Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged Environment

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
11More

Is This How Discrimination Ends? A New Approach to Implicit Bias - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...525405 bias brain science psychology research
shared by honordearlove on 14 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • “There are a lot of people who are very sincere in their renunciation of prejudice,” she said. “Yet they are vulnerable to habits of mind. Intentions aren’t good enough.”
  • the psychological case for implicit racial bias—the idea, broadly, is that it’s possible to act in prejudicial ways while sincerely rejecting prejudiced ideas. She demonstrated that even if people don’t believe racist stereotypes are true, those stereotypes, once absorbed, can influence people’s behavior without their awareness or intent.
  • While police in many cases maintain that they used appropriate measures to protect lives and their own personal safety, the concept of implicit bias suggests that in these crucial moments, the officers saw these people not as individuals—a gentle father, an unarmed teenager, a 12-year-old child—but as members of a group they had learned to associate with fear.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In fact, studies demonstrate bias across nearly every field and for nearly every group of people. If you’re Latino, you’ll get less pain medication than a white patient. If you’re an elderly woman, you’ll receive fewer life-saving interventions than an elderly man. If you are a man being evaluated for a job as a lab manager, you will be given more mentorship, judged as more capable, and offered a higher starting salary than if you were a woman. If you are an obese child, your teacher is more likely to assume you’re less intelligent than if you were slim. If you are a black student, you are more likely to be punished than a white student behaving the same way.
  • Mike Pence, for instance, bristled during the 2016 vice-presidential debate: “Enough of this seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement broadly by making the accusation of implicit bias whenever tragedy occurs.” And two days after the first presidential debate, in which Hillary Clinton proclaimed the need to address implicit bias, Donald Trump asserted that she was “essentially suggesting that everyone, including our police, are basically racist and prejudiced.”
  • Still other people, particularly those who have been the victims of police violence, also reject implicit bias—on the grounds that there’s nothing implicit about it at all.
  • Bias is woven through culture like a silver cord woven through cloth. In some lights, it’s brightly visible. In others, it’s hard to distinguish. And your position relative to that glinting thread determines whether you see it at all.
  • All of which is to say that while bias in the world is plainly evident, the exact sequence of mental events that cause it is still a roiling question.  Devine, for her part, told me that she is no longer comfortable even calling this phenomenon “implicit bias.” Instead, she prefers “unintentional bias.” The term implicit bias, she said, “has become so broad that it almost has no meaning.”
  • Weeks afterwards, students who had participated noticed bias more in others than did students who hadn’t participated, and they were more likely to label the bias they perceived as wrong. Notably, the impact seemed to last: Two years later, students who took part in a public forum on race were more likely to speak out against bias if they had participated in the training.
  • This hierarchy matters, because the more central a layer is to self-concept, the more resistant it is to change. It’s hard, for instance, to alter whether or not a person values the environment. But if you do manage to shift one of these central layers, Forscher explained, the effect is far-reaching.
  • And if there’s one thing the Madison workshops do truly shift, it is people’s concern that discrimination is a widespread and serious problem. As people become more concerned, the data show, their awareness of bias in the world grows, too.
3More

The Exaggerated Promise of So-Called Unbiased Data Mining | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/...gerated-promise-of-data-mining brain science research knowledge science Technology
shared by sanderk on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Feynman trap—ransacking data for patterns without any preconceived idea of what one is looking for—is the Achilles heel of studies based on data mining. Finding something unusual or surprising after it has already occurred is neither unusual nor surprising. Patterns are sure to be found, and are likely to be misleading, absurd, or worse.
  • A standard neuroscience experiment involves showing a volunteer in an MRI machine various images and asking questions about the images. The measurements are noisy, picking up magnetic signals from the environment and from variations in the density of fatty tissue in different parts of the brain. Sometimes they miss brain activity; sometimes they suggest activity where there is none.A Dartmouth graduate student used an MRI machine to study the brain activity of a salmon as it was shown photographs and asked questions. The most interesting thing about the study was not that a salmon was studied, but that the salmon was dead. Yep, a dead salmon purchased at a local market was put into the MRI machine, and some patterns were discovered. There were inevitably patterns—and they were invariably meaningless.
  • sanderk on 20 Oct 19
     
