Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged easy

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
johnsonel7

Perspective: Treat Climate Change Like The Next World War | WNIJ and WNIU - 0 views

www.northernpublicradio.org/...-climate-change-next-world-war

climate change

shared by johnsonel7 on 11 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • But now we as a global community have some monumental decisions to make about our children’s future within just the next 10 to 25 years -- basically, two or three Presidents worth. 
  • It’s so easy to ignore, or maybe even too daunting to think about, as we go about our everyday lives. But we’re now well beyond the luxury of ostrich behavior. As Illinois’ future climate morphs over the next few decades to become more similar to that of northern Texas or South Carolina today, I urge you to think about the magnitude of it and take action, because we need a mobilization the size of which humanity has never seen. 
katherineharron

America is in turmoil and stocks are booming. Is the market broken? - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The stock market is not the economy. But rarely has the gap between Wall Street and Main Street felt so wide.
  • The United States is going through its worst race crisis since 1968 following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. Riots have hit cities across the nation. Looting is rampant. And President Donald Trump is threatening to send in the military to stop the violence.
  • The civil unrest could exacerbate the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 100,000 Americans. That in turn could deepen the economic collapse that has forced more than 40 million people to file for unemployment.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The S&P 500 closed Tuesday at the highest level in nearly three months. The Nasdaq has spiked 40% since March 23, fueled by the resilience of Big Tech, and is now within striking distance of all-time highs.
  • unprecedented stimulus from the Federal Reserve, and investors not wanting to miss out on monster returns once the economy recovers.
  • That means that while Main Street is still grappling with coronavirus, racial crisis and the impacts of both, Wall Street is doing just fine. Fed policy has allowed markets to decouple from economic reality.
  • Although the unrest was initially sparked by the killing of George Floyd, the continued broader economic discontent is an undercurrent.
  • that the American dream is not alive and well.
  • The divide between rich and poor was worsened by the Great Recession and its aftermath. The US government's response relied heavily on easy money from the Fed, rather than the kind of fiscal stimulus that can help lower-income Americans.
  • First, the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately hit poorer Americans, many of whom work in the hospitality and service sectors rocked by the pandemic. Nearly 40% of low-income workers lost their jobs in March alone, according to the Fed.
tongoscar

What's at Stake for Women's Rights in 2020? by Françoise Girard - Project Syn... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ts-by-francoise-girard-2020-01

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

Some of the Most Controversial Issues in Psychology - 0 views

www.zurinstitute.com/ial_issues_clinicalupdate.html

argument psychology brain science language

shared by krystalxu on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • If appropriate, assist with the transition to a new therapist. Make sure to document well.
  • Depending on where your potential clients live, the rules will be different. Be well informed and well trained before you practice across states lines.
  • As Skype is so convenient, popular, free and easy to use, many therapists have been using it to conduct online therapy and supervision. However, Skype is not HIPAA compliant, as it neither gives a BAA, nor does it notify therapists when breaches occur. VSee seems to provide a BAA to solo mental health practices at a reduced cost.
tongoscar

LA's high housing costs pose 'grave concern' to economy - Curbed LA - 0 views

la.curbed.com/...sing-costs-los-angeles-economy

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • “The fact that the median Californian household must pay more than seven times its income to afford a home should be grounds for grave concern regarding sustainable economic growth,”
  • It’s the first time the report—which predicts a slowdown in LA’s economy—has considered housing affordability. In the past, it focused largely on areas like developing the local workforce and attracting new businesses.
  • Without “significant policy action” to spur the construction of more homes, the costs of buying and renting will only continue to rise, the report concludes. That could make an already dire situation even worse.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “It’s very easy for people when they encounter someone who is homeless to say, ‘Oh, that’s not me. I have a job. I own a home.’ But what our research shows is that this is impacting you too,”
  • One particular statistic cited in the report illuminates how unaffordable home prices are already. In 2018, California’s median home price was 7.3 times the median household income. The median home price in the U.S., however, was 3.7 times the median household income.
katherineharron

