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Megan Flanagan

Hidden Side of the College Dream: Mediocre Graduation Rates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...op-out-follow-the-dollars.html

college rates psychology education

shared by Megan Flanagan on 02 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • “go to college” is such a proven prescription
  • college graduates have lower unemployment rates, earn higher wages and even have longer-lasting marriages
  • 7.2 million students who need federal loans to attend college
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Of the 1,027 private colleges studied, 761 have graduation rates of less than 67 percent.
  • the rate is even lower, 46 percent
  • high schools in which more than a third of students do not graduate on time are labeled to receive special attention by federal standards.
  • a college can have a graduation rate as low as 2 percent and still preserve its accreditation
  • “We act as if they’re all the same right now. In K-12 we differentiate.”
  • “Graduation rates are primarily two factors: what the student brings and what the college brings to the experience,”
  • Colleges with lower graduation rates tend to admit a higher percentage of students with Pell grants, which usually go to lower-income students.
  • money is a huge roadblock to graduation.
  • “That is the No. 1 reason our students give when they drop out,”
  • any setback or poor grade can make them question whether they should be in college in the first place
  • colleges are not fulfilling their promise of upward mobility to students, particularly those who are trying to become the first in their families to earn a degree
  • “It’s not that the low-income students are destined to fail,” Mr. Shireman said. “It’s just that they have more challenges, so it takes a lot more resources to ensure that they succeed.”
mcginnisca

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

www.nytimes.com/...omen-love-hillary-clinton.html

sexism hillary clinton gender politics bias

shared by mcginnisca on 22 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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?
tornekm

DNA 'tape recorder' to trace cell history - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-36397034

dna tape recorder science research

shared by tornekm on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • The technique is being hailed as a breakthrough in understanding how the trillions of complex cells in a body are descended from a single egg.
  • The human body has around 40 trillion cells, each with a highly specialised function. Yet each can trace its history back to the same starting point - a fertilised egg.
  • The molecular tape recorder developed by Prof Shendure's team at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, is a length of DNA inserted into the genome that contains a series of edit points which can be changed throughout an organism's life.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Cancers develop by a lineage, too," Alex Schier told the BBC. "Our technique can be used to follow these lineages during cancer formation - to tell us the relationships of cells within a tumour, and between the original tumour and secondary tumours formed by metastasis."
Javier E

Trump Fires Adviser's Son From Transition for Spreading Fake News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...michael-flynn-son-trump.html

trump adviser NSC fake news conspiracy theory psychology

shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • At the Defense Intelligence Agency, his staff members even coined their own name for his sometimes dubious assertions: “Flynn facts.”
  • “He has regularly engaged in the reckless public promotion of conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact, with disregard for the risks that giving credence to those theories could pose to the public,” Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday.
  • “Someone who is so oblivious to the facts, or intentionally ignorant of them, should not be entrusted with policy decisions that affect the safety of the American people,” Mr. Smith added.
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  • His son, in contrast, showed no such restraint in the weeks before he was fired, regularly posting on Twitter about conspiracy theories involving Mrs. Clinton and her campaign staff well after the election.He continued to push his support for the fake news about Comet Ping Pong after his messages on Twitter about Sunday’s episode began attracting widespread attention. It was not until shortly before 3:30 p.m. Monday that he went silent on Twitter.
  • In one of the last messages he posted, he shared a post from another Twitter user who sought to spread a conspiracy theory that sprang up on the right-wing fringes after the shooting: that the suspect arrested at Comet Ping Pong, Edgar M. Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N.C., was actually an actor, and that the episode was a hoax cooked up to discredit the claim of a sex trafficking ring at the restaurant.
Javier E

Our Ecological Boredom - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...our-ecological-boredom.html

