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What are Ethical Dilemmas? | TOKTalk.net - 2 views

www.toktalk.net/...what-are-ethical-dilemmas world perception reason emotion ethical ethics intuition
shared by artuscaer on 10 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • artuscaer on 10 Dec 14
     
    This is also related to psychology through an idea of cognitive dissonance.
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Does Language Influence our View of the World? | TOKTalk.net - 0 views

www.toktalk.net/...nfluence-our-view-of-the-world influence world net perception psychology reason emotion
shared by artuscaer on 10 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • artuscaer on 10 Dec 14
     
    A very interesting topic that we have already talked about a bit in our class before but it is still interesting to see a deeper analysis
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How should we value the arts? | Culture professionals network | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-2015-general-election-policy
shared by Andrea Barlien on 10 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 10 Dec 14
     
    As the 2015 general election looms, a new paper calls for a radical redefining of policy. Whichever party comes to power, we must be honest about culture's purpose and impact, says Dave O'Brien
  • Andrea Barlien on 10 Dec 14
     
    As the 2015 general election looms, a new paper calls for a radical redefining of policy. Whichever party comes to power, we must be honest about culture's purpose and impact, says Dave O'Brien
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Falling - 1 views

www.iasc-culture.org/...rticle_2014_Fall_McPherson.php TOK economics psychology
shared by Barbora Kejvalova on 09 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Barbora Kejvalova on 09 Dec 14
     
    The Hedgehog Review - Volume 16, No. 3 (Fall 2014) - Falling -
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Bear Traps Investing Letter | Keynote Speaker | Lawrence McDonald - Ethical Issues That... - 0 views

www.lawrencegmcdonald.com/fect-the-success-of-a-business ethics business success economics
shared by marydanielyan777 on 08 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Ethics refers to a prescribed or accepted code of conduct. Ethical issues are a set of moral values that need to be addressed while carrying out business. Businesses operate in a society that is structured around moral values. Therefore, when conducting its operations, a business has certain responsibilities which are to provide the society with quality goods and services that will improve the people’s living standards.
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You can't detox your body. It's a myth. So how do you get healthy? | Life and style | T... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...-health-diet-science-ignorance TOK science pseudoscience marketing
shared by markfrankel18 on 07 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • “Trying to tie detoxing in with ancient religious practices is clutching at straws,” she says. “You need to look at our social makeup over the very recent past. In the 70s, you had all these gyms popping up, and from there we’ve had the proliferation of the beauty and diet industry with people becoming more aware of certain food groups and so on. “The detox industry is just a follow-on from that. There’s a lot of money in it and there are lots of people out there in marketing making a lot of money.”
  • Peter Ayton, a professor of psychology at City University London, agrees. He says that we’re susceptible to such gimmicks because we live in a world with so much information we’re happy to defer responsibility to others who might understand things better.
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Why Our Memory Fails Us - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-our-memory-fails-us.html TOK memory psychology science false memories
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Overconfidence in memory could emerge from our daily experience: We recall events easily and often, at least if they are important to us, but only rarely do we find our memories contradicted by evidence, much less take the initiative to check if they are right. We then rely on confidence as a signal of accuracy — in ourselves and in others. It’s no accident that Oprah Winfrey’s latest best seller is called “What I Know For Sure,” rather than “Some Things That Might Be True.”Continue reading the main story Our lack of appreciation for the fallibility of our own memories can lead to much bigger problems than a misattributed quote. Memory failures that resemble Dr. Tyson’s mash-up of distinct experiences have led to false convictions, and even death sentences. Whose memories we believe and whose we disbelieve influence how we interpret controversial public events, as demonstrated most recently by the events in Ferguson, Mo.Erroneous witness recollections have become so concerning that the National Academy of Sciences convened an expert panel to review the state of research on the topic. This fall the panel (which one of us, Daniel Simons, served on) released a comprehensive report that recommended procedures to minimize the chances of false memory and mistaken identification, including videotaping police lineups and improving jury instructions.
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Why Save a Language? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-save-a-language.html TOK language culture diversity indigenous knowledge systems
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Certainly, experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think. Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.This is cool stuff. But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.
  • Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community. Few would deny, for example, that American Jews who still speak Yiddish in the home are a tighter-knit community, less assimilated into Anglophone American life and less at odds with questions about Jewish identity, than Jews who speak only English.
  • For example, whether or not it says anything about how its speakers think, the fact that there is a language in New Guinea that uses the same word for eat, drink and smoke is remarkable in itself. Another New Guinea language is Yeli Dnye, which not only has 90 sounds to English’s 44, but also has 11 different ways to say “on” depending on whether something is horizontal, vertical, on a point, scattered, attached and more. And there is Berik, where you have to change the verb to indicate what time of day something happened. As with any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”
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There is no language instinct - Vyvyan Evans - Aeon - 0 views

