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

  • You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. 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  • At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
  • Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
Javier E

Clouds' Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds. More Photos » Temperature Rising Enigma in the Sky This series focuses on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences. More From the Series » if (typeof NYTDVideoManager != "undefined") { NYTDVideoManager.setAllowMultiPlayback(false); } function displayCompanionBanners(banners, tracking) { tmDisplayBanner(banners, "videoAdContent", 300, 250, null, tracking); } Multimedia Interactive Graphic Clouds and Climate Slide Show Understanding the Atmosphere Related Green Blog: Climate Change and the Body Politic (May 1, 2012) An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change (May 1, 2012) A blog about energy and the environment. Go to Blog » Readers’ Comments "There is always some possibility that the scientific consensus may be wrong and Dr. Lindzen may be right, or that both may be wrong. But the worst possible place to resolve such issues is the political arena." Alexander Flax, Potomac, MD Read Full Comment » Post a Comment » Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.
  • They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.
  • At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.
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  • His idea has drawn withering criticism from other scientists, who cite errors in his papers and say proof is lacking. Enough evidence is already in hand, they say, to rule out the powerful cooling effect from clouds that would be needed to offset the increase of greenhouse gases.
  • “If you listen to the credible climate skeptics, they’ve really pushed all their chips onto clouds.”
  • Dr. Lindzen is “feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message, and wants to hear it put forth by people with enough scientific reputation that it can be sustained for a while, even if it’s wrong science,” said Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Washington. “I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”
  • With climate policy nearly paralyzed in the United States, many other governments have also declined to take action, and worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases are soaring.
  • The most elaborate computer programs have agreed on a broad conclusion: clouds are not likely to change enough to offset the bulk of the human-caused warming. Some of the analyses predict that clouds could actually amplify the warming trend sharply through several mechanisms, including a reduction of some of the low clouds that reflect a lot of sunlight back to space. Other computer analyses foresee a largely neutral effect. The result is a big spread in forecasts of future temperature, one that scientists have not been able to narrow much in 30 years of effort.
  • The earth’s surface has already warmed about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, most of that in the last 40 years. Modest as it sounds, it is an average for the whole planet, representing an enormous addition of heat. An even larger amount is being absorbed by the oceans. The increase has caused some of the world’s land ice to melt and the oceans to rise.
  • Even in the low projection, many scientists say, the damage could be substantial. In the high projection, some polar regions could heat up by 20 or 25 degrees Fahrenheit — more than enough, over centuries or longer, to melt the Greenland ice sheet, raising sea level by a catastrophic 20 feet or more. Vast changes in  rainfall, heat waves and other weather patterns would most likely accompany such a large warming. “The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. “Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.”
  • But the problem of how clouds will behave in a future climate is not yet solved — making the unheralded field of cloud research one of the most important pursuits of modern science.
  • for more than a decade, Dr. Lindzen has said that when surface temperature increases, the columns of moist air rising in the tropics will rain out more of their moisture, leaving less available to be thrown off as ice, which forms the thin, high clouds known as cirrus. Just like greenhouse gases, these cirrus clouds act to reduce the cooling of the earth, and a decrease of them would counteract the increase of greenhouse gases. Dr. Lindzen calls his mechanism the iris effect, after the iris of the eye, which opens at night to let in more light. In this case, the earth’s “iris” of high clouds would be opening to let more heat escape.
  • Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained “some stupid mistakes” in his handling of the satellite data. “It was just embarrassing,” he said in an interview. “The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.” Last year, he tried offering more evidence for his case, but after reviewers for a prestigious American journal criticized the paper, Dr. Lindzen published it in a little-known Korean journal. Dr. Lindzen blames groupthink among climate scientists for his publication difficulties, saying the majority is determined to suppress any dissenting views. They, in turn, contend that he routinely misrepresents the work of other researchers.
  • Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late. By then, they say, the atmosphere would contain so much carbon dioxide as to make a substantial warming inevitable, and the gas would not return to a normal level for thousands of years.
  • In his Congressional appearances, speeches and popular writings, Dr. Lindzen offers little hint of how thin the published science supporting his position is. Instead, starting from his disputed iris mechanism, he makes what many of his colleagues see as an unwarranted leap of logic, professing near-certainty that climate change is not a problem society needs to worry about.
  • “Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, ‘We’re sure it’s not a problem,’ ” said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. “It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.”
Javier E

