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Javier E

The Lasting Lessons of John Conway's Game of Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...math-conway-game-of-life.html

emergent life game lessons programming software simulation chaos

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • “Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called ‘simulation games,’” Mr. Gardner wrote when he introduced Life to the world 50 years ago with his October 1970 column.
  • The Game of Life motivated the use of cellular automata in the rich field of complexity science, with simulations modeling everything from ants to traffic, clouds to galaxies. More trivially, the game attracted a cult of “Lifenthusiasts,” programmers who spent a lot of time hacking Life — that is, constructing patterns in hopes of spotting new Life-forms.
  • The tree of Life also includes oscillators, such as the blinker, and spaceships of various sizes (the glider being the smallest).
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Patterns that didn’t change one generation to the next, Dr. Conway called still lifes — such as the four-celled block, the six-celled beehive or the eight-celled pond. Patterns that took a long time to stabilize, he called methuselahs.
  • The second thing Life shows us is something that Darwin hit upon when he was looking at Life, the organic version. Complexity arises from simplicity!
  • I first encountered Life at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1978. I was hooked immediately by the thing that has always hooked me — watching complexity arise out of simplicity.
  • Life shows you two things. The first is sensitivity to initial conditions. A tiny change in the rules can produce a huge difference in the output, ranging from complete destruction (no dots) through stasis (a frozen pattern) to patterns that keep changing as they unfold.
  • Life shows us complex virtual “organisms” arising out of the interaction of a few simple rules — so goodbye “Intelligent Design.”
  • I’ve wondered for decades what one could learn from all that Life hacking. I recently realized it’s a great place to try to develop “meta-engineering” — to see if there are general principles that govern the advance of engineering and help us predict the overall future trajectory of technology.
  • Melanie Mitchell— Professor of complexity, Santa Fe Institute
  • Given that Conway’s proof that the Game of Life can be made to simulate a Universal Computer — that is, it could be “programmed” to carry out any computation that a traditional computer can do — the extremely simple rules can give rise to the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible. This means that there are certain properties of the Game of Life that can never be predicted, even in principle!
  • I use the Game of Life to make vivid for my students the ideas of determinism, higher-order patterns and information. One of its great features is that nothing is hidden; there are no black boxes in Life, so you know from the outset that anything that you can get to happen in the Life world is completely unmysterious and explicable in terms of a very large number of simple steps by small items.
  • In Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a character says, “But you had taken on a greater and more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen.”This is compelling but wrong, and Life is a great way of showing this.
  • In Life, we might say, things only happen at the pixel level; nothing controls anything, nothing does anything. But that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as action, as control; it means that these are higher-level phenomena composed (entirely, with no magic) from things that only happen.
  • Stephen Wolfram— Scientist and C.E.O., Wolfram Research
  • Brian Eno— Musician, London
  • Bert Chan— Artificial-life researcher and creator of the continuous cellular automaton “Lenia,” Hong Kong
  • it did have a big impact on beginner programmers, like me in the 90s, giving them a sense of wonder and a kind of confidence that some easy-to-code math models can produce complex and beautiful results. It’s like a starter kit for future software engineers and hackers, together with Mandelbrot Set, Lorenz Attractor, et cetera.
  • if we think about our everyday life, about corporations and governments, the cultural and technical infrastructures humans built for thousands of years, they are not unlike the incredible machines that are engineered in Life.
  • In normal times, they are stable and we can keep building stuff one component upon another, but in harder times like this pandemic or a new Cold War, we need something that is more resilient and can prepare for the unpreparable. That would need changes in our “rules of life,” which we take for granted.
  • Rudy Rucker— Mathematician and author of “Ware Tetralogy,” Los Gatos, Calif.
  • That’s what chaos is about. The Game of Life, or a kinky dynamical system like a pair of pendulums, or a candle flame, or an ocean wave, or the growth of a plant — they aren’t readily predictable. But they are not random. They do obey laws, and there are certain kinds of patterns — chaotic attractors — that they tend to produce. But again, unpredictable is not random. An important and subtle distinction which changed my whole view of the world.
  • William Poundstone— Author of “The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge,” Los Angeles, Calif.
  • The Game of Life’s pulsing, pyrotechnic constellations are classic examples of emergent phenomena, introduced decades before that adjective became a buzzword.
  • Fifty years later, the misfortunes of 2020 are the stuff of memes. The biggest challenges facing us today are emergent: viruses leaping from species to species; the abrupt onset of wildfires and tropical storms as a consequence of a small rise in temperature; economies in which billions of free transactions lead to staggering concentrations of wealth; an internet that becomes more fraught with hazard each year
  • Looming behind it all is our collective vision of an artificial intelligence-fueled future that is certain to come with surprises, not all of them pleasant.
  • The name Conway chose — the Game of Life — frames his invention as a metaphor. But I’m not sure that even he anticipated how relevant Life would become, and that in 50 years we’d all be playing an emergent game of life and death.
caelengrubb