    This article relates to our discussion in class about data mining. Scientists assume that patterns in data are true instead of making a hypothesis and trying to see if their hypothesis is true. These assumptions can lead to false conclusions. Also, this article talks about how people go through all of this data without knowing what they are looking for. When someone does this, it is called The Feynman Trap. I also found it interesting how someone studied the brain activity of a dead fish and still found patterns.
4More

The 10 Most Controversial Psychology Studies Ever Published - Research Digest - 0 views

digest.bps.org.uk/...chology-studies-ever-published psychology brain science research science
shared by krystalxu on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The pair argue, on the basis of their own BBC Prison study and real-life instances of prisoner resistance, that people do not yield mindlessly to toxic environments. Rather, in any situation, power resides in the group that manages to establish a sense of shared identity.
  • The original studies have attracted huge controversy, not only because of their ethically dubious nature, but also because of the way they have been interpreted and used to explain historical events such as the supposedly blind obedience to authority in the Nazi era. Haslam and Reicher have again been at the forefront of counter-arguments.
  • because those attempting a replication lack the necessary research skills, make statistical errors, or fail to perfectly match the original research design.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • They later claimed that Merritte was neurologically impaired, which if true would only add to the unethical nature of the original research.
7More

From Climate Change to Omnicide - Tablet Magazine - 0 views

www.tabletmag.com/...rom-climate-change-to-omnicide
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • As this decade dawns, we are confronted with the reality of climate crisis—both in the image of uncontainable fires raging across the Australian bush, and in the voices of young people speaking truth to power and calling out for their future and the living Earth.
  • And as this future has arrived with smoke-filled air, its vocabulary has evolved: from the innocuous sounding “climate change,” to “climate crisis,” and now “climate collapse,” gradually awakening us to an accelerating disaster. Our seas polluted with plastic, air toxic, trees burning whether in the Amazon or Australia, we are also including other words to describe the nature of this crisis: ecocide, our deliberate destruction of the natural environment; and most recently: omnicide. Omnicide images a crime “we have previously been unable to witness because we have never imagined it.” Across Australia—with billions of dead animals and birds, and millions of people suffering ill health effects—we are witnessing what the world will look like with three or more degrees warming, “the killing of everything.”
  • With almost a hundred homes destroyed, we waited in the smoke-filled air, just out of the mandatory evacuation zone, with our go-bags ready, for nearly a week without electricity.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This insecurity, anxiety, is especially affecting young people, who rightly fear for their future, fear that the current system is pushing the Earth beyond its ecological limits.
  • Understandably we try to place the future of climate crisis within the images of our present conditions—that this way of life will continue, saved by technological solutions or planting millions of trees.
  • While this vast devastation unfolds across Australia, its politicians—paid by climate deniers—are in the process of developing a huge new open coal mine helped by Siemens, which also profited from the Holocaust as a leading corporate participant in Hitler’s “death through work program,” despite the protests of Fridays for Future activists;
  • What will our world look like two, or three degrees warmer? We can already see signs of a future few of us want to imagine.
7More