The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage - 0 views

  • Nigel Holmes at Time magazine and George Rorick, who invented the modern weather map at USA Today, began to draw playful graphics that boiled down a question to a few numbers and then presented them in a colorful package. They were inviting and simple drawings, like a cascading stack of oil drums to show the rising price of oil, and were generally more full of good cheer than hard data. Tufte has derided the genre, calling them “chartoons.”
  • Tufte has coined several terms that have come to define his style, such as “data-ink ratio,” the proportion of graphical detail that does not represent statistical information, and “chartjunk,” ornamental and often saccharine design flourishes that impede understanding
Javier E

Review: Vernor Vinge's 'Fast Times' | KurzweilAI - 0 views

  • Vernor Vinge’s Hugo-award-winning short science fiction story “Fast Times at Fairmont High” takes place in a near future in which everyone lives in a ubiquitous, wireless, networked world using wearable computers and contacts or glasses on which computer graphics are projected to create an augmented reality.
  • So what is life like in Vinge’s 2020?The biggest technological change involves ubiquitous computing, wearables, and augmented reality (although none of those terms are used). Everyone wears contacts or glasses which mediate their view of the world. This allows computer graphics to be superimposed on what they see. The computers themselves are actually built into the clothing (apparently because that is the cheapest way to do it) and everything communicates wirelessly.
  • If you want a computer display, it can appear in thin air, or be attached to a wall or any other surface. If people want to watch TV together they can agree on where the screen should appear and what show they watch. When doing your work, you can have screens on all your walls, menus attached here and there, however you want to organize things. But none of it is "really" there.
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  • Does your house need a new coat of paint? Don’t bother, just enter it into your public database and you have a nice new mint green paint job that everyone will see. Want to redecorate? Do it with computer graphics. You can have a birdbath in the front yard inhabited by Disneyesque animals who frolic and play. Even indoors, don’t buy artwork, just download it from the net and have it appear where you want.
  • Got a zit? No need to cover up with Clearsil, just erase it from your public face and people will see the improved version. You can dress up your clothes and hairstyle as well.
  • Of course, anyone can turn off their enhancements and see the plain old reality, but most people don’t bother most of the time because things are ugly that way.
  • Some of the kids attending Fairmont Junior High do so remotely. They appear as "ghosts", indistinguishable from the other kids except that you can walk through them. They go to classes and raise their hands to ask questions just like everyone else. They see the school and everyone at the school sees them. Instead of visiting friends, the kids can all instantly appear at one another’s locations.
  • The computer synthesizing visual imagery is able to call on the localizer network for views beyond what the person is seeing. In this way you can have 360 degree vision, or even see through walls. This is a transparent society with a vengeance!
  • The cumulative effect of all this technology was absolutely amazing and completely believable
  • One thing that was believable is that it seemed that a lot of the kids cheated, and it was almost impossible for the adults to catch them. With universal network connectivity it would be hard to make sure kids are doing their work on their own. I got the impression the school sort of looked the other way, the idea being that as long as the kids solved their problems, even if they got help via the net, that was itself a useful skill that they would be relying on all their lives.
Javier E

The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage - 0 views

  • PowerPoint, a software program that Tufte says is constricting and obfuscating and “turns information into a sales pitch.”
  • Tufte dissected NASA’s PowerPoint slides on his Web site, showing that the program didn’t allow engineers to write in scientific notation and replaced complex quantitative measurement with imprecise words like “significant.” He then published a twenty-eight-page essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” in which he analyzed hundreds of existing PowerPoint slides and showed that the statistical graphics used in PowerPoint presentations show an average of twelve numbers each, which, in Tufte’s analysis, ranks it below every major world publication except for Pravda. The low information density of PowerPoint is “approaching dementia,” he wrote.
  • the reliance on PowerPoint often means that battle orders are rendered in incomplete, often unclear sentences and maps are squashed and stripped of meaningful detail, leaving essential battlefield questions of geography dangerously unclear. The details are classified, but Hammes told me that he has seen war plans for the Korean peninsula prepared in PowerPoint in which massive terrain issues were completely glossed over. On the whole, Hammes told me, the rise of PowerPoint in the military has made the decision-making process less intellectually active. And Tufte, he added, “is the master on this whole thing.”
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  • Nate Silver, who runs the political Web site FiveThirtyEight, now part of the New York Times, uses many of Tufte’s maxims in the site’s design. Silver told me that he tries to keep the “data-ink” ratio of his current site very high, meaning most of the pixels on the screen show actual numbers or data points; he also thinks of the site’s design in terms of “small multiples,” another Tufte neologism that refers to a series of related numbers that reveal subtle differences over time. “Tufte treats data like good writing,” he said. “You have a certain thought—how clearly and beautifully are you conveying it?”
  • Good design, then, is not about making dull numbers somehow become magically exhilarating, it is about picking the right numbers in the first place. “It’s about data that matters to you,”
Javier E

