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BBC News - Maps that shaped the world - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-30840318 TOK maps history propaganda
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Bursting with information and often incredibly beautiful - maps do more than just showing you where you are, or where you might be going. Here we tell the stories behind some fascinating examples. The recently published Times History of the World in Maps features documents from ancient civilisations, through the medieval period, to some of the key events of the 20th Century.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Feb 15
     
    note: useful video included
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The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast S... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385246 TOK religious knowledge systems history
shared by markfrankel18 on 07 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Now, Christianity did not "cause" slavery, anymore than Christianity "caused" the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power.
  • If you are truly appalled by the brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it has been, pulled over the brink.
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Vermont Proposes Official Latin Motto, Wingnuts Tell Vermont To Go Back To Mexico | Won... - 0 views

wonkette.com/...l-vermont-to-go-back-to-mexico TOK language history politics
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Here’s a sweet little story of Democracy in Action. A bright eighth grader writes to her state legislator with an idea for a law: Vermont doesn’t have an official Latin motto, so why not adopt one? And for that matter, make it a reference to history? Neato! So state Sen. Joe Benning — a Republican who was actually trying to do a good thing, which he has probably learned to never try again — introduced a bill to adopt the motto “Stella quarta decima fulgeat.” — May the fourteenth star shine bright.” Because Vermont was the 14th state, see? Benning noted that when Vermont briefly minted its own currency, it was engraved with “Stella Quarta Deccima,” so the phrase had real historical cachet.ADVERTISEMENTAnd then Burlington TV station WCAX put the story on its Facebook page with the headline, “Should Vermont have an official Latin motto?” and all Stupid broke loose when morons thought that Vermont was knuckling under to a bunch of goddamned illegal immigrants. Charles Topher at “If you Only News” collected some of the worst of the over 600 comments from some of the geniuses worried about protecting ‘Merca from the invading Latin hordes:
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Feb 15
     
    Note: In addition to the article itself, see the comments from angry citizens.
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The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 0 views

m.motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney TOK bias reason emotion science psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."
  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
  • In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information.
  • Okay, so people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or "narrowcast" and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan's Arthur Lupia, are "not well-adapted to our information age."
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​When Superintelligent AI Arrives, Will Religions Try to Convert It? - 1 views