Mysterious fast radio bursts helped detect missing matter in the universe, study says -... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • Mysterious fast radio bursts have been used to unlock another strange aspect of the universe: the case of the "missing matter."
  • Astronomers have yet to determine what causes these fast radio bursts, which are unpredictable but can be spotted and traced back to their origin using sensitive telescopes.
  • Normal matter, called baryonic matter in this study, is made of the protons and neutrons that comprise both humans and star stuff. But astronomers could only account for about half of it that should exist in the universe.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Unaccounted for, this missing matter was predicted to exist, but hard to find. In fact, astronomers have been searching for it over the last 30 years, the researchers said. Measurements of the Big Bang show how much matter was present in the early days of the universe, suggesting its existence.
  • "It turned out that it was hiding in a density so low that it does not emit light, it doesn't absorb it, and it doesn't reflect it," he said.
  • "The radiation from fast radio bursts gets spread out by the missing matter in the same way that you see the colors of sunlight being separated in a prism," Macquart said.
  • "Their millisecond durations made it very easy to measure the effect of dispersion — the process by which their longer wavelength emission is delayed with respect to their shorter wavelength emission is delayed — and hence to measure exactly how much matter they have encountered on their multi-billion year intergalactic journeys to Earth," Macquart said.
  • Astronomers were able to pin down the source of a repeating fast radio burst in 2017. But single radio bursts are harder to pinpoint because they don't reoccur.
  • "ASKAP both has a wide field of view, about 60 times the size of the full Moon, and can image in high resolution," said Ryan Shannon, study coauthor and associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, in a statement. "This means that we can catch the bursts with relative ease and then pinpoint locations to their host galaxies with incredible precision.
  • "We've discovered the equivalent of the Hubble-Lemaître Law for galaxies, only for fast radio bursts," Macquart said. "The Hubble-Lemaître Law, which says the more distant a galaxy from us, the faster it is moving away from us, underpins all measurements of galaxies at cosmological distances."
katherineharron

Central Park confrontation sends an ugly message (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • he story of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on an African American man who was bird watching in Central Park and who asked her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules, is about racism, yes. But it's also about how racism is more than just whites' hostility toward people of color. Racism is more than a feeling; it's a system in which white people can and do exploit their own social positions, assumptions about their innocence, and the presumption that they're telling the truth.
  • That a black man has to rely on videotaped wrongdoing to be believed -- to protect himself from an agitated stranger advancing up on him, and to ultimately see something resembling justice
  • She refused to leash the dog, and, according to Christian Cooper's account on Facebook (where he posted a video of part of their encounter), he told her "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it."
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.
  • Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.
  • "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."
  • "I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"
  • Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.
  • She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.
  • Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.
  • We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.
  • To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.
  • Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."
  • Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.
  • let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.
johnsonel7

Greta Thunberg: Kids 'will never forgive' you for failing on climate change - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

greta climate change

shared by johnsonel7 on 23 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth," the Swedish climate activist told the United Nations General Assembly on Monday. "How dare you?"
  • But convincing her to come to America wasn't easy. Thunberg refuses to fly because of the high levels of emissions from air travel. When she traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, she traveled by train. It took her 32 hours
  • "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear, how dare do you continue to look away?"
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "If you chose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you," she added
katherineharron

Google's algorithm for happiness - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Step one: "Calm your mind"Read MoreTo introduce his first piece of advice, Meng led the SXSW audience through a short collective breathing exercise to calm the fluffy particles in the "snow-globes" (his metaphor) in our skulls. He advocates finding easy ways to take pauses during the day and be mindful of your breath. "If that's too hard, then just think about nothing for little bit," he joked.
  • Step two: "Log moments of joy"This means simply saying to yourself -- as you sip a great espresso, laugh at your friend's joke or buy that shirt you've wanted -- "I am having a moment of joy!" When negative things happen to us throughout the day we tend to hold on to them, while the good things are more fleeting and ephemeral. So, by consciously acknowledging the good things, says Meng, we increase our chances that when we reflect on our day, we conclude it was happy one.
  • Step three: "Wish other people to be happy"According to Meng, altruistic thoughts benefit us because we derive a lot of joy from giving, even more than from receiving.Meng makes eloquent arguments for the (I think) self-evident need to infuse your life with more compassion, but only cites one study -- on people performing acts for others -- to back his claim that "kindness is a sustainable source of happiness."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • And yet, at the same time the more I practiced the three-step method, the more it seemed to be working. I started meditating at work. I programmed my mobile phone to send me hourly reminders to wish happiness on others. And I remembered to tell myself "I'm having a moment of joy!" when I was having fun with my daughters, running in the park, drinking a delicious beer and even writing this column.
  • I asked psychologist Tom Stafford, who writes the Neurohacks column for BBC Future about the gap. "Squaring what works for you and what the science says is difficult because happiness is a complex object," he told me. "There will be local variations due to individual personality, so we've immediately got a reason for expecting a gap between the science -- which tends to work with group averages -- and any one person's experience."The interesting general question, to me, is when do we trust our experience and when do we listen to science," Stafford added. "Obviously some things we don't need science for ('Does dropping a rock on my foot hurt?'), and some things we do ('Is smoking bad for my health?'). Happiness, I'd argue, is in between these two cases."
  • To many, Meng's three steps may seem obvious or simplistic. Yet he compared his advice to showing us how to do a single push up or arm curl at the gym. You know it does you good, but you have to do the exercise every day to get results. I may be more experientially convinced than scientifically sated, but it's enough to keep me going to Google's happiness gym and doing those push-ups.
tongoscar

