Group items tagged

IN 1884 Roger Casement, an ascetic young Ulsterman, joined an expedition up the Congo river led by Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born American explorer, believing that commerce, Christianity and colonialism would emancipate the dark continent.

When reports reached London that the rubber boom had prompted a similar reign of terror against the indigenous population in Putumayo, in the Peruvian Amazon, the British foreign secretary sent Casement to investigate, with the words: “You're a specialist in atrocities. You can't say no.

Only a few years after his lauded success in Peru he was hanged in Pentonville prison as a traitor. Having transferred his thirst for justice to the fight for Irish independence, he sought German military support for the cause during the first world war

This question of accounting for what we call the "big bang state" -- the search for a physical explanation of it -- is probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology, and there are a couple different lines of thought about it.

One that's becoming more and more prevalent in the physics community is the idea that the big bang state itself arose out of some previous condition, and that therefore there might be an explanation of it in terms of the previously existing dynamics by which it came about

The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that's very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we're coming out of that

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade.

She doesn’t respond, her thumb on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then “28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.” She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed.

Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where she is, too.

It also recognized a potentially life-threatening aspect of campus culture: Penn Face. An apothegm long used by students to describe the practice of acting happy and self-assured even when sad or stressed, Penn Face is so widely employed that it has showed up in skits performed during freshman orientation.

While the appellation is unique to Penn, the behavior is not. In 2003, Duke jolted academe with a report describing how its female students felt pressure to be “effortlessly perfect”: smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful and popular, all without visible effort. At Stanford, it’s called the Duck Syndrome. A duck appears to glide calmly across the water, while beneath the surface it frantically, relentlessly paddles.

Citing a “perception that one has to be perfect in every academic, cocurricular and social endeavor,” the task force report described how students feel enormous pressure that “can manifest as demoralization, alienation or conditions like anxiety or depression.”

What did satisfy Haidt’s natural thirst for understanding human beings was social psychology.

Haidt initially found moral psychology “really dull.” He described it to me as “really missing the heart of the matter and too cerebral.” This changed in his second year after he took a course from the anthropologist Allen Fiske and got interested in moral emotions.

“The Emotional Dog and its Rational Trail,” which he describes as “the most important article I’ve ever written.”

The number of people who today openly question reality are not the tin-foil hat-wearing kind. Increasingly they are our friends, and those who hold positions of power.

Indeed, the public understanding of what constitutes valid evidence, and a worthy expert opinion, seems to be at an all time low.

Well, a new study suggests that this wealth of information might be the problem.

When you walk or drive in the UK, you’re being nudged by dozens of hidden messages embedded in the roads and pavements.

He suffers from a rare inherited condition that leaves him only able to make out vague colour contrasts around him. Yet he is able to safely pick his way through the hectic city streets, thanks to dozens of hidden messages embedded in our roads and pavements that few of us even notice are there.

This subtle form of communication is not just confined to the pavement, either: increasingly, motorists and cyclists are also unknowingly being told what to do.

Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails

Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

Could the emotional connotations of words in literature be a kind of lagging economic indicator? According to scientists who analyzed a century’s worth of writing, they might: After using big-data techniques to document the frequency of sad and happy words in millions of books, the researchers concluded that the emotional mood of literature reflects the mood of the economy over the previous 10 years.

They then matched that against a well-known indicator called the “economic misery index” — the sum of inflation rates and unemployment rates — and found that literary misery in a given year correlated with the average of the previous decade’s economic misery index numbers.

“To me it confirms that we do have a collective memory that conditions the way we write, and that economics is a very important driver of that.”

It all began when Warren Gefter, a radiologist “prone to posing Zen-koan-like questions,” asked his 15-year-old daughter, Amanda, over dinner at a Chinese restaurant near their home just outside Philadelphia: “How would you define nothing?”

“I think we should figure it out,” he said. And his teenage daughter — sullen, rebellious, wallowing in existential dread — smiled for the first time “in what felt like years.” The project proved to be a gift from a wise, insightful father. It was Warren Gefter’s way of rescuing his child.

Tracking down the meaning of nothing — and, by extension, secrets about the origin of the universe and whether observer-independent reality exists — became the defining project of their lives. They spent hours together working on the puzzle, two dark heads bent over their physics books far into the night.

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.

One of the company’s most compelling arguments for its quest to spread GMOs is that Monsanto products are the solution to world hunger

The company’s defenders claim that opposing GMOs is a luxury of Western privilege that denies developing countries vital resources to feed impoverished communities

According to Food Sovereignty Ghana, seven African countries held anti-Monsanto rallies on Saturday

Ryan was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year building systems to make stock-market trades faster. He was struck, over and over again, by how little those he helped understood the technology they were using

Ryan described what he witnessed inside the exchanges: The frantic competition for nanoseconds, clients’ trying to get their machines closer to the servers within the exchanges, the tens of millions being spent by high-frequency traders for tiny increments of speed. The U.S. stock market was now a class system of haves and have-nots, only what was had was not money but speed (which led to money).

A salesman at RBC who marketed Thor recalls one big investor calling to say, “You know, I thought I knew what I did for a living, but apparently not, because I had no idea this was going on.”

One of the most interesting things about studying fear is looking at the social constructions of fear, and learned fears versus those fears that appear to be more innate, or even genetic

Through fear conditioning (connecting a neutral stimulus with a negative consequence) we can link pretty much anything to a fear response.

So we know that we can learn to fear, and this means our socialization and the society in which we are raised is going to have a lot to do with what we find scary.

With four weeks to go before the midterm elections, Republicans have made questions of how safe we are – from disease, terrorism or something unspoken and perhaps more ominous – central in their attacks against Democrats. Their message is decidedly grim: Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party run a government that is so fundamentally broken it cannot offer its people the most basic protection from harm.

Republicans believe they have found the sentiment that will tie Congressional races together with a single national theme.

When Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate in 2010, they did so by running on burning emotional issues like unemployment and anger over the passage of the Affordable Care Act.