gizmodo.com/ill-religions-try-t-1682837922 TOK religious knowledge systems technology
shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • As artificial intelligence advances, religious questions and concerns globally are bound to come up, and they're starting too: Some theologians and futurists are already considering whether AI can also know God. "I don't see Christ's redemption limited to human beings," Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek told me in a recent interview
  • But there is an opposing school of thought that insists that AI is a machine and therefore doesn't have a soul.
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Arguments Against God - NYTimes.com - 2 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...arguments-against-god TOK religious knowledge systems atheism theism
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.
  • That’s not to say that I think everything is within the scope of human knowledge. Surely there are things not dreamt of in our philosophy, not to mention in our science – but that fact is not a reason to believe in supernatural beings. I think many arguments for the existence of a God depend on the insufficiencies of human cognition. I readily grant that we have cognitive limitations. But when we bump up against them, when we find we cannot explain something — like why the fundamental physical parameters happen to have the values that they have — the right conclusion to draw is that we just can’t explain the thing. That’s the proper place for agnosticism and humility. But getting back to your question: I’m puzzled why you are puzzled how rational people could disagree about the existence of God. Why not ask about disagreements among theists? Jews and Muslims disagree with Christians about the divinity of Jesus; Protestants disagree with Catholics about the virginity of Mary; Protestants disagree with Protestants about predestination, infant baptism and the inerrancy of the Bible. Hindus think there are many gods while Unitarians think there is at most one. Don’t all these disagreements demand explanation too? Must a Christian Scientist say that Episcopalians are just not thinking clearly? Are you going to ask a Catholic if she thinks there are no good reasons for believing in the angel Moroni?
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Chinese teacher wakes up after stroke speaking English but no Chinese | Daily Mail Online - 2 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...eaking-English-no-Chinese.html TOK language brain neuroscience
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • However, she is not the only person to wake up from a coma speaking another language.Australian Ben McMahon woke up able to speak Mandarin after being involved in a car accident, while a 13-year-old Croatian girl woke up having replaced her fluency in her native language with speaking German. There was also the case of a U.S. navy veteran was found unconscious in a motel room who had no recollection of who he was and woke up speaking fluent Swedish. A Queensland Brain Institute neuroscientist suggested a possible explanation last year. Dr Pankaj Sah said the brain was made up of different circuits - which assist in language, breathing, speaking and thinking - similar to electronic circuits.According to him, it is possible in Ben's case that the parts of the brain which recalled English were damaged in the crash and those that retained Mandarin were activated when the 22-year-old woke up.Whether this is what happened to Ms Jieyu is not known. More commonly, people are known to have woken up with a different accent, like in the case of Kath Locket, who was born and bred in Stafford. But after she was rushed into hospital unable to speak or swallow, she developed a strong accent which was distinctly European.  WHAT IS FOREIGN ACCENT SYNDROME?
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BBC News - China: Stroke patient loses Chinese language ability - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...s-news-from-elsewhere-31114123 TOK language memory brain
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • An elderly Chinese woman is only able to speak English after suffering a stroke, it's been reported. Liu Jaiyu, a 94-year-old former English teacher, has found herself no longer able to speak Chinese after parts of her brain relating to native language were damaged by a cerebral infarction, the local Hunan TV reports. Television pictures show her in bed, answering simple questions in English, which means the nursing staff are having to brush up on their language skills. "She greets me in the morning using English, after she's eaten her meals in the afternoon she uses English," one nurse tells the TV. "My memory of the language isn't too good, sometimes I don't understand what she's saying!" A doctor at the hospital says that Ms Liu is suffering from paralysis of all her limbs, as well as an "obstacle" to her language functions. "It seems the part of her brain responsible for her mother tongue has been damaged, however the part that uses English has been preserved," Li Yanfang says. There have been rare cases where patients develop a different accent after a stroke, migraine or head trauma. But Ms Liu's case appears different because she has apparently turned to an already-learned language. Experts say that the complex Chinese language requires the use of both parts of the brain, while English only uses one side.
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How your eyes trick your mind - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-how-your-eyes-trick-your-mind TOK perception illusions
shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Visual, or optical, illusions show us that our minds tend to make assumptions about the world – and what you think you see is often not the truth. Throughout history, curious minds have questioned why our eyes are so easily fooled by these simple drawings. Illusions, we have found, can reveal everything from how we process time and space to our experience of consciousness.
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BBC - Culture - The greatest mistranslations ever - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-greatest-mistranslations-ever TOK language translation history culture politics
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15
     
    "Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "
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Why Cambodians Never Get 'Depressed' : Goats and Soda : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...cambodians-never-get-depressed TOK language psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • People in Cambodia experience what we Americans call depression. But there's no direct translation for the word "depression" in the Cambodian Khmer language. Instead, people may say thelea tdeuk ceut, which literally means "the water in my heart has fallen." Anxious or depressed Haitians, on the other hand, may use the phrase reflechi twop, which means "thinking too much." And in parts of Nepal and India, people use the English word "tension."
  • But just as words for depression and anxiety get lost in translation, so can treatments.
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Letting People Simulate Blindness Actually Worsens Attitudes Toward Blindness - 0 views