freedom wilderness conformity boredom ecological psychology human origins

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Live free or die: This is the maxim of our age. But the freedoms we celebrate are particular and limited. We fetishize the freedom of business from state control; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to carry guns and speak our minds and worship whom we will. But despite, in some cases because of, this respect for particular freedoms, every day the scope of our lives appears to contract.
  • Half a century ago, we were promised that rising wealth would mean less work, longer vacations and more choice
  • our working hours rise in line with economic growth, and they are now governed by a corporate culture of snooping and quantification, of infantilizing dictats and impossible demands, all of which smothers autonomy and creativity. Technologies that promised to save time and free us from drudgery (such as email and smartphones) fill our heads with a clatter so persistent it stifles the ability to think.
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  • Young people, who have no place in this dead-eyed, sanitized landscape, scarcely venture from their bedrooms. Political freedom now means choosing between alternative versions of market fundamentalism.
  • Even the freedoms we do possess we tend not to exercise. We spend hours every day watching other people doing what we might otherwise be doing: dancing, singing, playing sports, even cooking. We venture outdoors to seek marginally different varieties of stuff we already possess
  • We entertain the illusion that we have chosen our lives. Why, if this is the case, do our apparent choices differ so little from those of other people? Why do we live and work and travel and eat and dress and entertain ourselves in almost identical fashion? It’s no wonder, when we possess and use it so little, that we make a fetish out of freedom.Continue reading the main story
  • our survival in the modern economy requires the use of few of the mental and physical capacities we possess. Sometimes it feels like a small and shuffling life. Our humdrum, humiliating lives leave us, I believe, ecologically bored.
  • Across many rich nations, especially the United States, global competition is causing the abandonment of farming on less fertile land. Rather than trying to tame and hold back the encroaching wilds, I believe we should help to accelerate the process of reclamation, removing redundant roads and fences, helping to re-establish missing species, such as wolves and cougars and bears, building bridges between recovering habitats to create continental-scale wildlife corridors, such as those promoted by the Rewilding Institute.
  • This rewilding of the land permits, if we choose, a partial rewilding of our own lives. It allows us to step into a world that is not controlled and regulated, to imagine ourselves back into the rawer life from which we came
kushnerha

New Ways Into the Brain's 'Music Room' - The New York Times - 5 views

www.nytimes.com/...nto-the-brains-music-room.html

new york times music brain science research language

shared by kushnerha on 08 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.
  • And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”
  • devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
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  • “Why do we have music?” Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”
  • Dr. McDermott said the new method could be used to computationally dissect any scans from a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, or F.M.R.I. — the trendy workhorse of contemporary neuroscience — and so may end up divulging other hidden gems of cortical specialization. As proof of principle, the researchers showed that their analytical protocol had detected a second neural pathway in the brain for which scientists already had evidence — this one tuned to the sounds of human speech.
  • Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.
  • In fact, Dr. Rauschecker said, music sensitivity may be more fundamental to the human brain than is speech perception. “There are theories that music is older than speech or language,” he said. “Some even argue that speech evolved from music.”
  • , many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology
  • when previous neuroscientists failed to find any anatomically distinct music center in the brain, they came up with any number of rationales to explain the results.“The story was, oh, what’s special about music perception is how it recruits areas from all over the brain, how it draws on the motor system, speech circuitry, social understanding, and brings it all together,” she said. Some researchers dismissed music as “auditory cheesecake,” a pastime that co-opted other essential communicative urges. “This paper says, no, when you peer below the cruder level seen with some methodologies, you find very specific circuitry that responds to music over speech.”
  • The researchers wondered if the auditory system might be similarly organized to make sense of the soundscape through a categorical screen. If so, what would the salient categories be? What are the aural equivalents of a human face or a human leg — sounds or sound elements so essential the brain assigns a bit of gray matter to the task of detecting them?
  • Focusing on the brain’s auditory region — located, appropriately enough, in the temporal lobes right above the ears — the scientists analyzed voxels, or three-dimensional pixels, of the images mathematically to detect similar patterns of neuronal excitement or quietude.“The strength of our method is that it’s hypothesis-neutral,” Dr. McDermott said. “We just present a bunch of sounds and let the data do the talking.”
  • Matching sound clips to activation patterns, the researchers determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, like pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain’s perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, disclosing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, or sulcus, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played.
  • “The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that has a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it,” Dr. Norman-Haignere said. “That’s one reason the result surprised us. The signals of speech are so much more homogeneous.”
  • The researchers have yet to determine exactly which acoustic features of music stimulate its dedicated pathway. The relative constancy of a musical note’s pitch? Its harmonic overlays? Even saying what music is can be tricky.
sissij

Why Does Time Seem to Move Faster as We Grow Older? | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...o-move-faster-as-we-grow-older

science brain science psychology

shared by sissij on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Today it feels like the days peel on by, and a vacation which may last days or weeks is gone in mere hours. This is a common human experience.
  • There are an awful lot of theories that give us insight. But a direct scientific law so far remains elusive.
  • In 1877, the “ratio theory” was born, which states that we compare intervals to the total amount of time we’ve been alive. This can also be called “proportional theory,” the idea that as we age, our sense of the present begins to feel short as compared to our total lifespan.
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  • While youth colors everything anew, as we age, we become more or less familiar with every aspect of our surroundings, and so the nuance wears off.
  • Young people tended to select steady or unchanging metaphors for time, while older people chose those which had to do with swiftness and speed.
  • This creates a “reminiscence bump.” The farther we move away from the bump, the quicker time seems to move.
  • A neurochemical explanation lies in the dopamine level in our brains. This is the pleasure neurotransmitter that gives us a feeling of wellbeing and reward.
  • sissij on 08 Feb 17
     
