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Javier E

Opinion | Transgender biology debates should focus on the brain, not the body - The Was... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-biology-brain-science-freedom

trans neuroscience feeling biology debates body

shared by Javier E on 01 May 23 - No Cached
  • what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?
  • The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender.
  • It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.
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  • What the research has found is that the brains of trans people are unique: neither female nor male, exactly, but something distinct.
  • But what does that mean, a male brain, or a female brain, or even a transgender one?
  • It’s a fraught topic, because brains are a collection of characteristics, rather than a binary classification of either/or
  • yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology
  • Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on. There’s even something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female, and may not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.
  • t there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.
  • trying to open people’s hearts by saying “Check out my brain!” can do more harm than good, because this line of argument delegitimizes the experiences of many trans folks. It suggests that there’s only one way to be trans — to feel trapped in the wrong body, to go through transition, and to wind up, when all is said and done, on the opposite-gender pole. It suggests that the quest trans people go on can only be considered successful if it ends with fitting into the very society that rejected us in the first place.
  • All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.
  • No one who embarks upon a life as a trans person in this country is doing so out of caprice, or a whim, or a delusion. We are living these wondrous and perilous lives for one reason only — because our hearts demand it.
  • what we need now is not new legislation to make things harder. What we need now is understanding, not cruelty. What we need now is not hatred, but love.
  • the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire, to be free to feel the way I feel.
Javier E

If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...covid-lessons-learned-9dd5566f

politics us history crisis culture policy trump pandemic response science psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets
  • A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.
  • The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.
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  • “My first and biggest wish is that we had known early that Covid-19 was airborne,”
  • , “Once you’ve realized that, it informs an entirely different strategy for protection.” Masking, ventilation and air cleaning become key, as well as avoiding high-risk encounters with strangers, he says.
  • Instead of washing our produce and wearing hand-sewn cloth masks, we could have made sure to avoid superspreader events and worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. “We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone,” says Dr. Volckens. “We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.”
  • We didn’t realize how important clear, straight talk would be to maintaining public trust. If we had, we could have explained the biological nature of a virus and warned that Covid-19 would change in unpredictable ways.  
  • We didn’t know how difficult it would be to get the basic data needed to make good public-health and medical decisions. If we’d had the data, we could have more effectively allocated scarce resources
  • In the face of a pandemic, he says, the public needs an early basic and blunt lesson in virology
  • and mutates, and since we’ve never seen this particular virus before, we will need to take unprecedented actions and we will make mistakes, he says.
  • Since the public wasn’t prepared, “people weren’t able to pivot when the knowledge changed,”
  • By the time the vaccines became available, public trust had been eroded by myriad contradictory messages—about the usefulness of masks, the ways in which the virus could be spread, and whether the virus would have an end date.
  • , the absence of a single, trusted source of clear information meant that many people gave up on trying to stay current or dismissed the different points of advice as partisan and untrustworthy.
  • “The science is really important, but if you don’t get the trust and communication right, it can only take you so far,”
  • people didn’t know whether it was OK to visit elderly relatives or go to a dinner party.
  • Doctors didn’t know what medicines worked. Governors and mayors didn’t have the information they needed to know whether to require masks. School officials lacked the information needed to know whether it was safe to open schools.
  • Had we known that even a mild case of Covid-19 could result in long Covid and other serious chronic health problems, we might have calculated our own personal risk differently and taken more care.
  • just months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists released a white paper detailing the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public-health system still reliant on manual data collection methods—paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes.
  • While the U.K. and Israel were collecting and disseminating Covid case data promptly, in the U.S. the CDC couldn’t. It didn’t have a centralized health-data collection system like those countries did, but rather relied on voluntary reporting by underfunded state and local public-health systems and hospitals.
  • doctors and scientists say they had to depend on information from Israel, the U.K. and South Africa to understand the nature of new variants and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. They relied heavily on private data collection efforts such as a dashboard at Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center that tallied cases, deaths and vaccine rates globally.
  • For much of the pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and state and local governments had no way to find out in real time how many people were contracting Covid-19, getting hospitalized and dying
  • To solve the data problem, Dr. Ranney says, we need to build a public-health system that can collect and disseminate data and acts like an electrical grid. The power company sees a storm coming and lines up repair crews.
  • If we’d known how damaging lockdowns would be to mental health, physical health and the economy, we could have taken a more strategic approach to closing businesses and keeping people at home.
  • t many doctors say they were crucial at the start of the pandemic to give doctors and hospitals a chance to figure out how to accommodate and treat the avalanche of very sick patients.
  • The measures reduced deaths, according to many studies—but at a steep cost.
  • The lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful, some scientists say. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.
  • Lockdowns could, during Covid-19 surges, close places such as bars and restaurants where the virus is most likely to spread, while allowing other businesses to stay open with safety precautions like masking and ventilation in place.  
  • The key isn’t to have the lockdowns last a long time, but that they are deployed earlier,
  • If England’s March 23, 2020, lockdown had begun one week earlier, the measure would have nearly halved the estimated 48,600 deaths in the first wave of England’s pandemic
  • If the lockdown had begun a week later, deaths in the same period would have more than doubled
  • It is possible to avoid lockdowns altogether. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—all countries experienced at handling disease outbreaks such as SARS in 2003 and MERS—avoided lockdowns by widespread masking, tracking the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing and quarantining infected individuals.
  • With good data, Dr. Ranney says, she could have better managed staffing and taken steps to alleviate the strain on doctors and nurses by arranging child care for them.
  • Early in the pandemic, public-health officials were clear: The people at increased risk for severe Covid-19 illness were older, immunocompromised, had chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes or serious heart conditions
  • t had the unfortunate effect of giving a false sense of security to people who weren’t in those high-risk categories. Once case rates dropped, vaccines became available and fear of the virus wore off, many people let their guard down, ditching masks, spending time in crowded indoor places.
  • it has become clear that even people with mild cases of Covid-19 can develop long-term serious and debilitating diseases. Long Covid, whose symptoms include months of persistent fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches and brain fog, hasn’t been the virus’s only nasty surprise
  • In February 2022, a study found that, for at least a year, people who had Covid-19 had a substantially increased risk of heart disease—even people who were younger and had not been hospitalized
  • respiratory conditions.
  • Some scientists now suspect that Covid-19 might be capable of affecting nearly every organ system in the body. It may play a role in the activation of dormant viruses and latent autoimmune conditions people didn’t know they had
  •  A blood test, he says, would tell people if they are at higher risk of long Covid and whether they should have antivirals on hand to take right away should they contract Covid-19.
  • If the risks of long Covid had been known, would people have reacted differently, especially given the confusion over masks and lockdowns and variants? Perhaps. At the least, many people might not have assumed they were out of the woods just because they didn’t have any of the risk factors.
Javier E

Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-mysterious-hot-hand.html

pattern recognition brain science research psychology randomness

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved
  • The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue
  • Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.
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  • A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.
  • We mortals can benefit, at least in theory, from islands of predictability — a barely perceptible tilt of a roulette table that makes the ball slightly more likely to land on one side of the wheel than the other
  • The same is true for the random walk of the stock market. Becoming aware of information before it has propagated worldwide can give a speculator a tiny, temporary edge. Some traders pay a premium to locate their computer servers as close as possible to Lower Manhattan, gaining advantages measured in microseconds.
  • Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science
  • I know it sounds crazy but when you average the scores together the answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but about 40-60 in favor of tails.
  • There is not, as Guildenstern might imagine, a tear in the fabric of space-time. It remains as true as ever that each flip is independent, with even odds that the coin will land one way or the other. But by concentrating on only some of the data — the flips that follow heads — a gambler falls prey to a selection bias.
  • basketball is no streakier than a coin toss. For a 50 percent shooter, for example, the odds of making a basket are supposed to be no better after a hit — still 50-50. But in a purely random situation, according to the new analysis, a hit would be expected to be followed by another hit less than half the time. Finding 50 percent would actually be evidence in favor of the hot hand
  • Dr. Gilovich is withholding judgment. “The larger the sample of data for a given player, the less of an issue this is,” he wrote in an email. “Because our samples were fairly large, I don’t believe this changes the original conclusions about the hot hand. ”
  • Take a fair coin — one as likely to land on heads as tails — and flip it four times. How often was heads followed by another head?
  • For all their care to be objective, scientists are as prone as anyone to valuing data that support their hypothesis over those that contradict it. Sometimes this results in experiments that succeed only under very refined conditions, in certain labs with special reagents and performed by a scientist with a hot hand.
  • We’re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.
kortanekev

Immanuel Kant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Immanuel_Kant

philosophy psychology reality perception

shared by kortanekev on 23 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • the agreement between reality and the concepts we use to conceive it arises not because our mental concepts have come to passively mirror reality, but because reality must conform to the human mind's active concepts to be conceivable and at all possible for us to experience. Kant thus regarded the basic categories of the human mind as the transcendental "condition of possibility" for any experience.[6]
  • kortanekev on 23 Sep 16
     
    Kant, german philosopher, argues that reality must conform to the mind, rather than the mind conform to reality, for us to begin to understand it. Interesting way to think about our perception.   (Evie, 9/23/16) 
sissij

Apple removed the New York Times app in China. Why now? - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...pple-china-20170105-story.html

new york times language social media bias

shared by sissij on 06 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • California’s Internet companies may have once dreamed of liberating China through technology, but these days they seem more willing than ever to play the Communist Party's game
  • "This is a restoration of the Cultural Revolution or another historical retrogression," said another.
  • The Washington Post is one of many Western newspapers that carries a regular paid supplement by China Daily, another Communist Party mouthpiece.
  • sissij on 06 Jan 17
     
    The censorship in China has long been a controversial issue that's widely discussed. I think it's very natural that those internet companies play the government the rules to enter the Chinese market because most companies are profit-driven rather than being all idealistic. However, I found the tone of this article very uncomfortable. He used the word "liberating" as if China is in bad condition or great suffer that need American freedom to save. Also, looking back to American history, American heroism plays a big part in what the American government did. They "liberated" Canada, "liberated" Vietnam, "liberated" Pakistan, and now America tries to "liberate" China. However, they never fully understand the pros and cons of censorship and how China is a totally different country to America. One's medicine can toxic for another. --Sissi (1/6/2017)
kushnerha