China floods economy with cash with coronavirus outbreak set to hit economic growth har... - 0 views

www.scmp.com/...h-coronavirus-outbreak-set-hit

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The influx of credit is part of the country’s overall plan to kick-start production and bring the national economy back on track after the virus forced an extended Lunar New Year holiday.
  • The world’s second largest economy is widely estimated to suffer a decline of around a few percentage points in the first quarter of 2020 as the virus forced the vast majority of Chinese business activities to a standstill.A large decline from last year’s 6.1 per cent gross domestic product growth rate could threaten the long-pursued goal of building a “comprehensive well-off society”, which demands an increase of at least 5.6 per cent this year.
  • “Will this lead to a historical high this year? Does it mean an end to the deleveraging campaign? Debt concerns will certainly return from a long-term perspective,” he said. “If the nominal [gross domestic product] won’t be able to grow fast [upon the boost], the country is easy to fall into a liquidity trap like Japan,” Yeung warned.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Commercial banks extended 3.34 trillion yuan (US$477 billion) of credit in January, an all-time high for bank lending in a single month, the People’s Bank of China said Aggregate financing also reached a new high of 5.07 trillion yuan (US$724 billion)
  • Chinese banks flooded the economy with a record amount of bank credit at the start of 2020, a move aimed at protecting fragile growth amid the coronavirus outbreak.
tongoscar

Beijing's governing formula may be the same but Hong Kong can never be like Macau | Sou... - 0 views

www.scmp.com/...e-hong-kong-can-never-be-macau

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • During my recent business trip to New York, what struck me was the unprecedented interest in the latest news from Hong Kong among many of my American friends.
  • Beijing has been understandably upset over the appearance of American flags at protests in the city, furious at local politicians going all the way to Washington to lobby support for the anti-government movement,
  • Former Chinese commerce minister Chen Deming, while attending this paper’s China Conference in New York last week, confirmed that Beijing did not want the trade talks to be affected by Hong Kong, but added that no agreement would change the new normal of bumpy bilateral relations, at least for the foreseeable future.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Also, Hong Kong, having enjoyed decades of special ties with the United States, and now rocked by more than half a year of massive social unrest with still no easy solution in sight, is likely to be haunted by the ups and downs of China-US relations.
  • Firstly, Beijing has regularly reminded Hong Kong to take neighbouring Macau as a good reference, in particular for plugging national security loopholes. Only that Hong Kong can never be like Macau for reasons going beyond the fact that both cities are governed by the same, unique “one country, two systems” formula.
  • The complex situation this city finds itself in requires some real leadership that can take Hong Kong out of troubled waters. Beijing should better acknowledge such sentiment among Hongkongers.
tongoscar

Donald Trump's trade wars have not been 'easy to win'  | Financial Times - 0 views