Can Brain Science Help Us Break Bad Habits? | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ience-help-us-break-bad-habits Technology brain science
shared by johnsonel7 on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.
  • Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use.
  • Our minds, Wood explains, have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability—a phenomenon known as the “introspection illusion”—and that may be why we overestimate its power.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • n Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, only a quarter of the subjects were able to resist eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. This implies that a large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life.
  • They were most successful at adopting productive behaviors not when they resolved to do better, or distracted themselves from temptation, but when they altered their environment. Instead of studying on a couch in a dorm, with a TV close by, they went to the library. They ate better when they removed junk food from the dorm refrigerator. “Successful self-control,” Wood writes, “came from essentially covering up the marshmallow.”
  • Both, too, emphasize the role of conscious effort—not in resisting habit but in analyzing it, the better to formulate a strategy for reform.
  • Wood advises us to come up with new rewards as substitutes for the ones the phone provided. I listened to music on the car radio. In the evening, instead of scrolling through tweets and e-mails, I sought out authors I’d never read. At the end of each day, I felt calmer, and free.
5More

Psychology's Bias Toward Rich Western Societies Limits Findings - 0 views

undark.org/...personality-environment psychology bias research western
shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • In the field of psychology, the image is canon: a child sitting in front of a marshmallow, resisting the temptation to eat it. If she musters up the willpower to resist long enough, she’ll be rewarded when the experimenter returns with a second marshmallow. Using this “marshmallow test,” the Austrian-born psychologist Walter Mischel demonstrated that children who could resist immediate gratification and wait for a second marshmallow went on to greater achievements in life. They did better in school, had better SAT scores, and even managed their stress more skillfully.
  • People reasoned from these studies of the 1970s and ’80s that there must be some deep individual characteristic, some personality feature, that set kids up for higher achievements throughout life. But what if that wasn’t the right conclusion to draw from these studies? What if patience, and maybe other personality features too, are more a product of where we are than who we are?
  • The other challenge concerns whom psychologists have been studying for the past century. While scholars know a fair amount about how traits develop, that knowledge derives from research on a very specific and peculiar subset of humans: those living in industrialized societies.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • For uncertainty, they got to choose between a safe bag that always paid out one candy or a risky bag that gave them only a one-in-six chance of more candy. We found lots of variation, especially between the Shuar and the three other communities. Children in the U.S., Argentina, and India behaved similarly, tending to be more patient and more tolerant of uncertainty, while the Shuar showed a very different pattern of behavior. They were more impatient, and warier of uncertainty; they almost never picked the risky bag.
  • In a follow-up study the next year, we looked within Shuar communities and found the same patterns. Shuar kids living near the cities acted more like Americans than the Shuar kids in the rainforest. Something about living near cities — and perhaps something about industrialization more broadly — seemed to be shaping kids’ behavior
5More

Australia fires: 8 things everyone should know about the bushfire disaster - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...s-koalas-wildlife-smoke-donate
shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Since September, at least 24 million acres of Australia have burned in one of the country’s worst fire seasons on record.
  • The severity of the widespread fires is a symptom of global warming, and the blazes may even contribute to it — at least in the short term. Australia’s bushfires have released 400 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
  • Before the fires ignited, Australia was already enduring its hottest and driest year on record. It’s summertime in the southern hemisphere, and the heat keeps rising.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This summer’s high temperatures and subsequent fires are linked to climate change, which drives long-term warming trends and makes these kinds of events more severe.
  • Australia is one of the great biodiversity hotspots in the world. The island continent was isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years, allowing evolution to take strange new paths, and until fairly recently, with little human influence.Around 244 species of mammals are found only in Australia. Before the fires, its great diversity of life was already threatened due to invasive species, habitat destruction, and climate change, according to Australia’s science research agency, CSIRO. Now, ecologists are fearing severe ecological consequences from so much land being burnt at once.
6More