The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage - 0 views

  • The underlying philosophy behind sparklines—and, really, all of Tufte’s work—is that data, when presented elegantly and with respect, is not confounding but clarifying.
  • Tufte has shifted how designers approach the job of turning information into understanding.
  • “It’s not about making the complex simple,” Grefe told me. “It’s about making the complex clear.”
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  • Envisioning Information, published in 1990, implored readers to think of information design as a discipline that encompassed far more than the charts, tables, and other purely quantitative forms that had traditionally dominated the field
  • Graphics aren’t just useful for displaying numbers, in other words, but for clarifying just about anything one person is trying to tell someone else. The book opens with a print of a visitor’s guide to the Ise shrine in Japan and ends around 120 pages later with Galileo Galilei’s drawing of the rings of Saturn from 1613.
Javier E

The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage - 0 views

  • After the publication of Envisioning Information, Tufte decided, he told me, “to be indifferent to culture or history or time.” He became increasingly consumed with what he calls “forever knowledge,” or the idea that design is meant to guide fundamental cognitive tasks and therefore is rooted in principles that apply regardless of the material being displayed and the technology used to produce it. As Tufte explains it, basic human cognitive questions are universal, which means that design questions should be universal too.
  • As Tufte sees it, graphic design has become a tragic field, a rich and storied craft knowledge that has been taken out of the realm of “nonfiction,” as he calls it, and into that of “fiction,” or marketing and propaganda. He told me several times of his contempt for “commercial art,” the graphic design that is “part of a fashion and a style and will be different someday.” Most designers, he said, want to do something new each time. “But I’m interested in the solved problem,” he said. “I’m interested in high art and real science.”
dicindioha

Americans have lost faith in institutions. That's not because of Trump or 'fake news.' ... - 0 views

  • we live in a “Matrix”-infused “conspiracy culture,” according to social scientists, where one is thought to be impossibly simple to not understand that the world is ruled by collusion and machination.
  • journalists have allowed too much of their personalities to creep into their work.
  • “less analysis and more reporting, less personality and more facts.”
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  • Trust in American institutions, however, has been in decline for some time. Trump is merely feeding on that sentiment.
  • olitical scientist Ron Inglehart proposed in the 1970s that as societies grow wealthier and less concerned about basic survival, we should expect a shift from communal to individual values: People express themselves more and trust authorities less.
    • dicindioha
       
      This quote sums up what we have been talking about with regard to economics
  • The Watergate scandal caused Americans to lose faith in their government. Conversely, after the country was attacked on 9/11, trust in government soared and people went back to church. After the impact of scandal and threat faded, however, the long-term trends returned.
  • As far back as the 1600s, travelers confronted by new cultures and novel deities began to question their own societies’ rules and institutions
  • In 1964, 3 out of 4 Americans trusted their government to do the right thing most of the time. By 1976, that number had dropped to 33 percent.
  • And technology offers everyone the chance to be one’s own reporter, broadcaster and commentator.
  • In some Los Angeles schools, so many parents opt out of the vaccination regime that inoculation rates are on a par with South Sudan’s as people make their own scientific judgments.
  • Political scientists tell us that democracies require a little faith. To engage with others, you have to believe that if you lose a contest or a debate, the winner will treat you equitably; that if the other side wins, it will act within the law and not send its opponents off to jail. You have to assume that institutions will be fair and that leaders will act in the country’s best interest.
    • dicindioha
       
      interesting
  •  
    This article talks about how people have lost trust in different American institutions, like the media, and how some newspapers are trying to gain it back. It's interesting that it talks about how people are letting emotions come through their writing, which as we have learned, is hard not to do. This article also uses graphical data, probably because people trust graphs and scientific looking data more than they would simple claims in an article. It's interesting it said that trust comes when we have to deal with something bad like 9/11, for people come together after an event like that. It also brings up how societies develop, people become more self interested, as we have discussed.
manhefnawi

Reality, Representation, and the Search for Meaning: Argentine Artist Mirtha Dermisache... - 0 views

  • “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” Nietzsche asked in contemplating how we use language to both reveal and conceal reality.
  • In the 1970s, Dermisache invented an array of graphic languages, each with a distinct syntactic texture and a visual rhythm that inclines toward meaning, or the longing for meaning.
Javier E