www.science20.com/...itudes_toward_blindness-152271 TOK psychology ethics
shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  •  "When people think about what it would be like to be blind, they take from their own brief and relatively superficial experience and imagine it would be really, really terrible and that they wouldn't be able to function well," said Arielle Silverman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is lead author of the paper and also blind.  Silverman became interested in studying the effects of blindness simulations in part because of her own interactions with strangers enthusiastically wanting to help her navigate her way across a street, for example. "I noticed and wondered why people who've never met a blind person before seem to intuitively have good attitudes toward blind people and people who tell me they have interacted with a blind person before tend to seem more condescending," she said
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The Moral Instinct - New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...13Psychology-t.html TOK ethics morality psychology human sciences social studies science reason
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations. These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history’s worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us. So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.
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BBC World Service - The Why Factor, Sad Music - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01gmhx6 TOK music emotion arts psychology
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Helena Merriman asks why people listen to sad music. A recent study has shown that sad music has become increasingly popular, but why do people choose to listen to it, and what goes on in the brain and the body when they do so? Helena speaks to Japanese pianist and music researcher Dr Ai Kawakami who has some surprising answers about some of the positive feelings people experience when they listen to sad music. American writer Amanda Stern tells Helena why she regularly listens (and cries) to sad music and British composer Debbie Wiseman, known for her moving TV and film scores, explains what makes a piece of music sound sad. You’ll also hear pieces of sad music suggested by BBC listeners from all over the world.
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The Psychological Difference Between $12.00 and $11.67 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...384993 TOK psychology economics
shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Consumers are primed to see ".99," but prices that deviate from that format can affect the way they interpret the cost.
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Can Torture Ever Be Moral? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...can-torture-ever-be-moral TOK ethics torture
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • I think that torture is almost always morally wrong and that, for moral reasons, it ought to be prohibited absolutely in law. Torture has been used to extract confessions, to terrorize people associated with the victims, to punish presumed wrongdoers, and even to gratify and amuse sadists and bullies. These uses are always morally wrong. The only use of torture that has any chance of being morally justified is to gain important information. But even when torture is used to gain information, the torturers are usually wrongdoers seeking information that will help them to achieve their unjust aims. And even when those seeking information have just aims, their victims are often innocent, or lack the information sought, or are sufficiently strong-willed to mislead their torturers, so that the torture is ineffective or counterproductive. Still, both those pursuing unjust aims and those pursuing just aims will continue to be tempted to engage in torture if they can do so with impunity. Hence, torture has been widely practiced, though its use has almost invariably been wrong. This means that the overriding goal of the law ought to be to deter the wrongful use of torture, even at the cost of forbidding the use of torture in those rare cases in which it might be morally justified. The legal prohibition ought therefore to be absolute; for those who think that torture would be advantageous to them will always be tempted to try to exploit any legal permission to use it.
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How Do We Increase Empathy? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ow-do-we-increase-empathy.html TOK empathy emotion ethics literature
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • “Probably the biggest empathy generator is cuteness: paedomorphic features such as large eyes, a large head, and a small lower face,” Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, tells me. “Professional empathy entrepreneurs have long known this, of course, which is why so many charities feature photos of children and why so many conservation organizations feature pandas. Prettier children are more likely to be adopted, and baby-faced defendants get lighter sentences.”
  • Likewise, the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans give significantly less to charity as a fraction of income (1.4 percent) than the poorest 20 percent do (3.5 percent), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That may be partly because affluence insulates us from need, so that disadvantage becomes theoretical and remote rather than a person in front of us. Wealthy people who live in economically diverse areas are more generous than those who live in exclusively wealthy areas.
  • Professor Pinker, in his superb book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” explores whether the spread of affordable fiction and journalism beginning in the 18th century expanded empathy by making it easier for people to imagine themselves in the shoes of others. Researchers have found that reading literary fiction by the likes of Don DeLillo or Alice Munro — but not beach fiction or nonfiction — can promote empathy.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Yet I’ve come to believe that service trips do open eyes and remind students of their good fortune. In short, they build empathy.So let’s escape the insulation of our comfort zones. Let’s encourage student service projects and travel to distant countries and to needy areas nearby. Whatever the impact on others, volunteering may at least help the volunteer.
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