. So, most of the time your brain is stitching together a succession of views into a coherent event model, and it can handle cuts the same way it handles disruptions such as blinks and saccades in the real world.
  • There is, however, one situation in which stitching a new view in with the previous one is a bad idea: when the new view represents a transition from one event to another.
  • So now I think we have a story about why our heads don’t explode when we watch movies. It’s not that we have learned how to deal with cuts. It’s certainly not that our brains have evolved biologically to deal with film – the timescale is way too short. Instead, film cuts work because they exploit the ways in which our visual systems evolved to work in the real world.
Lawrence Hrubes

Reading With Imagination - NYTimes.com - 2 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...reading-with-imagination

arts literature imagination

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Fiction, which I believe suffers most from modern readership, is by definition not factual. It may be about the real world and it may try to illuminate some facts about the real world or how real people behave in it or, as is so often the case in modern literature, it may also be about the impossibility of portraying any such reality since the very nature of art is artifice. Primarily, however, fiction (and biography, essay, history, memoir only perhaps to a lesser degree) is a creative act, an act of the author’s imagination and likewise, ideally, it should be read with imagination.
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