www.ft.com/...98-36ed-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The phase one trade agreement between the US and China signed on Wednesday is only a truce in the trade war, rather than a major reversal of the tariffs imposed since 2018. Nevertheless, it halts a dangerous political momentum.
  • Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs describes this as a “subtraction of the negatives”. Paradoxically, the worse the effects on US growth rates in the past two years, the greater the scope for a bounceback this year. Mr Trump’s initial confidence about the effects of trade protection was based on a belief that China’s bilateral trade surplus with the US would force President Xi Jinping to make major policy concessions to safeguard his own export sector. The outcome was rather different: China retaliated with similar measures and this damaged American manufacturers. 
  • The damage to financial and business confidence triggered by the trade announcements hurt US growth still further. The tightening in financial conditions caused by the rising dollar and the collapse in equities late in 2018 would probably have been more severe if the Fed had not reduced policy interest rates by 75 basis points since then.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The good news is that part of this overall drag may disappear before the end of 2020, boosting American GDP growthby at least half a percentage point.What about the longer-term benefits of the trade deal?The purchase of $200bn of additional US exports in the energy, agriculture, manufacturing and services sectors, spread over two years, will reduce the bilateral trade deficit with China. But many of these exports will probably be redirected from elsewhere and will not boost US domestic output in those sectors. Longer term, China’s business restrictions, including alleged unfair trading practices, appear to be easing. Given the political boost from the phase one deal, Chinese economic reformers such as vice-premier Liu He may be in the ascendancy in Beijing for a while. 
  • The trade war has significantly damaged US growth in 2018-19Since President Donald Trump became more aggressive in his threats about trade protection early in 2018, US tariffs on Chinese goods have risen markedly, prompting retaliation from China. There have been only a few comprehensive studies on the overall impact of tariffs on the US growth rate. A notable exception is the work of Jan Hatzius’s US economics team at Goldman Sachs. They have estimated the possible impact of rising tariffs on net trade flows, real incomes, financial conditions and business confidence, and have combined these effects to produce the aggregate growth estimates shown in the graph below. As the negative effects of rising tariffs fade in 2020, the US growth rate is expected to be boosted by at least half a percentage point.
marleen_ueberall

Humans Are the World's Best Pattern-Recognition Machines, But for How Long? - Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...tion-machines-but-for-how-long

shared by marleen_ueberall on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Not only are machines rapidly catching up to — and exceeding — humans in terms of raw computing power, they are also starting to do things that we used to consider inherently human
  • Quite simply, humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines. They have the ability to recognize many different types of patterns - and then transform these "recursive probabalistic fractals" into concrete, actionable steps.
  • Intelligence, then, is really just a matter of being able to store more patterns than anyone else
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil was among the first to recognize how the link between pattern recognition and human intelligence could be used to build the next generation of artificially intelligent machines.
  • where human "expertise" has always trumped machine "expertise."
  • It turns out patterns matter, and they matter a lot.
  • The more you think about it, the more you can see patterns all around you. Getting to work on time in the morning is the result of recognizing patterns in your daily commute
  • it's really just a matter of recognizing the right patterns faster than anyone else, and machines just have so much processing power these days it's easy to see them becoming the future doctors and lawyers of the world.
  • The future of intelligence is in making our patterns better, our heuristics stronger.
  • One thing is clear – being able to recognize patterns is what gave humans their evolutionary edge over animals.
  • How we refine, shape and improve our pattern recognition is the key to how much longer we'll have the evolutionary edge over machines.
anniina03

It's Cold Outside, but Earth Is at Its Closest Approach to the Sun - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...perihelion-earth-sun.html

science Technology research

shared by anniina03 on 08 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • This story was updated to reflect 2020’s perihelion.In the wee hours of Sunday (2:47 a.m. Eastern time, to be exact), Earth will make its closest approach to the sun and reach a point in its orbit known as perihelion.
  • Chilly as winter may feel in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re more than three million miles closer to our fiery star than we were in the dead of summer.
  • The change in distance occurs because our planet’s orbit is stretched into an ellipse
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Although three million miles sounds vast, it’s not much on the scale of our solar system. In fact, despite the planet’s elliptical path through the heavens, most astronomers say that Earth’s orbit is basically circular. On a scale of 0 to 100 percent, where 0 is a perfect circle and nearly 100 is a very thin oval, Earth only scores a 1.7.
  • It’s a defining trait that keeps our planet at roughly the same distance from our sun, and keeps the climate relatively stable. This has led many astronomers to wonder whether a circular orbit just might be a crucial ingredient in the cocktail of life — and a key factor to consider as they search for signs of alien life around the thousands of exoplanets known to be circling other stars within the galaxy.
  • Such a dire portrait could suggest that life prefers a circle. But do most exoplanets orbit their host stars in bands similar to the Earth, or are their orbits more like that of HD 20782 b?
  • Consider the exoplanet known as HD 20782 b, which boasts the highest eccentricity yet discovered — a whopping 97 percent. Although the alien world is likely more akin to Jupiter than Earth in mass, it’s easy to imagine what might happen to a wildly eccentric Earthlike planet.At its closest approach to the star, the planet would face an explosion of heat that would evaporate the planet’s oceans and strip the planet’s atmosphere, sending crucial molecules such as oxygen streaming into space.
  • This suggests that most of these rocky worlds might be able to host a stable climate and, therefore, life.But Dr. Kane and other researchers warned against dismissing the possibility of life forming on worlds with highly-eccentric orbits.
  • Last year, Dr. Kane and his colleagues estimated that a planet with an eccentricity as high as 30 or even 40 percent could remain habitable
  • the galaxy and its many orbiting planets could surprise us. “I think it’s often assumed that life is wimpy and needs ‘just so’ conditions to exist,” Dr. Raymond said. “But life on Earth did indeed survive some tough times.”
Javier E

