Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged Space

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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.
Emilio Ergueta

Thinking Straight About Curved Space | Issue 108 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...ng_Straight_About_Curved_Space

Space time curve philosophy science physics

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • In earlier columns, I have defended time from the assaults of physics. With a few exceptions, physicists have not been kind to time. Relativity theory stripped it of its tenses, dismissing the difference between past, present, and future as illusory. Worse, the theory seemed to deny time an independent existence.
  • My own view, however, is that both space and time are traduced in physics. They should form a victim support group, which is why this column is devoted to a defence of space.
  • Places – habitats – are stripped down to decimal places. Much is lost in consequence. The space of the physicist has neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’, no centre or periphery, no inside or outside, except in terms of relationships between points defined mathematically with respect to a frame of reference built out of axes whose (0,0,0) point of origin is arbitrarily chosen. The inhabitants of the physicists’ space are fields and objects that have only primary qualities – size, distance, number of instances. They are void of secondary qualities – warmth, brightness, colour, texture – never mind meaning, value, and use – even though all these qualities are inseparable from the space in which we experience, enact, and suffer our lives.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • So long as we don’t think that the physicists’ space is more fundamental than, or is the ultimate reality of, lived space, then no harm is done.
  • in contemporary physics, space is curved, or non-Euclidean. In non-Euclidean space, the sum of the angles of a triangle may be greater than 180°; more importantly, the shortest distance between two points may not be a straight line, but a curved one.
  • When we first hear talk of ‘curved space’ we rebel. The least we should ask of something said to be curved is that it should have edges, surfaces, and parts that look or feel curved, which space itself does not. Analogies are offered to make the idea less counter-intuitive
  • Physicists will smile at taking the analogy too literally. But if it is not taken literally, it lacks explanatory force. And taken literally, it is seriously misleading. The curvature of an object such as the earth is extrinsic – evident in its surface
  • From Pythagoras onwards we have been prone to the illusion that our ways of geometrising space capture space itself – perhaps even believing that the mathematical logic of pure quantities is somehow ‘out there’. However, the immense power of mathematical physics – which requires abstracting from phenomenal reality and the reduction of experienced and experienceable reality to mere parameters to which numerical values are assigned – does not justify uncritically accepting concepts such as ‘curved space’ that attempt to re-insert phenomenal appearances into its abstractions. On the contrary, we should acknowledge that ‘unreasonably effective’ mathematics (to borrow Eugene Wigner’s phrase) can take us to places to which nothing non-mathematical corresponds. For instance, consider the assumption, central to modern cosmology, that space itself is expanding.
kushnerha

American 'space pioneers' deserve asteroid rights, Congress says | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ricans-to-exploit-new-frontier

the guardian space bipartisan resources nationalism

shared by kushnerha on 13 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • In a rare bipartisan moment US lawmakers opened up the possibility of mining on other worlds despite an international treaty barring sovereign claims in space
  • The US Senate passed the Space Act of 2015 this week, sending its revisions of the bill back to the House for an expected approval, after which it would land on the president’s desk. The bill has a slew of provisions to encourage commercial companies that want to explore space and exploit its resources, granting “asteroid resource” and “space resource” rights to US citizens who managed to acquire the resource themselves.
  • lawmakers defined “space resource” as “an abiotic resource in situ in outer space” that would include water and minerals but not life.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The company’s president, Chris Lewicki, compared the bill to the Homestead Act, which distributed public land to Americans heading west and helped reshape the United States. “The Homestead Act of 1862 advocated for the search for gold and timber, and today, HR 2262 fuels a new economy,” Lewicki said in a statement. “This off-planet economy will forever change our lives for the better here on Earth.”
  • obstacle to space mining is an 1967 international treaty known as the Outer Space Treaty, to which the US is a signatory. The treaty holds that no “celestial body” is subject to “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”.
  • careful to add in their bill that they grant rights only to citizens who act under the law, “including the international obligations of the United States”.
  • added a “disclaimer of extraterritorial sovereignty”, saying the US does not thereby assert ownership, exclusive rights or jurisdiction “of any celestial body”.
  • bill asserts certain rights for US citizens, it disavows any national claim – sending a mixed message on asteroid rights
  • “They’re trying to dance around the issue. I tend to think it doesn’t create any rights because it conflicts with international law. The bottom line is before you can give somebody the right to harvest a resource you have to have ownership.”
  • Asteroids vary in their makeup, but some are rich in platinum and other valuable metals. Nasa has run missions to explore the possibilities of mining asteroids
  • solidifies America’s leading role in the commercial space sector
Emilio Ergueta

Kant on Space | Issue 49 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...Kant_on_Space

philosophy Kant space time research science

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Pinhas Ben-Zvi thinks Kant was inconsistent in his revolutionary ideas about the nature of space and time.
  • In the first and second editions of his Critique of Pure Reason (A&B) Immanuel Kant asks: “What, then, are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would belong to things even if they were not intuited?” (A23; B37). At the time when he wrote that, conflicting theories of space dominated the scientific and philosophical world.
  • Leibniz wrote that God does not need a ‘sense organ' to perceive objects. Leibniz argued that space is merely relations between objects and is not a self-subsistent reality. He rejected: “… the fancy of those who take space to be a substance, or at least an absolute being,” and added ironically that: “…real and absolute space (is) an idol of some modern Englishmen.” The ‘modern Englishmen' are of course Newton and his adherents.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Kant, in the quotation with which I began this article, refers to the Newtonian concept as the ‘real existences' view, and to the Leibnizian concept as the view according to which space is: “only determinations or relations of things.”
  • Kant states that: “Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences.” (B/38) On the contrary: “…it is the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us.” (A/26; B/42)
  • He further argues that this sensory-spatiotemporal process requires a supreme mediator that will synthesize the sensory input within our cognition so as to turn it into meaningful knowledge.
  • “The apodeictic certainty of all geometrical propositions and the possibility of their a priori construction is grounded in this a priori necessity of space.” (B/39), and: “Geometry is a science which determines the properties of space synthetically, and yet a priori,”(B/40).
runlai_jiang

You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ces-2018-reader-questions.html