AI is about to completely change how you use computers | Bill Gates - 0 views

  • Health care
  • Entertainment and shopping
  • Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.
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  • agents will open up many more learning opportunities.
  • Already, AI can help you pick out a new TV and recommend movies, books, shows, and podcasts. Likewise, a company I’ve invested in, recently launched Pix, which lets you ask questions (“Which Robert Redford movies would I like and where can I watch them?”) and then makes recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past
  • Productivity
  • copilots can do a lot—such as turn a written document into a slide deck, answer questions about a spreadsheet using natural language, and summarize email threads while representing each person’s point of view.
  • before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.
  • Helping patients and healthcare workers will be especially beneficial for people in poor countries, where many never get to see a doctor at all.
  • To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want. It will be able to write the code, design the look and feel of the app, create a logo, and publish the app to an online store
  • Agents will do even more. Having one will be like having a person dedicated to helping you with various tasks and doing them independently if you want. If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like
  • For decades, I’ve been excited about all the ways that software would make teachers’ jobs easier and help students learn. It won’t replace teachers, but it will supplement their work—personalizing the work for students and liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job.
  • Mental health care is another example of a service that agents will make available to virtually everyone. Today, weekly therapy sessions seem like a luxury. But there is a lot of unmet need, and many people who could benefit from therapy don’t have access to it.
  • I don’t think any single company will dominate the agents business--there will be many different AI engines available.
  • The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.
  • They’ll replace word processors, spreadsheets, and other productivity apps.
  • Education
  • For example, few families can pay for a tutor who works one-on-one with a student to supplement their classroom work. If agents can capture what makes a tutor effective, they’ll unlock this supplemental instruction for everyone who wants it. If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors.
  • your agent will be able to help you in the same way that personal assistants support executives today. If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you. If you tell it you’d like to catch up with your old college roommate, it will work with their agent to find a time to get together, and just before you arrive, it will remind you that their oldest child just started college at the local university.
  • To see the dramatic change that agents will bring, let’s compare them to the AI tools available today. Most of these are bots. They’re limited to one app and generally only step in when you write a particular word or ask for help. Because they don’t remember how you use them from one time to the next, they don’t get better or learn any of your preferences.
  • The current state of the art is Khanmigo, a text-based bot created by Khan Academy. It can tutor students in math, science, and the humanities—for example, it can explain the quadratic formula and create math problems to practice on. It can also help teachers do things like write lesson plans.
  • Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business.
  • other issues won’t be decided by companies and governments. For example, agents could affect how we interact with friends and family. Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them?
  • In the computing industry, we talk about platforms—the technologies that apps and services are built on. Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.
  • A shock wave in the tech industry
  • Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them. If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision.
  • Agents will affect how we use software as well as how it’s written. They’ll replace search sites because they’ll be better at finding information and summarizing it for you
  • they’ll be dramatically better. You’ll be able to have nuanced conversations with them. They will be much more personalized, and they won’t be limited to relatively simple tasks like writing a letter.
  • Companies will be able to make agents available for their employees to consult directly and be part of every meeting so they can answer questions.
  • AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get. Wysa and Youper are two of the early chatbots here. But agents will go much deeper. If you choose to share enough information with a mental health agent, it will understand your life history and your relationships. It’ll be available when you need it, and it will never get impatient. It could even, with your permission, monitor your physical responses to therapy through your smart watch—like if your heart starts to race when you’re talking about a problem with your boss—and suggest when you should see a human therapist.
  • If the number of companies that have started working on AI just this year is any indication, there will be an exceptional amount of competition, which will make agents very inexpensive.
  • Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.
  • Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.
  • The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people
  • The ramifications for the software business and for society will be profound.
  • In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.
  • You’ll also be able to get news and entertainment that’s been tailored to your interests. CurioAI, which creates a custom podcast on any subject you ask about, is a glimpse of what’s coming.
  • An agent will be able to help you with all your activities if you want it to. With permission to follow your online interactions and real-world locations, it will develop a powerful understanding of the people, places, and activities you engage in. It will get your personal and work relationships, hobbies, preferences, and schedule. You’ll choose how and when it steps in to help with something or ask you to make a decision.
  • even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. That’s the kind of thing that is only possible today with another human being, like a close friend or personal assistant.
  • In the distant future, agents may even force humans to face profound questions about purpose. Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much. In a future like that, what would people do with their time? Would anyone still want to get an education when an agent has all the answers? Can you have a safe and thriving society when most people have a lot of free time on their hands?
  • They’ll have an especially big influence in four areas: health care, education, productivity, and entertainment and shopping.
Javier E