Inherited Learning? It Happens, but How Is Uncertain | Quanta Magazine - 0 views

www.quantamagazine.org/-but-how-is-uncertain-20191016 brain science research
shared by johnsonel7 on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Most recently, some researchers have found evidence that even some learned behaviors and physiological responses can be epigenetically inherited.
  • But in the 1950s, the botanist Royal Alexander Brink discovered that, under different environmental conditions, maize plants with identical genomes expressed different-colored kernels, and these colors were heritable. It was some of the first evidence for epigenetic inheritance. Since then, more examples of inheritance without a clear genetic basis have come to light, as have a variety of possible mechanisms for epigenetic inheritance.
  • C. elegans worms infected with viruses would defend themselves by generating small RNAs that targeted and neutralized the viruses. Moreover, the subsequent offspring of the roundworms also made these small protective RNAs, even though they had never been exposed to the viruses.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • He hypothesizes that the process involves one or more molecules released by the nervous system — perhaps small RNAs, perhaps something secreted like a hormone. But somehow those germ cells then influence the behavior of the next generation and seem to circumvent the normal need for rde-4 in the production of the small RNAs for chemotaxis in the progeny.
  • “I believe that today, there is not a single solid paper showing that only small RNAs are involved in epigenetic inheritance,” said Isabelle Mansuy, a neuroepigenetics researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the University of Zurich who studies the inheritance of trauma in humans and mice. In the mouse model she works with, she knows that small RNAs are not sufficient because if she injects small RNAs alone into fertilized mouse eggs, the resulting animals do not show the RNA-associated trait.
  • “If we can ingest a chemical from our environment that changes the epigenomes of the egg or sperm, why couldn’t our brain make a similar molecule that does the same thing?”
4More

A High-Tech System to Make Homes More Healthy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tem-to-make-homes-healthy.html homes science psychology Technology
shared by sanderk on 13 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Darwin is operated through a Wi-Fi-enabled tablet that resembles an iPad and displays metrics on conditions across the home. Properties with the system are constructed with air quality sensors and filters that detect and remove impurities like pollution and smoke. They also have water purifiers that get rid of chlorine, heavy metals and other particles from tap water.
  • “We’re indoors for most of our lives, and while we may not be able to change that, Darwin gives you the ability to change your environment,” he said.
  • Not many are equipped with such high-tech systems as Darwin, but these communities offer wellness in other ways: growing produce for residents, for example, or providing outdoor space and fitness classes.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • With their high ceilings, tall windows, herringbone floors and granite stone bathrooms, these homes, like the Simonds properties, feel contemporary; the residences on the ground floors have 645-square-foot outdoor courtyards.
7More

The 'Availability Bias' Is Driving Investor Decisions - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/ing-investor-decisions-2012-10 availability decisions knowledge psychology Bias research
shared by sanderk on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • What availability bias tells us is that investors’ lingering perceptions of a dire market environment may be causing them to view investment opportunities through an overly negative lens, making it less appealing to consider taking on investment risk, no matter how small the returns on perceived “safe” investments.
  • “Imagine if I was a financial advisor and you came to talk to me about your risk attitude, and I started the discussion by asking you to describe how you felt in the last three years on the days when your portfolio lost 5% of its value. Then I asked you what your risk attitude was. Most people would say they don’t want to ever experience days like that again. On the other hand, what if instead I talked about people I knew who were retired and living in the Bahamas, fishing and golfing. Now your risk attitude would probably be different.”
  • As humans, our thinking is strongly influenced by what is personally most relevant, recent or dramatic.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • lingering perceptions based on dramatic, painful events are impacting decision-making even when those events are over.
  • Ariely said a home country investment bias might be generated by two perceptual factors.“The first is an overly optimistic belief about one’s own economy; an expectation of performance in their country that is higher than what would be statistically realistic. The second reason is most likely due to procedural difficulties in investing outside the country – such as less knowledge about how to access these markets.”
  • investors may be making decisions driven more by personal bias or irrational belief than by reality and, in doing so, they may be hindering their own investment success.
  • The problem? These decisions may hinder their ability to reach their desired retirement or savings goals. The choice is between changing the goal—or changing the means of reaching it.
9More

