GAZA — Very little of Abu Shadi Shenbari’s family home remains in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip. Only a concrete bathroom wall was left standing when Israeli forces flattened the neighborhood near the border with Israel during the war with Hamas last summer.Though Mr. Shenbari had all but abandoned that last panel of erect concrete, in recent days he began building a wood and wire-mesh fort with a flimsy nylon roof to protect the bombed-out bathroom wall, which is now home to a 10-foot-tall depiction of a kitten.The spray-painted mural was created by the elusive British graffiti artist Banksy, who slipped in and out of Gaza in February, leaving his mark on three slabs of rubble left from Israel’s 50-day fight with Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza.
Lesser-Known Trolley Problem Variations. - 0 views
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funny
Banksy Finds a Canvas and a New Fanbase in Gaza's Ruins - NYTimes.com - 1 views
Mathematicians and Blue Crabs - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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The math behind these formulas may be elegant, but applying them is more complicated.
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For instance, it was long believed that a blue crab’s maximum life expectancy was eight years. This estimate was used, indirectly, to calculate crab mortality from fishing. Derided by watermen, the life expectancy turned out to be much too high; this had resulted in too many crab deaths being attributed to harvesting, thereby supporting charges of overfishing.
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Although a definitive cause has yet to be identified, one thing is clear: Mathematical models failed to predict it.
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Five reasons why we should still read maps - BBC News - 0 views
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But now experts say a reliance on sat-navs and smartphone map apps is undermining map-reading skills. So here are five reasons why you should love maps and resist the easy attraction of the sat-nav.
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They have to be used in conjunction with the physical world, be that reading a sign, noticing a church (with or without a spire of course) or identifying that big hill on your right. This process of using your eyes and engaging your brain leaves memories and knowledge of the world around you. With sat-nav as a guide, nothing is learned nor loved about the journey.
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Maps are a partner to our intellect, not a replacement.
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Why 'Natural' Doesn't Mean Anything Anymore - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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It seems that getting end-of-life patients and their families to endorse “do not resuscitate” orders has been challenging. To many ears, “D.N.R.” sounds a little too much like throwing Grandpa under the bus. But according to a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics, when the orders are reworded to say “allow natural death,” patients and family members and even medical professionals are much more likely to give their consent to what amounts to exactly the same protocols.
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So does this mean that, when it comes to saying what’s natural, anything goes? I don’t think so. In fact, I think there’s some philosophical wisdom we can harvest from, of all places, the Food and Drug Administration. When the federal judges couldn’t find a definition of “natural” to apply to the class-action suits before them, three of them wrote to the F.D.A., ordering the agency to define the word. But the F.D.A. had considered the question several times before, and refused to attempt a definition. The only advice the F.D.A. was willing to offer the jurists is that a food labeled “natural” should have “nothing artificial or synthetic” in it “that would not normally be expected in the food.” The F.D.A. states on its website that “it is difficult to define a food product as ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth,” suggesting that the industry might not want to press the point too hard, lest it discover that nothing it sells is natural.
Laïcité and the Skirt - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In most Western democracies, separation of church and state generally means that the government leaves people free to observe their religion’s traditions, diets or dress codes, so long as they do no harm to other groups. In France, however, the stern code of secularism known as laïcité often seems to cross from protecting religious expression into imposing a state-defined secular behavior — most often on the country’s sizable Muslim population. The latest example came when a school in northeastern France twice sent a 15-year-old Muslim girl home for wearing a skirt that was deemed too long.
xkcd: Correlation - 0 views
Why Marvel's Female Superheroes Look Like Porn Stars - The New Yorker - 3 views
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Last week, Marvel launched a new Avengers movie, “Age of Ultron,” and this month it’s launching a new comic book, “A-Force.” Ultron is a robot with artificial intelligence who believes that the only way to achieve peace on earth is to exterminate the human race. The A-Force is a race of lady Avengers, led by She-Hulk, who come from a “feminist paradise,” but I don’t know what that could possibly mean, because they all look like porn stars.
Our Biased Brains - NYTimes.com - 4 views
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The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face. Brain scans show that even when people are told to sort people by gender, the brain still groups people by race.
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White American kids disproportionately judged that the people who were smiling were white and that those who were frowning were Asian. When the experiment was conducted in Taiwan with exactly the same photos, Taiwanese children thought that the faces when smiling were Asian, when frowning were white.
UBC student writes 52,438 word architecture dissertation with no punctuation - not ever... - 1 views
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A 61-year-old architect from the Nisga’a First Nation, Stewart explains that he “wanted to make a point” about aboriginal culture, colonialism, and “the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia.”
Do You Believe In Magic? Interview with Dr. Paul Offit - CSI - 0 views
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I think there is something to be said for the placebo response, which is unfortunately named. I think when people hear the word “placebo,” they assume that it's dismissive, trivializing, that it's just all in my head and that it's not real. I think that in fact, the placebo response can be a physiological response. I think believing that you are about to be helped in some way goes a long way to being helped in some way.
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If you believe that human anatomy has nothing to do with rivers in China or days of the year, then there's nothing accurate about acupuncture. Indeed, if you look at people who benefit from acupuncture, it doesn't matter where you put the needles. In fact, it doesn't even matter whether you put the needles under the skin! Even these retractable needles seem to work, so‑called “acupressure.” That is interesting!
Cass Sunstein on Taylor Swift, Pandora-ization, and why choosing not to choose is somet... - 0 views
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Sunstein zeroes in on a particular kind of nudge, a default setting, which is extraordinarily effective at shaping outcomes. He argues that defaults are perhaps the best of all nudges. For one thing, they can always be over-ridden, thereby preserving the ability to choose. They also, he says, preserve a certain kind of liberty that people lose when they’re forced to make a decision: the freedom not to choose.
What is the role of memory in a digital age? - BBC News - 0 views
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The digital age is also raising broader philosophical questions about memory. How much do we need to remember when it can be effortlessly recalled for us by a machine? If the use of search engines for retrieving facts is allowed at some point in the future, exams themselves might have to change.
This War Of Mine - 0 views
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This War Of Mine provides an experience of war seen from an entirely new angle. For the very first time you do not play as an elite soldier, rather a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city. During the day snipers outside stop you from leaving your refuge, so you need to focus on maintaining your hideout. At night you get a chance to scavenge nearby locations for items that will help you stay alive. Make life-and-death decisions driven by your conscience. Try to protect everybody from your shelter or sacrifice some of them to endure the hardships. During war, there are no good or bad decisions; there is only survival. The sooner you realize that, the better.
Witness Accounts in Midtown Hammer Attack Show the Power of False Memory - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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There is no evidence that the mistaken accounts of either person were malicious or intentionally false. Studies of memories of traumatic events consistently show how common it is for errors to creep into confidently recalled accounts, according to cognitive psychologists.“It’s pretty normal,” said Deryn Strange, an associate psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “That’s the hard thing to get our heads around. It’s frightening how easy it is to build in a false memory.”
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