5 key facts about language and the brain - 0 views

www.medicalnewstoday.com/...324529

shared by caelengrubb on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Language is a complex topic, interwoven with issues of identity, rhetoric, and ar
  • While other animals do have their own codes for communication — to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food — such communications are typically “repetitive instrumental acts” that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences
  • As Homo sapiens, we have the necessary biological tools to utter the complex constructions that constitute language, the vocal apparatus, and a brain structure complex and well-developed enough to create a varied vocabulary and strict sets of rules on how to use it.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Though it remains unclear at what point the ancestors of modern humans first started to develop spoken language, we know that our Homo sapiens predecessors emerged around 150,000–200,000 years ago. So, Prof. Pagel explains, complex speech is likely at least as old as that
  • A study led by researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that committed language students experienced growth in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with learning and spatial navigation, as well as in parts of the cerebral cortex, or the outmost layer of the brain.
  • In fact, researchers have drawn many connections between bilingualism or multilingualism and the maintenance of brain health
  • Multiple studies, for instance, have found that bilingualism can protect the brain against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
  • Being bilingual has other benefits, too, such as training the brain to process information efficiently while expending only the necessary resources on the tasks at hand.
  • Research now shows that her assessment was absolutely correct — the language that we use does change not only the way we think and express ourselves, but also how we perceive and interact with the world.
  • Language holds such power over our minds, decision-making processes, and lives, so Broditsky concludes by encouraging us to consider how we might use it to shape the way we think about ourselves and the world.
pier-paolo

How To Avoid Election Stress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...election-stress.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “We’re seeing a huge increase in the need for mental health services,”
  • “One of the very few things that remains, and not only remains but is heightened, is our political standing,”
  • “I think that people are way more polarized even within their families and essential groups than they ever have been before.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Uncertainty produces anxiety, but you can counter that, in part, by understanding what to expect on Election Day this year.
  • This year, Dr. Tillery observed, there’s a significant chance the presidential election will not be called on Tuesday night.
  • “Voters should get some comfort from knowing that we do have counting procedures and auditing procedures and voter notification procedures that would make it better for us to be calm and let those processes play out,”
  • Other analog activities can help you cope, too. “Anxious thoughts race by,” Dr. Stosny said, “and the faster they go, the less realistic they get.” Instead of dwelling on them, write them out longhand; this will slow down and moderate their frenetic pace. Next to each source of fear, write down how you’ll respond to it.
  • Be on the lookout for viral disinformation: Check the provenance of news articles or memes making polarizing political claims or calling the election before a mainstream news outlet has done so.
  • “Humans are quite resilient,” she said. “There’s a strong possibility that you will be able to cope.”
  • f a family member approaches you with anger, try to respond with compassion. Consider setting a time limit on your political discussions, Dr. Lee said, agreeing in advance to a fun, shared activity when your time is up.
  • If you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed, or need to take time out of a challenging conversation, go for a walk or run, and try to spend at least 30 minutes outside.
  • 68 percent of adults report finding the election to be a significant source of stress. This is due, at least in part, to the vitriol and name-calling exhibited by candidates,
  • “One of the things Covid has made abundantly clear in so many aspects of our life is that we have a lot of cracks in the system,”
  • “This is the first step in a long journey of really reimagining what America is going to look like and what America is going to be about,” Ms. Holland said. “That’s not going to end when the voting does.”
pier-paolo

ON EDUCATION; A Failure of Logic And Logistics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...re-of-logic-and-logistics.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • THE federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 may go down in history as the most unpopular piece of education legislation ever created. It has been criticized for setting impossibly high standards -- that every child in America must be proficient in reading and math by 2014
  • Now it turns out that about a third of the 8,000 transfers -- children often traveling over an hour to attend crowded schools -- have been moved from one school labeled failing under the law to another failing school.
  • Overcrowding breeds tension.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • How could they? As might be expected from a law that tries to create a single accountability formula for every American school, No Child Left Behind is replete with technicalities and split hairs.
  • Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did not want to take on the Bush administration over the federal law. The chancellor denied this, saying ''nothing is served'' by turning a tough equity issue into politics.
  • Recently, Mr. Klein had his photo taken with Bill Gates, who presented the city with $51 million to create small high schools. But principals of small high schools, like Louis Delgado of Vanguard in Manhattan, say transfers have devastated them this year.
huffem4

Opinion | Trump risks the lives of millions to save himself - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...hy-exploits-coronavirus-crisis

politics COVID-19 Trump

shared by huffem4 on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • As basic humanity demands that he minimize death and destitution, he seems more set on protecting his political standing and rewarding cronies. This isn’t America First — it’s Trump First.
  • To preserve political viability, he’s willing to risk the lives of millions.
    • huffem4
      huffem4 on 02 Nov 20
       
      To what extent is the author's opinion true? What knowledge can the reader extract from this article?
  • this is a president who, when asked what he would “say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared,” replies: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter.”ADThere is no empathy inside this broken man — nor in his feeble response to this disaster.
    • huffem4
      huffem4 on 02 Nov 20
       
      How can the reader take this author's opinion and utilize it to strengthen their knowledge?
pier-paolo

