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If 'permacrisis' is the word of 2022, what does 2023 have in store for our me... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ord-of-2022-2023-mental-health crisis history effects mental health health psychology research
shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage
  • The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years
  • During the 20th century, the list got much longer. In came existential crises, midlife crises, energy crises and environmental crises. When Koselleck was writing about the subject in the 1970s, he counted up more than 200 kinds of crisis we could then face
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  • Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.
  • When he looked at 5,000 creative individuals over 127 generations in European history, he found that significant creative breakthroughs were less likely during periods of political crisis and instability.
  • Victor H Mair, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that in fact the Chinese word for crisis, wēijī, refers to a perilous situation in which you should be particularly cautious
  • “Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of elements meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society,” he writes. “It lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit.” Revolutionaries, billionaires and politicians may relish the chance to profit from a crisis, but most people world prefer not to have a crisis at all.
  • A common folk theory is that times of great crisis also lead to great bursts of creativity.
  • The first world war sparked the growth of modernism in painting and literature. The second fuelled innovations in science and technology. The economic crises of the 1970s and 80s are supposed to have inspired the spread of punk and the creation of hip-hop
  • psychologists have also found that when we are threatened by a crisis, we become more rigid and locked into our beliefs. The creativity researcher Dean Simonton has spent his career looking at breakthroughs in music, philosophy, science and literature. He has found that during periods of crisis, we actually tend to become less creative.
  • psychologists have found that it is what they call “malevolent creativity” that flourishes when we feel threatened by crisis.
  • during moments of significant crisis, the best leaders are able to create some sense of certainty and a shared fate amid the seas of change.
  • These are innovations that tend to be harmful – such as new weapons, torture devices and ingenious scams.
  • A 2019 study which involved observing participants using bricks, found that those who had been threatened before the task tended to come up with more harmful uses of the bricks (such as using them as weapons) than people who did not feel threatened
  • Students presented with information about a threatening situation tended to become increasingly wary of outsiders, and even begin to adopt positions such as an unwillingness to support LGBT people afterwards.
  • during moments of crisis – when change is really needed – we tend to become less able to change.
  • When we suffer significant traumatic events, we tend to have worse wellbeing and life outcomes.
  • , other studies have shown that in moderate doses, crises can help to build our sense of resilience.
  • we tend to be more resilient if a crisis is shared with others. As Bruce Daisley, the ex-Twitter vice-president, notes: “True resilience lies in a feeling of togetherness, that we’re united with those around us in a shared endeavour.”
  • Crises are like many things in life – only good in moderation, and best shared with others
  • The challenge our leaders face during times of overwhelming crisis is to avoid letting us plunge into the bracing ocean of change alone, to see if we sink or swim. Nor should they tell us things are fine, encouraging us to hide our heads in the san
  • Waking up each morning to hear about the latest crisis is dispiriting for some, but throughout history it has been a bracing experience for others. In 1857, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter that “the crisis will make me feel as good as a swim in the ocean”. A hundred years later, John F Kennedy (wrongly) pointed out that in the Chinese language, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters, “one representing danger, and the other, opportunity”. More recently, Elon Musk has argued “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”.
  • This means people won’t feel an overwhelming sense of threat. It also means people do not feel alone. When we feel some certainty and common identity, we are more likely to be able to summon the creativity, ingenuity and energy needed to change things.
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Proposed Brain Mapping Project Faces Significant Hurdles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faces-significant-hurdles.html neuroscience language research
shared by Emily Horwitz on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 26 Feb 13
     
    This article was very interesting. It at fist described some of the disconnect between what we understand about scientists and what the scientists understand; in this case, the article argued that, while the 10-year grant to neuroscientific research seems great to the general public, it is extremely complicated to even begin mapping how our neurons interact. What I found the most intriguing though, was the fact that some scientists from UC San Francisco have found the exact part of the brain, as well as their mechanisms, that control our language function. The research concluded that for those who have lost their faculties of speech, by stroke or otherwise, could eventually speak again if a prosthetic was developed. In short, the article conveyed the idea that nothing is ever as simple as it seems; although we try to make advances in science, we often just wind up with a whole other set of problems to solve.
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¿Por qué tosemos más en los conciertos de música clásica? - BBC Mundo - Noticias - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...os_concierto_clasica_gtg.shtml coughing classical music
shared by Emily Horwitz on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Todo está en silencio. Los instrumentos de cuerda, los de viento y percusión esperan la señal del director para empezar la pieza. Al otro lado está el público callado, tragando más espeso y conteniendo la tos. Hay alguien que no lo puede evitar y con el primer acorde empieza a toser. ¿Por qué siempre ocurre esto?
  • "Toda la estadística existente sugiere que la gente tose dos veces más durante los conciertos", le dijo Wagener a la BBC.
  • El especialista descubrió que la acción de toser no es completamente aleatoria. La pieza que se escucha también incita a toser más o menos.
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  • "Si se trata de conciertos más modernos, como por ejemplo música clásica del siglo XX, los movimientos más lentos y los silencios son interrumpidos con mayor frecuencia".
  • cuando alguien empieza a toser y contagia a los otros.
  • "Creo que muchas personas cuando van a conciertos clásicos se dan cuenta que el nivel de ruido es mucho menor que la música a la que están acostumbradas a oir a través de sus auriculares o conciertos de música pop", agregó la pianista.
  • ese silencio en los conciertos acústicos es reconfortante, para otros puede originar inconformidad que se manifiesta en la acción de toser.
  • Andreas Wagener se mostró parcialmente de acuerdo con la teoría de Tomes, pues "cuando alguien va a un concierto (de música clásica) sabe que debe permanecer en silencio".
  • "Es una cuestión de etiqueta, saben que no deben hablar o caminar, hacer ruido o toser, pero la gente sigue tosiendo en exceso".
  • con la tos no se puede saber si es deliberado o involuntario.
  • "Creo que a veces la gente no esta consciente de como suena para el concertista. Es un factor muy distractor".
