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As Technology Advances, What Will Happen With Online Privacy? - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...ill-happen-with-online-privacy Technology privacy social media
shared by sanderk on 13 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • individuals should be able to control when their personal data is collected by third parties and how it is used is nearly impossible to implement in a world where personal data is collected, created, used, processed, analyzed, shared, transferred, copied, and stored in unprecedented ways and at an extraordinary speed and volume.
  • There will be no opting out of this data-intensive world.
  • That said, we’re making progress. A series of high profile scandals in 2018 have ignited the privacy debate and put a spotlight on irresponsible business practices
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  • Although Congress is now debating new Federal privacy legislation, I’m not optimistic that policymakers will be able to craft a law that will address these issues in a meaningful way — if they can create any law at all. There are too many stakeholders involved in the debate, each protecting their own economic self interest and competitive advantage in the marketplace
  • We need to engage more, make better informed decisions, use privacy settings and tools, and hold companies accountable when they misuse our data and violate our trust
  • As we debate privacy, we also shouldn’t forget that all of this new tech produces enormous benefits for our society - from curing diseases to easing traffic and reducing pollution
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Geopolitics Redux: Explaining the Japan-Korea Dispute and Its Implications for Great Po... - 0 views

warontherocks.com/...ns-for-great-power-competition
shared by tongoscar on 10 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • China’s rise — perhaps the story of the century — followed economic miracles in Japan and South Korea.
  • The Asian financial crisis was painful, but the region bounced back. A major exception was North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, which brought the region to the brink. For the most part, however, East Asia appeared relatively immune from the geopolitics that bedeviled other key regions.
  • In March 2015, Beijing issued a statement on the Belt and Road Initiative, which it claimed would “promote the connectivity of Asian, European, and African countries and their adjacent seas.” Alarmed by China’s maritime expansion, the United States proposed an Indo-Pacific strategy whereby it would “pursue many belts and many roads by keeping [its] decades-old alliances strong and fostering growing partnerships.”
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  • On Aug. 22, 2019, Seoul announced its withdrawal from the General Security of Military Information Agreement, an intelligence-sharing pact between Japan and South Korea signed in November 2016. Recently, the relationship between these two neighbors has deteriorated to its lowest point since the end of World War II.
  • These past efforts to mend ties make the downward trajectory of the relationship between the two U.S. allies even more puzzling.
  • Some observers have argued that Seoul and Tokyo tend to set aside differences and cooperate when the U.S. security commitment to the region appears weak. But while this may be true, the size of the gap to be bridged continues to widen, due to the rise of China and the Japanese and South Korean reactions to increasing great power tension.
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Undocumented immigrants in the US won't get stimulus checks amid coronavirus lockdown -... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Millions of workers aren't getting any help from the largest emergency aid deal in US history.
  • But immigrant rights advocates say leaving this group out of the $2 trillion plan isn't merely a matter of dollars and cents, and it isn't something that only affects undocumented workers and their families. It's a dangerous decision, they argue, that puts the whole country's health at risk as the novel coronavirus spreads.
  • This isn't just another set of salvos in the political battle over immigration that's raged in our country for decades. It's a very different debate -- because of who could be impacted, and what's at stake.
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  • "From a public health perspective, you cannot have an effective national response to a pandemic that excludes enormous segments of the population. That's both illogical and immoral," Sarmiento says.
  • "With one of the worst jobless reports in quite a few years, the primary focus right now should be on American workers and lawful immigrants," said Chris Chmielenski, deputy director of Numbers USA. "We should make sure that those people are taken care of first."
  • "This is a crisis moment for hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers and families that don't have any sort of a basic work protections, like sick leave, like unemployment insurance," says Sarmiento of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
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Coronavirus Tips: How to Protect and Prepare Yourself - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...prepare-for-coronavirus.html education Knowledge brain science research
shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus continues to spread worldwide, with over 200,000 confirmed cases and at least 8,000 dead. In the United States, there have been at least 8,000 cases and more than 100 deaths, according to a New York Times database.
  • Most important: Do not panic. With a clear head and some simple tips, you can help reduce your risk, prepare your family and do your part to protect others.