What We Dream When We Dream About Covid-19 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dreams-covid-coronavirus.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “At least qualitatively, you see some shifts in content of dreams from the beginning of the pandemic into the later months,” Dr. Barrett said. “It’s an indication of what is worrying people most at various points during the year.”
  • Taken together, the papers also hint at an answer to a larger question: What is the purpose of dreaming, if any?
  • In recent years, brain scientists have argued that REM sleep — the period of sleep during which most dreaming occurs — bolsters creative thinking, learning and emotional health, providing a kind of unconscious psychotherapy.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • People with persistent waking anxieties also tended to play out scenarios involving future work, relationships and life generally in their heads over the course of a day. Previous research has correlated this pattern to scene-shifting in dreams: the frequent changing of the setting, from indoors to outdoors, city to country, mountains to coast.
  • the continuity hypothesis. This framework holds that the content of dreams simply reflects what people thought, felt and did during the day — the good and the bad, the hopeful and the frightening.
  • dreamers during the first phase of the pandemic recorded far more such shifts in their REM mini-dramas.
  • “I wasn’t expecting this, but the findings suggest to me this idea that men are mainly experiencing fear of getting sick and dying, health fears,”
  • Women have been weathering more secondary effects; they tend to be the ones nursing sick family members, more often than males, for instance. I suspect this is the single most likely reason that sadness is up for women in these times.”
adonahue011

Twitter is Showing That People Are Anxious and Depressed - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-media-.html

new york times people psychology research technology social media

shared by adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the lab offers this answer: Sunday, May 31. That day was not only the saddest day of 2020 so far, it was also the saddest day recorded by the lab in the last 13 years. Or at least, the saddest day on Twitter.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The lab is offering the idea that May 31st was the saddest day of 2020, and the saddest in the last 13 years. The toll 2020 has put on all of us mentally is probably something at times we cannot even recognize.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The lab is offering the idea that May 31st was the saddest day of 2020, and the saddest in the last 13 years. The toll 2020 has put on all of us mentally is probably something at times we cannot even recognize.
  • measuring word choices across millions of tweets, every day, the world over, to come up with a moving measure of well-being.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      They use a machine to track the words people are using on twitter specifically to measure the well-being of people
  • the main finding to emerge was our tendency toward relentless positivity on social media.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • “Happiness is hard to know. It’s hard to measure,”
  • “We don’t have a lot of great data about how people are doing.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This is an interesting statement because it is so true. Yet it is so important to know how people are doing. Often times I think we personally miss some of the feelings we have, which is something we talked about in TOK. We cut out certain memories or feelings to make the narrative we want
  • to parse our national mental health through the prism of our online life.
  • that stockpile of information towered as high as it does now, in the summer of 2020
  • , Twitter reported a 34 percent increase in daily average user growth.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important statistic because we all took part in this
  • has gathered a random 10 percent of all public tweets, every day, across a dozen languages.
  • Twitter included “terrorist,” “violence” and “racist.” This was about a week after George Floyd was killed, near the start of the protests that would last all summe
  • the pandemic, the Hedonometer’s sadness readings have set multiple records. This year, “there was a full month — and we never see this — there was a full month of days that the Hedonometer was reading sadder than the Boston Marathon day,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This is saddening because it is the reality we have all had to learn how to deal with.
  • “These digital traces are markers that we’re not aware of, but they leave marks that tell us the degree to which you are avoiding things, the degree to which you are connected to people,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I agree with this statement because it is so similar to what we discussed in TOK with the idea that our brain lets us avoid things when we don't feel like we can deal with them.
  • one of the challenges of this line of research is that language itself is always evolving — and algorithms are notoriously bad at discerning context.
  • they were able to help predict which ones might develop postpartum depression, based on their posts before the birth of their babies.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This type of research seems like a positive way to utilize social media. Not that the saddening posts are good but the way we can perceive this information is important
  • Using data from social media for the study of mental health also helps address the WEIRD problem:
  • psychology research is often exclusively composed of subjects who are Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I never thought of this but it is so true! Using social media means that the stats are global.
  • We’re now able to look at a much more diverse variety of mental health experiences.”
  • but also anxiety, depression, stress and suicidal thoughts. Unsurprisingly, she found that all these levels were significantly higher than during the same months of 2019.
  • is really a representative place to check the state of the general population’s mental health.
  • argues that in the rush to embrace data, many researchers ignore the distorting effects of the platforms themselves.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Contrasting opinion from the rest of the article
  • emotionally invested in the content we are presented with, coaxed toward remaining in a certain mental state.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting idea though I tend to think more in the opposite direction that social media is a pretty solid reflection.
  • The closest we get to looking at national mental health otherwise is through surveys like the one Gallup performs
  • the lowest rates of life satisfaction this year in over a decade, including during the 2008 recession
  • I have never been more exhausted at the end of the day than I am now,” said Michael Garfinkle, a psychoanalyst in New York.
  • There are so many contenders to consider: was it Thursday, March 12, the day after Tom Hanks announced he was sick and the N.B.A. announced it was canceled? Was it Monday, June 1, the day peaceful protesters were tear gassed so that President Trump could comfortably stroll to his Bible-wielding photo op?
adonahue011

