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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

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

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.
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

Can Dying Languages Be Saved? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...a-loss-for-words

language culture indigenous knowledge systems

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • There are approximately seven billion inhabitants of earth. They conduct their lives in one or several of about seven thousand languages—multilingualism is a global norm. Linguists acknowledge that the data are inexact, but by the end of this century perhaps as many as fifty per cent of the world’s languages will, at best, exist only in archives and on recordings. According to the calculations of the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat)—a joint effort of linguists at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and at the University of Eastern Michigan—nearly thirty language families have disappeared since 1960. If the historical rate of loss is averaged, a language dies about every four months.
  • The mother tongue of more than three billion people is one of twenty, which are, in order of their current predominance: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Javanese, German, Wu Chinese, Korean, French, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, Tamil, Vietnamese, and Urdu. English is the lingua franca of the digital age, and those who use it as a second language may outnumber its native speakers by hundreds of millions. On every continent, people are forsaking their ancestral tongues for the dominant language of their region’s majority. Assimilation confers inarguable benefits, especially as Internet use proliferates and rural youth gravitate to cities. But the loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them.
markfrankel18

Everyone's Trying Really Hard Not to Call the Germanwings Co-Pilot a Terrorist - Mic - 3 views

mic.com/...rmanwings-co-pilot-a-terrorist

TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Daniel Lamken on 28 Mar 15
     
    The Breivek analogy in this article has some resonance to the notion of media reporting to a certain audience--in this case, western/white, though first impressions necessarily need revision. At this time, we don't know enough about Lubitz, a curiosity in this instant-access age of information. Even his now inaccessible facebook information reduces our impression to a seemingly relaxed tourist enjoying the backdrop of the Golden Gate bridge. To the point of the article, we crave to have more 'backdrop', more cues to connect any dots. Some crave to have preconceptions confirmed, others to reverse common assumptions. For my part, I jotted first impressions via poetry, which doesn't purport veracity but should still, as John Keats reminds in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', probe to know beauty and truth, the former of which defies understanding in this event. Thus, my first impressions: http://lostmenagerie.blogspot.cz/2015/03/meanwhile-tuesday.html
markfrankel18

You Are What You Read | ART21 Magazine - 8 views

blog.art21.org/...you-are-what-you-read

TOK arts ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • What are the ethical implications of using live animals in art?
  • The use of live animals in art has raised many ethical questions regarding what art is and what art should be. Should live animals be used as art objects at all? An art object may have aesthetic value regardless of whether it is ethical or not, but an artist should be held accountable if it can be proved that his or her actions deliberately caused inhumane suffering.
markfrankel18

Urinal Vandal, or New Artiste? : NPR - 2 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

TOK arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • An appeals court in Paris may soon have to actually answer the generally rhetorical question: But is it art? Pierre Pinoncelli was convicted of vandalizing one of the famous urinals signed by Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp. He plans to appeal, arguing that when he scratched and scrawled on the urinal, he created a new, original piece of art.
Lawrence Hrubes

An Artist with Amnesia - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...an-artist-with-amnesia

memory arts psychology cognition neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Lately, Johnson draws for pleasure, but for three decades she had a happily hectic career as an illustrator, sometimes presenting clients with dozens of sketches a day. Her playful watercolors once adorned packages of Lotus software; for a program called Magellan, she created a ship whose masts were tethered to billowing diskettes. She made a popular postcard of two red parachutes tied together, forming a heart; several other cards were sold for years at MOMA’s gift shop. Johnson produced half a dozen covers for this magazine, including one, from 1985, that presented a sunny vision of an artist’s life: a loft cluttered with pastel canvases, each of them depicting a fragment of the skyline that is framed by a picture window. It’s as if the paintings were jigsaw pieces, and the city a puzzle being solved. Now Johnson is obsessed with making puzzles. Many times a day, she uses her grids as foundations for elaborate arrangements of letters on a page—word searches by way of Mondrian. For all the dedication that goes into her puzzles, however, they are confounding creations: very few are complete. She is assembling one of the world’s largest bodies of unfinished art.
  • Nicholas Turk-Browne, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton, entered the lab and greeted Johnson in the insistently zippy manner of a kindergarten teacher: “Lonni Sue! We’re going to put you in a kind of space machine and take pictures of your brain!” A Canadian with droopy dark-brown hair, he typically speaks with mellow precision. Though they had met some thirty times before, Johnson continued to regard him as an amiable stranger. Turk-Browne is one of a dozen scientists, at Princeton and at Johns Hopkins, who have been studying her, with Aline and Maggi’s consent. Aline told me, “When we realized the magnitude of Lonni Sue’s illness, my mother and I promised each other to turn what could be a tragedy into something which could help others.” Cognitive science has often gained crucial insights by studying people with singular brains, and Johnson is the first person with profound amnesia to be examined extensively with an fMRI. Several papers have been published about Johnson, and the researchers say that she could fuel at least a dozen more.
markfrankel18

Episode 189: Why A Dead Shark Costs $12 Million : Planet Money : NPR - 4 views

www.npr.org/...-a-dead-shark-costs-12-million

TOK arts economics

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • On today's Planet Money: Why a dead shark costs $12 million, and a photo of steel wool that looks like a tornado costs $1,265. In other words, we wade into the economics of the art world.
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