aeon.co/...there-is-no-language-instinct TOK language chomsky
shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Chomsky’s idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong.
  • How much sense does it make to call whatever inborn basis for language we might have an ‘instinct’? On reflection, not much.
  • If our knowledge of the rudiments of all the world’s 7,000 or so languages is innate, then at some level they must all be the same. There should be a set of absolute grammatical ‘universals’ common to every one of them. This is not what we have discovered.
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  • In a 2002 version, Chomsky and colleagues at Harvard proposed that perhaps all that is unique to the human language capability is a general-purpose computational capacity known as ‘recursion’.
  • While the human brain does exhibit specialisation for processing different genres of information, such as vision, there appears not to be a dedicated spot specialised just for language.
  • And indeed, we now believe that several of Chomsky’s evolutionary assumptions were incorrect.
  • we don’t have to assume a special language instinct; we just need to look at the sorts of changes that made us who we are, the changes that paved the way for speech.
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BBC News - US chimpanzee Tommy 'has no human rights' - court - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-30338231 TOK ethics animals rights law duty
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • A chimpanzee is not entitled to the same rights as people and does not have be freed from captivity by its owner, a US court has ruled. The appeals court in New York state said caged chimpanzee Tommy could not be recognised as a "legal person" as it "cannot bear any legal duties". The Nonhuman Rights Project had argued that chimps who had such similar characteristics to the humans deserved basic rights, including freedom. The rights group said it would appeal. Owner pleased In its ruling, the judges wrote: "So far as legal theory is concerned, a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties. "Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions.'' The court added that there was no precedent for treating animals as persons and no legal basis.
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Why Cameras on Police Officers Won't Save Us - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...a-police-officers-wont-save-us TOK bias eyewitness perception
shared by markfrankel18 on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The truth is that if the cameras do offer a benefit—and there is some, not a lot, of research showing that they do—it’s in influencing behavior before the fact, not providing evidence after it.
  • Maybe the bigger lesson is, again, that cameras won’t save us. Like photographs and like eyewitness testimony, video evidence is subject to differing interpretations, and to the prejudices and assumptions of individual viewers. We’ve known that for a long time; still, we can’t help hoping.
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Why Are Some Cultures More Individualistic Than Others? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dividualistic-than-others.html TOK SocialScience human sciences culture indigenous knowledge systems anthropology
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • AMERICANS and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, this is a peculiar idea.People in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out. People imagine themselves as part of a larger whole — threads in a web, not lone horsemen on the frontier. In America, we say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, people say that the nail that stands up gets hammered down.
  • These are broad brush strokes, but the research demonstrating the differences is remarkably robust and it shows that they have far-reaching consequences. The social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and his colleagues found that these different orientations toward independence and interdependence affected cognitive processing. For example, Americans are more likely to ignore the context, and Asians to attend to it. Show an image of a large fish swimming among other fish and seaweed fronds, and the Americans will remember the single central fish first. That’s what sticks in their minds. Japanese viewers will begin their recall with the background. They’ll also remember more about the seaweed and other objects in the scene.Another social psychologist, Hazel Rose Markus, asked people arriving at San Francisco International Airport to fill out a survey and offered them a handful of pens to use, for example four orange and one green; those of European descent more often chose the one pen that stood out, while the Asians chose the one more like the others.
  • In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways. Not wheat farmers. Wheat needs only rainfall, not irrigation. To plant and harvest it takes half as much work as rice does, and substantially less coordination and cooperation. And historically, Europeans have been wheat farmers and Asians have grown rice.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story The authors of the study in Science argue that over thousands of years, rice- and wheat-growing societies developed distinctive cultures: “You do not need to farm rice yourself to inherit rice culture.”
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Margaret Atwood on Our Robotic Future - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ood-on-our-robotic-future.html TOK technology robots future