How 'Empowerment' Became Something for Women to Buy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...omething-for-women-to-buy.html

new york times empowerment feminism language inequality wealth

shared by kushnerha on 16 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The mix of things presumed to transmit and increase female power is without limit yet still depressingly limiting.“Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women.
  • Four decades ago, the word had much more in common with Latin American liberation theology than it did with “Lean In.” In 1968, the Brazilian academic Paulo Freire coined the word “conscientization,” empowerment’s precursor, as the process by which an oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able to take action against his oppressors.
  • Eight years later, the educator Barbara Bryant Solomon, writing about American black communities, gave this notion a new name, “empowerment.” It was meant as an ethos for social workers in marginalized communities, to discourage paternalism and encourage their clients to solve problems in their own ways. Then in 1981, Julian Rappaport, a psychologist, broadened the concept into a political theory of power that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitless; it placed faith in the individual and laid at her feet a corresponding amount of responsibility too.
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  • Sneakily, empowerment had turned into a theory that applied to the needy while describing a process more realistically applicable to the rich. The word was built on a misaligned foundation; no amount of awareness can change the fact that it’s the already-powerful who tend to experience empowerment at any meaningful rate. Today “empowerment” invokes power while signifying the lack of it. It functions like an explorer staking a claim on new territory with a white flag.
  • highly marketable “women’s empowerment,” neither practice nor praxis, nor really theory, but a glossy, dizzying product instead. Women’s empowerment borrows the virtuous window-dressing of the social worker’s doctrine and kicks its substance to the side. It’s about pleasure, not power; it’s individualistic and subjective, tailored to insecurity and desire.
  • The new empowerment doesn’t increase potential so much as it assures you that your potential is just fine. Even when the thing being described as “empowering” is personal and mildly defiant (not shaving, not breast-feeding, not listening to men, et cetera), what’s being mar­keted is a certain identity.
  • When consumer purchases aren’t made out to be a path to female empowerment, a branded corporate experience often is. There’s TEDWomen (“about the power of women”), the Forbes Women’s Summit (“#RedefinePower”) and Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Conference (tickets are $10,000).
  • This consumption-and-conference empowerment dilutes the word to pitch-speak, and the concept to something that imitates rather than alters the structures of the world. This version of empowerment can be actively disempowering: It’s a series of objects and experiences you can purchase while the conditions determining who can access and accumulate power stay the same. The ready partici­pation of well-off women in this strat­egy also points to a deep truth about the word “empowerment”: that it has never been defined by the people who actually need it. People who talk empowerment are, by definition, already there.
  • I have never said “empowerment” sincerely or heard it from a single one of my friends. The formulation has been diluted to something representational and bloodless — an architectural rendering of a building that will never be built.But despite its nonexistence in honest conversation, “empowerment” goes on thriving. It’s uniquely marketable, like the female body, which is where women’s empowerment is forced to live.
  • Like Sandberg, Kardashian is the apotheosis of a particular brand of largely contentless feminism, a celebratory form divorced from material politics, which makes it palatable — maybe irresistible — to the business world. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The mistake would be to locate further empowerment in choosing between the two. Corporate empowerment — as well as the lightweight, self-exculpatory feminism it rides on — feeds rav­enously on the distracting performance of identity, that buffet of false opposition.
Javier E

Lacking Brains, Plants Can Still Make Good Judgments About Risks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ea-plants-risk-assessment.html

plants risk survival natural selection research

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Plants may not be getting enough credit. Not only do they remember when you touch them, it turns out that they can make risky decisions that are as sophisticated as those made by humans, all without brains or complex nervous systems. And they may even judge risks more efficiently than we do.
  • Researchers showed that when faced with the choice between a pot containing constant levels of nutrients or one with unpredictable levels, a plant will pick the mystery pot when conditions are sufficiently poor.
  • When nutrient levels were low, the plants laid more roots in the unpredictable pot. But when nutrients were abundant, they chose the one that always had the same amount. The plants somehow knew the best time to take risks.
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  • “In bad conditions, the only chance of success is to take a chance and hope it works out, and that’s what the plants are doing,
  • This complex behavior in a plant supports an idea, known as risk sensitivity theory, that scientists have long had trouble testing in insects and animals. It states that when choosing between stable and uncertain outcomes, an organism will play it safe when things are going well, and take risks when times are hard.
  • The simplicity of plants makes it much easier to create a proper test for at least one reason: Plants don’t worry about feelings.
Maria Delzi