Marine Labs on the Water's Edge Are Threatened by Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ate-change-marine-science.html science crisis education
shared by anniina03 on 08 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A marine laboratory 85 miles southwest of New Orleans was designed to be a fortress against extreme weather. But it might be defeated by climate change.
  • It stands 18 feet above the ground on pillars with pilings that extend more than 100 feet underground. Its walls can withstand winds of up to 250 miles per hour.But the water is coming.
  • The assault from climate change is slower but more relentless than any storm, and will ultimately do more damage. It threatens researchers’ ability to study marine environments up close at a time when it’s more vital than ever to understand them.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Fox Island Environmental Education Center, a Virginia institution that has opened up the wonders of the natural world to young people for more than 40 years, shut down in November. Between erosion and sea level rise, so much of the island’s salt marsh had disappeared that “it made it unsafe to run the program,” said Tom Ackerman, vice president for education at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which owns the island center.
  • because south Louisiana’s land is subsiding while the oceans are rising, the region has what may be the highest relative sea level rise in the country. “We’re just 10 to 30 years in front of the curve of everybody else,” he said.
  • Officials predict that, without action, the lab might need to shut down several dozen days each year within the next 10 to 15 years. The corrosive saltwater attacks the structure and has risen up through the soil into buried electrical cables, at one point causing a blackout. Some floods are accompanied by droves of fiddler crabs that sometimes find their way into the elevators.
  • Many marine labs are preparing to meet similar challenges, though they are in locations that are not yet facing the level of threat that Louisiana is.
  • At the Louisiana center, Ms. Conover sees educational value in their problems. Along with its mission as a scientific research facility, it is also a center for environmental education with visits from some 5,000 students each year. “If our parking lot is flooding when a group is here, we definitely talk about why we’re flooding on that given day, when five years ago we wouldn’t, given the same conditions.” That example, she said, “gives the perspective of what our coastal communities are dealing with.”
  • “Global sea-level rise is one of the greatest challenges facing society in the 21st century, and understanding how this phenomenon impacts coastal systems, infrastructure and the people who use them requires a regular coastal presence.”
4More

The Psychology of "OK, Boomer" | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...the-psychology-ok-boomer psychology language generational war
shared by johnsonel7 on 18 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Unlike previous editions of intergenerational conflict, the phrase isn’t about older generations not being “cool” or appreciating a counter-culture aesthetic. It refers instead to a perception that the older generation is unrealistic about the way the world works now, out of touch with the kitchen table issues of climate change, shrinking opportunities for economic advancement, and the suffering caused by wars that never should have been started.
  • Imagine that instead of members of a couple, we have two generations talking to each other. Each has its own distinct interests and style, but ultimately they are tied together in a relationship. What would it mean if one member of the couple was willing to just off-handedly dismiss the entire worldview of another?
  • Being dismissive of someone’s entire world view is rude behavior, and so the phrase “OK, Boomer” is just an instance of bad behavior by people in one generation. The problem would appear to be that Generation Z and Millenials are rude and behaving badly. But when you listen to why people use the phrase, it’s pretty clear it’s because they are frustrated, fed up. Just telling people who are fed up “don’t be rude to people” without also trying to address why they are fed up also feels dismissive.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It sometimes feels like the refusal to turn back towards people after conflict, but instead fire back and double down on the conflict, is the most prevalent and pressing problem in modern society.
6More

Russia Unveils Climate Change Adaptation Plan - 0 views

www.highnorthnews.com/...climate-change-adaptation-plan
shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The National Action Plan for the First Phase of Adaptation to Climate Change for the Period up to 2022 was published online by the Russian government.
  • The document outlines the measures to be taken by federal and regional authorities to “reduce the vulnerability of the population, economy and natural environment to the impacts of climate change.” Moreover, it defines a number of possible opportunities arising from climate change.
  • Russia will likely experience more intense and frequent droughts, precipitation, floods, fires, and the degradation of permafrost in the North.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The first seven pages of the document outline the planning, implementation and evaluation of a climate change adaptation plan. The government pledges its support by offering scientific assistance and expects to take responsibility for the security of people impacted by the consequences of climate change. Russia only officially ratified the Paris agreement in October 2019. The new plan reiterates Russia’s obligation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other international treaties.
  • These measures include upgrading the national climate monitoring system, preparing assessments of the impacts of climate change and developing adaptation strategies for specific sectors (such as the energy, transport and agriculture industries).
  • Russia, the world’s largest country, is particularly vulnerable to climate change. In July 2019, the government declared an emergency after raging wildfires engulfed an area in Siberia bigger than the size of Belgium.
9More