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. Jump to topic: CES Internet of Things TV Wireless Expand All Collapse All /* SHOW LIBRARY ===================== */ .g-show-xsmall, .g-show-small, .g-show-smallplus, .g-show-submedium, .g-show-sub-medium, .g-show-medium, .g-show-large, .g-show-xlarge { display: none; } .g-show { display: block; } .lt-ie10 .g-aiImg { width: 100%; } /* story top */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { max-width: 720px; margin: 0 auto 10px; text-align: center; line-height: 2.844rem; font-size: 2.4rem; } @media only screen and (max-width: 1244px) { .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { line-height: 2.5596rem; font-size: 2.16rem; } } @media only screen and (max-width: 719px) { .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { line-height: 2.2752rem; font-size: 1.92rem; } } .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .interactive-leadin.summary { max-width: 460px; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; text-align: left; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1.6; } .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .byline-dateline { text-align: center; } /* top asset */ .g-top-asset { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 20px; } .g-top-asset img { width: 100%; } /* body text */ .g-body { max-width: 460px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1.6; } .g-body b, .g-body strong { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; } .g-body a { text-decoration: underline; } /* subhed */ .g-subhed h2 { max-width: 460px; margin: 2em auto 1em auto; font: 700 1.2em/1.3em 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; } .viewport-small-10 .g-subhed h2 { font-size: 1.5em; } /* images */ .g-item-image { margin: 25px auto; } .g-item-image img { width: 100%; } /* video */ .g-item-video { margin: 25px auto; } /* sources and credits */ .g-asset-source { padding-top: 3px; } .g-asset-source .g-source { font: 400 12px/15px 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; color: #999; } .g-asset-source .g-pipe { margin: 0 6px 0 3px; font: 400 12px/12px 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; color: #999; } .g-asset-source .g-caption { font: 300 14px/17px georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; } .g-asset-source .g-credit { font: 400 12px/17px 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; display: inline-block; color: #999; } /* graphics */ .g-item-ai2html { margin: 25px auto; } p.g-asset-hed { font: 700 16px/18px 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0; } .g-map-key { float: none; clear: both; overflow: hidden; margin: 10px auto 4px auto; } .g-map-key .g-key-row { margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 15px; float: left; } .viewport-small .g-map-key .g-key-row { width: auto; margin-bottom: 0; } .viewport-small-20 .g-map-key .g-key-row { width: auto; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-rect, .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-circle { display: inline-block; vertical-align: middle; margin-right: 8px; float: left; } .g-map-key .g-key-row p { font: 500 0.9em/1.6 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; float: left; vertical-align: middle; margin: -2px 0 0 0; } .viewport-small .g-map-key .g-key-row p { max-width: 92%; } .viewport-small-20 .g-map-key .g-key-row p { width: auto; max-width: none; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-rect { width: 22px; height: 10px; margin-top: 4px; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-circle { width: 9px; height: 9px; border-radius: 50%; margin-top: 4px; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-custom { width: 20px; height: 20px; background-size: 100%; display: block; float: left; width: 24px; height: 24px; margin: -4px 2px 0 0; } .viewport-small .g-map-key .g-key-row-title p { width: 100%; max-width: none; } .g-red-dot, .g-black-dot { display: inline-block; background: #d00; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20px; height: 20px; font: 700 14px/1.4 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; border-radius: 10px; line-height: 20px; } .g-black-dot { background: #222; } /* column text */ .g-column-container { max-width: 460px; margin: 20px auto 0 auto; } .viewport-medium .g-column-container { max-width: 1050px; } .viewport-large .g-column-container { margin-bottom: 30px; } .g-column-container .g-column-hed { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; margin-bottom: 2px; } .g-column-container .g-column-col { vertical-align: top; } .viewport-small .g-column-container .g-column-col { display: block; min-width: 100%; } .viewport-medium .g-column-container .g-column-col { min-width: 0; display: inline-block; margin-right: 15px; } .viewport-medium .g-column-container .g-column-col:last-child { margin-right: 0; } .g-column-container .g-column-asset, .g-column-container .g-column-image { margin-bottom: 8px; } .g-column-container .g-column-image img { width: 100%; } /* tables */ .g-table { margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 25px; } .g-table tr { border-bottom: 1px solid #ececec; } .g-table p { font: 500 14px/1.4 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; text-align: left; margin: 6px 0; } /* grid */ .g-grid { margin-bottom: 15px; } .g-grid .g-grid-item { position: relative; display: inline-block; min-width: calc(50% - 5px); } .viewport-small-20 .g-grid .g-grid-item { min-width: calc(33% - 5px); } .viewport-medium .g-grid .g-grid-item { min-width: 0; } .g-grid .g-grid-item p { font: 500 15px/1.4 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; position: absolute; bottom: 10px; left: 10px; color: #fff; margin-bottom: 0; } /* Mobile issues */ /* Get rid of border under intro and share tools on mobile */ .story-header.interactive-header { border-bottom: none !important; } /* Share tools issues */ /* Pad out the kicker/sharetool space */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .kicker-container { margin-bottom: 12px; } /* Override the moving sharetools on mobile */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .kicker-container .sharetools { position: relative; float: right; /*right: 0px;*/ bottom: auto; left: auto; width: auto; margin-top: -6px; clear: none; } /* Maintain the proper space with the section name and kicker next to share tools */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .interactive-kicker { float: left; width: 70%; display: inline-block; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper { margin: 30px auto; max-width: 1050px; } .viewport-medium .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper { margin: 50px auto; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper .ad { border-top: 1px solid #e2e2e2 !important; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2 !important; margin: 0 auto; padding: 10px 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper .ad div { margin: 0 auto; display: block !important; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper iframe { margin: 0 auto; display: block; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper .g-ad-text { text-align: center; font: 500 12px/1.2 "nyt-franklin", arial, sans-serif; color: #bfbfbf; text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 7px; } .ad.top-ad { border: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } /* Fix spacing at top of story */ .has-top-ad .story.theme-interactive, .has-ribbon .story.theme-interactive { margin-top: 10px; } /* Fix comments button margin */ .story.theme-interactive .comments-button.theme-kicker { margin-top: 0; } /* Get rid of border under intro and share tools on mobile */ .page-interactive-default .story.theme-main .story-header { border-bottom: none; } /*
  • At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
  • Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
Javier E

How to Remember Everything You Want From Non-Fiction Books | by Eva Keiffenheim, MSc | ... - 0 views