How Life Began: New Clues | TIME.com - 0 views

science.time.com/...egan-new-clues-from-new-worlds

shared by Maria Delzi on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Astronomers recently announced that there could be an astonishing 20 billion Earthlike planets in the Milky Way
  • How abundant life actually is, however, hinges on one crucial factor: given the right conditions and the right raw materials,
  • what is the mathematical likelihood that life will actually would arise?
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  • biology would have to be popping up all over the place.
  • Andrew Ellington, of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the University of Texas, Austin, “I can’t tell you what the probability is. It’s a chapter of the story that’s pretty much blank.”
  • Given that rather bleak-sounding assessment, it may be surprising to learn that Ellington is actually pretty upbeat. But that’s how he and two colleagues come across in a paper in the latest Science. The crucial step from nonliving stuff to a live cell is still a mystery, they acknowledge, but the number of pathways a mix of inanimate chemicals could have taken to reach the threshold of the living turns out to be many and varied. “It’s difficult to say exactly how things did occur,” says Ellington. “But there are many ways it could have occurred.
  • The first stab at answering the question came all the way back in the 1950s, when chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey passed an electrical spark through a beaker containing methane, ammonia, water vapor and hydrogen, thought at the time to represent Earth’s primordial atmosphere.
  • Scientists have learned so much, in fact, that the number of places life might have begun has grown to include such disparate locations as the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean; beds of clay; the billowing clouds of gas emerging from volcanoes; and the spaces in between ice crystals.
  • The number of ideas about how the key step from organic chemicals to living organisms might have been taken has multiplied as well: there’s the “RNA world hypothesis” and the “lipid world hypothesis” and the “iron-sulfur world hypothesis” and more, all of them dependent on a particular set of chemical circumstances and a particular set of dynamics and all highly speculative.
  • “Maybe when they do,” says Ellington, “we’ll all do a face-plant because it turns out to be so obvious in retrospect.” But even if they succeed, it will only prove that a manufactured cell could represent the earliest life forms, not that it actually does. “It will be a story about what we think might have happened, but it will still be a story.”
  • The story Ellington and his colleagues have been able to tell already, however, is a reason for optimism. We still don’t know the odds that life will arise under the right conditions. But the underlying biochemistry is abundantly, ubiquitously available—and it would take an awfully perverse universe to take things so far only to shut them down at the last moment.
grayton downing

Material looks cool while heating up | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...erial-looks-cool-while-heating

heating science research

shared by grayton downing on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It’s a thermodynamic Houdini: the first material that appears to get colder as it heats up.
  • Physics textbooks explain that the hotter a body gets, the more light it radiates. This principle allows soldiers with infrared goggles to ferret out enemies even in total darkness.
  • But scientists are starting to learn how to design materials that do not always radiate more as they warm.
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  • “We saw this really dramatic effect,” Kats says. “You have an object that at 90o looks the same as at 50o.”
  • , it could allow soldiers and military aircraft to evade thermal sensors, Kats and his colleagues think. Such a material could also allow heaters to maintain a constant temperature by emitting less radiation in cold conditions and more in hot conditions.
  • want to know how vanadium dioxide rearranges its internal structure as it warms to create its unusual interactions with light and electricity.
  • “It opens the door to some really interesting physics.”
Javier E

Hyperactive Prescribing? Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...hyperactive-prescribing-ctd-6

elite career lifestyle ADHD

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • I think a large part of people’s knee-jerk skepticism about ADHD stems from the fact that, at least anecdotally, this condition seems to disproportionately afflict people at or near the top of the income/education distribution
  • Is it not worth considering the possibility that the pressures and expectations of modern-day elite occupations are, for lack of a better word, insane?
  • That the person who can simultaneously excel and be happy under the typical demands of, say, a medical resident or first-year law associate is a very rare psychological outlier? My sense is that the strong feelings some people have about the (over)diagnosis of ADHD has to do with the fear that we’re trying to medicate our way out of an existential crisis: most people were simply not designed to thrive under the conditions that society holds up as the very height of achievement.
Javier E

Young Minds in Critical Condition - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-minds-in-critical-condition

liberal arts critical thinking skepticism university youth cynicism

shared by Javier E on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • Our best college students are very good at being critical. In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own “privilege.”
  • The combination of resistance to influence and deflection of responsibility by confessing to one’s advantages is a sure sign of one’s ability to negotiate the politics of learning on campus.
  • Taking things apart, or taking people down, can provide the satisfactions of cynicism. But this is thin gruel.
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  • In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the chance to learn as much as possible from what they study.
  • As debunkers, they contribute to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning — a culture whose intellectuals and cultural commentators get “liked” by showing that somebody else just can’t be believed.
  • Liberal education in America has long been characterized by the intertwining of two traditions: of critical inquiry in pursuit of truth and exuberant performance in pursuit of excellence. In the last half-century, though, emphasis on inquiry has become dominant, and it has often been reduced to the ability to expose error and undermine belief.
  • fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is becoming an endangered species of cultural life, as our nonstop, increasingly fractured technological existence wears down our receptive capacities.
  • Liberal learning depends on absorption in compelling work. It is a way to open ourselves to the various forms of life in which we might actively participate. When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are, at least temporarily, overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand an experience from another’s point of view.
  • we are learning to activate potential, and often to instigate new possibilities.
  • Liberal education must not limit itself to critical thinking and problem solving; it must also foster openness, participation and opportunity. It should be designed to take us beyond the campus to a life of ongoing, pragmatic learning that finds inspiration in unexpected sources, and increases our capacity to understand and contribute to the world
carolinewren