    I have sometimes think about this issue and the explanation I come up is that when we are seven, one year is one seventh of our live. When we are seventy, the denominator get much bigger and the proportion get significantly smaller, one seventieth. I am very surprised to find that the scientists have similar theory. It also shows how unreliable our sense perception is. We are very unreliable about time since time is a concept that we cannot see or touch. How we feel about time largely depends on our individual emotion. Our brain also tends to remember the first times and we also have a tendency to believe vivid memory. --Sissi (2/8/2017)
Dunia Tonob

The World Today - Speculation rife over missing Chinese leader 11/09/2012 - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...s3587507.htm

shared by Dunia Tonob on 11 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Listen to MP3 of this story ( minutes) Alternate WMA version | MP3 download ELEANOR HALL: China's anointed successor to Hu Jintao as leader of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, has been missing from public view in recent days.Officials are yet to provide
  • an explanation for his absences, and now speculation is building about why and what it could mean for the transition to a new generation of leaders in China later this year.
  • This is a bit unusual, but it is not totally surprising in view of the age of the Chinese leaders. I do believe that the Chinese authorities are extremely sensitive and worried about various potential adverse events or developments that may affect the image of the leadership succession process and the coming party congress.
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    • Dunia Tonob
      Dunia Tonob on 11 Sep 12
       
      Such a culture shock! If something like this occurred in America, I do not believe that the government would get away with keeping it hidden.
  • convention that one should ask about top leaders' health and should not talk about it.
Javier E

Anti-vaccine activists, 9/11 deniers, and Google's social search. - Slate Magazine - 1 views

www.slate.com/...e_s_social_search_.single.html

internet online science skepticism closure lying deceit search

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories
  • Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.
  • Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.
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  • The Vaccine article contains a number of important insights. First, the anti-vaccination cohort likes to move the goal posts: As scientists debunked the link between autism and mercury (once present in some childhood inoculations but now found mainly in certain flu vaccines), most activists dropped their mercury theory and point instead to aluminum or said that kids received “too many too soon.”
  • Second, it isn't clear whether scientists can "discredit" the movement's false claims at all: Its members are skeptical of what scientists have to say—not least because they suspect hidden connections between academia and pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the vaccines.
  • mere exposure to the current state of the scientific consensus will not sway hard-core opponents of vaccination. They are too vested in upholding their contrarian theories; some have consulting and speaking gigs to lose while others simply enjoy a sense of belonging to a community, no matter how kooky
  • attempts to influence communities that embrace pseudoscience or conspiracy theories by having independent experts or, worse, government workers join them—the much-debated antidote of “cognitive infiltration” proposed by Cass Sunstein (who now heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House)—w
  • perhaps, it's time to accept that many of these communities aren't going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential—rather than existent—members.
  • Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option, what can be done to ensure that users are made aware that all the pseudoscientific advice they are likely to encounter may not be backed by science?
  • One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like "vaccination leads to autism" appears in our browser, that sentence woul
  • The second—and not necessarily mutually exclusive—option is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.
  • In more than a dozen countries Google already does something similar for users who are searching for terms like "ways to die" or "suicidal thoughts" by placing a prominent red note urging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.
Duncan H

Study Suggests Way to Delay Age-Related Changes - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4621904577014011448483058.html

health ageing cancer

shared by Duncan H on 03 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Article Video Comments (54) more in Health & Wellness | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ »
  • Scientists may have found a way to put off some conditions of aging, according to a study in which they postponed or even prevented such afflictions as cataracts and wrinkle-inducing fat loss in mice by removing cells that had stopped dividing.
  • Most young, healthy cells divide continuously in order to keep body tissues and organs functioning properly, but eventually stop splitting—a state called senescence—and are replaced by others. Senescence occurs throughout life, but people's ability to clear such cells from their bodies decreases with age, leading to a buildup.
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  • "If you could clear senescent cells, you perhaps could treat age-related diseases as a group rather than individually," said Jan van Deursen, senior author of the paper and a professor in the departments of biochemistry and pediatric and adolescent medicine at Mayo.
  • When cells become senescent, they produce harmful compounds such as those that cause inflammation. Chronic tissue inflammation with aging is thought to underlie dementia, atherosclerosis and diabetes, among other ills,
  • Because senescence is believed to have developed as a defense against cancer, in which cells divide uncontrollably, simply halting the process could be dangerous. But scientists have wondered for decades if the damage inflicted by senescent cells could be stopped if they were removed from the body altogether, or if the harmful substances they produced were neutralized.
  • Duncan H on 03 Nov 11
     