  • Emily Horwitz on 01 Feb 13
     
    I realize that this article is in Spanish, so those who don't understand the language will likely be confused, but I thought that it was very interesting, and related to TOK. Essentially, the article talked about a study that Andreas Wagener, a German scientist did, in which it was discovered that people cough twice as much at classical music concerts than otherwise. Wagener also found that the amount of coughing was not random; rather, it was dependent on the style, tempo, etc. of the music being played. The slow, more modern pieces often elicited more coughs. Additionally, Wagener found that, similar to how we think about yawning, coughing is contagious; one cough can cause an avalanche of other coughs. The article also noted the possibility that some of the coughing going on during a classical music concert may not be the typical, involuntary, reflexive cough, but a deliberate cough of social interaction. In terms of TOK, I thought that this article was most interesting in that, when put into a situation in which we may be uncomfortable (often with silence), we cough more. I related this to my own experiences at Friends, during MFW, when people often seem to cough out of a need for interaction. It would be interesting to see if Wagener could work with some geneticists and biologists to discover if a connection between slow classical music and more coughing is purely biological, or if it stems from another causation of human behavior.
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With Mass Protests, South Koreans Wield a Familiar Weapon in a New Era - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...th-korea-protests-history.html new york times social media
shared by sissij on 12 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Then as now, mass protest was a powerful weapon deployed by enraged citizens who felt they had nowhere else to turn but the streets. Thirty years later, it’s clear how far Korean democracy has advanced. Then, South Korea was a dictatorship, protests were outlawed and the threat of torture, imprisonment and martial law ever-present.
  • Students have long been at the vanguard of South Korea’s robust history of protest, drawing on deep-rooted Confucian traditions that elevated scholars as guardians of morality.
  • Yonsei produced its own martyr, 21-year-old Lee Han-yol, who died after a tear-gas canister hit him in the head.
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  • I saw an older woman, hair neatly coifed, beat a policeman with her handbag. A young father hoisted his little girl on his shoulder, carefully affixing a surgical mask to her face, an imperfect shield from the gas. A student in Kwangju bit his finger and wrote protest slogans in his own blood.
  • At the trial, his father lunged at the three policemen, small and scared now, protected by more than 50 guards. Screams broke out and a purse flew through the air at the judges as the light sentence was read. Women whose sons were still in jail stormed the bus carrying the policemen, throwing bottles against the windows. Plainclothes police shoved the four of them onto the concrete, where they lay unconscious.
  • Laws are still on the books that can be used as tools to stifle dissent. South Korea remains shadowed by legitimate fears of North Korean aggression and espionage, but those were and are exploited by the government.
  • This is not a tame society, for all the comforts its public has won in the years since. This may be the land of Psy and Gangnam style, a country so wired that some of its children are sent to boot camps to wean them from internet addiction.
  • Politicians buck the popular will at their peril.
  • sissij on 12 Dec 16
     
    This article talks about the protests in South Korea. I found that there are deep conflict between the police and the the people. It makes me think of the police brutality we talked about recently. I think the police should protect the people but now they are using martial arts and tear-gas canisters. To what extent should the police yield the protest from the people? I also found it interesting that students are often more eager to attend those protest than adults. They are usually more radical than adults. Is it a good thing to always let out all their complaints? --Sissi (12/11/2016)
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The Future of Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-future-of-privacy.html new york times privacy bias psychology
shared by sissij on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Turning Point: Apple resists the F.B.I. in unlocking an iPhone in the San Bernardino terrorism case.
  • Privacy confuses me, beyond my simplest understanding, which is that individuals prefer, to different degrees, that information about them not be freely available to others.
  • What does it mean, in an ostensible democracy, for the state to keep secrets from its citizens? The idea of the secret state seems antithetical to democracy, since its citizens, the voters, can’t know what their government is doing.
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  • If you have nothing to hide and you trust your government, what can you possibly have to fear? Except that one can just as readily ask: If you have nothing to hide, what do you really have, aside from the panoptic attention of a state, which itself keeps secrets?
  • Is individual privacy and state privacy the same thing?
  • In the short term, the span of a lifetime, many of us would argue for privacy, and therefore against transparency.
  • But history, the long term, is transparency; it is the absence of secrets.
  • The past, our own past, which our descendants will see us as having emerged from, will not be the past from which we now see ourselves emerging, but a reinterpretation of it, based on subsequently available information, greater transparency and fewer secrets.
  • our species is the poorer for every secret faithfully kept. Any permanently unbreakable encryption seems counter to that.
  • So perhaps that desire is as much a part of us, as a species, as our need to build these memory palaces.
  • sissij on 07 Dec 16
     
    I found this article very interesting because it talked about the dilemma in the definition of privacy. I found that our idea of privacy is very complicated. As everybody wants to keep their secret, they are curious of others' secret at the same time. This article also relate privacy with the democratic society. I think it shows one of the weakness of the democratic society: it trying to fulfill the desire of everybody and sometimes those desires contradicts each other. I think privacy is just like freedom, something very theoretical and does not exist in the reality. --Sissi (12/7/2016)
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The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...101213fa_fact_lehrer science empiricism philosophy scientific method decline research statistics method bias truth
shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
  • But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.
  • This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
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  • If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?
  • Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”
  • The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time.
  • yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time!
  • this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics
  • In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance.
  • Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them
  • publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”
  • While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts.
  • Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for
  • Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments.
  • One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
  • suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.
  • after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.”
  • Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”
  • Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the “sho
  • horning” process.
  • “A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.”
  • For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.
  • John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. “These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common,” he says. “It’d be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don’t. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading.”
  • In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.
  • the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
  • the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
  • According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher.
  • One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials.
  • The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong.
  • “It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies
  • That’s why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. “We’re wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments,”
  • The current “obsession” with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design.
  • “Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they’re going to use, and what exactly they’re testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments.”
  • Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,”
  • scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging.
  • The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand.
  • The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected
  • This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that.
  • Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests.
  • Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.)
  • Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.)
  • The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦
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Marie Kondo and the Ruthless War on Stuff - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-ruthless-war-on-stuff.html clutter simplicity organization psychology
shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • the method outlined in Kondo’s book. It includes something called a “once-in-a-lifetime tidying marathon,” which means piling five categories of material possessions — clothing, books, papers, miscellaneous items and sentimental items, including photos, in that order — one at a time, surveying how much of each you have, seeing that it’s way too much and then holding each item to see if it sparks joy in your body. The ones that spark joy get to stay. The ones that don’t get a heartfelt and generous goodbye, via actual verbal communication, and are then sent on their way to their next life.