How Media Bias Is Killing Black America - The Root - 0 views

www.theroot.com/..._is_killing_black_america.html

media bias

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • leads to both the erasure and criminalization of marginalized communities, has had dire consequences for both the psyches and lived experiences of black people in the United States since at least the 18th century,
  • “This is the press, an irresponsible press,” he said. “It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
  • Many studies have tackled implicit racial bias in law enforcement, health care and the legal field. In recent years, the phrase has become a buzzword used to broadly frame bigotry and racism as something so entrenched that some people aren’t aware that they subconsciously harbor racist feelings, associating black skin with negative behavior
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  • their “conditioning has been conditioned,” and marginalized groups are often left to pick up the pieces in the wake of brutality and/or neglect by those in positions of power, trust and influence.
  • tackles media bias (pdf) and how it indiscriminately pathologizes communities of color for mass consumption.
  • “Implicit bias impacts the way black communities are treated across practically all sectors of life in America, from courtrooms to doctors’ offices,
  • “The media is no different, whether it be the use of pejorative terms like ‘thug’ and ‘animal’ to describe protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore, or the widespread overreporting of crime stories involving black suspects in New York City.”
  • Media bias not only negatively impacts black America’s relationship with law enforcement and the judicial system (pdf) but also extends to how African Americans are perceived in society at large.
  • “Television newsrooms are nearly 80 percent white, according to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, while radio newsrooms are 92 percent white,”
  • “The percentage of minority journalists has remained between 12 and 14 percent for more than a decade.”
  • This lays the groundwork for an intrinsically racist media structure that, according to The Atlantic’s Riva Gold, means “news organizations are losing their ability to empower, represent, and—especially in cases where language ability is crucial—even to report on minority populations in their communities.”
grayton downing

In Syria, Doctors Risk Life and Juggle Ethics - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...sk-life-and-juggle-ethics.html

syria doctors life ethics science research social media

shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Majid, who gave only his first name to protect his safety, collected hair and urine samples, clothing, tree leaves, soil and even a dead bird. He shared it with the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian group that had been delivering such samples to American intelligence officials, as proof of possible chemical attacks.
  • United Nations inspectors have taken the first steps to destroy Syria’s chemical stockpile.
  • Many Syrian doctors have fled; those who remain describe dire conditions where even the most basic care is not available.
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  • Mothers are desperate to have their children vaccinated; patients with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes struggle to get medicine; and there is “huge anxiety in the population,”
  • On Aug. 21, the group got word from some of its “silent partner” hospitals of a flood of patients with “neurotoxic symptoms” — roughly 3,600 in a period of three hours, including 355 who died.
  • The debate over whether doctors should expose human rights abuses has long been “one of these inside baseball arguments within the humanitarian community,” said Len Rubenstein, an expert on human rights and medical ethics at Johns Hopkins University. While Doctors Without Borders has a culture of “bearing witness,” he said, not all humanitarian organizations do.
  • The International Committee of the Red Cross, for instance, adheres to a strict code of political neutrality;
Javier E

Regulating Sex - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-shulevitz-regulating-sex.html

sexual ethics law consent psychology rape

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • THIS is a strange moment for sex in America. We’ve detached it from pregnancy, matrimony and, in some circles, romance. At least, we no longer assume that intercourse signals the start of a relationship.
  • But the more casual sex becomes, the more we demand that our institutions and government police the line between what’s consensual and what isn’t. And we wonder how to define rape. Is it a violent assault or a violation of personal autonomy? Is a person guilty of sexual misconduct if he fails to get a clear “yes” through every step of seduction and consummation?
  • According to the doctrine of affirmative consent — the “yes means yes” rule — the answer is, well, yes, he is.
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  • if one person can think he’s hooking up while the other feels she’s being raped, it makes sense to have a law that eliminates the possibility of misunderstanding. “You shouldn’t be allowed to make the assumption that if you find someone lying on a bed, they’re free for sexual pleasure,”
  • About a quarter of all states, and the District of Columbia, now say sex isn’t legal without positive agreement,
  • And though most people think of “yes means yes” as strictly for college students, it is actually poised to become the law of the land.
  • But criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores.
  • Should we really put people in jail for not doing what most people aren’t doing? (Or at least, not yet?)
  • It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. Colleges are entitled to uphold their own standards of comportment, even if enforcement of that behavior is spotty or indifferent to the rights of the accused. It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication.
  • Most people just aren’t very talkative during the delicate tango that precedes sex, and the re-education required to make them more forthcoming would be a very big project. Nor are people unerringly good at decoding sexual signals. If they were, we wouldn’t have romantic comedies.
  • “If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”
  • The example points to a trend evident both on campuses and in courts: the criminalization of what we think of as ordinary sex and of sex previously considered unsavory but not illegal.
  • Some new crimes outlined in the proposed code, for example, assume consent to be meaningless under conditions of unequal power. Consensual sex between professionals (therapists, lawyers and the like) and their patients and clients, for instance, would be a fourth-degree felony, punishable by significant time in prison.
  • most of these occupations already have codes of professional conduct, and victims also have recourse in the civil courts. Miscreants, she says, “should be drummed out of the profession or sued for malpractice.”
  • It’s important to remember that people convicted of sex crimes may not only go to jail, they can wind up on a sex-offender registry, with dire and lasting consequences.
  • We shouldn’t forget the harm done to American communities by the national passion for incarceration, either. In a letter to the American Law Institute, Ms. Smith listed several disturbing statistics: roughly one person in 100 behind bars, one in 31 under correctional supervision
  • the case for affirmative consent is “compelling,” he says. Mr. Schulhofer has argued that being raped is much worse than having to endure that awkward moment when one stops to confirm that one’s partner is happy to continue. Silence or inertia, often interpreted as agreement, may actually reflect confusion, drunkenness or “frozen fright,” a documented physiological response in which a person under sexual threat is paralyzed by terror
  • To critics who object that millions of people are having sex without getting unqualified assent and aren’t likely to change their ways, he’d reply that millions of people drive 65 miles per hour despite a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, but the law still saves lives. As long as “people know what the rules of the road are,” he says, “the overwhelming majority will comply with them.”
  • He understands that the law will have to bring a light touch to the refashioning of sexual norms, which is why the current draft of the model code suggests classifying penetration without consent as a misdemeanor, a much lesser crime than a felony.
  • This may all sound reasonable, but even a misdemeanor conviction goes on the record as a sexual offense and can lead to registration
  • An affirmative consent standard also shifts the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, which represents a real departure from the traditions of criminal law in the United States. Affirmative consent effectively means that the accused has to show that he got the go-ahead
  • if the law requires a “no,” then the jury will likely perceive any uncertainty about that “no” as a weakness in the prosecution’s case and not convict. But if the law requires a “yes,” then ambiguity will bolster the prosecutor’s argument: The guy didn’t get unequivocal consent, therefore he must be guilty of rape.
  • “It’s an unworkable standard,” says the Harvard law professor Jeannie C. Suk. “It’s only workable if we assume it’s not going to be enforced, by and large.” But that’s worrisome too. Selectively enforced laws have a nasty history of being used to harass people deemed to be undesirable, because of their politics, race or other reasons.
  • it’s probably just a matter of time before “yes means yes” becomes the law in most states. Ms. Suk told me that she and her colleagues have noticed a generational divide between them and their students. As undergraduates, they’re learning affirmative consent in their mandatory sexual-respect training sessions, and they come to “believe that this really is the best way to define consent, as positive agreement,” she says. When they graduate and enter the legal profession, they’ll probably reshape the law to reflect that belief.
  • Sex may become safer for some, but it will be a whole lot more anxiety-producing for others.
Javier E