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Many of our proposed futures contain robots. The present also contains robots, but The Future is said to contain a lot more of them. Is that good or bad? We haven’t made up our minds. And while we’re at it, how about a robotic mind that can be made up more easily than a human one?Sci-fi writers have been exploring robots for decades, but they were far from the first to do so. Humankind has been imagining nonbiological but sentient entities that do our bidding ever since we first set stylus to papyrus.
  • To understand Homo sapiens’ primary wish list, go back to mythology. We endowed the gods with the abilities we wished we had ourselves: immortality and eternal youth, flight, resplendent beauty, total power, climate control, ultimate weapons, delicious banquets minus the cooking and washing up — and artificial creatures at our beck and call.
  • Every technology we develop is an extension of one of our own senses or capabilities. It has always been that way. The spear and the arrow extended the arm, the telescope extended the eye, and now the Kissinger kissing device extends the mouth. Every technology we’ve ever made has also altered the way we live. So how different will our lives be if the future we choose is the one with all these robots in it?
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My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rancium-and-it-killed-her.html TOK science chemistry physics ethics health
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • There is a common narrative in science of the tragic genius who suffers for a great reward, and the tale of Curie, who died from exposure to radiation as a result of her pioneering work, is one of the most famous. There is a sense of grandeur in the idea that paying heavily is a means of advancing knowledge. But in truth, you can’t control what it is that you find — whether you’ve sacrificed your health for it, or simply years of your time.
  • How quickly an element decayed and how it did so — meaning which of its component parts it shed — became the focus of researchers in radioactivity. Apart from purely scientific insights, there was a hope that radiation could lead to something marvelous. X-rays, a kind of radiation discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen and produced by accelerated electrons, had already been hailed as a major medical breakthrough and, in addition to showing doctors their patients’ insides, were being investigated as a treatment for skin lesions from tuberculosis and lupus. In her 1904 book “Investigations on Radioactive Substances,” Marie Curie wrote that radium had promise, too — diseased skin exposed to it later regrew in a healthy state. Radium’s curious ability to destroy tissue was being turned against cancer, with doctors sewing capsules of radium into the surgical wounds of cancer patients (including Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are used today in research). This enthusiasm for radioactivity was not confined to the doctor’s office. The element was in face creams, tonics, even candy. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article that Curie and her daughter wrote on radium in 1926, preliminary experiments suggested that radium could even improve the quality of soil.
  • Perhaps the most tragic demonstration of this involved workers at the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, N.J., which in 1917 began hiring young women to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The workers were told that the paint was harmless and were encouraged to lick the paintbrushes to make them pointy enough to inscribe small numbers. In the years that followed, the women began to suffer ghoulish physical deterioration. Their jaws melted and ballooned into masses of tumors larger than fists, and cancers riddled their bodies. They developed anemia and necrosis. The sensational court case started — and won — by the dying Radium Girls, as they were called, is a landmark in the history of occupational health. It was settled in June 1928, four months before Marguerite Perey arrived at the Radium Institute to begin a 30-year career of heavy exposure to radiation.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • We know now that alpha and beta particles emitted in radiation attack DNA and that the mutations they cause can lead to cancer. Ingested radioactive elements can concentrate in the bones, where they continue their decay, in effect poisoning someone for as long as that person lives. By the time Perey made her discovery, she was already heavily contaminated. She spent the last 15 years of her life in treatment for a gruesome bone cancer that spread throughout her body, claiming her eyesight, pieces of her hand and most of the years in which she had planned to study francium. As the disease progressed, she warned her students of the horrible consequences of radiation exposure. Francis, my grandfather, says he recalls hearing that when she walked into labs with radiation counters in her later years, they would go off.
  • Over the years, historians have pondered what drove the Curies to throw caution so thoroughly to the wind. Perhaps it was inconceivable to them that the benefits of their research would not outweigh the risks to themselves and their employees. In a field in which groundbreaking discoveries were being made and the competition might arrive there first, speed was put above other concerns, Rona noted. But you almost get the impression that in the Curie lab, dedication to science was demonstrated by a willingness to poison yourself — as if what made a person’s research meaningful were the sacrifices made in the effort to learn something new.
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Colin Tudge: Microscopes have no morals | World news | The Guardian - 4 views