  • That might be hard to follow, especially for those who can’t work from home. Also, if you’re young, your personal risk is most likely low. The majority of those who contract coronavirus do not become seriously ill, and it might just feel as if you have the flu. But keeping a stiff upper lip is not only foolhardy, but will endanger those around you.
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  • Avoid public transportation when possible, limit nonessential travel, work from home and skip social gatherings. Don’t go to crowded restaurants or busy gyms. You can go outside, as long as you avoid being in close contact with people.
  • If you develop a high fever, shortness of breath or another, more serious symptom, call your doctor. (Testing for coronavirus is still inconsistent — there are not enough kits, and it’s dangerous to go into a doctor’s office and risk infecting others.) Then, check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website and your local health department for advice about how and where to be tested.
  • Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. That splash-under-water flick won’t cut it anymore.
  • Also, clean “high-touch” surfaces, like phones, tablets and handles. Apple recommends using 70 percent isopropyl alcohol, wiping gently. “Don’t use bleach,” the company said.
  • To disinfect any surface, the C.D.C. recommends wearing disposable gloves and washing hands thoroughly immediately after removing the gloves. Most household disinfectants registered by the Environmental Protection Agency will work.
  • There’s a lot of information flying around, and knowing what is going on will go a long way toward protecting your family.
  • Right now, there’s no reason for parents to worry, the experts say; coronavirus cases in children have been very rare. The flu vaccine is a must, as vaccinating children is good protection for older people. And take the same precautions you would during a normal flu season: Encourage frequent hand-washing, move away from people who appear sick and get the flu shot.
  • Unless you are already infected, face masks won’t helpFace masks have become a symbol of coronavirus, but stockpiling them might do more harm than good. First, they don’t do much to protect you. Most surgical masks are too loose to prevent inhalation of the virus. (Masks can help prevent the spread of a virus if you are infected. The most effective are the so-called N95 masks, which block 95 percent of very small particles.)Second, health care workers and those caring for sick people are on the front lines. Last month, the surgeon general urged the public to stop stockpiling masks, warning that it might limit the amount of resources available to doctors, nurses and emergency professionals.
  • Stock up on a 30-day supply of groceries, household supplies and prescriptions, just in case.That doesn’t mean you’ll need to eat only beans and ramen. Here are tips to stock a pantry with shelf-stable and tasty foods
  • No. The first testing in humans of an experimental vaccine began in mid-March. Such rapid development of a potential vaccine is unprecedented, but even if it is proved safe and effective, it probably will not be available for 12 to18 months.
  • If you’re sick and you think you’ve been exposed to the new coronavirus, the C.D.C. recommends that you call your healthcare provider and explain your symptoms and fears. They will decide if you need to be tested. Keep in mind that there’s a chance — because of a lack of testing kits or because you’re asymptomatic, for instance — you won’t be able to get tested.
  • That’s not a good idea. Even if you’re retired, having a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds so that your money keeps up with inflation, or even grows, makes sense. But retirees may want to think about having enough cash set aside for a year’s worth of living expenses and big payments needed over the next five years.
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Computers Are Learning to Read-But They're Still Not So Smart | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-but-theyre-still-not-so-smart research artificial intelligence pattern recognition
shared by johnsonel7 on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • computers still weren’t very good at understanding the written word. Sure, they had become decent at simulating that understanding in certain narrow domains, like automatic translation or sentiment analysis (for example, determining if a sentence sounds “mean or nice,” he said). But Bowman wanted measurable evidence of the genuine article: bona fide, human-style reading comprehension in English. So he came up with a test
  • The machines bombed. Even state-of-the-art neural networks scored no higher than 69 out of 100 across all nine tasks: a D-plus, in letter grade terms. Bowman and his coauthors weren’t surprised. Neural networks — layers of computational connections built in a crude approximation of how neurons communicate within mammalian brains
  • It produced a GLUE score of 80.5. On this brand-new benchmark designed to measure machines’ real understanding of natural language — or to expose their lack thereof — the machines had jumped from a D-plus to a B-minus in just six months.