Understanding What's Wrong With Facebook | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ding-whats-wrong-with-facebook

evil structural tension 2nd generation internet comparative externality engine tech network manipulation architecture

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model
  • much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.
  • Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Good old fashioned advertising does that to a degree. But Facebook is much more powerful, adaptive and efficient.
  • Facebook is designed to do specific things. It’s an engine to understand people’s minds and then manipulate their thinking.
  • Those tools are refined for revenue making but can be used for many other purposes. That makes it ripe for misuse and bad acting.
  • The core of all second wave Internet commerce operations was finding network models where costs grow mathematically and revenues grow exponentially.
  • The network and its dominance is the product and once it takes hold the cost inputs remained constrained while the revenues grow almost without limit.
  • Facebook is best understood as a fantastically profitable nuclear energy company whose profitability is based on dumping the waste on the side of the road and accepting frequent accidents and explosions as inherent to the enterprise.
  • That’s why these companies employ so few people relative to scale and profitability.
  • That’s why there’s no phone support for Google or Facebook or Twitter. If half the people on the planet are ‘customers’ or users that’s not remotely possible.
  • The core economic model requires doing all of it on the cheap. Indeed, what Zuckerberg et al. have created with Facebook is so vast that the money required not to do it on the cheap almost defies imagination.
  • Facebook’s core model and concept requires not taking responsibility for what others do with the engine created to drive revenue.
  • It all amounts to a grand exercise in socializing the externalities and keeping all the revenues for the owners.
  • Here’s a way to think about it. Nuclear power is actually incredibly cheap. The fuel is fairly plentiful and easy to pull out of the ground. You set up a little engine and it generates energy almost without limit. What makes it ruinously expensive is managing the externalities – all the risks and dangers, the radiation, accidents, the constant production of radioactive waste.
  • managing or distinguishing between legitimate and bad-acting uses of the powerful Facebook engine is one that would require huge, huge investments of money and armies of workers to manage
  • But back to Facebook. The point is that they’ve created a hugely powerful and potentially very dangerous machine
  • The core business model is based on harvesting the profits from the commercial uses of the machine and using algorithms and very, very limited personnel (relative to scale) to try to get a handle on the most outrageous and shocking abuses which the engine makes possible.
  • Zuckerberg may be a jerk and there really is a culture of bad acting within the organization. But it’s not about him being a jerk. Replace him and his team with non-jerks and you’d still have a similar core problem.
  • To manage the potential negative externalities, to take some responsibility for all the dangerous uses the engine makes possible would require money the owners are totally unwilling and in some ways are unable to spend.
Javier E

COVID-19: Individually Rational, Collectively Disastrous - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617192