www.theguardian.com/...religion.science science ethics TOK religion
shared by daryashinwary on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • daryashinwary on 04 Dec 14
     
    The article is about how the correlation between being a scientist and being an atheist is unnecessary, and the importance of having religion when it comes to ethics.
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Exploring the Ethics of 'Designer Babies' - Huffington Post - 2 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...designer-babies_n_4966189.html science ethics psychology emotion reason intuition technology genetics biology engineering design genetic modification implications
shared by adamdrazsky on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • adamdrazsky on 04 Dec 14
     
    By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer Published: 03/13/2014 02:18 PM EDT on LiveScience Creating designer babies who are free from disease and super athletic or smart may finally be around the corner.
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BBC News - Why do people cough during concerts? - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...entertainment-arts-21242727 TOK arts science human sciences SocialScience music
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Many concert-goers are often frustrated by the sound of people coughing during classical music performances. These coughers have now become the subject of an academic paper concerning "the economics of concert etiquette", which analyses a stark fact: people appear to cough more in concerts than in they do in normal life. The German economist Andreas Wagener told the Today programme: "The statistics indicate people cough during concerts twice as much as they do in normal life." Concert pianist Susan Tomes said: "I certainly do notice it, but I think it has something to do with the fact that people have gotten so used to hearing music amplified. "Many types of music are so loud, but classical music is not, and when you go to a classical concert, you forget how quiet acoustic instruments are." First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme on Monday 28 January 2012.
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Rich countries and the minorities they discriminate against, mapped - Quartz - 1 views

qz.com/...ey-discriminate-against-mapped TOK bias economics minorities psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • So what do these findings really mean? Well there are a few different ways of thinking about the economics of discrimination in the workplace. One, known as taste-based discrimination, simply suggests that some employers have a preference against hiring minorities, even if they’re just as productive as other workers. Another, implicit discrimination, is thought to reflect attitudes that the people making discriminatory decisions they are themselves unaware of. Finally, there’s the notion of statistical discrimination, in which the person making the decision is relying not on the characteristics—for example the job skills—of the person in question, but rather some other notion of the “the average characteristics of the group” to which that person belongs. But really those are only elaborate ways of dressing up the obvious: discrimination is discrimination.
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David Byrne: "Do you really think people are going to keep putting time and effort into... - 0 views

www.salon.com/..._if_no_one_is_making_any_money TOK arts imagination
shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • I’m not saying that the artist doesn’t put their feelings into it, or any part of their biography, but that there’s a lot of constraints and considerations and templates that they work with – unconscious decisions or constraints put upon them that guide what they’re going to do.Otherwise, why didn’t people in the 14th century start writing full-blown operas with giant orchestras and whatever?” These things just weren’t available to them. Our imaginations are constrained by all these other things — which is a good thing. There’s kind of a process of evolution that goes on where the creative part of you adapts to whatever circumstances are available to you. And if you decide you want to make pop songs, or whatever, there’s a format. You can push the boundaries pretty far, but it’s still a recognized thing. And if you’re going to do something at Lincoln Center, there’s a pretty prescribed set of things you are going to do. You can push that form, but kind of from inside the genre. So I guess I’m saying that a lot of creative decisions are kind of made for us, and the trick is then working creatively within those constraints.
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How the Color Red Influences Our Behavior - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...or-red-influences-our-behavior TOK science perception emotion behvior
shared by Aidar Ulan on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • red regularly sways behavior.
  • Red is a powerful color
  • It means luck in China, where bridal wear is red, mourning in parts of Africa and sex in Amsterdam's red-light district.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Charged with social and cultural meanings
  • Whereas humans are trichromats—meaning that we have three types of retinal cones sensitive to long (red), medium (green) and short (blue) wavelengths—cattle are dichromats: they possess only two kinds of cones.
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