For many, the first line of defense against Covid-19 is out of reach - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • Washing your hands frequently, with plenty of water and soap, is one of the simplest and most effective measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Yet due to a lack of water supply and indoor plumbing, three-quarters of households in the developing world won't be able to follow this advice, Tim Wainwright of the nonprofit WaterAid told The Guardian, because they lack some place to wash with soap and water. How will they cope when the pandemic escalates and there is no clean water to help stop contagion?
  • The pandemic may be raging in Europe and the US, but it is spreading across Asia, Africa and Latin America, from where it may yet return to strike the Northern Hemisphere again. This pandemic is a global threat, and it will not be defeated until our most vulnerable communities are safe. One of the crucial ways of keeping them safe is to ensure they have access to safe water and sanitation; never has the sixth UN Sustainable Development Goal, which aims to ensure just this by 2030, been more vital for saving and protecting lives.
  • Two years ago, Cape Town in South Africa came perilously close to "Day Zero" -- the day its 3.7 million residents would run out of water. Strict water rationing has been the order of the day ever since. Water scarcity increases the burden on the poorest of the poor -- women who must walk for miles to find water and carry it back to their homes. And, of course, water scarcity makes the challenge of delivering clean water and sanitation much more complex.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Every year, 1.5 million young children die of preventable infectious diseases such as diarrhea because of poor sanitation, according to UNICEF. One out of every three humans on our planet -- some 2.2 billion people -- lack access to safe drinking water, and six out of 10 lack access to proper sanitation, meaning toilets or safely managed sewage systems. Residents of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, can share one pit latrine with over 100 people. In Dharavi, Asia's largest urban slum located in Mumbai, India, 80% of its seven million residents have no running water, the National Observer has noted. What hope do they have of washing their hands frequently?
  • More than two million Americans live without running water, indoor plumbing or wastewater treatment, according to the nonprofits Dig Deep and the US Water Alliance. A report by Food & Water Watch found that, in 2016, 15 million Americans had their water shut off due to an inability to pay water bills -- one out of every 20 households across the country. The US neither provides a constitutional right to water nor recognizes the UN Human Right to Water and Sanitation.
  • The truth is that in every country, water infrastructure -- where it is present -- is deteriorating.
  • But investing in clean water infrastructure saves lives, and we must seize this moment to ramp up investment in safe water and sanitation. Spending on water is not just the right thing to do; it's also the smart thing to do.
  • According to the UN, every $1 invested in safe drinking water in urban areas yields more than $3 in saved medical costs and added productivity, on average. For every $1 invested in basic sanitation, society makes $2.50 back. The return is higher in rural areas, with $7 gained or saved for every $1 invested in clean drinking water.
  • Without clean water and proper sanitation, we will not be able to combat the spread of the new coronavirus. Like Covid-19, water scarcity is a global problem that needs collective action. Never has there been a more urgent time to address the world's water crisis.
7More