medium.com/...non-fiction-books-df17096d517f

books reading learning notetaking memory long-term

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A Bachelor’s degree taught me how to learn to ace exams. But it didn’t teach me how to learn to remember.
  • 65% to 80% of students answered “no” to the question “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?”
  • the most-popular Coursera course of all time: Dr. Barabara Oakley’s free course on “Learning how to Learn.” So did I. And while this course taught me about chunking, recalling, and interleaving
  • ...66 more annotations...
  • I learned something more useful: the existence of non-fiction literature that can teach you anything.
  • something felt odd. Whenever a conversation revolved around a serious non-fiction book I read, such as ‘Sapiens’ or ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ I could never remember much. Turns out, I hadn’t absorbed as much information as I’d believed. Since I couldn’t remember much, I felt as though reading wasn’t an investment in knowledge but mere entertainment.
  • When I opened up about my struggles, many others confessed they also can’t remember most of what they read, as if forgetting is a character flaw. But it isn’t.
  • It’s the way we work with books that’s flawed.
  • there’s a better way to read. Most people rely on techniques like highlighting, rereading, or, worst of all, completely passive reading, which are highly ineffective.
  • Since I started applying evidence-based learning strategies to reading non-fiction books, many things have changed. I can explain complex ideas during dinner conversations. I can recall interesting concepts and link them in my writing or podcasts. As a result, people come to me for all kinds of advice.
  • What’s the Architecture of Human Learning and Memory?
  • Human brains don’t work like recording devices. We don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.
  • we store new information in terms of its meaning to our existing memory
  • we give new information meaning by actively participating in the learning process — we interpret, connect, interrelate, or elaborate
  • To remember new information, we not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what we already know.
  • Learning is dependent on memory processes because previously-stored knowledge functions as a framework in which newly learned information can be linked.”
  • Human memory works in three stages: acquisition, retention, and retrieval. In the acquisition phase, we link new information to existing knowledge; in the retention phase, we store it, and in the retrieval phase, we get information out of our memory.
  • Retrieval, the third stage, is cue dependent. This means the more mental links you’re generating during stage one, the acquisition phase, the easier you can access and use your knowledge.
  • we need to understand that the three phases interrelate
  • creating durable and flexible access to to-be-learned information is partly a matter of achieving a meaningful encoding of that information and partly a matter of exercising the retrieval process.”
  • Next, we’ll look at the learning strategies that work best for our brains (elaboration, retrieval, spaced repetition, interleaving, self-testing) and see how we can apply those insights to reading non-fiction books.
  • The strategies that follow are rooted in research from professors of Psychological & Brain Science around Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel. Both scientists spent ten years bridging the gap between cognitive psychology and education fields. Harvard University Press published their findings in the book ‘Make It Stick.
  • #1 Elaboration
  • “Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.”
  • Why elaboration works: Elaborative rehearsal encodes information into your long-term memory more effectively. The more details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better because you’ll be generating more cues. And the more cues they have, the easier you can retrieve your knowledge.
  • How I apply elaboration: Whenever I read an interesting section, I pause and ask myself about the real-life connection and potential application. The process is invisible, and my inner monologues sound like: “This idea reminds me of…, This insight conflicts with…, I don’t really understand how…, ” etc.
  • For example, when I learned about A/B testing in ‘The Lean Startup,’ I thought about applying this method to my startup. I added a note on the site stating we should try it in user testing next Wednesday. Thereby the book had an immediate application benefit to my life, and I will always remember how the methodology works.
  • How you can apply elaboration: Elaborate while you read by asking yourself meta-learning questions like “How does this relate to my life? In which situation will I make use of this knowledge? How does it relate to other insights I have on the topic?”
  • While pausing and asking yourself these questions, you’re generating important memory cues. If you take some notes, don’t transcribe the author’s words but try to summarize, synthesize, and analyze.
  • #2 Retrieval
  • With retrieval, you try to recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory. While retrieval practice can take many forms — take a test, write an essay, do a multiple-choice test, practice with flashcards
  • the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ state: “While any kind of retrieval practice generally benefits learning, the implication seems to be that where more cognitive effort is required for retrieval, greater retention results.”
  • Whatever you settle for, be careful not to copy/paste the words from the author. If you don’t do the brain work yourself, you’ll skip the learning benefits of retrieval
  • Retrieval strengthens your memory and interrupts forgetting and, as other researchers replicate, as a learning event, the act of retrieving information is considerably more potent than is an additional study opportunity, particularly in terms of facilitating long-term recall.
  • How I apply retrieval: I retrieve a book’s content from my memory by writing a book summary for every book I want to remember. I ask myself questions like: “How would you summarize the book in three sentences? Which concepts do you want to keep in mind or apply? How does the book relate to what you already know?”
  • I then publish my summaries on Goodreads or write an article about my favorite insights
  • How you can apply retrieval: You can come up with your own questions or use mine. If you don’t want to publish your summaries in public, you can write a summary into your journal, start a book club, create a private blog, or initiate a WhatsApp group for sharing book summaries.
  • a few days after we learn something, forgetting sets in
  • #3 Spaced Repetition
  • With spaced repetition, you repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals.
  • The harder it feels to recall the information, the stronger the learning effect. “Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cues and routes for fast retrieval,”
  • Why it works: It might sound counterintuitive, but forgetting is essential for learning. Spacing out practice might feel less productive than rereading a text because you’ll realize what you forgot. Your brain has to work harder to retrieve your knowledge, which is a good indicator of effective learning.
  • How I apply spaced repetition: After some weeks, I revisit a book and look at the summary questions (see #2). I try to come up with my answer before I look up my actual summary. I can often only remember a fraction of what I wrote and have to look at the rest.
  • “Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for the betterment of life.”
  • How you can apply spaced repetition: You can revisit your book summary medium of choice and test yourself on what you remember. What were your action points from the book? Have you applied them? If not, what hindered you?
  • By testing yourself in varying intervals on your book summaries, you’ll strengthen both learning and cues for fast retrieval.
  • Why interleaving works: Alternate working on different problems feels more difficult as it, again, facilitates forgetting.
  • How I apply interleaving: I read different books at the same time.
  • 1) Highlight everything you want to remember
  • #5 Self-Testing
  • While reading often falsely tricks us into perceived mastery, testing shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Self-testing helps you identify knowledge gaps and brings weak areas to the light
  • “It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution.”
  • Why it works: Self-testing helps you overcome the illusion of knowledge. “One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.”
  • How I apply self-testing: I explain the key lessons from non-fiction books I want to remember to others. Thereby, I test whether I really got the concept. Often, I didn’t
  • instead of feeling frustrated, cognitive science made me realize that identifying knowledge gaps are a desirable and necessary effect for long-term remembering.
  • How you can apply self-testing: Teaching your lessons learned from a non-fiction book is a great way to test yourself. Before you explain a topic to somebody, you have to combine several mental tasks: filter relevant information, organize this information, and articulate it using your own vocabulary.
  • Now that I discovered how to use my Kindle as a learning device, I wouldn’t trade it for a paper book anymore. Here are the four steps it takes to enrich your e-reading experience
  • How you can apply interleaving: Your brain can handle reading different books simultaneously, and it’s effective to do so. You can start a new book before you finish the one you’re reading. Starting again into a topic you partly forgot feels difficult first, but as you know by now, that’s the effect you want to achieve.
  • it won’t surprise you that researchers proved highlighting to be ineffective. It’s passive and doesn’t create memory cues.
  • 2) Cut down your highlights in your browser
  • After you finished reading the book, you want to reduce your highlights to the essential part. Visit your Kindle Notes page to find a list of all your highlights. Using your desktop browser is faster and more convenient than editing your highlights on your e-reading device.
  • Now, browse through your highlights, delete what you no longer need, and add notes to the ones you really like. By adding notes to the highlights, you’ll connect the new information to your existing knowledge
  • 3) Use software to practice spaced repetitionThis part is the main reason for e-books beating printed books. While you can do all of the above with a little extra time on your physical books, there’s no way to systemize your repetition praxis.
  • Readwise is the best software to combine spaced repetition with your e-books. It’s an online service that connects to your Kindle account and imports all your Kindle highlights. Then, it creates flashcards of your highlights and allows you to export your highlights to your favorite note-taking app.
  • Common Learning Myths DebunkedWhile reading and studying evidence-based learning techniques I also came across some things I wrongly believed to be true.
  • #2 Effective learning should feel easyWe think learning works best when it feels productive. That’s why we continue to use ineffective techniques like rereading or highlighting. But learning works best when it feels hard, or as the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ write: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”
  • In Conclusion
  • I developed and adjusted these strategies over two years, and they’re still a work in progress.
  • Try all of them but don’t force yourself through anything that doesn’t feel right for you. I encourage you to do your own research, add further techniques, and skip what doesn’t serve you
  • “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”— Mortimer J. Adler
anniina03