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  • The only problem is that perfect rulebooks don’t exist, because natural language is far too complex and haphazard to be reduced to a rigid set of specifications.
  • Researchers simply fed their neural networks massive amounts of written text copied from freely available sources like Wikipedia — billions of words, preformatted into grammatically correct sentences — and let the networks derive next-word predictions on their own. In essence, it was like asking the person inside a Chinese room to write all his own rules, using only the incoming Chinese messages for reference.“The great thing about this approach is it turns out that the model learns a ton of stuff about syntax,”
  • The nonsequential nature of the transformer represented sentences in a more expressive form, which Uszkoreit calls treelike. Each layer of the neural network makes multiple, parallel connections between certain words while ignoring others — akin to a student diagramming a sentence in elementary school. These connections are often drawn between words that may not actually sit next to each other in the sentence. “Those structures effectively look like a number of trees that are overlaid,” Uszkoreit explained.
  • But instead of concluding that BERT could apparently imbue neural networks with near-Aristotelian reasoning skills, they suspected a simpler explanation: that BERT was picking up on superficial patterns in the way the warrants were phrased.
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When Did Ancient Humans Start to Speak? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...603484 science psychology research brain science language
shared by anniina03 on 14 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The larynx, also called the voice box, is where the trouble begins: Its location is, or was, supposed to be the key to language.
  • Scientists have agreed for a while that the organ is lower down the throat in humans than it is in any other primate, or was in our ancestors. And for decades, they thought that low-down larynx was a sort of secret ingredient to speech because it enabled its bearers to produce a variety of distinctive vowels, like the ones that make beet, bat, and boot sound like different words. That would mean that speech—and, therefore, language—couldn’t have evolved until the arrival of anatomically modern Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago
  • In fact, they propose that the necessary equipment—specifically, the throat shape and motor control that produce distinguishable vowels—has been around as long as 27 million years, when humans and Old World monkeys (baboons, mandrills, and the like) last shared a common ancestor.
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  • Those speech abilities could include distinct vowels and consonants, syllables, or even syntax—all of which, according to LDT, should be impossible for any animal without a human vocal tract.
  • As John Locke, a linguistics professor at Lehman College, put it, “Motor control rots when you die.” Soft tissues like tongues and nerves and brains generally don’t fossilize; DNA sequencing is impossible past a few hundred thousand years; no one has yet found a diary or rap track recorded by a teenage Australopithecus.
  • One of the quantitative models the new study relies on, he says, doesn’t properly represent the shape of the larynx, tongue, and other parts we use to talk: “It would convert a mailing tube into a human vocal tract.” And according to Lieberman, laryngeal descent theory “never claimed language was not possible” prior to the critical changes in our ancestors’ throat anatomy. “They’re trying to set up a straw man,” he said.
  • Rather than 27 million years, Hickok proposes that the earliest bound on any sort of speech ability would be nearer to human ancestors’ split with the Pan genus, which includes chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives. That split happened about 5 million to 7 million years ago—certainly longer than 200,000 years, but a far cry from 27 million. Lieberman argues that the precursors of speech might have emerged about a little more than 3 million years ago, when artifacts like jewelry appear in the archaeological record. The idea is that both language and jewelry are intimately related to the evolution of symbolic thinking.
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What's at Stake for Women's Rights in 2020? by Françoise Girard - Project Syn... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ts-by-francoise-girard-2020-01
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • EW YORK – From US Republicans’ effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s right to an abortion, to Poland’s increased restrictions on access to emergency contraception, to Brazil’s clampdown on sexual health education, this is a difficult time for women. But if the global feminist movement has proved anything over the years, it is that it can overcome powerful resistance to defend the rights of marginalized groups. In 2020, it will do so again.
  • According to “strongman” leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and India’s Narendra Modi, women are born to be wives and mothers; immigrants and racial, religious, and ethnic minorities are dangerous and inferior; and LGBTQI+ persons deserve ostracism, detention, or even death. These leaders have emboldened people who share their views to engage in discrimination and violent attacks against racial or other minorities, migrants, women, and other marginalized groups.