    This seems like a question of a lesser of two evils, but it will be interesting to see where the research goes from here.
Duncan H

In Republican Race, a New Breed of Superdonor - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-new-breed-of-superdonor.html

shared by Duncan H on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • “I might give $10 million or $100 million to Gingrich,” Mr. Adelson said in a coming profile in Forbes magazine. The motivation and logistics behind these large contributions remain something of a mystery. Most megadonors and the campaigns they support are reluctant to talk about the hidden scaffolding of high-level political giving. But glimpses of it emerge in public records.
  • Many of the biggest givers to the pro-Romney super PAC hail from the world of finance, particularly private equity and hedge funds. Julian H. Robertson Jr., who has given at least $1.25 million to Restore Our Future, is considered one of the godfathers of the hedge fund industry.
  • Duncan H on 22 Feb 12
     
    What do you think about the evolution of the Superpacs?
Javier E

"Wikipedia Is Not Truth" - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...wikipedia-is-not-truth.html

wikipedia truth social media coherence

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 12 - Cached
  • entriesOnPage.push("6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c"); facebookButtons['6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c'] = ''; twitterButtons['6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c'] = ''; email permalink 20 Feb 2012 12:30 PM "Wikipedia Is Not Truth" Timothy Messer-Kruse tried to update the Wiki page on the Haymarket riot of 1886 to correct a long-standing inaccurate claim. Even though he's written two books and numerous articles on the subject, his changes were instantly rejected: I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles. One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site's "undue weight" policy, which states that "articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views."
  • "Explain to me, then, how a 'minority' source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong 'majority' one?" I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. ...  Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."
Javier E

New Statesman - All machine and no ghost? - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...consciousness-mind-brain

evolution human brain intelligence contingent

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 12 - Cached
  • More subtly, there are many who insist that consciousness just reduces to brain states - a pang of regret, say, is just a surge of chemicals across a synapse. They are collapsers rather than deniers. Though not avowedly eliminative, this kind of view is tacitly a rejection of the very existence of consciousness
  • it occurred to me that the problem might lie not in nature but in ourselves: we just don't have the faculties of comprehension that would enable us to remove the sense of mystery. Ontologically, matter and consciousness are woven intelligibly together but epistemologically we are precluded from seeing how. I used Noam Chomsky's notion of "mysteries of nature" to describe the situation as I saw it. Soon, I was being labelled (by Owen Flanagan) a "mysterian"
  • Dualism makes the mind too separate, thereby precluding intelligible interaction and dependence.
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  • At this point the idealist swooshes in: ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing but mind! There is no problem of interaction with matter because matter is mere illusion
  • idealism has its charms but taking it seriously requires an antipathy to matter bordering on the maniacal. Are we to suppose that material reality is just a dream, a baseless fantasy, and that the Big Bang was nothing but the cosmic spirit having a mental sneezing fit?
  • pan­psychism: even the lowliest of material things has a streak of sentience running through it, like veins in marble. Not just parcels of organic matter, such as lizards and worms, but also plants and bacteria and water molecules and even electrons. Everything has its primitive feelings and minute allotment of sensation.
  • The trouble with panpsychism is that there just isn't any evidence of the universal distribution of consciousness in the material world.
  • The dualist, by contrast, freely admits that consciousness exists, as well as matter, holding that reality falls into two giant spheres. There is the physical brain, on the one hand, and the conscious mind, on the other: the twain may meet at some point but they remain distinct entities.
  • The more we know of the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness: it's just a big collection of biological cells and a blur of electrical activity - all machine and no ghost.
  • mystery is quite pervasive, even in the hardest of sciences. Physics is a hotbed of mystery: space, time, matter and motion - none of it is free of mysterious elements. The puzzles of quantum theory are just a symptom of this widespread lack of understanding
  • The human intellect grasps the natural world obliquely and glancingly, using mathematics to construct abstract representations of concrete phenomena, but what the ultimate nature of things really is remains obscure and hidden. How everything fits together is particularly elusive, perhaps reflecting the disparate cognitive faculties we bring to bear on the world (the senses, introspection, mathematical description). We are far from obtaining a unified theory of all being and there is no guarantee that such a theory is accessible by finite human intelligence.
  • real naturalism begins with a proper perspective on our specifically human intelligence. Palaeoanthropologists have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centring on the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and constrained the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls (as the lifestyle of other species form their set of cognitive skills). What chance is there that an intelligence geared to making stone tools and grounded in the contingent peculiarities of the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries of the universe? Can omniscience spring from an opposable thumb? It seems unlikely, so why presume that the mysteries of consciousness will be revealed to a thumb-shaped brain like ours?
  • The "mysterianism" I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth - an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would reg
  • rd as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history - as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.
Javier E

