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Javier E

Book Club: A Guide To Living « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...book-club-a-guide-to-living

Montaigne philosophers skepticism conservatism

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • He proves nothing that he doesn’t simultaneously subvert a little; he makes no over-arching argument about the way humans must live; he has no logician’s architecture or religious doctrine. He slips past all those familiar means of telling other people what’s good for them, and simply explains what has worked for him and others and leaves the reader empowered to forge her own future
  • You can see its eccentric power by considering the alternative ways of doing what Montaigne was doing. Think of contemporary self-help books – and all the fake certainty and rigid formulae they contain. Or think of a hideous idea like “the purpose-driven life” in which everything must be forced into the box of divine guidance in order to really live at all. Think of the stringency of Christian disciplines – say, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola – and marvel at how Montaigne offers an entirely different and less compelling way to live. Think of the rigidity of Muslim practice and notice how much lee-way Montaigne gives to sin
  • This is a non-philosophical philosophy. It is a theory of practical life as told through one man’s random and yet not-so-random reflections on his time on earth. And it is shot through with doubt. Even the maxims that Montaigne embraces for living are edged with those critical elements of Montaigne’s thought that say “as far as I know”
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  • Is this enough? Or is it rather a capitulation to relativism, a manifesto for political quietism, a worldview that treats injustice as something to be abhorred but not constantly fought against? This might be seen as the core progressive objection to the way of Montaigne. Or is his sensibility in an age of religious terror and violence and fanaticism the only ultimate solution we have?
  • here’s what we do know. We are fallible beings; we have nothing but provisional knowledge; and we will die. And this is enough. This does not mean we should give up inquiring or seeking to understand. Skepticism is not nihilism. It doesn’t posit that there is no truth; it merely notes that if truth exists, it is inherently beyond our ultimate grasp. And accepting those limits is the first step toward sanity, toward getting on with life. This is what I mean by conservatism.
  • you can find in philosophy any number of clues about how to live; you can even construct them into an ideology that explains all of human life and society – like Marxism or free market fundamentalism or a Nietzschean will to power. But as each totalist system broke down upon my further inspection, I found myself returning to Montaigne and the tradition of skepticism he represents
  • If I were to single out one theme of Montaigne’s work that has stuck with me, it would be this staring of death in the face, early and often, and never flinching. It is what our culture refuses to do much of the time, thereby disempowering us in the face of our human challenges.
kushnerha

BBC - Future - Will emoji become a new language? - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...ll-emoji-become-a-new-language