Opinion | Take a Social Media Break Until You've Voted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-election-misinformation.html

opinion new york times social media research technology education bias

shared by adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is an interesting idea to me because people are so set in their views, how staying on social media leading up to the election will affect their vote is a bit confusing.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I think the idea of believing what you see on social media could be a logical fallacy. The idea of following the mases on a specific idea, or an authority figure
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I think the idea of believing what you see on social media could be a logical fallacy. The idea of following the mases on a specific idea, or an authority figure
  • Americans who rely the most on social media to get their news are also far less likely to have accurate or complete knowledge of political events
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • 60 percent of people who primarily get their news from social media had minimal knowledge of current political events, according to the study, compared with 23 percent who primarily get their news directly from news websites or apps
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Very interesting statistic. I think social media allows for too much individual opinion when it comes to news. Our brains are very deceptive so I find it easy to believe things I personally read on social media.
  • 18- to 29-year-olds, 48 percent get most of their political news from social media sites
  • are breeding a generation of the misinformed — a situation that has only grown more dire at a time when the president spreads falsehoods about public health and the election.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I don't agree with this at all. I think the younger generation is seeing the older generation use social media as a news outlet many times. This is the logical fallacy I previously mentioned.
  • while false information flows unimpeded through Facebook groups, user posts and advertisements.
  • The company says it will limit political advertising in the week before Election Day — but with huge numbers of mail-in ballots already being sent in around the country, that will amount to too little, too late.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The writer of this article is very bias on this topic, at least facebook is trying to help.
  • “I don’t think there is any question at this point voters will be more informed by seeking out news brands they trust rather than spending their time on social media where it’s less than clear,”
  • Twitter sometimes forces users to first click through a warning that a tweet violates its rules on election integrity,
  • The problem with such posts is that they are widely spread, echoed and believed — and that happens far more quickly than moderators can react with a warning label.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is an important point which is why when we look at media we need to try and analyze it, and not allow ourselves to believe everything we read.
  • Mr. Trump that falsely claimed the seasonal flu is responsible for more deaths than coronavirus
  • here are many positives to social media, of course — particularly as millions of Americans struggle to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • available more reliably elsewhere, from your local board of elections website and from good government groups
  • People believe them.
  • Social media is a cesspool
  • however, aren’t taking the threat of spreading misinformation seriously enough ahead of the election.
  • Stay off social media at least until you’ve voted.
ilanaprincilus06

Manipulating memory to treat addiction | Mo Costandi | Neurophilosophy blog | Science |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...1

brain manipulation addiction extinction exposure therapy

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the procedure involves manipulating addicts' memories of past drug use, and could lead to non-pharmacological therapy for addiction, as well as psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobia.
  • the procedure involves manipulating addicts' memories of past drug use, and could lead to non-pharmacological therapy for addiction, as well as psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobia.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Could this manipulation affect other parts of the brain?
  • addicts quickly associate paraphernalia and other drug-associated cues with the pleasurable effects of the drug, so that seeing these cues triggers cravings and drug-seeking behaviour.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Current treatments effectively relieve cravings in the clinic, but not when addicts return to their usual environment
  • This process – called 'extinction' – forms the basis of cue exposure therapy, in which addicts are repeatedly exposed to drug-associated cues and prevented from responding to them in the usual way of using the drug.
  • It combines cue exposure with manipulation of a process called memory reconsolidation, in which information is retrieved from long-term storage and then reactivated so that it can be strengthened.
  • "We did the extinction training during reconsolidation, and what seems to have happened is that we somehow updated the old fear memory,"
  • also manipulates reconsolidation of addicts' memories of past drug use to weaken their habitual responses to paraphernalia and other drug-related stimuli.
  • so it remains to be seem whether the procedure will be effective in preventing cravings outside of the clinical setting.
lucieperloff

Are Nightmares Bad for You? | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...are-nightmares-bad-for-you

psychology brain science nightmares knowledge research

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • But experts who study nightmares say this is a pretty typical bad-dream scenario. “There’s often some threat of death or injury or annihilation, and you’re trying to escape,”
  • In some instances, a bad dream’s setting or events may be innocent, but the emotions the dreamer feels are ones of terror, disgust or distress, he explains.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      It's not so much the event as it is how it makes you feel
  • “For people who have significant nightmare problems, it’s also common is for these individuals to actively try to avoid sleep in order to avoid having nightmares,” he says. “When they do have [a nightmare], they often don’t sleep for the rest of the night.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Nightmares can lead to sleep deprivation
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Chronic poor sleep can cause a whole range of mental and physical health issues, including depression and heart disease.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Nightmares have many effect other than just being tired
  • In many cases, they may help the dreamer ameliorate some of their daytime anxieties. Research has found that nightmares can help some people learn to better manage stress.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      How does this happen??
  • In much the same way, nightmares—especially those following an upsetting event—may allow a person’s brain to relive the event and move past it, Nadorff says.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      The brain's form of exposure therapy?
  • “We have the person talk through their nightmare and change it in a way that’s not threatening, and then they practice the new dream during the day using visual imagery,” Nadorff explains. This kind of daily rehearsal can help reshape the scary dream even while a person is sleeping.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      This seems much more difficult and abstract
katedriscoll