Is the Universe a Simulation? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-universe-a-simulation.html

math reality simulation computer

shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. Its truths are objective, necessary and timeless.
  • What kinds of things are mathematical entities and theorems, that they are knowable in this way? Do they exist somewhere, a set of immaterial objects in the enchanted gardens of the Platonic world, waiting to be discovered? Or are they mere creations of the human mind?
  • Many mathematicians, when pressed, admit to being Platonists. The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” But if this is true, how do humans manage to access this hidden reality?
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  • We don’t know. But one fanciful possibility is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics — not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used.
  • the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not. If such simulations are possible in theory, he reasons, then eventually humans will create them — presumably many of them. If this is so, in time there will be many more simulated worlds than nonsimulated ones. Statistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than the real one.
  • The jury is still out on the simulation hypothesis. But even if it proves too far-fetched, the possibility of the Platonic nature of mathematical ideas remains — and may hold the key to understanding our own reality.
Sophia C

When Studies Are Wrong: A Coda - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-studies-are-wrong-a-coda.html

science research technology knowledge

shared by Sophia C on 10 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • All scientific results are, of course, subject to revision and refutation by later experiments. The problem comes when these replications don’t occur and the information keeps spreading unchecked. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Raw Data: Hills to Scientific Discoveries Grow SteeperFEB. 17, 2014 Raw Data: New Truths That Only One Can SeeJAN. 20, 2014 D
  • Based on the number of papers in major journals, Dr. Ioannidis estimates that the field accounts for some 50 percent of published research.
  • Together that constitutes most of scientific research. The remaining slice is physical science — everything from geology and climatology to cosmology and particle physics. These fields have not received the same kind of scrutiny as the others. Is that because they are less prone to the problems Dr. Ioannides describe
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “This certainly increases the transparency, reliability and cross-checking of proposed research findings,” he wrote.
  • “There seems to be a higher community standard for ‘shaming’ reputations if people step out and make claims that are subsequently refuted.” Cold fusion was a notorious example. He also saw less of an aversion to publishing negative experimental results — that is, failed replications.
  • Almost anything might be suspected of causing cancer, but physicists are unlikely to propose conjectures that violate quantum mechanics or general relativity. But I’m not sure the difference is always that stark. Here is how I put it my blog post:
  • “I have no doubt that false positives occur in all of these fields,” he concluded, “and occasionally they may be a major problem.”I’ll be looking further into this matter for a future column and would welcome comments from scientists about the situation in their own domain.
  • problem comes when these replications don’t occur and the information keeps spreading unchecked.
Emily Freilich

Gut Bacteria Might Guide The Workings Of Our Minds : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...transcript.php

bacteria emotion brain science

shared by Emily Freilich on 23 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Turns out you really can have a gut feeling about something, because evidence has been mounting that those microbes in the body may be important for our emotional health as well as our physical health.
  • PRIA TEWARI: Growing up in India we believe that what you eat influences your thoughts.
  • MAYER: We found that the type of community you have, of microbes you have in your gut, is reflected in some ways in some basic architectural aspects of the brain.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • STEIN: The brain connections of people whose microbes are dominated by one species of bacteria look different than those of people whose microbes are dominated by another species. That suggests that the specific mix of microbes in our guts helps determine what kinds of brains we have, how our brain circuits develop, how they're wired.
  • STEIN: It worked the other way around too. The bold mice became timid when they got the microbes of anxious ones. Aggressive mice also calmed down when the scientists altered their microbes by changing their diet, feeding them probiotics, or dosing them with antibiotics.
  • This could help explain why some people are born with brains that don't work the way they're supposed to, causing problems like autism, anxiety, depression.
  • COLLINS: And this resulted in a change in behavior. The mice became a little bit less anxious, a little bit more gregarious.
  • They did things like replace the gut bacteria of anxious mice with bacteria from fearless mice.
  • STEIN: Finally, these scientists figured out how the microbes in the guts of the mice were communicating with their brains - by sending signals up a big nerve known as the vagus nerve.
  • All this is raising the possibility that scientists could create drugs that mimic these signals. Or just give people the good bacteria - probiotics - to prevent or treat problems involving the brain.
Emily Freilich