  • Achieving social change to protect marginalized groups is never an easy process. There are no quick victories over weak opposition. But, as feminists have proved time and again, with sustained commitment, changes that once seemed impossible can later seem inevitable.
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  • Yet, as president of the International Women’s Health Coalition and a longtime women’s rights advocate, I have seen firsthand what the feminist movement can do. Consider Argentine feminists’ fight against highly restrictive abortion laws.
  • In the last year alone, there have been numerous examples of such changes. The Mexican state of Oaxaca and the Australian state of New South Wales decriminalized abortion, as did Northern Ireland, while others liberalized their laws, expanding the circumstances in which women can access safe, legal abortion services. In April, South Korea’s Supreme Court struck down the country’s abortion law as unconstitutional, setting the stage for decriminalization this year.
  • Particularly inspiring are the young female and non-binary activists who are leading movements for transformative change. For example, Emma González is demanding gun reform in the US; Bertha Zúñiga is defending the land rights of Honduras’ indigenous people; and Jamie Margolin and Greta Thunberg have emerged as leading climate activists.
  • Feminist activists will continue this work at the Beijing+25 Generation Equality Forum, convened by Mexico and France, in Mexico City in May and Paris in July. There, they will call for bold new commitments to address crosscutting challenges like climate change and the refugee crisis.
  • This broader perspective is vital. In fact, feminists must strengthen their alliances with other progressive movements, especially those fighting for environmental sustainability, racial justice, and LGBTQI+ rights. Only by mobilizing together and supporting one another’s agendas can we overcome white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal, and exploitative forces to build a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.
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China's coronavirus economic cardiac arrest | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...avirus-economic-cardiac-arrest
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • In the best of times, an economic cardiac arrest in China, the world’s second-largest economy, would not be good for the global economy. But these are far from the best of times. This makes it all the more difficult to understand both the financial markets’ and world economic policymakers’ complacency about the real risk of a coronavirus-induced global economic recession in the months immediately ahead.
  • Already China’s economic problems are reverberating throughout the global economy. As underlined by Apple and Hyundai’s recent earnings warnings, global supply chains, reliant on in-time Chinese parts deliveries, are being seriously disrupted. At the same time, commodity export-dependent emerging market economies are being dealt a body blow by a Chinese induced decline in international commodity prices, while those economies reliant on Chinese tourism are being severely impacted by a generalized suspension of international flights to China.
  • The world economy is hardly in a good state to withstand a Chinese economic shock. Already before the start of the coronavirus epidemic, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom, the world’s third, fourth and sixth largest economies, respectively, were all on the cusp of economic recessions. Meanwhile, large emerging market economies like Brazil, China, India and Mexico were all experiencing marked economic slowdowns.
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  • The financial markets and global economic policymakers seem to be expecting that the coronavirus epidemic will soon be contained notwithstanding disturbing reports of its significant spread to other Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and Singapore. They also seem to be expecting that as was the case with the 2003 SARS epidemic, the Chinese economy will bounce back quickly and leave little lasting impact on the global economy.
  • In 2008, financial markets and global policymakers were caught by surprise by the way in which trouble in the U.S. subprime mortgage market triggered the worst global economic recession in the post-war period. Judging by their seeming complacency about China’s economic cardiac arrest, one has to wonder how much, if anything, they learned from their 2008-2009 near-death experience.
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The recipe for happiness and success? Try compassion - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN)Looking for a way to be happier? Are you seeking deeper connections with friends or looking for more friends? Want to relate better to your co-workers? Try a little compassion.Compassion, as one scholar describes it, is "experiencing feelings of loving kindness toward another person's affliction." It's related to, but a little different from empathy, which the same scholar defines as "feeling with someone, that is, sharing the other person's emotion."
  • What she, and many other scholars have found, is that compassion is key to coping. The compassionate tend to have deeper connections with others and more friends. They are more forgiving and have a stronger sense of life purpose. Many studies have shown these results.
  • In that quiet space, sit in a comfortable position. Focus on your breath and try to clear your mind. The key is to be present in that space in that time. Then mentally focus on your heart area and think about someone you feel tenderness toward. This could be your spouse or your mom or your child.