Supernumerary phantom limb in a patient with basal ganglia hemorrhage - a case report a... - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC5591514

shared by katedriscoll on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a rare neurologic phenomenon, in which a patient misperceives an extra limb in addition to the original set of limbs. We report a case of SPL in a patient with a right basal ganglia hemorrhage and review the previous literature about this peculiar phenomenon.
  • Two days after the event of a right basal ganglia hemorrhage, a 78-year-old male reported a phantom arm protruding from his left shoulder. He could not see or touch the phantom arm but he felt the presence of an addition arm lateral to his paretic arm. Pain or sensory discomfort were absent in either the paretic arm or the phantom arm. He stated that he could intentionally move the phantom arm independent of his paretic arm. The examination showed that the passive movement of his paretic arm did not elicit any movement of his phantom arm. We diagnosed the SPL as a complication of the hypertensive basal ganglia hemorrhage and treated him with anti-hypertensive medications. His phantom arm persisted for 3 weeks, and it gradually faded away.
  • SPL had been reported as a rare complication of various types of cerebral lesions. Right hemispheric lesions were most frequently associated with the SPL. Considering the intentional movement of the phantom arm, we deduced that the SPL might result from the impairment of the sensory feedback system for both internal body image and motor movement.
  • katedriscoll on 03 Nov 20
     
    This is a real life example of the supernumerary phatom limb which we talked about in TOK.
anonymous

Opinion | Why Fox News Is Still in a Coronavirus Bubble - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rump-covid-fox-news-masks.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Humans will do figure eights to make facts suit their fictions.
  • Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Leon Festinger came up with cognitive dissonance theory, which can essentially be described as the very human desire to reconcile the irreconcilable.
  • Our brains, he realized, will go to baroque lengths — do magic tricks, even — to preserve the integrity of our worldview, even when the facts inconveniently club us over the head with a two-by-four.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Today, perhaps the best case study of cognitive dissonance theory can be found in the prime-time lineup on Fox News, where Donald Trump’s most dedicated supporters are struggling mightily to make sense of the president’s Covid-19 diagnosis.
  • just as Festinger’s work predicts, they are doubling down on their beliefs, interpreting recent events as incontrovertible proof that they were right from the start.
  • the figure-eight logic we resort to when our stories don’t align with reality.
  • Later in her program, Ingraham even managed to find a doctor who challenged the efficacy of masks.
  • Everyone reckons with cognitive dissonance.
  • On his Friday show, Sean Hannity was reckoning with his own set of contradictions. He repeated, at almost metronomic intervals, that the president had been admitted to the hospital “out of an abundance of caution.” But in his outrage segment, during which he and his choir of the incensed (rightly) condemned those who wished the president harm, he didn’t blink when Geraldo Rivera said: “I hate when I hear that B.S. cliché ‘an abundance of caution.’ The headline here is that the president of the United States and the first lady of the United States have been diagnosed with Covid disease — a wicked, dangerous, deadly disease that’s already claimed 208,000 American lives.”
  • People will do a great deal to justify their belief systems, even if it means tolerating a thousand tiny inconsistencies.
  • And Fox News is especially adept at giving people scripts they can use to minimize their discomfort with bothersome, disconfirming facts.
  • It was notable, I thought, that a few of Trump’s supporters were wearing masks outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
  • But I don’t feel much hope. It requires a pretty thick hide to say you disagree with your former self
  • For those who’ve dismissed or downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, now is a good time to reconsider that position. And for those who’ve prayed for such a conversion, now is a good time simply to be thankful, and not to judge.
anonymous

How Engaging With Art Affects the Human Brain | American Association for the Advancemen... - 0 views

www.aaas.org/...gaging-art-affects-human-brain

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Today, the neurological mechanisms underlying these responses are the subject of fascination to artists, curators and scientists alike.
  • "Once you circle these little things and come to the end of this little project, you'll be invited to compare where you came out against what the results of this experiment were and are," Vikan said. "What you'll find in this show is that there is an amazing convergence. The people that came to the museum liked and disliked the same categories of shapes as the people in the lab as the people in the fMRIs."
  • "Art accesses some of the most advanced processes of human intuitive analysis and expressivity and a key form of aesthetic appreciation is through embodied cognition, the ability to project oneself as an agent in the depicted scene,
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  • Embodied cognition is "the sense of drawing you in and making you really feel the quality of the paintings,"
  • The Birth of Venus" because it makes them feel as though they are floating in with Venus on the seashell. Similarly, viewers can feel the flinging of the paint on the canvas when appreciating a drip painting by Jackson Pollock.
  • Mirror neurons, cells in the brain that respond similarly when observing and performing an action, are responsible for embodied cognition
  • Most research on the effects of music education has been done on populations that are privileged enough to afford private music instruction so Kraus is studying music instruction in group settings
  • "But observing the action requires the information to flow inward from the image you're seeing into the control centers. So that bidirectional flow is what's captured in this concept of mirror neurons and it gives the extra vividness to this aesthetics of art appreciation
  • Performing an action requires the information to flow out from the control centers to the limbs,
  • While congenitally blind people usually don't have activation in the visual area of the brain, in brain scans done after the subjects were taught to draw from memory,
  • Hearing speech in noise is one area in which musicians are uniquely skilled. In standardized tests, musicians across the lifespan were much better than the general public at listening to sentences and repeating them back as the level of background noise increased, Kraus said.
  • Artists are known to be better observers and exhibit better memory than non-artists. In an effort to see what happens in the brain when an individual is drawing and whether drawing can increase the brain's plasticity
  • Musicians are also known for their ability to keep rhythm, a skill that is correlated with reading ability and how precisely the brain responds to sound. After one year, students who participated in the group music instruction were faster and more accurate at keeping a beat than students in the control group, Kraus said.
  • "To sum things up, we are what we do and our past shapes our present," Kraus said. "Auditory biology is not frozen in time. It's a moving target. And music education really does seem to enhance communication by strengthening language skills."
  • "When you're doing art, your brain is running full speed,"
  • "It's hitting on all eight cylinders. So if you can figure out what's happening to the brain on art,
knudsenlu