Boeing's Mission for NASA Gets Cut Short - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...603970

science research Technology

shared by anniina03 on 13 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • It was a picture-perfect launch, just before sunrise on a sandy coastline. The rocket, bright as a candle flame, climbed steadily, leaving a spindly trail of smoke that split the sky in half, with the sharp darkness of night on one side and the first pastel hues of daylight on the other. It carried a capsule, bound for the International Space Station, to the edge of space and let go.
  • The trouble started after that. The capsule, built for NASA by Boeing, was supposed to ignite its own engines to boost itself higher into orbit, where it would chase after the space station. But the engines didn’t start when they should have.
  • But the craft was flying just out of reach of communication, between two satellites. When engineers could finally contact Starliner, they made the spacecraft thrust itself higher, but it was too late. The confused capsule had been burning fuel to maintain its position, and didn’t have enough left to execute that crucial push toward the ISS.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The capsule, named CST-100 Starliner, is part of a NASA program called Commercial Crew, an effort to launch astronauts to the ISS from the U.S. The agency has not had that capability since the space-shuttle program ended in 2011 under the weight of cost, safety, and political factors.
  • According to NASA officials, after Starliner separated from the rocket, the capsule missed the moment it needed to ignite its engines for a carefully timed and fully automated process known as an orbital insertion burn. Without that step, the spacecraft couldn’t fire the thrusters to shove itself into the correct orbit.
  • Engineers watched, unable to help from below, as the spacecraft became disoriented.
  • Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing Space and Launch, said engineers don’t know why the clock went off track. Nicole Mann, who would have made her first trip to space on the next mission, said that the astronauts “train extensively for this type of contingency, and had we been on board, there could have been actions that we could have taken,” such as manually controlling the spacecraft.
  • Now the future of the program is uncertain, particularly for Boeing. It’s unclear what additional tests NASA might now require from Boeing before letting astronauts fly, including, perhaps, another attempt at an uncrewed mission. The capsule’s failure will certainly reshuffle schedules and could contribute to further delays for Boeing, already under scrutiny for its sluggishness in a recent report from NASA’s inspector general.
  • The spacecraft failure means yet another cycle of bad news for Boeing. The company has a long history with NASA; it was the prime contractor for the ISS and also worked on the space shuttles. But the company is better known for its airplanes, and in recent months the flaws of its 737 Max, which contributed to two deadly crashes, have put Boeing under intense pressure to prove that its aircraft are safe.
  • In the coming days, NASA and Boeing teams will review data from Starliner’s short-lived mission. And the space agency will continue its negotiations to buy more seats on the Soyuz, Russia’s transportation system, which can cost as much as $86 million. NASA’s last trip on the Soyuz system is scheduled for April. If neither company’s crew capsule is ready by then, NASA will have to buy more slots to ensure that American astronauts can launch to space.
Javier E

How a Simple Spambot Became the Second Most Powerful Member of an Italian Social Networ... - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...r-of-an-italian-social-network

social network influence popular automated robot

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Luca Maria Aiello and a few pals from the University of Turin in Italy began studying a social network called aNobii.com in which people exchange information and opinions about the books they love. Each person has a site that anybody can visit. Users can then choose to set up social links with others
  • To map out the structure of the network, Aiello and co-created an automated crawler that starts by visiting one person’s profile on the network and then all of the people that connect to this node in turn. It then visits each of the people that link to these nodes and so on. In this way, the bot builds up a map of the network
  • people began to respond to the crawler’s visits. That gave the team an idea. “The unexpected reactions the bot caused by its visits motivated us to set up a social experiment in two parts to answer the question: can an individual with no trust gain popularity and influence?”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Aiello and co were careful to ensure that the crawler did not engage with anybody on the network in any way other than to visit his or her node. Their idea was to isolate a single, minimal social activity and test how effective it was in gaining popularity.
  • They began to record the reactions to lajello’s visits including the number of messages it received, their content, the links it received and how they varied over time and so on.
  • By December 2011, lajello’s profile had become one of the most popular on the entire social network. It had received more than 66,000 visits as well as 2435 messages from more than 1200 different people.  In terms of the number of different message received, a well-known writer was the most popular on this network but lajello was second.
  • “Our experiment gives strong support to the thesis that popularity can be gained just with continuous “social probing”,” conclude Aiello and co. “We have shown that a very simple spambot can attract great interest even without emulating any aspects of typical human behavior.”
  • Having created all this popularity, Aiello and co wanted to find out how influential the spam bot could be. So they started using the bot to send recommendations to users on who else to connect to.The spam bot could either make a recommendation chosen at random or one that was carefully selected by a recommendation engine. It then made its recommendations to users that had already linked to lajello and to other users chosen at random.
  • “Among the 361 users who created at least one social connection in the 36 hours after the recommendation, 52 per cent followed suggestion given by the bot,” they say.
  • shows just how easy it is for an automated bot to play a significant role in a social network. Popularity appears easy to buy using nothing more than page visits, at least in this experiment. What is more, this popularity can be easily translated into influence
  • It is not hard to see the significance of this work. Social bots are a fact of life on almost every social network and many have become so sophisticated they are hard to distinguish from humans. If the simplest of bots created by Aiello and co can have this kind of impact, it is anybody’s guess how more advanced bots could influence everything from movie reviews and Wikipedia entries to stock prices and presidential elections.
johnsonle1

Milky Way being pushed through space by cosmic dead zone, say scientists | Science | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...osmic-dead-zone-say-scientists

space scientists science

shared by johnsonle1 on 04 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • johnsonle1 on 04 Mar 17
     
    The movement of the Milky Way is dominated by the gravitational attraction of the galaxies around it. If galaxies were scattered randomly through space, the pull would be the same in every direction. But galaxies are not evenly spread out in the universe. As a result, patches of space that are dense in galaxies draw others towards them, while regions that are emptier than normal literally fail to pull their weight: they effectively push objects away from them.
summertyler

Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...riving-us-apart-after-all.html

technology research sociology social media

shared by summertyler on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • raised a camera atop a 16-foot tripod to film down into Bryant Park
  • They hit record, then milled about nearby pretending they had nothing to do with the rig, as it semi-surreptitiously filmed the comings and goings of hundreds of New Yorkers.
  • groundbreaking granular studies of the city’s public spaces, spending hours filming and photographing and taking notes about how people behave in public
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the sociologist William H. Whyte
  • The Street Life Project, as it was called, was revolutionary in urban planning, changing not only the way we think about public spaces but also what can be learned in this kind of close observational research of human interaction.
  • affected people’s enjoyment of a public space
  • We could make people happier.
  • Are we really talking to one another? Is modernity making us lonely?
  • Project for Public Spaces
  • time-lapse films of four major urban nodes — Bryant Park; the front steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; a corner of Chestnut Street in Center City Philadelphia; and Downtown Crossing in Boston — in order to better understand how people used the spaces and how they might be improved.
  • studies how digital technology changes our lives
  • summertyler on 07 Mar 15
     