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  • Dwell on those positive thoughts for a little bit. Then extend that same feeling toward yourself. Ruminate on that for a little while. Then expand that feeling out to others. Maybe think of someone you aren't as close to and think tenderly about them.
  • You also become more accepting of your own failings. That's what a 2014 study in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found. In this experiment, there were three small groups of women who were subjected to videos of distressing images. One group got empathy training. Another got compassion training.
  • The people with the compassion training still felt these negative emotions, like those with empathy training did, but the part of their brain connected with reward and positive effect also lit up.
  • Compassion prompts your brain to have a wider sense of what's going on and it gives you access to more ideas on how to act. When your brain feels threatened like it does with pain, even someone else's, it focuses on the pain only to make it go away, and shuts down those other avenues that incentivize you to help.
  • Soldiers who took compassion training recovered faster from stressful situations, such as basic training. Their heart and breathing rates return to normal much quicker than those soldiers who don't get the training.
  • School children who did a short eight-week compassion training program functioned better overall, a study showed. After the training, even students who struggled with mental challenges such as ADHD had better attendance and behavior records, and their grades improved.
  • "Developing compassion, sets a foundation for the stability of the mind," Jha said. "And developing intrinsic compassion, a concern for the suffering of others and for oneself, that can be very powerful ... for all involved."
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Climate change: 1 in 3 plant and animal species extinct in 50 years, study warns - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Take a moment to cherish your plants and appreciate the animals you see around you.In 50 years, a third of them may no longer exist.
  • approximately one in three plant, insect and animal species could face extinction by 2070. However, things could be even worse if emissions continue to rise as rapidly as they have in recent decades.
  • In a worst-case scenario, that number could rise to over 55%.
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  • Of the 538 species studied, 44% of them have already experienced an extinction in a particular local area.
  • While many species were able to tolerate a moderate increase in maximum temperatures, 50% of the species had local extinctions if maximum temperatures increased by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. That number rose to 95% if temperatures increased by more than 2.9 degrees Celsius.
  • With January going in the record books as the warmest January in 141 years and statistical analysis done by NOAA scientists predicting 2020 to be one of the five warmest years on record, the researchers believe there will be more local extinctions across the globe.
  • The Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 by ministers from 195 countries from around the globe.It committed these countries to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and below 1.5 degrees, if possible.
  • "Based on our sample of 538 species, we projected a loss of 30% of the species under a more extreme warming scenario, but only about 16% if we stick to the Paris Agreement," Wiens told CNN. "So, think in 1 in 6 species, not 1 in 3."
  • The Paris Agreement is an international pact aimed at curbing global emissions of heat-trapping gases.Unfortunately, studies have shown that so far, many countries are failing to meet the emissions cuts they set to limit climate change.
  • "Some researchers have estimated that two-thirds of all species of plants and animals could be lost due to tropical deforestation alone," Wiens said. "If you combine that with climate change (which can impact species in protected forests and other reserves), then it really is terrible. Even from our data alone, there are extreme warming scenarios where 55% of the species would be lost from intact habitats. And note that deforestation also increases global warming. It is a double whammy against biodiversity."
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The year of living thankfully - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Family. Friends. Love. Health. Freedom from war and natural disaster. Imagination. Community. A roof over our heads. Common decency. Hope. Opportunity. Memories. Financial stability. Favorite places. Days off work. Good weather. The golden age of television. Books. Music. Ice cream. Weekends. A friendly exchange. Something good that happened today. Something bad that didn't happen today. A good cup of coffee.
  • What keeps us from longer and more frequent visits to a grateful (and graceful) mental place is that we think about other things. In fact, we are wired to. Our primitive brains smartly evolved the capacity to quickly sense potential threats, to keep us safe. But in a post-saber-toothed-tiger era, we get easily annoyed, worried and distracted by a lot of extraneous noise.
  • Instead, we need more focus on the positive, And you don't have to set the bar high. Allow yourself to be thankful for the small, mundane things that give you joy and meaning, as well as the big ones. And don't try to gather heaps of blessings to count; a handful each day should do it.