Happiness | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...happiness

happiness psychology research brain science

shared by knudsenlu on 25 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Ah, happiness, that elusive state. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, even economists, have long sought to define it, and since the 1990s, a whole branch of psychology—positive psychology—has been dedicated to pinning it down and propagating it.
  • Research shows that happiness is not the result of bouncing from one joy to the next; achieving happiness typically involves times of considerable discomfort. 
  • . Researchers estimate that much of happiness is under personal control. Regularly indulging in small pleasures (such as warm baths!), getting absorbed in challenging activities, setting and meeting goals, maintaining close social ties, and finding purpose beyond oneself are all actions that increase life satisfaction.
runlai_jiang

A Short History of the Soviet and Russian Space Program - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/-space-program-history-4140631

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The modern age of space exploration includes more than 70 countries with research institutes and space agencies. However, only a few of them have launch capability, the three largest being NASA in the United States, Roscosmos in the Russian Federation, and the European Space Agency. Back in the early days of the Space Age, there were only two space agencies, both vying for supremacy in space: the U.S. and the Soviet Union (predecessor to today's Russian Federation).
  • The Mir YearsThe most successful space station built by the Soviet Union flew from 1986 through 2001. It was called Mir, and assembled on orbit (much as the later ISS was). It hosted a number of crew members from the Soviet Union and other countries in a show of space cooperation.
  • Disaster in Soviet SpaceDisaster struck the Soviet program and gave them their first big setback. It happened in 1967, when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed when the parachute that was supposed to settle his Soyuz 1 capsule gently on the ground failed to open. It was the first in-flight death of a man in space in history and a great embarrassment to the program. Problems continued to mount with the Soviet N1 rocket, which also set back planned lunar missions. Eventually, the U.S. beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, and the country turned its attention to sending unmanned probes to the Moon and Venus.
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  • Regime ChangeThe Soviet space program faced interesting times as Union began to crumble in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Instead of the Soviet space agency, Mir and its Soviet cosmonauts (who became Russian citizens when the country changed) came under the aegis of Roscosmos, the newly formed Russian space agency. Many of the design bureaus that had dominated space and aerospace design were either shut down or reconstituted as private corporations. The Russian economy went through major crises, which affected the space program. Eventually, things stabilized and the country moved ahead with plans to participate in the International Space Station, plus resume launches of weather and communications satellites.
knudsenlu

Quinn Norton: The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...554402

language social media technology offense

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Quinn Norton
  • The day before Valentine’s Day, social media created a bizarro-world version of me. I have seen strange ideas about me online before, but this doppelgänger was so far from resembling me that I told friends and loved ones I didn’t want to even try to rebut it. It was a leading question turned into a human form. The net created a person with my name and face, but with so little relationship to me, she could have been an invader from an alternate universe.
  • It started when The New York Times hired me for its editorial board. In January, the Times sought me out because, editorial leaders told me, the Times as an institution is struggling with understanding how technology is shifting society and politics. We talked for a while. I discussed my work, my beliefs, and my background.
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  • I was hesitant with the Times. They were far out of my comfort zone, but I felt that the people I was talking to had a sincerity greater than their confusion. Nothing that has happened since then has dissuaded me from that impression.
  • If you’re reading this, especially on the internet, you are the teacher for those institutions at a local, national, and global level. I understand that you didn’t ask for this position. Neither did I. History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are. When the backlash began, I got the call from the person who had sought me out and recruited me. The fear I heard in that shaky voice coming through my mobile phone was unmistakable. It was the fear of a mob, of the unknown, and of the idea that maybe they had gotten it wrong and done something terrible. I have felt all of those things. Many of us have. It’s not a place of strength, even when it seems to be coming from someone standing in a place of power. The Times didn’t know what the internet was doing—tearing down a new hire, exposing a fraud, threatening them—everything seemed to be in the mix.
  • I had even written about context collapse myself, but that hadn’t saved me from falling into it, and then hurting other people I didn’t mean to hurt. This particular collapse didn’t create much of a doppelgänger, but it did find me spending a morning as a defensive jerk. I’m very sorry for that dumb mistake. It helped me learn a lesson: Be damn sure when you make angry statements. Check them out long enough that, even if the statements themselves are still angry, you are not angry by the time you make them. Again and again, I have learned this: Don’t internet angry. If you’re angry, internet later.
  • I think if I’d gotten to write for the Times as part of their editorial board, this might have been different. I might have been in a position to show how our media doppelgängers get invented, and how we can unwind them. It takes time and patience. It doesn’t come from denying the doppelgänger—there’s nothing there to deny. I was accused of homophobia because of the in-group language I used with anons when I worked with them. (“Anons” refers to people who identify as part of the activist collective Anonymous.) I was accused of racism for use of taboo language, mainly in a nine-year-old retweet in support of Obama. Intentions aside, it wasn’t a great tweet, and I was probably overemotional when I retweeted it.
  • In late 2015 I woke up a little before 6 a.m., jet-lagged in New York, and started looking at Twitter. There was a hashtag, I don’t remember if it was trending or just in my timeline, called #whitegirlsaremagic. I clicked on it, and found it was racist and sexist dross. It was being promulgated in opposition to another hashtag, #blackgirlsaremagic. I clicked on that, and found a few model shots and borderline soft-core porn of black women. Armed with this impression, I set off to tweet in righteous anger about how much I disliked women being reduced to sex objects regardless of race. I was not just wrong in this moment, I was incoherently wrong. I had made my little mental model of what #blackgirlsaremagic was, and I had no clue that I had no clue what I was talking about. My 60-second impression of #whitegirlsaremagic was dead-on, but #blackgirlsaremagic didn’t fit in the last few tweets my browser had loaded.
  • I had been a victim of something the sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd call context collapse, where people create online culture meant for one in-group, but exposed to any number of out-groups without its original context by social-media platforms, where it can be recontextualized easily and accidentally.
  • Not everyone believes loving engagement is the best way to fight evil beliefs, but it has a good track record. Not everyone is in a position to engage safely with racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and homophobes, but for those who are, it’s a powerful tool. Engagement is not the one true answer to the societal problems destabilizing America today, but there is no one true answer. The way forward is as multifarious and diverse as America is, and a method of nonviolent confrontation and accountability, arising from my pacifism, is what I can bring to helping my society.
  • Here is your task, person on the internet, reader of journalism, speaker to the world on social media: You make the world now, in a way that you never did before. Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots. But humanity is the most complicated thing we’ve found in the universe, and so far as we know, we’re the only thing even looking. We are miracles by the billions with powers and luxuries beyond the dreams of kings of old.
  • We are powerful creatures, but power must come with gentleness and responsibility. No one prepared us for this, no one trained us, no one came before us with an understanding of our world. There were hints, and wise people, and I lean on and cherish them. But their philosophies and imaginations can only take us so far. We have to build our own philosophies and imagine great futures for our world in order to have any futures at all. Let mercy guide us forward in these troubled times. Let yourself imagine, because imagination is the wellspring of hope. Here, in the beginning of the 21st century, hope is our duty to the future.
runlai_jiang