    Human behavior, or sociology, in major areas was filmed and studied in order to get a better understanding of how people used the spaces and how the could be improved.
qkirkpatrick

Testing the Limits of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity - 0 views

www.livescience.com/nstein-general-relativity.html

science Newton Einstein knowledge space-time

shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A century ago this year, a young Swiss physicist, who had already revolutionized physics with discoveries about the relationship between space and time, developed a radical new understanding of gravity.
  • He came up with a set of equations that relate the curvature of space-time to the energy and momentum of the matter and radiation that are present in a particular region.
  • Today, 100 years later, Einstein's theory of gravitation remains a pillar of modern understanding, and has withstood all the tests that scientists could throw at it
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • General relativity describes gravity not as a force, as the physicist Isaac Newton thought of it, but rather as a curvature of space and time due to the mass of objects
  • The reason Earth orbits the sun is not because the sun attracts Earth, but instead because the sun warps space-time, he said
anonymous

Experts Describe the Perfect Classroom Space for Learning in School - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...498224

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The seats, space, and stuff that idyllic learning environments are made of
  • We asked prominent voices in education—from policy makers and teachers to activists and parents—to look beyond laws, politics, and funding and imagine a utopian system of learning. They went back to the drawing board—and the chalkboard—to build an educational Garden of Eden.
  • Students need to be in classrooms that inspire them—spaces that are light, airy, and filled with examples of work that they aspire to do
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • There might be desks, cushions, or benches arranged in rows or circles—however the teachers want them, as not every classroom will follow a template. Each classroom will be set up based on what is necessary to meet learning objectives. But schools will prioritize configuring classes to inspire learning first and foremost, and, where appropriate, reflect the diversity of environments that students are exposed to outside a school setting.
  • Students will have beautiful spaces that make them feel good to be at school—with art, living plants, music where appropriate, comfortable seating, and fast internet access.
  • Windows that open are a nice feature, as are clean bathrooms and individual desks that can be rearranged
  • Smaller schools and smaller rooms seem to work better than larger schools and larger rooms.  
  • My experience as a high-school principal taught me to never spend too much time worrying about the “small stuff.”
  • High-school classrooms will be designed by students themselves, providing breakout space for group work and more private areas for individual work and studying. High-school classrooms will reflect the transition that students are facing, allowing for independence but also providing a nurturing environment for curiosity.
  • There will be areas where students can post ideas to help make the learning environment more engaging and fun. The classroom will also be tailored to the topic, but all will have interactive stations where hands-on learning can be experienced by all students.
  • In the future, we won’t have “classrooms.” The enemy of the future of the classroom has arguably been that phrase: “the future of the classroom.” It locks us into a model of believing students will be sorted by age and sit in a room together with one teacher in the front.
  • Form will follow function, and if one of the key principles of public education is to instill an appreciation for democracy, then classrooms will be arranged so that students are equals with one another
  • (not some in the front, others in the back), and so that students are active participants in learning, not passive recipients of teachers’ knowledge.
  • Whereas the traditional lecture hall connotes hierarchy, placing desks in a circle suggests students should be learning to debate and become decision makers. Within the circle, desks will also be clustered in small groups of four to encourage collaboration among students.
  • There will be a large open space that will serve as a community gathering spot. The classroom will have big windows to let a lot of natural light shine through. The room will be colorful without being obnoxious—colors will be blues, greens, whites, and yellows.
  • It’s also important to look at the appropriate role of technology in the classroom. Technology can be a powerful tool, but it must be implemented with the intention of enhancing educator-facilitated learning, not replacing i
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    A few voices describe their visions of the best types of schools- what environment would our brains thrive in best?
knudsenlu

Will the Quantum Nature of Gravity Finally Be Measured? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555107

quantum gravity research

shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In 1935, when both quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity were young, a little-known Soviet physicist named Matvei Bronstein, just 28 himself, made the first detailed study of the problem of reconciling the two in a quantum theory of gravity. This “possible theory of the world as a whole,” as Bronstein called it, would supplant Einstein’s classical description of gravity, which casts it as curves in the space-time continuum, and rewrite it in the same quantum language as the rest of physics.
  • His words were prophetic. Eighty-three years later, physicists are still trying to understand how space-time curvature emerges on macroscopic scales from a more fundamental, presumably quantum picture of gravity; it’s arguably the deepest question in physics.
  • The search for the full theory of quantum gravity has been stymied by the fact that gravity’s quantum properties never seem to manifest in actual experience. Physicists never get to see how Einstein’s description of the smooth space-time continuum, or Bronstein’s quantum approximation of it when it’s weakly curved, goes wrong.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Not only that, but the universe appears to be governed by a kind of cosmic censorship: Regions of extreme gravity—where space-time curves so sharply that Einstein’s equations malfunction and the true, quantum nature of gravity and space-time must be revealed—always hide behind the horizons of black holes.
  • Dyson, who helped develop quantum electrodynamics (the theory of interactions between matter and light) and is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he overlapped with Einstein, disagrees with the argument that quantum gravity is needed to describe the unreachable interiors of black holes. And he wonders whether detecting the hypothetical graviton might be impossible, even in principle. In that case, he argues, quantum gravity is metaphysical, rather than physics.
  • The ability to detect the “grin” of quantum gravity would seem to refute Dyson’s argument. It would also kill the gravitational decoherence theory, by showing that gravity and space-time do maintain quantum superpositions.
  • If gravity is a quantum interaction, then the answer is: It depends. Each component of the blue diamond’s superposition will experience a stronger or weaker gravitational attraction to the red diamond, depending on whether the latter is in the branch of its superposition that’s closer or farther away. And the gravity felt by each component of the red diamond’s superposition similarly depends on where the blue diamond is.
Javier E