The Psychopath Makeover - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • The eminent criminal psychologist and creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist paused before answering. "I think, in general, yes, society is becoming more psychopathic," he said. "I mean, there's stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn't have seen 20, even 10 years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones. ... The recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don't even get me started on Wall Street."
  • in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision") have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.
  • Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.
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  • during this same period, students' self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the roof. "Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called 'Generation Me,' " Konrath continues, "as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history."
  • Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, "The Dreams of Readers," "more alert to the inner lives of others." We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn't.
  • if society really is becoming more psychopathic, it's not all doom and gloom. In the right context, certain psychopathic characteristics can actually be very constructive. A neurosurgeon I spoke with (who rated high on the psychopathic spectrum) described the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation as "an intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses." In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment.
  • mental toughness isn't the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There's also fearlessness.
  • I ask Andy whether he ever felt any regret over anything he'd done. Over the lives he'd taken on his numerous secret missions around the world. "No," he replies matter-of-factly, his arctic-blue eyes showing not the slightest trace of emotion. "You seriously don't think twice about it. When you're in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you've done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16. "The regiment's motto is 'Who Dares Wins.' But sometimes it can be shortened to 'F--- It.' "
  • one of the things that we know about psychopaths is that the light switches of their brains aren't wired up in quite the same way as the rest of ours are—and that one area particularly affected is the amygdala, a peanut-size structure located right at the center of the circuit board. The amygdala is the brain's emotion-control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. But in psychopaths, a section of this airspace, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty.
  • Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and you're well on the way to giving someone a psychopath makeover. Indeed, Liane Young and her team in Boston have since kicked things up a notch and demonstrated that applying TMS to the right temporoparietal junction—a neural ZIP code within that neighborhood—has significant effects not just on lying ability but also on moral-reasoning ability: in particular, ascribing intentionality to others' actions.
  • at an undisclosed moment sometime within the next 60 seconds, the image you see at the present time will change, and images of a different nature will appear on the screen. These images will be violent. And nauseating. And of a graphic and disturbing nature. "As you view these images, changes in your heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG activity will be monitored and compared with the resting levels that are currently being recorded
  • "OK," says Nick. "Let's get the show on the road." He disappears behind us, leaving Andy and me merrily soaking up the incontinence ad. Results reveal later that, at this point, as we wait for something to happen, our physiological output readings are actually pretty similar. Our pulse rates are significantly higher than our normal resting levels, in anticipation of what's to come. But with the change of scene, an override switch flips somewhere in Andy's brain. And the ice-cold Special Forces soldier suddenly swings into action. As vivid, florid images of dismemberment, mutilation, torture, and execution flash up on the screen in front of us (so vivid, in fact, that Andy later confesses to actually being able to "smell" the blood: a "kind of sickly-sweet smell that you never, ever forget"), accompanied not by the ambient spa music of before but by blaring sirens and hissing white noise, his physiological readings start slipping into reverse. His pulse rate begins to slow. His GSR begins to drop, his EEG to quickly and dramatically attenuate. In fact, by the time the show is over, all three of Andy's physiological output measures are pooling below his baseline.
  • Nick has seen nothing like it. "It's almost as if he was gearing himself up for the challenge," he says. "And then, when the challenge eventually presented itself, his brain suddenly responded by injecting liquid nitrogen into his veins. Suddenly implemented a blanket neural cull of all surplus feral emotion. Suddenly locked down into a hypnotically deep code red of extreme and ruthless focus." He shakes his head, nonplused. "If I hadn't recorded those readings myself, I'm not sure I would have believed them," he continues. "OK, I've never tested Special Forces before. And maybe you'd expect a slight attenuation in response. But this guy was in total and utter control of the situation. So tuned in, it looked like he'd completely tuned out."
  • My physiological output readings, in contrast, went through the roof. Exactly like Andy's, they were well above baseline as I'd waited for the carnage to commence. But that's where the similarity ended. Rather than go down in the heat of battle, in the midst of the blood and guts, mine had appreciated exponentially. "At least it shows that the equipment is working properly," comments Nick. "And that you're a normal human being."
  • TMS can't penetrate far enough into the brain to reach the emotion and moral-reasoning precincts directly. But by damping down or turning up the regions of the cerebral cortex that have links with such areas, it can simulate the effects of deeper, more incursive influence.
  • Before the experiment, I'd been curious about the time scale: how long it would take me to begin to feel the rush. Now I had the answer: about 10 to 15 minutes. The same amount of time, I guess, that it would take most people to get a buzz out of a beer or a glass of wine.
  • The effects aren't entirely dissimilar. An easy, airy confidence. A transcendental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the encroaching, and somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a s---, anyway? There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. That's the lack of attendant sluggishness. The enhancement of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness. Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it's on ice, and my anxieties drowned with a half-dozen shots of transcranial magnetic Jack Daniel's. But, at the same time, my whole way of being feels as if it's been sumptuously spring-cleaned with light. My soul, or whatever you want to call it, immersed in a spiritual dishwasher.
  • So this, I think to myself, is how it feels to be a psychopath. To cruise through life knowing that no matter what you say or do, guilt, remorse, shame, pity, fear—all those familiar, everyday warning signals that might normally light up on your psychological dashboard—no longer trouble you.
  • I suddenly get a flash of insight. We talk about gender. We talk about class. We talk about color. And intelligence. And creed. But the most fundamental difference between one individual and another must surely be that of the presence, or absence, of conscience. Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels good. But what if it's as tough as old boots? What if one's conscience has an infinite, unlimited pain threshold and doesn't bat an eye when others are screaming in agony?
Javier E