  • She is often mistaken for someone who thinks you shouldn’t own anything, but that’s wrong. Rather, she thinks you can own as much or as little as you like, as long as every possession brings you true joy.
  • By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods — from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target — but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.
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  • A woman named Diana, who wore star-and-flower earrings, said that before she tidied, her life was out of control. Her job had been recently eliminated when she found the book. “It’s a powerful message for women that you should be surrounded by things that make you happy,”
  • “I found the opposite of happiness is not sadness,” Diana told us. “It’s chaos.”
  • Another woman said she KonMaried a bad boyfriend. Having tidied everything in her home and finding she still distinctly lacked happiness, she held her boyfriend in her hands, realized he no longer sparked joy and got rid of him.
  • She realized that the work she was doing as a tidying consultant was far more psychological than it was practical. Tidying wasn’t just a function of your physical space; it was a function of your soul.
  • . She wants you to override the instinct to keep a certain thing because an HGTV show or a home-design magazine or a Pinterest page said it would brighten up your room or make your life better. She wants you to possess your possessions on your own terms, not theirs
  • she would say to him what she said to me, that yes, America is a little different from Japan, but ultimately it’s all the same. We’re all the same in that we’re enticed into the false illusion of happiness through material purchase.
  • She leaves room for something that people don’t often give her credit for: that the KonMari method might not be your speed. “I think it’s good to have different types of organizing methods,” she continued, “because my method might not spark joy with some people, but his method might.
  • Conference was different from the KonMari events that I attended. Whereas Kondo does not believe that you need to buy anything in order to organize and that storage systems provide only the illusion of tidiness, the women of Conference traded recon on timesaving apps, label makers, the best kind of Sharpie, the best tool they own (“supersticky notes,” “drawer dividers”)
  • They don’t like that you have to get rid of all of your papers, which is actually a misnomer: Kondo just says you should limit them because they’re incapable of sparking joy, and you should confine them to three folders: needs immediate attention, must be kept for now, must be kept forever.
  • each organizer I spoke with said that she had the same fundamental plan that Kondo did, that the client should purge (they cry “purge” for what Kondo gently calls “discarding”) what is no longer needed or wanted; somehow the extra step of thanking the object or folding it a little differently enrages them. This rage hides behind the notion that things are different here in America, that our lives are more complicated and our stuff is more burdensome and our decisions are harder to make.
  • Ultimately, the women of NAPO said that Kondo’s methods were too draconian and that the clients they knew couldn’t live in Kondo’s world. They had jobs and children, and they needed baby steps and hand-holding and maintenance plans. They needed someone to do for them what they couldn’t naturally do for themselves.
  • the most potent difference between Kondo and the NAPO women is that the NAPO women seek to make a client’s life good by organizing their stuff; Kondo, on the other hand, leads with her spiritual mission, to change their lives through magic.
  • She went to work in finance, but she found the work empty and meaningless. She would come home and find herself overwhelmed by her stuff. So she began searching for “minimalism” on the internet almost constantly, happening on Pinterest pages of beautiful, empty bathrooms and kitchens, and she began to imagine that it was her stuff that was weighing her down. She read philosophy blogs about materialism and the accumulation of objects. “They just all talked about feeling lighter,”
  • “I never knew how to get here from there,” she said. Ning looked around her apartment, which is spare. She loves it here now, but that seemed impossible just a couple of years ago.
  • She found Kondo’s book, and she felt better immediately, just having read it. She began tidying, and immediately she lost three pounds. She had been trying to lose weight forever, and then suddenly, without effort, three pounds, just gone.
  • when it comes to stuff, we are all the same. Once we’ve divided all the drawers and eliminated that which does not bring us joy and categorized ourselves within an inch of our lives, we’ll find that the person lying beneath all the stuff was still just plain old us. We are all a mess, even when we’re done tidying.
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Does Facebook Turn People Into Narcissists? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...k-turn-people-into-narcissists facebook social media self
shared by Javier E on 19 May 12 - Cached
  • Those who frequently updated their Facebook status, tagged themselves in photos and had large numbers of virtual friends, were more likely to exhibit narcissistic traits, the study found. Another study found that people with high levels of narcissism were more likely to spend more than an hour a day on Facebook, and they were also more likely to post digitally enhanced personal photos. But what the research doesn’t answer is whether Facebook attracts narcissists or turns us into them.
  • researchers found, to their surprise, that frequency of Facebook use, whether it was for personal status updates or to connect with friends, was not associated with narcissism. Narcissism per se was associated with only one type of Facebook user — those who amassed unrealistically large numbers of Facebook friends.
  • frequent Facebook users were more likely to score high on “openness” and were less concerned about privacy. So what seems like self-promoting behavior may just reflect a generation growing up in the digital age, where information — including details about personal lives — flows freely and connects us.
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  • The social medium of choice for the self-absorbed appears to be Twitter. The researchers found an association between tweeting about oneself and high narcissism scores.
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Go to Sleep: It May Be the Best Way to Avoid Getting Alzheimer's | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...sleep-alzheimers-disease health sleep science brain
shared by charlottedonoho on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • “What we think we found is a new way that disruption of sleep contributes to the pathology that can disrupt the cementing of memories,” says Bryce Mander, a post doctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the paper. The findings also resolve one of the puzzling questions in Alzheimer’s disease: why buildup of amyloid starts initially in areas of the brain that don’t have anything to do with memory. Mander and Walker’s team found that the protein does deposit, however, in areas of the brain that generate the wave patterns of deep sleep.
  • The relationship between sleep and amyloid is likely a two-way street, they say, in which the more amyloid that builds up, the worse the sleep, and the more disrupted the sleep, the more amyloid that gets deposited. Other studies have shown that deep sleep can cement memories as well as clear away amyloid. Not getting enough deep sleep, then, perpetuates the poor memory cycle.
  • When the team studied 26 cognitively normal older adults, they found that higher amounts of amyloid, the protein responsible for the hallmark plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease, were linked with more disrupted deep sleep patterns.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Poor sleep may be contributing to the buildup of the brain plaques that drive the disease
  • “Sleep is a great early warning beacon, a distress call that we can latch onto, to potentially alert us to the beginnings of Alzheimer’s,” says Walker.