Reactivity Definition in Chemistry - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/reactivity-definition-4147073

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In chemistry, reactivity is a measure of how readily a substance undergoes a chemical reaction. The reaction can involve the substance on its own or with other atoms or compounds, generally accompanied by a release of energy. The most reactive elements and compounds may ignite spontaneously or explosively. They generally burn in water as well as the oxygen in air. Reactivity is dependent upon temperature.
  • Reactivity Trend in the Periodic TableThe organization of elements on the periodic table allows for predictions concerning reactivity. Both highly electropositive and highly electronegative elements have a strong tendency to react. These elements are located in the upper right and lower left corners of the periodic table and in certain element groups. The halogens, alkali metals, and alkaline earth metals are highly reactive.
  • How Reactivity WorksA substance reacts when the products formed from a chemical reaction have a lower energy (higher stability) than the reactants. The energy difference can be predicted using valence bond theory, atomic orbital theory, and molecular orbital theory. Basically, it boils down to the stability of electrons in their orbitals. Unpaired electrons with no electrons in comparable orbitals are the most likely to interact with orbitals from other atoms, forming chemical bonds. Unpaired electrons with degenerate orbitals that are half-filled are more stable, but still reactive. The least reactive atoms are those with a filled set of orbitals (octet).
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  • Stability Versus ReactivitySometimes a species with low reactivity is called "stable", but care should be taken to make the context clear. Stability can also refer to slow radioactive decay or to the transition of electrons from the excited state to less energetic levels (as in luminescence). A nonreactive species may be called "inert". However, most inert species actually do react under the right conditions to form complexes and compounds (e.g., higher atomic number noble gases).
runlai_jiang

5 Psychology Studies To Restore Your Faith in Humanity - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/ood-psychology-studies-4152968

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • 5 Psychology Studies That Will Make You Feel Good About Humanity
  • When We're Grateful, We Want to Pay it Forward Caiaimage/Sam Edwards / Getty Images You may have heard in the news about "pay it forward" chains: when one person offers a small favor (like paying for the meal or coffee of the person behind them in line) the recipient is likely to offer the same favor to someone else. A study by researchers at Northeastern University has found that people really do want to pay it forward when someone else helps them — and the reason is that they feel grateful. This experiment was set up so that participants would experience a problem with their computer half way through the study. When someone else helped them fix the computer, they subsequently spend more time helping the next person with their computer issues. In other words, when we feel grateful f
  • When We Help Others, We Feel Happier
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Our Connections With Others Make Life More Meaningful
  • Supporting Others Is Linked to a Longer Life
  • 05 of 05 It's Possible to Become More Empathetic
marleen_ueberall