Opinion | You Are the Object of Facebook's Secret Extraction Operation - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-privacy.html

surveillance capitalism facebook extraction secret data

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data
  • Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world.
  • These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law.
  • ...56 more annotations...
  • The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon
  • The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit.
  • The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.
  • These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.
  • There is no way to escape the machine systems that surveil u
  • All roads to economic and social participation now lead through surveillance capitalism’s profit-maximizing institutional terrain, a condition that has intensified during nearly two years of global plague.
  • Will Facebook’s digital violence finally trigger our commitment to take back the “un-commons”?
  • Will we confront the fundamental but long ignored questions of an information civilization: How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in ways that sustain and advance democratic values and principles?
  • Mark Zuckerberg’s start-up did not invent surveillance capitalism. Google did that. In 2000, when only 25 percent of the world’s information was stored digitally, Google was a tiny start-up with a great search product but little revenue.
  • By 2001, in the teeth of the dot-com bust, Google’s leaders found their breakthrough in a series of inventions that would transform advertising. Their team learned how to combine massive data flows of personal information with advanced computational analyses to predict where an ad should be placed for maximum “click through.”
  • Google’s scientists learned how to extract predictive metadata from this “data exhaust” and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.
  • Prediction was the first imperative that determined the second imperative: extraction.
  • Lucrative predictions required flows of human data at unimaginable scale. Users did not suspect that their data was secretly hunted and captured from every corner of the internet and, later, from apps, smartphones, devices, cameras and sensors
  • User ignorance was understood as crucial to success. Each new product was a means to more “engagement,” a euphemism used to conceal illicit extraction operations.
  • When asked “What is Google?” the co-founder Larry Page laid it out in 2001,
  • “Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data,” Mr. Page said. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”
  • Instead of selling search to users, Google survived by turning its search engine into a sophisticated surveillance medium for seizing human data
  • Company executives worked to keep these economic operations secret, hidden from users, lawmakers, and competitors. Mr. Page opposed anything that might “stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data,” Mr. Edwards wrote.
  • As recently as 2017, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acknowledged the role of Google’s algorithmic ranking operations in spreading corrupt information. “There is a line that we can’t really get across,” he said. “It is very difficult for us to understand truth.” A company with a mission to organize and make accessible all the world’s information using the most sophisticated machine systems cannot discern corrupt information.
  • This is the economic context in which disinformation wins
  • In March 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Google’s head of global online advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, as his second in command. Ms. Sandberg had joined Google in 2001 and was a key player in the surveillance capitalism revolution. She led the build-out of Google’s advertising engine, AdWords, and its AdSense program, which together accounted for most of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue in 2007.
  • A Google multimillionaire by the time she met Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg had a canny appreciation of Facebook’s immense opportunities for extraction of rich predictive data. “We have better information than anyone else. We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer,” Ms. Sandberg explained
  • The company had “better data” and “real data” because it had a front-row seat to what Mr. Page had called “your whole life.”
  • Facebook paved the way for surveillance economics with new privacy policies in late 2009. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that new “Everyone” settings eliminated options to restrict the visibility of personal data, instead treating it as publicly available information.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg “just went for it” because there were no laws to stop him from joining Google in the wholesale destruction of privacy. If lawmakers wanted to sanction him as a ruthless profit-maximizer willing to use his social network against society, then 2009 to 2010 would have been a good opportunity.
  • Facebook was the first follower, but not the last. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are private surveillance empires, each with distinct business models.
  • In 2021 these five U.S. tech giants represent five of the six largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization in the world.
  • As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of countervailing law, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information
  • Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.
  • Historically, great concentrations of corporate power were associated with economic harms. But when human data are the raw material and predictions of human behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic
  • The difficulty is that these novel harms are typically understood as separate, even unrelated, problems, which makes them impossible to solve. Instead, each new stage of harm creates the conditions for the next stage.
  • Fifty years ago the conservative economist Milton Friedman exhorted American executives, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Even this radical doctrine did not reckon with the possibility of no rules.
  • With privacy out of the way, ill-gotten human data are concentrated within private corporations, where they are claimed as corporate assets to be deployed at will.
  • The sheer size of this knowledge gap is conveyed in a leaked 2018 Facebook document, which described its artificial intelligence hub, ingesting trillions of behavioral data points every day and producing six million behavioral predictions each second.
  • Next, these human data are weaponized as targeting algorithms, engineered to maximize extraction and aimed back at their unsuspecting human sources to increase engagement
  • Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with grave consequences. For example, the Facebook Files depict Mr. Zuckerberg using his algorithms to reinforce or disrupt the behavior of billions of people. Anger is rewarded or ignored. News stories become more trustworthy or unhinged. Publishers prosper or wither. Political discourse turns uglier or more moderate. People live or die.
  • Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance.
  • when it comes to the triumph of surveillance capitalism’s revolution, it is the lawmakers of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest burden of responsibility. They allowed private capital to rule our information spaces during two decades of spectacular growth, with no laws to stop it.
  • All of it begins with extraction. An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations.
  • We can’t fix all our problems at once, but we won’t fix any of them, ever, unless we reclaim the sanctity of information integrity and trustworthy communications
  • The abdication of our information and communication spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic, because it obstructs solutions to all other crises.
  • Neither Google, nor Facebook, nor any other corporate actor in this new economic order set out to destroy society, any more than the fossil fuel industry set out to destroy the earth.
  • like global warming, the tech giants and their fellow travelers have been willing to treat their destructive effects on people and society as collateral damage — the unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of perfectly legal economic operations that have produced some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism.
  • Where does that leave us?
  • Democracy is the only countervailing institutional order with the legitimate authority and power to change our course. If the ideal of human self-governance is to survive the digital century, then all solutions point to one solution: a democratic counterrevolution.
  • instead of the usual laundry lists of remedies, lawmakers need to proceed with a clear grasp of the adversary: a single hierarchy of economic causes and their social harms.
  • We can’t rid ourselves of later-stage social harms unless we outlaw their foundational economic causes
  • This means we move beyond the current focus on downstream issues such as content moderation and policing illegal content. Such “remedies” only treat the symptoms without challenging the illegitimacy of the human data extraction that funds private control over society’s information spaces
  • Similarly, structural solutions like “breaking up” the tech giants may be valuable in some cases, but they will not affect the underlying economic operations of surveillance capitalism.
  • Instead, discussions about regulating big tech should focus on the bedrock of surveillance economics: the secret extraction of human data from realms of life once called “private.
  • No secret extraction means no illegitimate concentrations of knowledge about people. No concentrations of knowledge means no targeting algorithms. No targeting means that corporations can no longer control and curate information flows and social speech or shape human behavior to favor their interests
  • the sober truth is that we need lawmakers ready to engage in a once-a-century exploration of far more basic questions:
  • How should we structure and govern information, connection and communication in a democratic digital century?
  • What new charters of rights, legislative frameworks and institutions are required to ensure that data collection and use serve the genuine needs of individuals and society?
  • What measures will protect citizens from unaccountable power over information, whether it is wielded by private companies or governments?
  • The corporation that is Facebook may change its name or its leaders, but it will not voluntarily change its economics.
aqconces

Clash of the billionaires: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are duking it out over space - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...s-are-duking-it-out-over-space

shared by aqconces on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • At stake is the right to pursue what many view as a potentially momentous breakthrough in space flight: the ability to launch a rocket into space, return it to Earth, and then launch it again as if it were a commercial air plane.
  • The ability to reuse rockets could dramatically lower the cost of space flight.
kushnerha