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Is Algebra Necessary? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-algebra-necessary.html math education requirement
shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 12 - Cached
  • My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.
  • one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.
  • Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. In New Mexico, 43 percent of white students fell below “proficient,” along with 39 percent in Tennessee
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  • The depressing conclusion of a faculty report: “failing math at all levels affects retention more than any other academic factor.” A national sample of transcripts found mathematics had twice as many F’s and D’s compared as other subjects.
  • Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math.
  • California’s two university systems, for instance, consider applications only from students who have taken three years of mathematics and in that way exclude many applicants who might excel in fields like art or history. Community college students face an equally prohibitive mathematics wall. A study of two-year schools found that fewer than a quarter of their entrants passed the algebra classes they were required to take.
  • a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above.
  • “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science, technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required.
  • I fully concur that high-tech knowledge is needed to sustain an advanced industrial economy. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe the solution is largely academic.
  • Nor will just passing grades suffice. Many colleges seek to raise their status by setting a high mathematics bar. Hence, they look for 700 on the math section of the SAT, a height attained in 2009 by only 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women. And it’s not just Ivy League colleges that do this: at schools like Vanderbilt, Rice and Washington University in St. Louis, applicants had best be legacies or athletes if they have scored less than 700 on their math SATs.
  • A January 2012 analysis from the Georgetown center found 7.5 percent unemployment for engineering graduates and 8.2 percent among computer scientists.
  • “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.” He’s absolutely right.
  • Quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies
  • Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status.
  • Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives. Thus mathematics teachers at every level could create exciting courses in what I call “citizen statistics.” This would not be a backdoor version of algebra, as in the Advanced Placement syllabus. Nor would it focus on equations used by scholars when they write for one another. Instead, it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.
  • This need not involve dumbing down. Researching the reliability of numbers can be as demanding as geometry.
  • I hope that mathematics departments can also create courses in the history and philosophy of their discipline, as well as its applications in early cultures. Why not mathematics in art and music — even poetry — along with its role in assorted sciences? The aim would be to treat mathematics as a liberal art, making it as accessible and welcoming as sculpture or ballet
  • Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.
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How Social Status Affects Your Health - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tatus-affects-your-health.html status social health control insurance stress hormone immune psychology
shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • If you want to see how status affects health, you have to isolate status from material wealth. How to do that? The easiest way is to observe a society in which there is minimal material wealth to contest and where there are limited avenues for status competition.
  • For several years, we studied the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia, a small, preindustrial, politically egalitarian society in which status confers no formal privileges (such as coercive authority).
  • we found that even among the Tsimane, higher status was associated with lower levels of stress and better health.
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  • Along the banks of the Maniqui River and in adjacent forests, the Tsimane people hunt, fish and plant plantains, rice and sweet manioc. They live in villages that range in size from 30 to 700 people. During village meetings, decision making is consensus-based. No individual has the right to coerce anyone else.
  • that doesn’t mean there are no status distinctions. When you attend a Tsimane village meeting, you soon notice that the opinions of certain men are more influential during the consensus-building process. These same men are often solicited to mediate disputes or to represent villagers’ interests with outsiders.
  • My colleagues and I measured the social status of all the men from four Tsimane villages (nearly 200 men between the ages of 18 and 83), by asking them to evaluate one another on their informal political influence. The men also provided urine samples and received medical examinations from physicians
  • We found that Tsimane men with less political influence had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which has many important physiological functions. This result persisted after controlling for other factors that might affect stress levels, including age, body size and personality.
  • In addition, we found that the less influential Tsimane men had a higher risk of respiratory infection, the most common cause of sickness and death in their society. Stress may contribute to this disparity in infection risk; when chronic, stress can dampen immune function.
  • Studying the same individuals over a four-year period, we also found that for men whose influence declined over time, greater declines were correlated with higher levels of cortisol and respiratory illness. Downward mobility is harmful, it seems, even in an egalitarian society.
  • Why might low status cause such stress for the Tsimane? One possibility is that status offers a greater sense of control.
  • Another is that status acts as a form of social insurance. Influential Tsimane men have more allies and food-production partners, who can be helpful in mitigating conflict, sickness and food shortage. The relative lack of such support may cause psychosocial stress.
  • It is interesting that even in industrialized societies, the status comparisons most consequential for psychosocial stress are often among individuals who live near one another or occupy the same social network, not individuals at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
  • Those living just above the poverty line may resent welfare for those living just below it, and a millionaire may envy a multimillionaire more than he envies a billionaire.
  • The importance of relative status perceptions may have its roots in the small-scale societies of our ancestors, which were similar to that of the Tsimane. In such societies, both our political competitors and our cooperative partners were likely individuals with whom we interacted regularly.
  • As our society debates the effects of wealth inequality, the Tsimane help us understand why we care so deeply about relative social position — and why our health depends on it.
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Economists tested 7 welfare programs to see if they made people lazy. They didn't. - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...welfare-cash-transfer-work research bias welfare
shared by silveiragu on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • For as long as there have been government programs designed to help the poor, there have been critics insisting that helping the poor will keep them from working. But the evidence for this proposition has always been rather weak.
  • And a recent study from MIT and Harvard economists
  • found "no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.
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  • he programs covered in the study have a pretty wide geographic spread. There are four in Latin America (two in Mexico, one each in Nicaragua and Honduras), two in Southeast Asia (Philippines and Indonesia), and one in Morocco
  • . The 95 percent confidence interval for how the programs affected the employment rate ranged from a 1.6 percentage point decline to a 0.9 point increase. There just isn't any change happening here
  • Some other studies find that cash encourages work
  • But it's worth being skeptical about welfare queen claims in rich countries as well.
  • There's a substantial body of evidence showing that the EITC encourages work
  • But even unrestricted cash programs aren't likely to have a major effect on work in rich countries
  • . A number of studies in the US in the 1970s examined "negative income tax" programs
  • The studies found very mild declines in work
  • A much better experiment in Canada, where an entire town got a guaranteed income by way of a negative income tax, found even milder reductions in wor
  • There's no doubt that poorly designed social programs can deter work. Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the pre–welfare reform welfare program, was found to decrease hours worked by 10 to 50 percen
  • Who would work under that condition
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The Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords and the Future of Work - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...590647 skills lifelong learning specialization inclusion expertise grit conscientiousness multitasking knowledge Research agility
shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone.