cognitive bias psychology infection pandemic

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • One major problem is that stopping the virus from spreading requires us to override our basic intuitions.
  • Three cognitive biases make it hard for us to avoid actions that put us in great collective danger.
  • 1. Misleading Feedback
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • some activities, including dangerous ones, provide negative feedback only rarely. When I am in a rush, I often cross the street at a red light. I understand intellectually that this is stupid, but I’ve never once seen evidence of my stupidity.
  • Exposure to COVID-19 works the same way. Every time you engage in a risky activity—like meeting up with your friends indoors—the world is likely to send you a signal that you made the right choice. I saw my pal and didn’t get sick. Clearly, I shouldn’t have worried so much about socializing!
  • Let’s assume, for example, that going to a large indoor gathering gives you a one in 20 chance of contracting COVID-19—a significant risk. Most likely, you’ll get away with it the first time. You’ll then infer that taking part in such gatherings is pretty safe, and will do so again. Eventually, you are highly likely to fall sick.
  • 2. Individually Rational, Collectively DisastrousWe tend to think behavior that is justifiable on the individual level is also justifiable on the collective level, and vice versa. If eating the occasional sugary treat is fine for me it’s fine for all of us. And if smoking indoors is bad for me, it’s bad for all of us.
  • The dynamics of contagion in a pandemic do not work like that
  • if everyone who isn’t at especially high risk held similar dinner parties, some percentage of these events would lead to additional infections. And because each newly infected person might spread the virus to others, everyone’s decision to hold a one-off dinner party would quickly lead to a significant spike in transmissions.
  • The dynamic here is reminiscent of classic collective-action problems. If you go to one dinner, you’ll likely be fine. But if everyone goes to one dinner, the virus will spread with such speed that your own chances of contracting COVID-19 will also rise precipitously.
  • 3. Dangers Are Hard to Recognize and Avoid
  • Many of the dangers we face in life are easy to spot—and we have, over many millennia, developed biological instincts and social conventions to avoid them
  • When we deal with an unaccustomed danger, such as a new airborne virus, we can’t rely on any of these protective mechanisms.
  • The virus is invisible. This makes it hard to spot or anticipate. We don’t see little viral particles floating through the air
  • In time, we can overcome these biases (at least to some extent).
  • Social disapprobation can help
  • We all should do what we can to identify the biases from which we suffer—and try to stop them from influencing our behavior.
blythewallick

How to Give People Advice They'll Be Delighted to Take - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...how-to-give-better-advice.html

science psychology brain science

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • “Expertise is a tricky thing,” said Leigh Tost, an associate professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. “To take advice from someone is to agree to be influenced by them.” Sometimes when people don’t take advice, they’re rejecting the idea of being controlled by the advice-giver more than anything.
  • Researchers identified three factors that determine whether input will be taken to heart. People will go along with advice if it was costly to attain and the task is difficult (think: lawyers interpreting a contract). Advice is also more likely to be taken if the person offering counsel is more experienced and expresses extreme confidence in the quality of the advice (doctors recommending a treatment, for example). Emotion plays a role, too: Decision makers are more likely to disregard advice if they feel certain about what they’re going to do (staying with a dud boyfriend no matter what) or they’re angry (sending an ill-advised text while fuming).
  • Make sure you’re actually being asked to give counsel. It’s easy to confuse being audience to a venting session with being asked to weigh in. Sometimes people just want to feel heard.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “It’s almost like people will say to you, ‘I want a strategy,’ and what they really mean is, ‘I want someone to understand,’” said Heather Havrilesky, an advice columnist and author of “What if This Were Enough?”
  • Be clear on the advice-seeker’s goals. When people approach Austin Kleon, author of “Steal Like an Artist,” for advice, he drills down and identifies the exact problem: “What do you want to know specifically that I can help you with?” This way, he won’t overwhelm the person with irrelevant information.
  • Consider your qualifications. People often go to those close to them for advice, even if family members and friends aren’t always in the best position to effectively assist, Dr. Tost said. Ask yourself: “Do I have the expertise, experience or knowledge needed to provide helpful advice in this situation?” If you do, fantastic! Advise away. If you don’t, rather than give potentially unhelpful advice, identify someone who is in a better position to help.
  • Look for physical signs of relief. Examine facial cues and body language: eyes and mouth softening, shoulders lowering or letting breath out, for example. Those are good indicators your advice is resonating.
  • People tend to resist when advice is preachy, Ms. Marshall said. Saying, “I’ve been there and here’s what I did,” makes people more receptive
  • Words have power. Words can heal. A recent study found that doctors who simply offer assurance can help alleviate their patients’ symptoms. It’s essential to start the advice-giving conversation with this same reassuring tone.
  • Identify takeaways (and give an out). It’s not realistic for people to act on every piece of advice you give. After discussing a problem and suggesting how to handle it, Ms. Marshall asks her clients what tidbit resonated with them the most.
  • “Your mileage may vary. Take what you need and leave the rest.”
  • Agree on next steps. Lastly, ask what kind of continued support is needed (if any) and what efforts should be avoided.
sanderk