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  • Resilience, including the ability to cope with stress and trauma, is another trait correlated with gratitude. Studies have showed that counting blessings was a factor in managing post-traumatic stress for Vietnam War veterans and an effective coping strategy for many after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Other research shows that the more grateful you are, the more you are likely to exhibit patience and self-control. It can even be good for marriages and relationships: Couples good at exhibiting thankfulness tend to be "more committed and more likely to remain in their relationships over time." Our best selves, it seems, are our most grateful selves.
  • A gratitude journal need not be any more complicated than keeping a notebook by your bed and starting a nightly habit of jotting down who and what you were grateful for that day. Journaling was the standard method for some of the studies cited above, so this is a simple but effective option.
  • Roses, Thorns & Buds (or RTB, among its devotees) has been part of so many family dinners since my older daughter was 4 years old that I've forgotten where we first heard about it. It's quite simple: Everyone at the table takes turns sharing "roses," which are something positive and happy-making about their day; "thorns," which are the opposite of that; and "buds" for something we're looking forward to and we anticipate will be a rose. Sometimes, the family meal and sharing these things itself is a rose.
  • Happiness jars, a strategy popularized by "Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert, is something of a hybrid of gratitude journal and RTB. The idea is to write down on a slip of paper the happiest moment of the day and drop it in a jar. The advantage of doing it this way is that in moments of unhappiness, you can reach into the jar and be reminded of those moments, perhaps becoming grateful for them anew. Gilbert was struck by how many of her fans shared photos of their decorated happiness jars (see Pinterest if you need inspiration) and by how her happiest moments are "generally really common and quiet and unremarkable."
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Coronavirus economic impact: Australia could be among world's hardest hit nations | Wor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ong-worlds-hardest-hit-nations
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Australia could be one of the countries worst affected by the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak as factories in China remain shuttered and millions of people are confined to their homes and banned from travelling.
  • But evidence is mounting that China is suffering a significant slowdown. S&P has downgraded its growth forecast for the world’s second biggest economy to 5% this year from 5.75%, predicting that the impact would spread around the world, while it seems clear that China’s lockdown is set to deprive Australia of billions of dollars in revenue from big spending tourists and students.
  • “When you look at how this will affect other countries, what their exposure is to China, how big the economy is, what type of companies it has, then Australia ticks a lot of the boxes,” he said. “In terms of which countries will be most affected, we’re right up there.”
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  • “It’s not just the numbers of tourists – it’s that they spend quite a lot because of the way they travel with packages, how they get around and spending on shopping,” he says. “If that gets cut off it’s a material impact on the economy in Australia.”
  • However, some partial data released on Friday suggests the scale of the problem that is emerging, with figures showing that property sales in China’s so-called first-tier cities fell by 93% on 3-5 February compared with the same days last year. Railway passenger traffic was down 89% on 5 February.
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A Model of Ambiguity and Vagueness in Clinical Practice Guideline Recommendations - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC1560665
shared by tongoscar on 03 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Ambiguity and vagueness in clinical practice guidelines reduce the likelihood of clinician adherence. They lead to inconsistent interpretation and, in turn, to inappropriate practice variation and medical errors.
  • mbiguity and vagueness have been the subject of considerable attention in linguistics and philosophy
  • Ambiguity exists when a term can reasonably be interpreted in more than one way, for example, the word “bank” can refer to a financial institution or a riverside. Vagueness occurs when the boundaries of a word’s meaning are not well defined, as in the word “tall”5. Vagueness also exists when a word or phrase reduces the level of information contained in a statement, as in stating that an action “may be appropriate”; this phrase reduces the clarity about whether or not the action should be performed.
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  • both vagueness and ambiguity and the term “disambiguation” has been used to describe the resolution of both vagueness and ambiguity.
  • The importance of context on the interpretation of vague terms was shown by Mapes who conducted a study in which physicians were asked to assign a numerical value to the phrase “side effects with [this drug] are rare” in two different contexts: beta adrenergic blocking agents and antihistaminic drugs11.
  • Creating a controlled vocabulary of vague terms has the potential to reduce variable interpretation. Researchers have found hundreds of vague terms used in the medical literature, and reducing these to a manageable set of terms is a viable solution.