  • Ten years from now, the Deloitte consultant Erica Volini projects, 70 to 90 percent of workers will be in so-called hybrid jobs or superjobs—that is, positions combining tasks once performed by people in two or more traditional roles.
  • If you ask Laszlo Bock, Google’s former culture chief and now the head of the HR start-up Humu, what he looks for in a new hire, he’ll tell you “mental agility.
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  • “What companies are looking for,” says Mary Jo King, the president of the National Résumé Writers’ Association, “is someone who can be all, do all, and pivot on a dime to solve any problem.”
  • The phenomenon is sped by automation, which usurps routine tasks, leaving employees to handle the nonroutine and unanticipated—and the continued advance of which throws the skills employers value into flux
  • Or, for that matter, on the relevance of the question What do you want to be when you grow up?
  • By 2020, a 2016 World Economic Forum report predicted, “more than one-third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations” will not have been seen as crucial to the job when the report was published
  • I asked John Sullivan, a prominent Silicon Valley talent adviser, why should anyone take the time to master anything at all? “You shouldn’t!” he replied.
  • Minimal manning—and the evolution of the economy more generally—requires a different kind of worker, with not only different acquired skills but different inherent abilities
  • It has implications for the nature and utility of a college education, for the path of careers, for inequality and employability—even for the generational divide.
  • Then, in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld arrived at the Pentagon. The new secretary of defense carried with him a briefcase full of ideas from the corporate world: downsizing, reengineering, “transformational” technologies. Almost immediately, what had been an experimental concept became an article of faith
  • But once cadets got into actual command environments, which tend to be fluid and full of surprises, a different picture emerged. “Psychological hardiness”—a construct that includes, among other things, a willingness to explore “multiple possible response alternatives,” a tendency to “see all experience as interesting and meaningful,” and a strong sense of self-confidence—was a better predictor of leadership ability in officers after three years in the field.
  • Because there really is no such thing as multitasking—just a rapid switching of attention—I began to feel overstrained, put upon, and finally irked by the impossible set of concurrent demands. Shouldn’t someone be giving me a hand here? This, Hambrick explained, meant I was hitting the limits of working memory—basically, raw processing power—which is an important aspect of “fluid intelligence” and peaks in your early 20s. This is distinct from “crystallized intelligence”—the accumulated facts and know-how on your hard drive—which peaks in your 50
  • Others noticed the change but continued to devote equal attention to all four tasks. Their scores fell. This group, Hambrick found, was high in “conscientiousness”—a trait that’s normally an overwhelming predictor of positive job performance. We like conscientious people because they can be trusted to show up early, double-check the math, fill the gap in the presentation, and return your car gassed up even though the tank was nowhere near empty to begin with. What struck Hambrick as counterintuitive and interesting was that conscientiousness here seemed to correlate with poor performance.
  • he discovered another correlation in his test: The people who did best tended to score high on “openness to new experience”—a personality trait that is normally not a major job-performance predictor and that, in certain contexts, roughly translates to “distractibility.”
  • To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker’s formulation, people with this trait are less focused on doing things right, and more likely to wonder whether they’re doing the right things.
  • High in fluid intelligence, low in experience, not terribly conscientious, open to potential distraction—this is not the classic profile of a winning job candidate. But what if it is the profile of the winning job candidate of the future?
  • One concerns “grit”—a mind-set, much vaunted these days in educational and professional circles, that allows people to commit tenaciously to doing one thing well
  • These ideas are inherently appealing; they suggest that dedication can be more important than raw talent, that the dogged and conscientious will be rewarded in the end.
  • he studied West Point students and graduates.
  • Traditional measures such as SAT scores and high-school class rank “predicted leader performance in the stable, highly regulated environment of West Point” itself.
  • It would be supremely ironic if the advance of the knowledge economy had the effect of devaluing knowledge. But that’s what I heard, recurrentl
  • “Fluid, learning-intensive environments are going to require different traits than classical business environments,” I was told by Frida Polli, a co-founder of an AI-powered hiring platform called Pymetrics. “And they’re going to be things like ability to learn quickly from mistakes, use of trial and error, and comfort with ambiguity.”
  • “We’re starting to see a big shift,” says Guy Halfteck, a people-analytics expert. “Employers are looking less at what you know and more and more at your hidden potential” to learn new things
  • advice to employers? Stop hiring people based on their work experience. Because in these environments, expertise can become an obstacle.
  • “The Curse of Expertise.” The more we invest in building and embellishing a system of knowledge, they found, the more averse we become to unbuilding it.
  • All too often experts, like the mechanic in LePine’s garage, fail to inspect their knowledge structure for signs of decay. “It just didn’t occur to him,” LePine said, “that he was repeating the same mistake over and over.
  • The devaluation of expertise opens up ample room for different sorts of mistakes—and sometimes creates a kind of helplessness.
  • Aboard littoral combat ships, the crew lacks the expertise to carry out some important tasks, and instead has to rely on civilian help
  • Meanwhile, the modular “plug and fight” configuration was not panning out as hoped. Converting a ship from sub-hunter to minesweeper or minesweeper to surface combatant, it turned out, was a logistical nightmare
  • So in 2016 the concept of interchangeability was scuttled for a “one ship, one mission” approach, in which the extra 20-plus sailors became permanent crew members
  • “As equipment breaks, [sailors] are required to fix it without any training,” a Defense Department Test and Evaluation employee told Congress. “Those are not my words. Those are the words of the sailors who were doing the best they could to try to accomplish the missions we gave them in testing.”
  • These results were, perhaps, predictable given the Navy’s initial, full-throttle approach to minimal manning—and are an object lesson on the dangers of embracing any radical concept without thinking hard enough about the downsides
  • a world in which mental agility and raw cognitive speed eclipse hard-won expertise is a world of greater exclusion: of older workers, slower learners, and the less socially adept.
  • if you keep going down this road, you end up with one really expensive ship with just a few people on it who are geniuses … That’s not a future we want to see, because you need a large enough crew to conduct multiple tasks in combat.