Buying begets buying: how stuff has consumed the average American's life | Life and sty... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...umerism-americans-buying-stuff

the guardian materialism consumerism

shared by kushnerha on 22 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Our addiction to consuming things is a vicious cycle, and buying a bigger house to store it all isn’t the answer.
  • personal storage industry rakes in $22bn each year, and it’s only getting bigger. Why?
  • We shop because we’re bored, anxious, depressed or angry, and we make the mistake of buying material goods and thinking they are treats which will fill the hole, soothe the wound, make us feel better. The problem is, they’re not treats, they’re responsibilities and what we own very quickly begins to own us.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • because of our stuff. What kind of stuff? Who cares!
  • don’t do anything but take up space and look pretty for a season or two before being replaced by other, newer things – equally pretty and equally useless.
  • if you have more stuff than you do space to easily store it, your life will be spent a slave to your possessions.
  • So, if our houses have tripled in size while the number of people living in them has shrunk, what, exactly, are we doing with all of this extra space? And why the billions of dollars tossed to an industry that was virtually nonexistent a generation or two ago?
  • when you buy something, you’re also taking on the task of disposing of it (responsibly or not) when you’re done with it. Our addiction to consumption is a vicious one, and it’s stressing us out.
  • A study published by UCLA showed that women’s stress hormones peaked during the times they were dealing with their possessions and material goods.
  • Our current solution to having too much stuff is as short-sighted as it is ineffective: when we run out of space, we simply buy a bigger house.
  • So if bigger homes aren’t the solution, what is? I suggest heading in the exact opposite direction: deliberately choose a life with less. Buy less and instantly you have less to store; you use less space. Eventually you can work less to pay for all of this stuff. Soon you will stress less too and, above all, your life will involve less waste.
  • wondering where to begin? Don’t. You know exactly where this journey starts. It starts with the stuff that makes you feel guilty, stressed or overwhelmed when you look at it.
  • Because when it comes to stuff, I promise you, you don’t need more labels or better systems or complicated Pinterest tutorials – all you need is less.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Covid's Airborne Transmission Was Acknowledged So Late - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rus-airborne-transmission.html

who cdc transmission Covid-19 Science research psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 08 May 21 - No Cached
  • A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.
  • The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”
  • on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • But these latest shifts challenge key infection control assumptions that go back a century, putting a lot of what went wrong last year in context
  • They may also signal one of the most important advancements in public health during this pandemic.
  • If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others.
  • We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary.
  • Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing
  • We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.
  • The implications of this were illustrated when I visited New York City in late April — my first trip there in more than a year.
  • A giant digital billboard greeted me at Times Square, with the message “Protecting yourself and others from Covid-19. Guidance from the World Health Organization.”
  • That billboard neglected the clearest epidemiological pattern of this pandemic: The vast majority of transmission has been indoors, sometimes beyond a range of three or even six feet. The superspreading events that play a major role in driving the pandemic occur overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, indoors.
  • The billboard had not a word about ventilation, nothing about opening windows or moving activities outdoors, where transmission has been rare and usually only during prolonged and close contact. (Ireland recently reported 0.1 percent of Covid-19 cases were traced to outdoor transmission.)
  • Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the W.H.O. committees that craft infection prevention and control guidance, wanted all this examined but knew the stakes made it harder to overcome the resistance. She told The Times last year, “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do.” She said it was a very good idea, but she added, “It will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In contrast, if the aerosols had been considered a major form of transmission, in addition to distancing and masks, advice would have centered on ventilation and airflow, as well as time spent indoors. Small particles can accumulate in enclosed spaces, since they can remain suspended in the air and travel along air currents. This means that indoors, three or even six feet, while helpful, is not completely protective, especially over time.
  • To see this misunderstanding in action, look at what’s still happening throughout the world. In India, where hospitals have run out of supplemental oxygen and people are dying in the streets, money is being spent on fleets of drones to spray anti-coronavirus disinfectant in outdoor spaces. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas keep getting closed around the world. This year and last, organizers canceled outdoor events for the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. Cambodian customs officials advised spraying disinfectant outside vehicles imported from India. The examples are many.
  • Meanwhile, many countries allowed their indoor workplaces to open but with inadequate aerosol protections. There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best
  • clear evidence doesn’t easily overturn tradition or overcome entrenched feelings and egos. John Snow, often credited as the first scientific epidemiologist, showed that a contaminated well was responsible for a 1854 London cholera epidemic by removing the suspected pump’s handle and documenting how the cases plummeted afterward. Many other scientists and officials wouldn’t believe him for 12 years, when the link to a water source showed up again and became harder to deny.
  • Along the way to modern public health shaped largely by the fight over germs, a theory of transmission promoted by the influential public health figure Charles Chapin took hold
  • Dr. Chapin asserted in the early 1900s that respiratory diseases were most likely spread at close range by people touching bodily fluids or ejecting respiratory droplets, and did not allow for the possibility that such close-range infection could occur by inhaling small floating particles others emitted
  • He was also concerned that belief in airborne transmission, which he associated with miasma theories, would make people feel helpless and drop their guard against contact transmission. This was a mistake that would haunt infection control for the next century and more.
  • It was in this context in early 2020 that the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. asserted that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted primarily via these heavier, short-range droplets, and provided guidance accordingly
  • Amid the growing evidence, in July, hundreds of scientists signed an open letter urging the public health agencies, especially the W.H.O., to address airborne transmission of the coronavirus.
  • Last October, the C.D.C. published updated guidance acknowledging airborne transmission, but as a secondary route under some circumstances, until it acknowledged airborne transmission as crucial on Friday. And the W.H.O. kept inching forward in its public statements, most recently a week ago.
  • Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.
  • Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol.
  • biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.
  • Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease, by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.
  • Since aerosols also infect at close range, measures to prevent droplet transmission — masks and distancing — can help dampen transmission for airborne diseases as well. However, this oversight led medical people to circularly assume that if such measures worked at all, droplets must have played a big role in their transmission.
  • Another dynamic we’ve seen is something that is not unheard-of in the history of science: setting a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it.
  • Another key problem is that, understandably, we find it harder to walk things back. It is easier to keep adding exceptions and justifications to a belief than to admit that a challenger has a better explanation.
  • The ancients believed that all celestial objects revolved around the earth in circular orbits. When it became clear that the observed behavior of the celestial objects did not fit this assumption, those astronomers produced ever-more-complex charts by adding epicycles — intersecting arcs and circles — to fit the heavens to their beliefs.
  • In a contemporary example of this attitude, the initial public health report on the Mount Vernon choir case said that it may have been caused by people “sitting close to one another, sharing snacks and stacking chairs at the end of the practice,” even though almost 90 percent of the people there developed symptoms of Covid-19
  • So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response.
  • Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.
  • Righting this ship cannot be a quiet process — updating a web page here, saying the right thing there. The proclamations that we now know are wrong were so persistent and so loud for so long.
  • the progress we’ve made might lead to an overhaul in our understanding of many other transmissible respiratory diseases that take a terrible toll around the world each year and could easily cause other pandemics.
  • So big proclamations require probably even bigger proclamations to correct, or the information void, unnecessary fears and misinformation will persist, damaging the W.H.O. now and in the future.
  • I’ve seen our paper used in India to try to reason through aerosol transmission and the necessary mitigations. I’ve heard of people in India closing their windows after hearing that the virus is airborne, likely because they were not being told how to respond
  • The W.H.O. needs to address these fears and concerns, treating it as a matter of profound change, so other public health agencies and governments, as well as ordinary people, can better adjust.
  • It needs to begin a campaign proportional to the importance of all this, announcing, “We’ve learned more, and here’s what’s changed, and here’s how we can make sure everyone understands how important this is.” That’s what credible leadership looks like. Otherwise, if a web page is updated in the forest without the requisite fanfare, how will it matter?
lucieperloff