Does Democracy Need Truth?: A Conversation with the Historian Sophia Rosenfeld | The Ne... - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-historian-sophia-rosenfeld

democracy truth

shared by marleen_ueberall on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Does Democracy Need Truth?: A Conversation with the Historian Sophia Rosenfeld | The New Yorker
  • Ever since Donald Trump announced his Presidential candidacy, in June of 2015, there has been considerable concern about whether his allergy to truth is endangering American democracy
  • the relationship between truth and democracy was fraught for centuries before the time of Twitter and Trump.
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  • One, it’s a story about how democracy itself is always based on uncertain notions of truth, in moral terms and in epistemological terms. The other is a story about a continual conflict between a kind of expert truth and a more populist, everyday, common-sense truth that supposedly stems not from experts but the wisdom of the crowd.
  • Democracy insists on the idea that truth both matters and that nobody gets to say definitively what it is. That’s a tension that’s built into democracy from the beginning, and it’s not solvable but is, in fact, intrinsic to democracy.
  • We don’t want to have one definitive source of truth. Part of the reason ideas evolve and culture changes is that we’re constantly debating what is an accurate rendition of reality in some form.
  • Can we accept evolution as a set truth or not? They have not exploded to the point where they’ve destabilized our political or social life, but they’ve been a controversial question for over a hundred years. That’s a public contest that, actually, democracy’s pretty good for. You know, you contest things in court, you contest things in universities, you contest things in the public sphere.
  • I think it’s important that there be a contest about what is true and also about, How do you know what’s true? Where does your information come from? I would say, largely, science has won. That is, that the mainstream educational institutions, the National Institutes of Health, et cetera, all accept that evolution is as close as we’re going to get to truth.
  • One says that experts often make [bad] decisions because there’s been no popular input on them—not just because they don’t know enough but because they haven’t actually taken account of popular knowledge.
  • The most common example involves things like the World Bank coming up with a plan about water use in some part of the world without studying how people actually think and use water, simply imagining a kind of technocratic solution with no local input, and it turns out to be totally ineffective because it runs contrary to cultural norms and everyday life. There’s every chance that experts alone get things wrong.
  • Social media and the Internet more broadly have clearly had a rather revolutionary effect on not just what we take to be true but how truths circulate, what we believe, how we know anything.
  • new technology causes certain kinds of panics about truth. The Internet is particularly important because of its reach and because of the algorithmic way in which it promotes what’s popular rather than what’s true. It creates a culture of untruth, probably, that other forms of publishing can’t easily.
  • I actually approve of fact-checking, even if I think it’s often not very effective, because it doesn’t persuade people who aren’t already inclined to want to look at fact-checking. And I don’t think it’s much of a substitute for real politics
  • I don’t think facts are pure in any sense. You know, if I give you something like an unemployment rate, it implies all kinds of interpretative work already about what is work and who should be looking for it and how old you should be when you’re working.
  • It’s important that that’s part of democracy, too—questioning received wisdom. If somebody says that’s how it is, it’s correct to think, Is that really how it is? Do I have enough information to be sure that’s how it is?
  • Conspiracy theories, the complex ones that arise from the bottom, tend to involve seeing through official truths and often seeing how the rich and powerful have pulled the wool over people’s eyes, that what looked like this turned out to be that because there was a kind of subterfuge going on from above.
  • Whereas, the climate-change one, which we know has been sort of promoted by the Koch brothers and others in business interest groups, as you say, didn’t start really organically as much as it became a kind of position of industry that then took on a life of its own because it got mixed in with a whole bunch of other assumptions, whether it was about political norms, government overreach, guns.
sanderk

A coronavirus vaccine should be affordable by everyone - STAT - 0 views

www.statnews.com/...accine-affordable-for-everyone

education Knowledge morals science brain science research

shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • As the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spreads in more than 60 countries, the race to develop a vaccine to prevent the illness has taken on new urgency. In a meeting with CEOs of major drug companies this week, President Trump ramped up the pressure, suggesting that vaccines could come to market faster than the 12- to 18-month timeline most researchers think is realistic.
  • But while the Trump administration is pushing drug companies to meet faster timelines, it hasn’t addressed an equally urgent question: What will be done to ensure the vaccine is accessible for those who need it most?
  • Making vaccines available only to the rich is not just immoral, it’s also bad public health policy. We’ll want everyone, rich or poor, insured or not, to be protected from the new coronavirus. Protecting others helps to protect everyone.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The final price of any vaccine should be one that governments of poor and rich countries alike can afford so all citizens can get it free at the point of care.
  • Without price controls, poor countries are unlikely to be able to afford or access enough vaccines to protect their populations.
  • A sad truth we have learned from past global pandemics is that poor people are hit first and worst. Vaccines are most urgently needed where health systems are fragile, and where the effects of this new coronavirus could be catastrophic.
  • Many countries lack the resources, infrastructure, and health care personnel to mount full-scale efforts to detect the virus and prevent it from spreading, meaning it will move quickly and easily among populations. In these settings, the number of cases is likely to grow exponentially, putting stress on already burdened health care workers and facilities and making it harder to provide timely care for those who are ill. Vaccines will be an important tool for preventing such a catastrophe.
  • For those with resources — rich countries and rich people — a vaccine would be valuable, one of several tools we will need to prevent the most serious effects of the new coronavirus. But for those who are poor or who live in poor countries, it may be essential. Without it, they will suffer disproportionately and unnecessarily.
  • To let a coronavirus vaccine be monopolized by the rich will perpetuate the unjust economics of outbreaks, where the poor always pay the heaviest price. Allowing this to happen would be a moral disgrace.
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