Psychology Is Not in Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ychology-is-not-in-crisis.html

psychology science social science replication method research

shared by Javier E on 02 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Suppose you have two well-designed, carefully run studies, A and B, that investigate the same phenomenon. They perform what appear to be identical experiments, and yet they reach opposite conclusions. Study A produces the predicted phenomenon, whereas Study B does not. We have a failure to replicate
  • Does this mean that the phenomenon in question is necessarily illusory? Absolutely not. If the studies were well designed and executed, it is more likely that the phenomenon from Study A is true only under certain conditions. The scientist’s job now is to figure out what those conditions are, in order to form new and better hypotheses to test.
  • Much of science still assumes that phenomena can be explained with universal laws and therefore context should not matter. But this is not how the world works. Even a simple statement like “the sky is blue” is true only at particular times of day, depending on the mix of molecules in the air as they reflect and scatter light, and on the viewer’s experience of color. Continue reading the main story Write A Comment
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  • Science is not a body of facts that emerge, like an orderly string of light bulbs, to illuminate a linear path to universal truth. Rather, science (to paraphrase Henry Gee, an editor at Nature) is a method to quantify doubt about a hypothesis, and to find the contexts in which a phenomenon is likely. Failure to replicate is not a bug; it is a feature. It is what leads us along the path — the wonderfully twisty path — of scientific discovery.
Javier E

Psychologists Approve Ban on Role in National Security Interrogations - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...l-security-interrogations.html

psychology psychologists interrogation social science

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • The American Psychological Association on Friday overwhelmingly approved a new ban on any involvement by psychologists in national security interrogations conducted by the United States government, even noncoercive interrogations now conducted by the Obama administration.
  • The ban was approved by the association’s council by a vote of 156 to 1. Seven council members abstained, while one was recused.
  • The ban passed on Friday says that “psychologists shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation.” The measure’s backers added language on Friday that stated that psychologists may consult with the government on broad interrogation policy, but may not get involved in any specific interrogation or consult on the specific detention conditions for detainees.
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  • The ban would only prohibit involvement in what the association defines as national security interrogations, which are those conducted by the American military or intelligence agencies, or by contractors or foreign governments outside traditional domestic criminal law enforcement inside the United States.
  • Psychologists played crucial roles in the post-9/11 harsh interrogation programs created by the C.I.A. and Pentagon, and their involvement helped the Bush administration claim that the abusive interrogation techniques were legal. The involvement of psychologists in the interrogations enabled the Justice Department to issue secret legal opinions arguing that the interrogations were safe because they were being monitored by health professionals, and thus did not constitute torture.
  • Even before Friday’s vote, the Hoffman report and its unsparing findings of collusion during the Bush administration had already had a dramatic impact on the A.P.A. Four top association officials, including its chief executive and his deputy, have left the organization since the report was released in July.
carolinewren