Grand Old Planet - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”
  • Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party.
  • that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.
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  • What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe.
  • What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs
  • it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.
  • We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?
  • then there’s the matter of using evidence to shape economic policy. You may have read about the recent study from the Congressional Research Service finding no empirical support for the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth. How did Republicans respond? By suppressing the report. On economics, as in hard science, modern conservatives don’t want to hear anything challenging their preconceptions — and they don’t want anyone else to hear about it, either.
Javier E

A Note on Sentimentality « Kenyon Review Blog - 0 views

  • One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed.
  • In the world of contemporary fiction, one of the biggest no-no’s is what goes by the name “sentimentality.” It’s hard to perceive it for what it is, when you’re on the inside, but this is actually an arbitrary allergy on our part; it’s analogous to the Victorian one against “immorality” in literature.
  • You can’t assert on a factual basis that sentimentality is wrong or false, that it somehow misrepresents the human experience—because mushy-gushy moments are an actual part of real lived life
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  • “Good” artists instinctively exclude elements of what they know to be part of real life if they feel it may be “bad,” artistically speaking. The prudish Victorians regarded sexual language in fiction that way. Charles Dickens, obviously, knew that people have sex, but he would never spell such a thing out in a novel, even though he knew dirty language was part of real life (especially among the lowlifes he sometimes wrote about, like Fagin and company). It was “bad.” It may have been “bad” in a different sense—as in indecent, improper—but it was “bad” artistically as well, in that his sense of his audience kept him from being too graphic or explicit, either in scenes or dialogue. Meanwhile, Dickens was at liberty to engineer a scene in which, say, a tuberculosis-stricken orphan switches places at the guillotine with a virginal seamstress. Today, you can put all sorts of explicit sexual references in fiction, and the average critic won’t chide you for immorality or indecency; sentimentality will get you panned every time.
  • The critical temperament of an age shapes an age’s creativity not just in the supply-demand way, motivating writers to produce what is praised and valued by critics and readers. The critical temperament actually blocks off areas of life to create a portrayal of the world that fits its idea of the world. So a prudish era like the Victorian will target immorality—and a cynical or ironic era like ours will target sentimentality.
Emily Horwitz

Scientists to Seek Clues to Violence in Genome of Gunman in Newtown, Conn. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In a move likely to renew a longstanding ethical controversy, geneticists are quietly making plans to study the DNA of Adam Lanza, 20, who killed 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Conn. Their work will be an effort to discover biological clues to extreme violence.
  • other experts speculated that the geneticists might look for mutations that might be associated with mental illnesses and ones that might also increase the risk for violence.
  • But whatever they do, this apparently is the first time researchers will attempt a detailed study of the DNA of a mass killer.
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  • Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them.
  • Everything known about mental illness, these skeptics say, argues that there are likely to be hundreds of genes involved in extreme violent behavior, not to mention a variety of environmental influences, and that all of these factors can interact in complex and unpredictable ways.
  • The National Institutes of Health was embroiled in controversy about 20 years ago simply for proposing to study the biological underpinnings of violence. Critics accused researchers of racism and singling out minorities, especially black men.
  • Studies of people at the far end of a bell curve can be especially informative, because the genetic roots of their conditions can be stark and easy to spot, noted J. H. Pate Skene, a Duke University neurobiologist. “I think doing research on outliers, people at an end of a spectrum on something of concern like violent behavior, is certainly a good idea,” he said, but he advised tempering expectations.
  • “If we know someone has a 2 percent chance or a 10 percent chance or a 20 percent chance of violent behavior, what would you do with that person?” Dr. Skene said. “They have not been convicted of anything — have not done anything wrong.”
  • Ultimately, understanding the genetics of violence might enable researchers to find ways to intervene before a person commits a horrific crime. But that goal would be difficult to achieve, and the pursuit of it risks jeopardizing personal liberties.
proudsa