How Procrastination Affects Your Health - Thrive Global - 0 views

thriveglobal.com/...astination-affects-your-health

procrastination health Technology

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • fine line between procrastination and being “pressure prompted.” If you’re like me and pressure prompted, you are someone who often does your best work when faced with a looming deadline. While being pressure prompted may entail a bit of procrastination, it is procrastination within acceptable limits. In other words, it is a set of conditions that offers just enough pressure to ensure you’re at the top of your game without divulging into chaos or most importantly, impacting other members of your team by preventing them from delivering their best work in a timely manner.
  • Procrastination is a condition that has consequences on one’s mental and physical health and performance at school and in the workplace.
  • Piers Steel defines procrastination as “a self-regulatory failure leading to poor performance and reduced well-being.” Notably, Steel further emphasizes that procrastination is both common (80% to 90% of college-age students suffer from it at least some of the time) and something most people (95%) wish to overcome.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Steel even argues that procrastination may now be on the rise as people increasingly turn to the immediate gratification made possible by information technologies and specifically, social media platforms.
  • for a small percentage of people, procrastination isn’t just a temporary or occasional problem but rather something that comes to structure their lives and ultimately limit their potential.
  • In a 2008 study, Peter Gröpel & Piers Steel investigated predictors of procrastination in a large Internet-based study that included over 9,000 participants. Their results revealed two important findings. First, their results showed that goal setting reduced procrastination; second, they found that it was strongly associated with lack of energy.
  • While it is true that intrinsically motivated people may have an easier time getting into flow, anyone, even a chronic procrastinator, can cultivate flow. The first step is easy—it simply entails coming up with a clear goal.
  • The second step is to stop feeling ashamed about your procrastinating tendencies.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    This article is very interesting because it says that procrastination is not necessarily bad. Procrastination can be good for people in small quantities because it causes them to be pressured into actually doing their work. However, there is a point where procrastination becomes an issue. I find it interesting how phones and computers have caused procrastination problems to become more severe. Phones and computers can give people instant gratification which leads to more procrastination. As the article says if people set goals for themselves and are disciplined they can overcome procrastination.
Javier E

This Time-Management Trick Changed My Whole Relationship With Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pomodoro-technique.html

time management personal philosophy time-management variety psychology

shared by Javier E on 24 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • A couple of years ago I was told a rumor about a notable artist who would break up everything she did, from making films in the day to running her studio in the afternoon to reading books in the evening, into intervals of 25 minutes, with five-minute breaks in between — 25 minutes on, five minutes off, over and over again.
  • the Pomodoro technique. Invented by Francesco Cirillo, a student at Rome’s Luiss Business School in the late 1980s, it’s a time-management method that takes its name from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used to regulate its core process, breaking the day into brief intervals
  • A pomodoro, once started, must not be interrupted, otherwise it has to be abandoned
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • there is relief: You are not allowed to extend a pomodoro, either. After a set of four 25-minute intervals are completed, you’re supposed to take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes before continuing.
  • It tells us when to start, and also when to stop; and now, more than ever, we have to be told when to stop.
  • An unquestioned assumption in our culture holds that the more hours spent on work — whether a passion project or office drudgery — the better we’ll perform and the more successful and happier we’ll be. What if none of that’s true?
  • Leisure time has also taken on a timeless, hypnotic quality lately. Everything our culture produces feels at once never-ending and meaningless — or perhaps meaningless because it’s never-ending.
  • An everlasting present expands around us in all directions, and it’s easy to get lost in there — all the more reason to set some boundaries.
  • Now that my breaks are short and fleeting, I think more carefully about what I’d like to do with them, and I’ve found it’s quite different from the unimaginative temptations I would otherwise default to
  • Instead I’ll make a sandwich, do a quick French lesson, reply to a few texts, have a shower, go to the laundromat; and such humdrum activities, now that they’re restricted, have become sources of great pleasure.
  • I’ve found that tackling a range of tasks in short bursts keeps things interesting and provides a more rounded life.
  • Variety is the sugar that helps the medicine go down; not the mirage of variety conjured by infinite scrolling content, by nearly a hundred different flavors of Oreos, but the genuine variety of pursuing different sorts of interests every day.
  • time-management techniques are for me a way of better understanding which things matter and which don’t.
  • time management makes time uncanny by revealing how it speeds up and slows down throughout the day, and how many different ways 25 minutes can feel;
  • it’s not an exaggeration to say that, by changing my relationship with and appreciation of time, the technique has brought me to some profound existential questions about whether I’m wasting my life — my fragile, fleeting life — on activities I neither care about nor enjoy
  • It has forced me to think about what I’d most like to be doing every day instead. It has made me see time afresh — as something we really don’t have enough of, as something precious precisely because it’s ephemeral.
« First ‹ Previous 201 - 220 of 247 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page