Another Partisan Divide: Mitt Romney's Looks : It's All Politics : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...isan-divide-mitt-romneys-looks

politics bias

shared by Emily Freilich on 15 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • , individual political biases might have caused 2012 GOP presidential nominee's physical appearance to appear different to Republicans and Democrats.
  • , researchers created two sets of composite photos of Romney's face — one based on the choices of the GOP-leaning participants, and another based on the Democratic-leaning participants.
  • When a separate group of 213 adults were asked which images of Romney looked more trustworthy and more positive, overall they chose the ones generated by the Republicans.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "That our attitudes could bias something that we're exposed to so frequently is an amazing biasing effect,"
  • they may construct a political world in which they literally see candidates differently."
Javier E

The Peril of Knowledge Everywhere - NYTimes.com - 1 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...-peril-of-knowledge-everywhere

Big Data censorship

shared by Javier E on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • Are there things we should try not to know?
  • IBM says that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. That is a number both unimaginable and somewhat unhelpful to real understanding. It’s not just the huge scale of the information, after all, it’s the novel types of data
  • many participants expressed concern about the effects all this data would have on the ability of powerful institutions to control people, from state coercion to product marketing.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • If we want protection from the world we’re building, perhaps we’re asking that the algorithm wielders choose not to know things, despite their being true. To some, that may be a little like the 1616 order by the Catholic Church that Galileo cease from teaching or discussing the idea that the Earth moves around the sun.
  • one bit here and another there, both innocuous, may reveal something personal that is hidden perhaps even from myself.
  • Since then, we have been living in something closer to the spirit of the 18th-century Enlightenment, when all forms of knowledge were acceptable, and learning was a good in its own right. Regulation has been based on actions, not on knowledge.
  • the situation may be something like a vastly more difficult version of laws against red lining
  • we are also entering a new world where individuals can be as powerful as institutions. That phone gives Big Brother lots of data goodies, but it can also have access to its own pattern-finding algorithms, and publish those findings to the world.
Javier E

Professors Are Prejudiced, Too - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...essors-are-prejudiced-too.html

prejudice university professor racial gender education

shared by Javier E on 10 May 14 - No Cached
  • we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang
  • We computed the average response rates for each category of student (e.g., white male, Hispanic female), dividing the number of responses from the professors by the number of emails sent from students in a given race or gender category.
  • response rates did indeed depend on students’ race and gender identity.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities
  • We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities
  • our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving a response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.
  • Surprisingly, several supposed advantages that some people believe women and minorities enjoy did not materialize
  • Were Asians favored, given the model minority stereotype they supposedly benefit from in academic contexts? No. In fact, Chinese students were the most discriminated-against group in our sample
  • Did reaching out to someone of the same gender or race — such as a black student emailing a black professor — reduce bias? No. We saw the same levels of bias in both same-race and same-gender faculty-student pairs that we saw in pairs not sharing a race or gender (the one exception was Chinese students writing to Chinese professors).
  • Did it help to be in a discipline with a greater representation of women and minorities? Again, no. Faculty members in those more diverse disciplines, like criminal justice, were no less likely to discriminate than those in less diverse disciplines,
  • Did it help that these were students in the pre-applicant stage, when some believe underrepresented groups enjoy advantageous access to selective opportunities? Again, no
  • each of the supposed hidden advantages of being a woman or minority proved to be no more than a phantom.
catbclark

Can Philosophy Help Predict a Turn in the Markets? - TheStreet - 0 views

www.thestreet.com/...ict-a-turn-in-the-markets.html

philosophy markets research

shared by catbclark on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • While calling market tops is notoriously hard, perhaps we can look to the great philosophers for wisdom on how the markets might behave
  • f all our inner lives are so hidden, how on earth can we make predictions about human behavioral patterns and ones that are going to affect the market?
  • Regardless of the results of this experiment the reminder of our relative ignorance will spark research interest in the physics and the psychology of time."
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