  • hat does all this mean for those of us in the workforce, and those of us planning to enter it? It would be wrong to say that the 10,000-hours-of-deliberate-practice idea doesn’t hold up at all. In some situations, it clearly does
  • A spinal surgery will not be performed by a brilliant dermatologist. A criminal-defense team will not be headed by a tax attorney. And in tech, the demand for specialized skills will continue to reward expertise handsomely.
  • But in many fields, the path to success isn’t so clear. The rules keep changing, which means that highly focused practice has a much lower return
  • In uncertain environments, Hambrick told me, “specialization is no longer the coin of the realm.”
  • It leaves us with lifelong learning,
  • I found myself the target of career suggestions. “You need to be a video guy, an audio guy!” the Silicon Valley talent adviser John Sullivan told me, alluding to the demise of print media
  • I found the prospect of starting over just plain exhausting. Building a professional identity takes a lot of resources—money, time, energy. After it’s built, we expect to reap gains from our investment, and—let’s be honest—even do a bit of coasting. Are we equipped to continually return to apprentice mode? Will this burn us out?
  • Everybody I met on the Giffords seemed to share that mentality. They regarded every minute on board—even during a routine transit back to port in San Diego Harbor—as a chance to learn something new.
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Norway Is the World's Happiest Country, Survey Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...worlds-happiest-countries.html new york times social media research psychology
shared by sissij on 20 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Norwegians have one more reason to smile, not that they need it.
  • The authors of the report found that a half-dozen socioeconomic factors explain much of the difference in happiness among countries, but that social factors play an underappreciated role.
  • As evidence, they cite periods of substantial economic growth that were nonetheless matched by declining happiness in China and the United States, which ranked 14th.
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  • Still, there are outliers.
  • Humanity is about halfway up the ladder, with an average global score of 5.3, based on hundreds of thousands of surveys conducted by Gallup over those years.
  • The authors found that three-quarters of the variation among countries can be explained by six economic and social factors: gross domestic product per capita (a basic measure of national wealth); healthy years of life expectancy; social support (having someone to rely on during times of trouble); trust (a perceived absence of corruption in government and business); the perceived freedom to make life choices; and generosity (measured by donations).
  • “We’re getting richer, but our social capital is deteriorating,” Dr. Sachs said.
  • To fix that social fraying, Dr. Sachs argues policy makers should work toward campaign finance reform, reducing income and wealth inequality, improving social relations between native-born and immigrant populations, overcoming the national culture of fear induced by the Sept. 11 attacks, and improving the educational system.
  • sissij on 20 Mar 17
     
    As we learned in TOK, human social science is far more complicated than natural sciences as they are multiple factors leading to a phenomenon and the standard scientific method used in natural sciences are useless when applied in social sciences. The results of some social study are often found out of our expectation. For example, in tis article, the research find out that the growth in substantial economic is probably inversely proportional to the happiness of the residences. And in some cases, economics alone did not explain the high rates of happiness. As many countries put the improvement in GDP as their first priority, they should really consider improving other aspects such as social equality, educational system, and etc so  residences can feel happy from the bottom of their heart. --Sissi (3/20/2017)
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The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-behind-the-sat-overhaul.html SAT exam assessment university admission
shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • “When you cover too many topics,” Coleman said, “the assessments designed to measure those standards are inevitably superficial.” He pointed to research showing that more students entering college weren’t prepared and were forced into “remediation programs from which they never escape.” In math, for example, if you examined data from top-performing countries, you found an approach that emphasized “far fewer topics, far deeper,” the opposite of the curriculums he found in the United States, which he described as “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
  • The lessons he brought with him from thinking about the Common Core were evident — that American education needed to be more focused and less superficial, and that it should be possible to test the success of the newly defined standards through an exam that reflected the material being taught in the classroom.
  • she and her team had extensive conversations with students, teachers, parents, counselors, admissions officers and college instructors, asking each group to tell them in detail what they wanted from the test. What they arrived at above all was that a test should reflect the most important skills that were imparted by the best teachers
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  • for example, a good instructor would teach Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech by encouraging a conversation that involved analyzing the text and identifying the evidence, both factual and rhetorical, that makes it persuasive. “The opposite of what we’d want is a classroom where a teacher might ask only: ‘What was the year the speech was given? Where was it given?’ ”
  • in the past, assembling the SAT focused on making sure the questions performed on technical grounds, meaning: Were they appropriately easy or difficult among a wide range of students, and were they free of bias when tested across ethnic, racial and religious subgroups? The goal was “maximizing differentiation” among kids, which meant finding items that were answered correctly by those students who were expected to get them right and incorrectly by the weaker students. A simple way of achieving this, Coleman said, was to test the kind of obscure vocabulary words for which the SAT was famous
  • In redesigning the test, the College Board shifted its emphasis. It prioritized content, measuring each question against a set of specifications that reflect the kind of reading and math that students would encounter in college and their work lives. Schmeiser and others then spent much of early last year watching students as they answered a set of 20 or so problems, discussing the questions with the students afterward. “The predictive validity is going to come out the same,” she said of the redesigned test. “But in the new test, we have much more control over the content and skills that are being measured.”
  • Evidence-based reading and writing, he said, will replace the current sections on reading and writing. It will use as its source materials pieces of writing — from science articles to historical documents to literature excerpts — which research suggests are important for educated Americans to know and understand deeply. “The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers,” Coleman said, “have managed to inspire an enduring great conversation about freedom, justice, human dignity in this country and the world” — therefore every SAT will contain a passage from either a founding document or from a text (like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) that is part of the “great global conversation” the founding documents inspired.
  • The Barbara Jordan vocabulary question would have a follow-up — “How do you know your answer is correct?” — to which students would respond by identifying lines in the passage that supported their answer.
  • The idea is that the test will emphasize words students should be encountering, like “synthesis,” which can have several meanings depending on their context. Instead of encouraging students to memorize flashcards, the test should promote the idea that they must read widely throughout their high-school years.
  • . No longer will it be good enough to focus on tricks and trying to eliminate answer choices. We are not interested in students just picking an answer, but justifying their answers.”