How movies influence perceptions of brain disorders - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article23081874

movies influence brain

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Blockbusters, from the 2002 action thriller The Bourne Identity to last year’s Scarlett Johansson vehicle Lucy, reinforce pervading misconceptions about how the brain works.
  • “Watching movies about neurological disorders, if they’re done well, I think gives people an appreciation for what the characters may go through,” she says, while films that promote stereotypes “can actually be a little bit more hurtful to people who have those disorders.”
  • this 2003 Disney film offers surprisingly solid insight about a neurological disorder.
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  • Dory, voiced by comedian Ellen DeGeneres, suffers classic symptoms of anterograde amnesia, which is typically associated with damage to the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in encoding memories.
  • the portrayal of the condition is spot on. She has difficulty remembering names and retaining new information, but her condition doesn’t affect her sense of identity.
  • Jason Bourne, the amnesiac main character of this action flick, exhibits no trouble with short-term memories, but wakes up after suffering an unspecified injury to the brain with no recollection of who he is.
  • it’s just a perfect example of the neuromyth
  • explaining that the “double conk” myth – the idea that someone can lose their identity after being hit in the head and regain it after a second blow or psychological trigger – is actually a conflation of two ideas.
  • Identity loss is more closely associated with psychogenic amnesia, an extremely rare and controversial diagnosis, whose origins, some experts believe, may be influenced by culture.
  • This sci-fi action film relies on the conceit that humans only use 10 per cent of their brains.
  • Sure, filmmakers may take artistic licence, she says, but the trouble is many people actually believe we only use a portion of our brains.
  • she notes that due to its success, the film may have inadvertently contributed to the stereotype of the autistic savant – the notion that people with autism excel in a specific area, which, in the case of Hoffman’s character, involved dealing in numbers. In reality, Spiers says, this is very rare.
Javier E

Why Teenagers Act Crazy - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-teenagers-act-crazy.html

adolescent fear conditioning learning psychology amygdala anxiety stimulants brain science

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • there is a darker side to adolescence that, until now, was poorly understood: a surge during teenage years in anxiety and fearfulness. Largely because of a quirk of brain development, adolescents, on average, experience more anxiety and fear and have a harder time learning how not to be afraid than either children or adults.
  • the brain circuit for processing fear — the amygdala — is precocious and develops way ahead of the prefrontal cortex, the seat of reasoning and executive control. This means that adolescents have a brain that is wired with an enhanced capacity for fear and anxiety, but is relatively underdeveloped when it comes to calm reasoning.
  • the brain’s reward center, just like its fear circuit, matures earlier than the prefrontal cortex. That reward center drives much of teenagers’ risky behavior. This behavioral paradox also helps explain why adolescents are particularly prone to injury and trauma. The top three killers of teenagers are accidents, homicide and suicide.
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  • The brain-development lag has huge implications for how we think about anxiety and how we treat it. It suggests that anxious adolescents may not be very responsive to psychotherapy that attempts to teach them to be unafraid, like cognitive behavior therapy
  • should also make us think twice — and then some — about the ever rising use of stimulants in young people, because these drugs may worsen anxiety and make it harder for teenagers to do what they are developmentally supposed to do: learn to be unafraid when it is appropriate
  • up to 20 percent of adolescents in the United States experience a diagnosable anxiety disorder, like generalized anxiety or panic attacks, probably resulting from a mix of genetic factors and environmental influences.
  • This isn’t to say that cognitive therapy is ineffective for teenagers, but that because of their relative difficulty in learning to be unafraid, it may not be the most effective treatment when used on its own.
  • Fear learning lies at the heart of anxiety and anxiety disorders. This primitive form of learning allows us to form associations between events and specific cues and environments that may predict danger.
  • once previously threatening cues or situations become safe, we have to be able to re-evaluate them and suppress our learned fear associations. People with anxiety disorders have trouble doing this and experience persistent fear in the absence of threat — better known as anxiety.
  • Dr. Casey discovered that adolescents had a much harder time “unlearning” the link between the colored square and the noise than children or adults did.
  • adolescents had trouble learning that a cue that was previously linked to something aversive was now neutral and “safe.” If you consider that adolescence is a time of exploration when young people develop greater autonomy, an enhanced capacity for fear and a more tenacious memory for threatening situations are adaptive and would confer survival advantage. In fact, the developmental gap between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex that is described in humans has been found across mammalian species, suggesting that this is an evolutionary advantage.
  • As a psychiatrist, I’ve treated many adults with various anxiety disorders, nearly all of whom trace the origin of the problem to their teenage years. They typically report an uneventful childhood rudely interrupted by adolescent anxiety. For many, the anxiety was inexplicable and came out of nowhere.
  • prescription sales for stimulants increased more than fivefold between 2002 and 2012. This is of potential concern because it is well known from both human and animal studies that stimulants enhance learning and, in particular, fear conditioning.
Emilio Ergueta