Jeff Bezos Is Going To Space (For A Few Minutes) : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ing-to-space-for-a-few-minutes

technology knowledge research transportation space

shared by lucieperloff on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Bezos will climb aboard a rocket made by his space exploration company Blue Origin.
  • Blue Origin's rocket is called New Shepard, and it's reusable – the idea being that reusing rockets will lower the cost of going to space and make it more accessible.
  • The flight is scheduled for July 20 — the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
Emily Horwitz

With Limited Budgets, Pursuing Science Smartly - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-pursuing-science-smartly.html

science politics space exploration mars rover nytimes

shared by Emily Horwitz on 02 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • With the first presidential debate coming up on Wednesday, it is striking — if not surprising — how bland and predictable the candidates have been in discussing America’s role in space.
  • neither candidate, and neither party, has addressed the scientific question of why we want to bother with exploring space.
  • Maybe scientists should simply face reality and accept that science doesn’t play a central role in the government’s equation.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • unmanned space exploration seems to me much more exciting and scientifically worthwhile than human spaceflight, especially at a time of restricted budgets and nascent technology.
  • human geologist could do in a few days what Curiosity may do in a year or two. But we aren’t likely to send geologists there anytime soon — and if we did, they wouldn’t be able to stay much longer than a few days, while Curiosity can silently and gently move about the planet for a decade or more, powered by its plutonium generator. Moreover, by the time we might get around to sending humans, in two to three decades at best, robots will have advanced to the point where they might easily compete in real time.
  • Over the coming decades we may send more robotic explorers to even harsher climes, maybe to explore deep oceans on Jupiter’s moon Europa, or to search on comets for telltale signs of life’s origins.
Javier E

The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ny_human_beings_their_humanity

brain science science psychology hate racism bias theory of mind killing distance

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The cross-cultural psychologist Gustav Jahoda catalogued how Europeans since the time of the ancient Greeks viewed those living in relatively primitive cultures as lacking a mind in one of two ways: either lacking self-control and emotions, like an animal, or lacking reason and intellect, like a child. So foreign in appearance, language, and manner, “they” did not simply become other people, they became lesser people. More specifically, they were seen as having lesser minds, diminished capacities to either reason or feel.
  • In the early 1990ss, California State Police commonly referred to crimes involving young black men as NHI—No Humans Involved.
  • The essence of dehumanization is, therefore, failing to recognize the fully human mind of another person. Those who fight against dehumanization typically deal with extreme cases that can make it seem like a relatively rare phenomenon. It is not. Subtle versions are all around us.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Even doctors—those whose business is to treat others humanely— can remain disengaged from the minds of their patients, particularly when those patients are easily seen as different from the doctors themselves. Until the early 1990s, for instance, it was routine practice for infants to undergo surgery without anesthesia. Why? Because at the time, doctors did not believe that infants were able to experience pain, a fundamental capacity of the human mind.
  • Your sixth sense functions only when you engage it. When you do not, you may fail to recognize a fully human mind that is right before your eyes.
  • Although it is indeed true that the ability to read the minds of others exists along a spectrum with stable individual differences, I believe that the more useful knowledge comes from understanding the moment-to-moment, situational influences that can lead even the most social person—yes, even you and me—to treat others as mindless animals or objects.
  • None of the cases described in this chapter so far involve people with chronic and stable personality disorders. Instead, they all come from predictable contexts in which people’s sixth sense remained disengaged for one fundamental reason: distance.
  • This three-part chain—sharing attention, imitating action, and imitation creating experience—shows one way in which your sixth sense works through your physical senses. More important, it also shows how your sixth sense could remain disengaged, leaving you disconnected from the minds of others. Close your eyes, look away, plug your ears, stand too far away to see or hear, or simply focus your attention elsewhere, and your sixth sense may not be triggered.
  • Distance keeps your sixth sense disengaged for at least two reasons. First, your ability to understand the minds of others can be triggered by your physical senses. When you’re too far away in physical space, those triggers do not get pulled. Second, your ability to understand the minds of others is also engaged by your cognitive inferences. Too far away in psychological space—too different, too foreign, too other—and those triggers, again, do not get pulled
  • For psychologists, distance is not just physical space. It is also psychological space, the degree to which you feel closely connected to someone else. You are describing psychological distance when you say that you feel “distant” from your spouse, “out of touch” with your kids’ lives, “worlds apart” from a neighbor’s politics, or “separated” from your employees. You don’t mean that you are physically distant from other people; you mean that you feel psychologically distant from them in some way
  • Interviews with U.S. soldiers in World War II found that only 15 to 20 percent were able to discharge their weapons at the enemy in close firefights. Even when they did shoot, soldiers found it hard to hit their human targets. In the U.S. Civil War, muskets were capable of hitting a pie plate at 70 yards and soldiers could typically reload anywhere from 4 to 5 times per minute. Theoretically, a regiment of 200 soldiers firing at a wall of enemy soldiers 100 feet wide should be able to kill 120 on the first volley. And yet the kill rate during the Civil War was closer to 1 to 2 men per minute, with the average distance of engagement being only 30 yards.
  • Modern armies now know that they have to overcome these empathic urges, so soldiers undergo relentless training that desensitizes them to close combat, so that they can do their jobs. Modern technology also allows armies to kill more easily because it enables killing at such a great physical distance. Much of the killing by U.S. soldiers now comes through the hands of drone pilots watching a screen from a trailer in Nevada, with their sixth sense almost completely disengaged.
  • Other people obviously do not need to be standing right in front of you for you to imagine what they are thinking or feeling or planning. You can simply close your eyes and imagine it.
  • The MPFC and a handful of other brain regions undergird the inferential component of your sixth sense. When this network of brain regions is engaged, you are thinking about others’ minds. Failing to engage this region when thinking about other people is then a solid indication that you’re overlooking their minds.
  • Research confirms that the MPFC is engaged more when you’re thinking about yourself, your close friends and family, and others who have beliefs similar to your own. It is activated when you care enough about others to care what they are thinking, and not when you are indifferent to others
  • As people become more and more different from us, or more distant from our immediate social networks, they become less and less likely to engage our MPFC. When we don’t engage this region, others appear relatively mindless, something less than fully human.
  • The mistake that can arise when you fail to engage with the minds of others is that you may come to think of them as relatively mindless. That is, you may come to think that these others have less going on between their ears than, say, you do.
  • It’s not only free will that other minds might seem to lack. This lesser minds effect has many manifestations, including what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own. Members of distant out-groups, ranging from terrorists to poor hurricane victims to political opponents, are also rated as less able to experience complicated emotions, such as shame, pride, embarassment, and guilt than close members of one’s own group.
1 - 20 of 326 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page