  • the essay portion of the test will also be reformulated so that it will always be the same, some version of: “As you read the passage in front of you, consider how the author uses evidence such as facts or examples; reasoning to develop ideas and to connect claims and evidence; and stylistic or persuasive elements to add power to the ideas expressed. Write an essay in which you explain how the author builds an argument to persuade an audience.”
  • The math section, too, will be predicated on research that shows that there are “a few areas of math that are a prerequisite for a wide range of college courses” and careers. Coleman conceded that some might treat the news that they were shifting away from more obscure math problems to these fewer fundamental skills as a dumbing-down the test, but he was adamant that this was not the case. He explained that there will be three areas of focus: problem solving and data analysis, which will include ratios and percentages and other mathematical reasoning used to solve problems in the real world; the “heart of algebra,” which will test how well students can work with linear equations (“a powerful set of tools that echo throughout many fields of study”); and what will be called the “passport to advanced math,” which will focus on the student’s familiarity with complex equations and their applications in science and social science.
  • “Sometimes in the past, there’s been a feeling that tests were measuring some sort of ineffable entity such as intelligence, whatever that might mean. Or ability, whatever that might mean. What this is is a clear message that good hard work is going to pay off and achievement is going to pay off. This is one of the most significant developments that I have seen in the 40-plus years that I’ve been working in admissions in higher education.”
  • The idea of creating a transparent test and then providing a free website that any student could use — not to learn gimmicks but to get a better grounding and additional practice in the core knowledge that would be tested — was appealing to Coleman.
  • (The College Board won’t pay Khan Academy.) They talked about a hypothetical test-prep experience in which students would log on to a personal dashboard, indicate that they wanted to prepare for the SAT and then work through a series of preliminary questions to demonstrate their initial skill level and identify the gaps in their knowledge. Khan said he could foresee a way to estimate the amount of time it would take to achieve certain benchmarks. “It might go something like, ‘O.K., we think you’ll be able to get to this level within the next month and this level within the next two months if you put in 30 minutes a day,’ ” he said. And he saw no reason the site couldn’t predict for anyone, anywhere the score he or she might hope to achieve with a commitment to a prescribed amount of work.
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When scientists saw the mouse heads glowing, they knew the discovery was big - The Wash... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-a1b3-faff0034e2de_story.html brain science psychology
shared by Javier E on 21 May 17 - No Cached
  • have found evidence linking problems in the lymphatic and glymphatic systems to Alzheimer’s. In a study on mice, they showed that glymphatic dysfunction contributes to the buildup in the brain of amyloid beta, a protein that plays a key role in the disease.
  • several colleagues examined postmortem tissue from 79 human brains. They focused on aquaporin-4, a key protein in glymphatic vessels. In the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, this protein was jumbled; in those without the disease, the protein was well organized. This suggests that glymphatic breakdowns may play a role in the disease
  • The vessels have also been implicated in autoimmune disease. Researchers knew that the immune system has limited access to the brain. But at the same time, the immune system kept tabs on the brain’s status; no one knew exactly how. Some researchers theorize that the glymphatic system could be the conduit and that in diseases such as multiple sclerosis — where the body’s immune system attacks certain brain cells — the communication may go awry.
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  • The system may also play a role in symptoms of traumatic brain injur
  • Mice are a good model, she says, because their glymphatic systems are very similar to humans’. She and Iliff found that even months after being injured, the animals’ brains were still not clearing waste efficiently, leading to a buildup of toxic compounds, including amyloid beta. Nedergaard returns to the dishwasher analogy. “It’s like if you only use a third of the water when you turn on the machine,” she says. “You won’t get clean dishes.”
  • in mice, omega-3 fatty acidsimproved glymphatic functioning.
  • Nedergaard has shown that at least in mice, the system processes twice as much fluid during sleep as it does during wakefulness. She and her colleagues focused on amyloid beta; they found that the lymphatic system removed much more of the protein when the animals were asleep than when they were awake. She suggests that over time, sleep dysfunction may contribute to Alzheimer’s and perhaps other brain illnesses. “You only clean your brain when you’re sleeping,” she says. “This is probably an important reason that we sleep. You need time off from consciousness to do the housekeeping.”
  • Sleeping on your stomach is also not very effective; sleeping on your back is somewhat better, while lying on your side appears to produce the best results.
  • glymphatic flow is significantly decreased in the period just before a migraine. The intense pain in these headaches is caused largely by inflamed nerves in the tissue that surrounds the brain. Neuroscientists Rami Burstein and Aaron Schain, the lead authors, theorize that faulty clearance of molecular waste from the brain could trigger inflammation in these pain fibers.
  • other scientists have found that deep breathing significantly increases the glymphatic transport of cerebrospinal fluid into the brain.
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The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...caregiving-burnout.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care
  • Health care in the U.S. relies on an “invisible army” of caregivers — mostly women. For many, stunted careers, lost earnings and exhaustion are part of the fallout.
  • “If society wants us to keep caring for others, it’s going to have to show a little more care for us.”
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  • Her husband, Brad Buchanan, was late for family dinner. She found him in the bathroom, coughing up blood — a lot of it.
  • Doctors found that a tumor had ruptured in one of his lungs and he urgently needed chemo. As her husband became critically ill, Ms. Washington, a freelance writer, was thrust into the role of nurse.
  • “My hands were shaking,” she said as she remembered apprehensively pushing in the drugs for the first time and feeling the weight of keeping her husband alive.
  • Mr. Buchanan had a stem cell transplant that left him with graft-versus-host disease
  • they tend to do more personal care tasks like helping patients bathe and use the toilet than their male counterparts, who are more likely to oversee finances and arrangement of care.
  • When she explained that she had two children who also had needs, he said, “Well, usually family steps in, and it works out fine.”
  • Ms. Washington felt the burden of responsibility, but also the sting
  • The U.S. health care system relies on and takes for granted the “invisible army” of people — mostly women — who keep the system functioning by performing home care for the many people who are “too well for the hospital” but “too sick for home,” as well as for those on end-of-life care.
  • In 2017, AARP found that about 41 million family caregivers in America perform roughly $470 billion worth of unpaid labor a year.
  • Depending on the analysis, between 61 and 75 percent of caregivers are women
  • The historical roots are complex, but as Evelyn Glenn puts it in “Forced to Care,”
  • emale caregivers put in more hours — 22 to men’s 17
  • A doctor told Ms. Washington that her husband would need 24-hour care and “could not be left alone for even a moment.”