Notes Towards a Philosophy of Sleep | Issue 91 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/..._Towards_a_Philosophy_of_Sleep

sleep philosophy psychology science brain science

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 27 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Meeting Christopher after a long interval reminded me of his excellent book Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality (2001). The volume includes a fascinating essay entitled ‘The Need to Sleep’, where he notes that philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to this extraordinary phenomenon. Well, a decade on, this is the beginning of a response to Christopher’s wake-up call.
  • If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way.
  • Of course, sleep is not a disease at all, but the condition of daily (nightly) life for the vast majority of us. The fact that we accept without surprise the need for a prolonged black-out as part of our daily life highlights our tendency to take for granted anything about our condition that is universal.
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  • Honest philosophers know they cannot complain about casting their philosophical pearls before drowsy swine, because they, too, have fallen asleep over the works of philosophers greater than themselves.
  • Not only is sleep a reminder of our ultimate helplessness, or even of how circumscribed a place thought sometimes plays in our lives, there is also the fear of contagion, as if talking about sleep might induce it – just as this reference to yawning will get at least 50% of you yawning in the next 15 minutes. (It’s a fact, honest!)
  • Since all animals sleep, we assume it has a biological purpose. The trouble is, we don’t know what that purpose is. There are many theories – energy conservation, growth promotion, immobilisation during hours of darkness when it might be dangerous to be out and about, consolidation of memories – but they are all open to serious objections.
  • Dreams, of course, have figured more significantly in philosophy. Being a mode of consciousness – prompting Aristotle to say that “the soul makes assertions in sleep” (On Dreams 458b) – dreams seem one step up from the mere putting out of zzzs.
  • they place a philosophically interesting question mark against our confidence in the nature of the world we appear to share with others.
  • Naturally, dreams preoccupied him as much as the daily resurrection of the self. He suggested that dreams might be an attempt to make sense of the body’s passage from sleep to wakefulness.
  • nothing is more sleep-inducing than the egocentric tales of someone else’s solipsistic dreams. We long to hear that magic phrase “And then I woke up.”
Javier E

How Poor Are the Poor? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...how-poor-are-the-poor.html

poor measurement poverty inequality

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “Anyone who studies the issue seriously understands that material poverty has continued to fall in the U.S. in recent decades, primarily due to the success of anti-poverty programs” and the declining cost of “food, air-conditioning, communications, transportation, and entertainment,”
  • Despite the rising optimism, there are disagreements over how many poor people there are and the conditions they live under. There are also questions about the problem of relative poverty, what we are now calling inequality
  • There are strong theoretical justifications for the use of a relative poverty measure. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts it this way:In order to participate fully in the social life of a community, individuals may need a level of resources that is not too inferior to the norms of a community. For example, the clothing budget that allows a child not to feel ashamed of his school attire is much more related to national living standards than to strict requirements for physical survival
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  • Democratic supporters of safety net programs can use Jencks’s finding that poverty has dropped below 5 percent as evidence that the war on poverty has been successful.
  • At the same time liberals are wary of positive news because, as Jencks notes:It is easier to rally support for such an agenda by saying that the problem in question is getting worse
  • The plus side for conservatives of Jencks’s low estimate of the poverty rate is the implication that severe poverty has largely abated, which then provides justification for allowing enemies of government entitlement programs to further cut social spending.
  • At the same time, however, Jencks’s data undermines Republican claims that the war on poverty has been a failure – a claim exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 quip: “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”
  • Jencks’s conclusion: “The absolute poverty rate has declined dramatically since President Johnson launched his war on poverty in 1964.” At 4.8 percent, Jencks’s calculation is the lowest poverty estimate by a credible expert in the field.
  • his conclusion — that instead of the official count of 45.3 million people living in poverty, the number of poor people in America is just under 15 million — understates the scope of hardship in this country.
  • Jencks argues that the actual poverty rate has dropped over the past five decades – far below the official government level — if poverty estimates are adjusted for food and housing benefits, refundable tax credits and a better method of determining inflation rates. In Jencks’s view, the war on poverty worked.
  • using a relative measure shows that the United States lags well behind other developed countries:If you use the O.E.C.D. standard of 50 percent of median income as a poverty line, the United States looks pretty bad in cross-national relief. We have a relative poverty rate exceeded only by Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Israel (which has seen a big increase in inequality in recent years). And that rate in 2010 was essentially where it was in 1995
  • While the United States “has achieved real progress in reducing absolute poverty over the past 50 years,” according to Burtless, “the country may have made no progress at all in reducing the relative economic deprivation of folks at the bottom.”
  • the heart of the dispute: How severe is the problem of poverty?
  • Kathryn Edin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, and Luke Schaefer, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, contend that the poverty debate overlooks crucial changes that have taken place within the population of the poor.
  • welfare reform, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act), which limited eligibility for welfare benefits to five years. The limitation has forced many of the poor off welfare: over the past 19 years, the percentage of families falling under the official poverty line who receive welfare benefits has fallen from to 26 percent from 68 percent. Currently, three-quarters of those in poverty, under the official definition, receive no welfare payments.
  • he enactment of expanded benefits for the working poor through the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit.According to Edin and Schaefer, the consequence of these changes, taken together, has been to divide the poor who no longer receive welfare into two groups. The first group is made up of those who have gone to work and have qualified for tax credits. Expanded tax credits lifted about 3.2 million children out of poverty in 2013
  • he second group, though, has really suffered. These are the very poor who are without work, part of a population that is struggling desperately. Edin and Schaefer write that among the losers are an estimated 3.4 million “children who over the course of a year live for at least three months under a $2 per person per day threshold.”
  • ocusing on these findings, Mishel argues, diverts attention from the more serious problem of “the failure of the labor market to adequately reward low-wage workers.”To support his case, Mishel points out that hourly pay for those in the bottom fifth grew only 7.7 percent from 1979 to 2007, while productivity grew by 64 percent, and education levels among workers in this quintile substantially improved.
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