Australia, your country is burning - dangerous climate change is here with you now - 0 views

theconversation.com/ge-is-here-with-you-now-129569
shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • I did not see vast expanses of rainforest framed by distant blue-tinged mountain ranges. Instead I looked out into smoke-filled valleys, with only the faintest ghosts of distant ridges and peaks in the background.
  • They seem disturbingly prescient in light of what we are witnessing unfold in Australia.
  • The brown skies I observed in the Blue Mountains this week are a product of human-caused climate change. Take record heat, combine it with unprecedented drought in already dry regions and you get unprecedented bushfires like the ones engulfing the Blue Mountains and spreading across the continent. It’s not complicated.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The warming of our planet – and the changes in climate associated with it – are due to the fossil fuels we’re burning: oil, whether at midnight or any other hour of the day, natural gas, and the biggest culprit of all, coal. That’s not complicated either.
  • The continent of Australia is figuratively – and in some sense literally – on fire.
  • Australia is experiencing a climate emergency. It is literally burning.
  • Australians must vote out fossil-fuelled politicians who have chosen to be part of the problem and vote in climate champions who are willing to solve it.
6More

Consciousness and Language | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...consciousness-and-language consciousness language psychology science brain science
shared by krystalxu on 25 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Homo sapiens became sapiens largely because of language.
  • We can call this problem the radically uneven distribution of language.
  • If one conceives of consciousness as access to our thoughts for action and report—the so-called ‘access consciousness’ (Block, 1995
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • related to our ability to have very complex interactions with our environment and with others.
  • ) determining how a semantics based on behavior and goals is capable of explaining the inferential and hierarchical structure of sentences, which is basic for language comprehension;
  • If one holds the view that phenomenal consciousness does not play any role (that it, as it were, just “sits there” in us) then one commits to a kind of epiphenomenalist view (that consciousness is just a by-product of cognitive processing with no meaningful purpose).
14More

Trump pursues his political obsessions as stark 100,000 coronavirus deaths landmark loo... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 26 May 20 - No Cached
  • Sometime in the next few days, the 100,000th American will succumb to Covid-19 in a pandemic that President Donald Trump once predicted would just "miraculously" disappear.
  • In his most politically significant maneuver, he heaped intense pressure on North Carolina's Democratic governor to permit a normal, crowded Republican National Convention, despite fears such a mass gathering could seed virus hot spots. Trump warned he could pull the huge money-earner out of Charlotte, which was picked to play host in August.
  • And he indulged his preoccupations on his tax returns, Hillary Clinton, Fox News, slanders against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, the Russia investigation, Joe Biden's mental health, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mail-in voting in November and highlighted dangerous and unproven Covid-19 therapies promoted on conservative media he has tested himself.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • "For as long as we have citizens willing to follow their example, to carry on their burden, to continue their legacy, then America's cause will never fail and American freedom will never, ever die."
  • But that doesn't mean it isn't jarring, as the most wrenching moment so far approaches in the nation's battle against a pandemic that while ebbing in terms of total deaths is trending up in 18 states, is steady in 22 and easing in 10 more. More than 98,000 people in the US have now died from the coronavirus and more than 1.6 million have been infected. More than 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and the unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels.
  • There was little evidence of a deeper meaning to his presidency at this stage than personal and political grievances.
  • No White House could have been fully prepared for the disaster and subsequent economic hollowing of this year's pandemic
  • Trump spent much of Memorial Day, fulminating against Cooper, complaining that the North Carolina governor was "unable to guarantee" the arena for the convention in August can be filled to capacity. The President is determined to deploy the full pageantry of convention season to portray a nation and economy in the full throes of what he calls a "transition to greatness."
  • Yet such a spectacle as the Republican convention seems utterly incongruous with real-world events. Sports teams that use such arenas are expecting to play without fans for at least months in a bio-secure environment. The prospect of thousands of delegates pouring into convention cities from all over the country, including coronavirus hotspots, is a huge headache for organizers.
  • "In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space."
  • It was not immediately clear whether Trump and the Republican National Committee are serious about pulling the convention from Charlotte.
  • Trump has used federal resources multiple times to fly to his resorts and golf courses. Trump's two rounds this weekend struck critics as inappropriate during a national crisis and on a weekend when American remembers its war dead.
  • "Nearly 100,000 lives have been lost, and tens of millions are out of work. Meanwhile, the president spent his day golfing," Biden wrote in a tweet accompanying an online ad Saturday.
  • Trump may not come under such criticism had he not been so dismissive of Obama's afternoons on the golf course -- and saying he wouldn't have time to play golf if he was elected president.
6More