  • Many people who take on caregiving roles experience negative health impacts, but women are especially at risk of the fallout from caregiver stress.
  • Female caregivers are also 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty as non-caregiver
  • A 2011 study found that women who left their jobs to care for a parent lost an average of $324,000 in wages and benefits over their lifetimes.
  • Ms. Washington was able to dip into savings and a recent inheritance to help pay for supplemental in-home care, but it was still a struggle, causing stress, resentment and lost income.
  • It was hard to have my life put on hold. Everything kind of slipped away.
  • I lost a sense of who I was. I was going to pick up a prescription for myself, the only prescription I had when my husband was sick, and the pharmacist asked for my date of birth, and I gave his date of birth
  • People talk about how it’s the most important job in the world, taking care of our children or taking care of our vulnerable elders, and yet those are some of the worst paid jobs.
  • How much is a quarterback paid versus someone who is doing care for a vulnerable elderly person?
  • How did care work become so undervalued?
  • they are also more likely to stand by their partner through a serious illness
  • Western culture has long framed care work done by women as a moral duty or obligation, rather than an economic activity.
  • If your earnings are lower than they would normally be because you’re busy caring for a family member, and you can’t save and pay into social security, it can lock whole families into a cycle of lower wealth and economic instability.
  • And what should someone not do
  • Don’t tell someone to stay positive. For me, there was no staying about it, because I didn’t feel positive to start with. It brought up this feeling
  • My time isn’t my own, but surely my emotions can be
17More

6 Ways Social Media Affects Our Mental Health - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...s-effects-on-our-mental-health
shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • But possibly as concerning is the thing that we often do while we're sitting: Mindlessly scrolling through our social media feeds when we have a few spare minutes (or for some, hours)
  • It’s addictive
  • Experts have not been in total agreement on whether internet addiction is a real thing, let alone social media addiction, but there’s some good evidence that both may exist.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • And studies have confirmed that people tend to undergo a kind of withdrawal: A study a few years ago from Swansea University found that people experienced the psychological symptoms of withdrawal when they stopped using (this went for all internet use, not just social media).
  • It triggers more sadness, less well-being
  • The more we use social media, the less happy we seem to be. One study a few years ago found that Facebook use was linked to both less moment-to-moment happiness and less life satisfaction—the more people used Facebook in a day, the more these two variables dropped off
  • In fact, another study found that social media use is linked to greater feelings of social isolation.
  • Comparing our lives with others is mentally unhealthy
  • One study looked at how we make comparisons to others posts, in “upward” or “downward” directions—that is, feeling that we’re either better or worse off than our friends.
  • It can lead to jealousy—and a vicious cycle
  • Studies have certainly shown that social media use triggers feelings of jealousy. The authors of one study, looking at jealousy and other negative feelings while using Facebook, wrote that “This magnitude of envy incidents taking place on FB alone is astounding, providing evidence that FB offers a breeding ground for invidious feelings."
  • We get caught in the delusion of thinking it will help
  • Part of the unhealthy cycle is that we keep coming back to social media, even though it doesn’t make us feel very good.
  • This is probably because of what’s known as a forecasting error: Like a drug, we think getting a fix will help, but it actually makes us feel worse, which comes down to an error in our ability to predict our own response.
  • More friends on social doesn’t mean you’re more social
  • A couple of years ago, a study found that more friends on social media doesn’t necessarily mean you have a better social life—there seems to be a cap on the number of friends a person’s brain can handle, and it takes actual social interaction (not virtual) to keep up these friendships
  • All of this is not to say that there’s no benefit to social media—obviously it keeps us connected across great distances, and helps us find people we’d lost touch with years ago
28More

Opinion | The 1619 Chronicles - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-1619-project-criticisms.html 1619 history politics project racism 1776 Founding journalism
shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.
  • in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.
  • ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.
  • That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.
  • he deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”
  • She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.
  • I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.
  • “1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”
  • Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):
  • In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”
  • What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”
  • As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them.
  • These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.
  • Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing?
  • On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?
  • The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.
  • This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.
  • It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.
  • James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”
  • In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”
  • McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”
  • Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s.
  • ie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”
  • The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.
  • “It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?
  • unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.
  • On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.
17More

COVID-19 anxiety linked to body image issues: Study finds association between stress an... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201022201407.htm
shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A new study has found that anxiety and stress directly linked to COVID-19 could be causing a number of body image issues amongst women and men.
  • A new study has found that anxiety and stress directly linked to COVID-19 could be causing a number of body image issues amongst women and men.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      In class, we've talked countless times about how weird the brain is, and how there are so many things that simply don't make sense. Simply reading this description and title, this seems like ones of those things.
  • Amongst women, the study found that feelings of anxiety and stress caused by COVID-19 were associated with a greater desire for thinness
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I need an explanation for this.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Amongst the male participants, the study found that COVID-19-related anxiety and stress was associated with greater desire for muscularity, with anxiety also associated with body fat dissatisfaction.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Wow, that's so interesting.
  • COVID-19, and the consequences of the restrictions introduced to help tackle it, could be contributing to a number of serious mental health issues.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Yikes. So getting covid is a health issue, yet so is the worry of getting it.
  • In some cases, these issues can have very serious repercussions, including triggering eating disorders.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      What is it that connects the two?
  • Certainly during the initial spring lockdown period, our screen time increased, meaning that we were more likely to be exposed to thin or athletic ideals through the media, while decreased physical activity may have heightened negative thoughts about weight or shape. At the same time, it is possible that the additional anxiety and stress caused by COVID-19 may have diminished the coping mechanisms we typically use to help manage negative thoughts.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Ahhhhh. This makes sense. So it's quarantine's fault more than anything. People who have covid anxiety tend be more responsible, and tend to stay home more, This leads to more screen time which leads to body image issues.
  • uring lockdown, women may have felt under greater pressure to conform to traditionally feminine roles and norms
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      oh, really?
  • iven that masculinity typically emphasises the value of toughness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of status, COVID-19-related stress and anxiety may be leading men to place greater value on the importance of being muscular."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Make sense.
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