When Correctional Officers Carry Shotguns, The Result is Death And Mayhem - The Huffing... - 0 views

  • Guards inside prisons shouldn't have guns. That's pretty much an accepted fact. Except in Nevada—and the results are mayhem and death.
    • proudsa
       
      Graphic image disclaimer, but really important read
  • “Neither could affect an effective offensive,” McNeill recalled. “It was like some awkward and quirky dance, then 'BOOM.'”
  • the same tiny pellets that sport shooters use to blow apart clay pigeons and that hunters use to kill birds and rabbits.
    • proudsa
       
      treatment of inmates as animals
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  • Ramos fired a warning shot, but the prisoners kept scuffling. Then he fired three live rounds. When he stopped, the left side of Arevalo's body was loaded with shots. Perez lay motionless and bleeding on the floor, near a shower bag and a towel. He had at least 30 pellets in his face, 30 in his neck and as many as 200 in his chest and arms.
  • while he tried to reload his gun.
  • “extensive” shots to the “left face, left neck, left arm, left chest, left flank.”
  • lowest ratio of guards to prisoners of any correctional system in the country—only about one security staffer for every 12 inmates, according to the Association of State Correctional Administrators.
  • The state defines this method as a “non-deadly” use of force, but a shotgun loaded with pellets can easily draw blood from as far as 50 yards away.
mcginnisca

Why Sexism at the Office Makes Women Love Hillary Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Younger Democratic women are mostly for Bernie Sanders; older women lean more toward Hillary Clinton.
  • The idealistic but ungrateful naïfs who think sexism is a thing of the past and believe, as Mr. Sanders recently said, that “people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender” are seemingly battling the pantsuited old scolds prattling on about feminism
  • More time in a sexist world, and particularly in the workplace, radicalizes women.
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  • It’s not that young women aren’t feminists, or don’t care about sexism. For college-age women — Mr. Sanders’s female base — sexism tends to be linked to sex.
  • Young women are neither ungrateful to their feminist foremothers nor complacent; rather, they are activists for feminist causes that reflect their needs.
  • College-educated women see only a tiny pay gap in their early- and mid-20s, making 97 cents for every dollar earned by their male colleagues.
  • That experience starts to change a few more years into the work force. By 35, those same college-educated women are making 15 percent less than their male peers. Women’s earnings peak between ages 35 and 44 and then plateau, while men’s continue to rise.
  • When women have children, they’re penalized: They’re considered less competent, they’re less likely to be hired for a new job and they’re paid less
  • one of the few female partners always seemed to be in charge of ordering lunch
  • For the many women who live at the center of that time crush, Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on the wage gap, paid family leave and universal prekindergarten may be particularly appealing. Mr. Sanders, who also supports paid leave and universal pre-K, takes a different rhetorical tone, usually stressing affordable higher education and universal health care.
  • I watched as men with little or irrelevant experience were hired and promoted, because they had such great ideas, or they fit in better. “We want a woman,” the conclusion seemed to be, “just not this woman.”
  • in the now-common refrain about Hillary Clinton: “I want a woman president, just not this woman president.”
  • a 19-year-old aspiring lawyer who is volunteering for Mr. Sanders today will work for firms with more female partners and live in a world where the wage gap has shrunk. But the trends show that her experience in a decade is unlikely to be that different from mine.
  • Many more women over 25 are in the work force than those under, and women over 25 also do about twice as much unpaid domestic work as their younger counterparts.
  • I listened as some of my male colleagues opined on the need to marry a woman who would stay home with the children — that wasn’t sexist, they insisted, because it wasn’t that they thought only women should stay home; it was just that somebody had to, and the years in which they planned on having children would be crucial ones for their own careers.
  • Child care is just as expensive in many places as sending a kid to public university, but a college kid can get a part-time job. A toddler can’t.”
  • There are many other reasons women in the 30-and-over cohort may lean toward Mrs. Clinton. They’ve already seen promises of revolutionary change fall short. They may prefer a candidate with a progressive ideology but a more restrained, and potentially more effective, strategy for putting that ideology in place.
  • If it’s not this woman, this year, then who and when?
summertyler