  • Researchers have noticed that a rank order of vague terms relative to one other was maintained across studies, despite wide variability in the interpretation of specific terms in the individual studies. This finding indicates it might be possible to create an ordinal scale of ranked vague terms from which authors could select when deliberately using vague terms.
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The Language You Speak Influences Where Your Attention Goes - Scientific American Blog ... - 0 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...nces-where-your-attention-goes language
shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Research with speakers of different languages revealed that bilingual speakers not only look at words that share sounds in one language but also at words that share sounds across their two languages. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word marker, they also look at a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp is marka.
  • Even more stunning, speakers of different languages differ in their patterns of eye movements when no language is used at all. In a simple visual search task in which people had to find a previously seen object among other objects, their eyes moved differently depending on what languages they knew. For example, when looking for a clock, English speakers also looked at a cloud. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, when looking for the same clock, looked at a present, because the Spanish names for clock and present—reloj and regalo—overlap at their onset.
  • Because of the way our brain organizes and processess linguistic and nonlinguistic information, a single word can set off a domino effect that cascades throughout the cognitive system.
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  • Not only is the language system thoroughly interactive with a high degree of co-activation across words and concepts, but it also impacts our processing in other domains such as vision, attention and cognitive control.
  • In other words, it is safe to say that the language you speak influences how you see the world not only figuratively but also quite literally, down to the mechanics of your eye movements.
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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.
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  • 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
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The Opposite of Empathy | Psychology Today - 0 views

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  • Dymond began by assessing empathy with the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)—a set of cards depicting images of archetypal personalities and dramatic scenes created by psychologist Henry Murray and artist Christiana Morgan. Subjects scrutinized the images and told stories about the figures in the pictures. These stories were frequently drawn from the subject’s own experiences.
  • Empathy was no longer a matter of making up intricate stories but of correctly predicting another’s response. Dymond's revised definition of empathy appeared in her 1952 paper as: “the imaginative and accurate transposing of oneself into the thinking, feeling and acting of another”
  • The finding that many undergraduates had little empathic accuracy prompted psychologists to propose that empathy should be trained. In 1952, Dartmouth offered a new course, “Introduction in Human Relations,” aimed at increasing students’ sensitivity to the attitudes and feelings of others. The Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport expressed concern that the social sciences had fallen far behind the rapid developments made in the natural sciences. He viewed the failure to understand social relationships as an existential threat: the chances for the survival of humanity were poor, he mused, “unless we can improve mankind’s understanding and control of social and personal factors” [6].
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$11 Billion And Counting: Trump's Border Wall Would Be The World's Most Costly : NPR - 0 views

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  • The pricetag for President Trump's border wall has topped $11 billion — or nearly $20 million a mile — to become the most expensive wall of its kind anywhere in the world.
  • If the Trump administration completes all of the wall projects it has set in motion, three-quarters of the U.S. southern border would be walled off from Mexico.
  • On one side of a caliche road, you can see the pedestrian fence that was erected more than a decade ago.
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  • "The border wall system will include a 150-foot enforcement zone, lighting, cameras, other technology, and most importantly an all-weather access road making it easier to respond to (undocumented immigrant) traffic," Alvarez said. "So it's not just gonna be the barrier itself."
  • There's more steel — an expensive commodity — in a 30-foot structure. Also, there are powerful floodlights, and every mile will have conduit for electric power and fiber optics that connect the surveillance cameras. Electronic gates that allow passage through the wall cost up to $1 million a piece. And there's a graded, graveled enforcement zone as wide as a six-lane highway.
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Why the US needs Russia and China to help change Iran's behavior | TheHill - 0 views

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  • Predicting the future behavior of any country in the Middle East is a dangerous undertaking. Some might suggest it’s a lot cheaper and more effective to rely on a pack of tarot cards than a report from the U.S. intelligence community.
  • Unfortunately, in America, we seem to have little memory of this region’s history, and the misplaced illation made by many over Iranian General Qassem Soleimani’s death soon will fade.