The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...545048 psychology research language
shared by honordearlove on 04 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • t was a victory for a subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.
  • Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them.
  • Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The supporters of inclusive writing say the strong institutional pushback in France is rooted in a misunderstanding of what language is meant to do; it should be a vector for social progress, they argue. “Language is … the space where we must inscribe societal transformations,”
  • Nevertheless, this May, Haddad and his firm released an online manual that codified inclusive writing for corporations and institutions. He believes that inclusive writing can successfully help businesses deal with gender inequality.
  • d. If France is serious about gender equality, there may be more efficient ways to get there than inclusive writing. And while cultural conservatism is definitely involved in the backlash, it’s not the only factor. “Mastery of a complex orthographic system is an important piece of cultural capital,” explained Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “and people everywhere object to any development that devalues it.”
7More

Brave new world: Simple changes in intensity of weather events 'could be lethal' -- Sci... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...190930131549.htm research science
shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • "It is difficult to predict how organisms will respond to changes in extreme events because these events tend to be, by definition, quite rare," Botero said. "But we can have a pretty good idea of how any given species may respond to current changes in this aspect of climate -- if we pay attention to its natural history, and have some idea of the climatic regime it has experienced in the past."
  • develop an evolutionary model of how populations respond to rare environmental extremes. (Think: 500-year floods.) These rare events can be tricky for evolution because it is difficult to adapt to hazards that are almost never encountered
  • Haaland and Botero also found that factors speeding up trait evolution are generally likely to hinder -- rather than favor -- adaptation to rare selection events. Part of the reason: High mutation rates tend to facilitate the process of adaptation to normal conditions during the long intervals in between environmental extremes.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "Our results challenge the idea that species that have been historically exposed to more variable environments are better suited to cope with climate change," Botero said.
  • The simple framework that Haaland and Botero describe can be applied to any kind of environmental extreme including flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, droughts, cold spells, tornadoes and hurricanes -- any and all of which might be considered part of the "new normal" under climate change.
  • "In this case, our model suggests that the typical inhabitants of these places are likely to be more vulnerable to hotter temperatures than to longer or more widespread heat waves."
  • "While this simple conservation action is unlikely to completely shift the balance from a 'conservative' to a 'care-free' evolutionary response to extreme events, it may nevertheless reduce the strongest vulnerability of these 'conservative' lizard populations," Botero said. "It might just buy them enough time to accumulate sufficient evolutionary changes in their toes and limbs to meet the new demands of their altered habitat."
5More

Having an elder brother is associated with slower language development -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...190905124522.htm science psychology research brain science knowledge language education
shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Intuitively, it is tempting to think that a child who has an elder brother or sister will grow up in a stimulating linguistic environment and will develop their language skills faster than the family's firstborn. However, several studies have shown the contrary: the acquisition of language in a child with an elder sibling is reported to be slower than a child who has none.
  • More than 1000 children have been followed from birth to five and a half years old in the mother-child cohort EDEN.* Their language skills were evaluated at 2, 3 and 5.5 years old by tests measuring several aspects of language, such as vocabulary, syntax and verbal reasoning
  • Children who have an elder brother had on average a two-month delay in language development compared with children with an elder sister.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The first is that elder sisters, in being more willing to talk to their younger siblings than brothers, may compensate for their parents being less available. Another hypothesis would be that elder sisters compete less than elder brothers for parental attention.
  • Though this study cannot separate these two hypotheses, it does show that early language development in a younger sibling tends to be slower when the elder is a boy.
« First ‹ Previous 281 - 300 of 332 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page