Why Facebook's News Experiment Matters to Readers - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Facebook’s new plan to host news publications’ stories directly is not only about page views, advertising revenue or the number of seconds it takes for an article to load. It is about who owns the relationship with readers.
  • Tech companies have always stepped on one another’s toes to try to become people’s gateway to the digital world — the only place people need to go to get what they want.
  • all kinds of companies are now becoming tech companies
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  • Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)
  • The front page of a newspaper and the cover of a magazine lost their dominance long ago. Web home pages are following suit. Increasingly, the articles, videos, photographs and graphics that media organizations publish are stand-alone fragments that readers happen upon one at a time, often on social media.
  • “In digital, every story becomes unbundled from each other, so if you’re not thinking of each story as living on its own, it’s tying yourself back to an analog era,”
  •  
    Should we trust social media with the news?
Duncan H

Phobias: Things to Fear and Loathe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • a new app for the treatment of phobias. You stare at pictures of dental drills, snakes or airplane interiors, depending on your affliction, and these totems of menace  — interspersed with reassuring images of teddy bears  — gradually cease to provoke you.
  • Another person wrote: “I am terrified of string. You know, when you have a loose string hanging off your clothes. Most people just shrug it off.” (Who knew?) “But I go insane until I get it off the item.”Balloons, pigeons, boats, bald men, cotton batten, garden peas. These have all acted as the culprits, according to reports I’ve received, in making otherwise reasonable human beings assume the visage of Edvard Munch’s screamer. People fear chins, condiments, towels, cut fruit.The object appears to be irrelevant, in many cases, beyond its subconscious assignation as the Very Thing to Fear.
  • One attempts to find logical causes for phobia at one’s peril.
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  • According to the psychologist Stéphane Bouchard, who studies phobia at the University of Quebec, about a third of phobias are indeed set off by direct exposure to frightening encounters, such as a dog bite. Roughly another third are culturally suggested: a classic example being the increase in shark and water phobias after the movie “Jaws.” With that final third, Mr. Bouchard told me, shrugging, “we just have no clue.”Let me zero in on that final third.“I have a fear of honeycomb shapes,” a woman once wrote to me when I solicited examples of phobias for my research. “I can’t look at something like a beehive. The other day, I saw a box of honeycomb-shaped pasta at the grocery store and it really creeped me out.”
  • Of all the manifestations of anxiety, specific phobias are by far the most idiosyncratic. About 6 percent of Americans have an acute fear of animals like rats and birds. But after that, the sources of terror are myriad.
  • Oddly, this act of transmuting anxiety into fear does possess a kind of logic. Anxiety has been described as fear in search of a cause, and there’s little question that fear is more actionable. Instead of being paralyzed by a sense of directionless menace, as would be the case with a generalized anxiety disorder where danger is everywhere and nowhere, the phobic can pour all dread into one vessel, and then swiftly run away.In other words, phobia can be a form of compartmentalization.
  • A fear of flying, for instance, can relate to acrophobia (fear of heights), or to claustrophobia, or it can be a stand-in for a much more threatening prospect that dare not be confronted at any cost, such as the death of a parent. You’re avoiding grief, and the next thing you know you would rather be trapped in an elevator with bees than board an airplane. The airplane is departing for another world but no, that’s too obvious.
  • We are not simple creatures, we human beings, and we know it; yet we still insist on imposing simple explanations upon our emotional conduct. “They’re just freaking dandelions, Mom,” my son tells me. It’s just a garter snake. They’re merely peas. How in the world  can you be so idiotically afraid of clowns?There are wider implications here for our civic and political discourse. Certain people may be neurologically prone to anxiety, true, but fear is also circumstantial. The current economic climate is extremely anxiety-provoking, and research has shown that people can tolerate uncertainty for only so long. At some point, the neurotically wired begin to prefer negative certitudes  — or compartmentalized threats  — to ambiguity.
  • f we cannot tolerate uncertainty, then it might be reasonable to expect an increase in phobic behaviors:   xenophobia, Islamophobia, Obamafear, a terror of newts. These aren’t stances that can be dealt with by counterargument.  They can be quelled only by exposure, by a reminder that the threat is symbolic, a stand-in. Let’s invite the enemy we  fear to dine, then, and rescue ourselves  from irrational conflict.
  •  
    If only we could apply her suggestions to politics.
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