  • In the process of deciding how they will exact this price, Iran will weigh its options against our domestic condition, whether these are set by the U.S. election cycle or Iranian perceptions of who, exactly, should pay the highest price. What Iran’s leadership does know is that a majority of Americans do not want war, nor do most Americans support the seemingly unarticulated reason for keeping U.S. troops in the region. 
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  • Asymmetric responses by the U.S. are a real option, but this comes with a high price. While we could pay this price, Washington would be unable to sustain such an effort indefinitely because of domestic and global political reasons. Israel has been undertaking such operations for many years, with some measurable impact, but the Israelis arguably have the political support at home and the same elements needed for asymmetric warfare that Iran has. Furthermore, the threat of large-scale U.S. military retaliation could quickly broaden the scope of the conflict, with unintended regional economic and political consequences, and still not diminish Iran’s capability to carry out covert attacks on American officials, interests and regional allies. 
  • Pursuing such superpower diplomacy, along with asymmetric pressure on Iran, will not come without some price. Washington may need to compromise with Moscow and Beijing on other matters of considerable geopolitical significance. However, Iran is one area where all three superpowers might find a workable agreement that brings the country back into the fold. Iran is an ancient, formidable regional player and the actions taken by all concerned, across a broad spectrum of issues, will have long-term repercussions for each stakeholder’s critical geopolitical goals in the region and beyond.
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Are Smart People More Likely to Believe Stereotypes? | Mental Floss - 0 views

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  • There are many different kinds of intelligence, each reliant on its own set of skills and abilities. One such ability is pattern recognition, without which we’d have trouble recognizing faces, learning languages, or reading other people’s emotions. Because it’s so central to our cognitive and social functioning, pattern recognition is sometimes used by researchers as a shorthand for overall intelligence.
  • Finding that higher pattern detection ability puts people at greater risk to detect and apply stereotypes, but also to reverse them, implicates this ability as a cognitive mechanism underlying stereotyping,” co-author Jonathan Freeman said in the statement.
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What do tense US-Iranian relations mean for China, North Korea? | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

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  • Deepening fractures in the relationship between the United States and Iran pose economic headaches for China but create strategic opportunities for North Korea, experts say - one of many reverberations from the weeklong crisis.
  • Its top sources are Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which has been exporting 100,000 barrels of crude oil a day to China since October as part of an infrastructure deal.  Beijing is also the biggest buyer of Iran's crude, although imports have fallen since waivers from US sanctions expired last year. In November, the Communist state bought 547,758 metric tonnes (539,106 tons) of crude from Iran, well below April's 3.04 million tonnes, according to Chinese customs data.
  • Chinese President Xi Jinping's administration, which held naval war exercises with Iran and Russia in the Gulf of Oman last month, has sternly criticised the US for Soleimani's death but there is not much else it can do, according to analysts. "China is keen to avoid further strain in its relations with the US, as ensuring regional stability and ending trade war are currently its top foreign policy priorities," said Kaho Yu, a senior Asia analyst at consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft in Singapore.
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  • "The US taking out a top Iranian leader may cause Pyongyang to rethink the scale of its next provocation," Leif-Eric Easley, an associate professor of international studies at Seoul's Ewha University, wrote in a Tuesday note published on The Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank. "Pyongyang may now point to Iran's case to justify resisting denuclearisation and enhancing its self-avowed strategic deterrent for regime survival," he continued.
  • In September, the White House slapped sanctions on various Chinese people and companies, including two COSCO Shipping Corporation units, for "knowingly engaging" in the transport of Iranian crude in breach of US sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Telecommunications giant Huawei, deemed a national security risk by the US, has also come under fire over alleged sanctions violations. Its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou is currently battling extradition to the US on charges of fraud and misleading HSBC Holdings over Huawei's business in Iran.
  • Given the riskiness of US foreign policy actions, other countries may be unwilling to continue cooperating with Washington, he warned: "With the current escalation in Iran-US ties, other countries with an interest in seeing a nuclear-free North Korea may be less willing to trust the US' good faith." "This is particularly true as China and Russia continue to set themselves up as an alternative force for North Korean denuclearisation in contrast to the US-led campaign of sanctions," Rinna said.
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