bbc language emoji psychology grammar

shared by kushnerha on 19 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.
  • If you were to believe the headlines, this is just the tipping point: some outlets have claimed that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage. To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is linguistic Armageddon.
  • Do emoji show the same characteristics of other communicative systems and actual languages? And what do they help us to express that words alone can’t say?When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.
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  • This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural language ever limited to speech alone. When we are speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we mean. For this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-verbal information, but emoji may allow us to re-incorporate it into our text.
  • Emoji are not always used as embellishments, however – sometimes, strings of the characters can themselves convey meaning in a longer sequence on their own. But to constitute their own language, they would need a key component: grammar.
  • A grammatical system is a set of constraints that governs how the meaning of an utterance is packaged in a coherent way. Natural language grammars have certain traits that distinguish them. For one, they have individual units that play different roles in the sequence – like nouns and verbs in a sentence. Also, grammar is different from meaning
  • When emoji are isolated, they are primarily governed by simple rules related to meaning alone, without these more complex rules. For instance, according to research by Tyler Schnoebelen, people often create strings of emoji that share a common meaning
  • This sequence has little internal structure; even when it is rearranged, it still conveys the same message. These images are connected solely by their broader meaning. We might consider them to be a visual list: “here are all things related to celebrations and birthdays.” Lists are certainly a conventionalised way of communicating, but they don’t have grammar the way that sentences do.
  • What if the order did matter though? What if they conveyed a temporal sequence of events? Consider this example, which means something like “a woman had a party where they drank, and then opened presents and then had cake”:
  • In all cases, the doer of the action (the agent) precedes the action. In fact, this pattern is commonly found in both full languages and simple communication systems. For example, the majority of the world’s languages place the subject before the verb of a sentence.
  • These rules may seem like the seeds of grammar, but psycholinguist Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues have found this order appears in many other systems that would not be considered a language. For example, this order appears when people arrange pictures to describe events from an animated cartoon, or when speaking adults communicate using only gestures. It also appears in the gesture systems created by deaf children who cannot hear spoken languages and are not exposed to sign languages.
  • describes the children as lacking exposure to a language and thus invent their own manual systems to communicate, called “homesigns”. These systems are limited in the size of their vocabularies and the types of sequences they can create. For this reason, the agent-act order seems not to be due to a grammar, but from basic heuristics – practical workarounds – based on meaning alone. Emoji seem to tap into this same system.
  • Nevertheless, some may argue that despite emoji’s current simplicity, this may be the groundwork for emerging complexity – that although emoji do not constitute a language at the present time, they could develop into one over time.
  • Could an emerging “emoji visual language” be developing in a similar way, with actual grammatical structure? To answer that question, you need to consider the intrinsic constraints on the technology itself.Emoji are created by typing into a computer like text. But, unlike text, most emoji are provided as whole units, except for the limited set of emoticons which convert to emoji, like :) or ;). When writing text, we use the building blocks (letters) to create the units (words), not by searching through a list of every whole word in the language.
  • emoji force us to convey information in a linear unit-unit string, which limits how complex expressions can be made. These constraints may mean that they will never be able to achieve even the most basic complexity that we can create with normal and natural drawings.
  • What’s more, these limits also prevent users from creating novel signs – a requisite for all languages, especially emerging ones. Users have no control over the development of the vocabulary. As the “vocab list” for emoji grows, it will become increasingly unwieldy: using them will require a conscious search process through an external list, not an easy generation from our own mental vocabulary, like the way we naturally speak or draw. This is a key point – it means that emoji lack the flexibility needed to create a new language.
  • we already have very robust visual languages, as can be seen in comics and graphic novels. As I argue in my book, The Visual Language of Comics, the drawings found in comics use a systematic visual vocabulary (such as stink lines to represent smell, or stars to represent dizziness). Importantly, the available vocabulary is not constrained by technology and has developed naturally over time, like spoken and written languages.
  • grammar of sequential images is more of a narrative structure – not of nouns and verbs. Yet, these sequences use principles of combination like any other grammar, including roles played by images, groupings of images, and hierarchic embedding.
  • measured participants’ brainwaves while they viewed sequences one image at a time where a disruption appeared either within the groupings of panels or at the natural break between groupings. The particular brainwave responses that we observed were similar to those that experimenters find when violating the syntax of sentences. That is, the brain responds the same way to violations of “grammar”, whether in sentences or sequential narrative images.
  • I would hypothesise that emoji can use a basic narrative structure to organise short stories (likely made up of agent-action sequences), but I highly doubt that they would be able to create embedded clauses like these. I would also doubt that you would see the same kinds of brain responses that we saw with the comic strip sequences.
margogramiak

How To Fight Deforestation In The Amazon From Your Couch | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...nce_n_5f737910c5b6f622a0c5b94c

shared by margogramiak on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • If you’ve got as little as 30 seconds and a decent internet connection, you can help combat the deforestation of the Amazon. 
  • Some 15% of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and a crucial carbon repository, has been cut or burned down. Around two-thirds of the Amazon lie within Brazil’s borders, where almost 157 square miles of forest were cleared in April alone. In addition to storing billions of tons of carbon, the Amazon is home to tens of millions of people and some 10% of the Earth’s biodiversity.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      all horrifying stats.
  • you just have to be a citizen that is concerned about the issue of deforestation,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      that's me!
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  • If you’ve got as little as 30 seconds and a decent internet connection, you can help combat the deforestation of the Amazon. 
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      great!
  • to build an artificial intelligence model that can recognize signs of deforestation. That data can be used to alert governments and conservation organizations where intervention is needed and to inform policies that protect vital ecosystems. It may even one day predict where deforestation is likely to happen next.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      That sounds super cool, and definitely useful.
  • To monitor deforestation, conservation organizations need an eye in the sky.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      bird's eye view pictures of deforestation are always super impactful.
  • WRI’s Global Forest Watch online tracking system receives images of the world’s forests taken every few days by NASA satellites. A simple computer algorithm scans the images, flagging instances where before there were trees and now there are not. But slight disturbances, such as clouds, can trip up the computer, so experts are increasingly interested in using artificial intelligence.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      that's so cool.
  • Users simply select the squares in which they’ve spotted some indication of human impact: the tell-tale quilt of farm plots, a highway, a suspiciously straight edge of tree line. 
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I could do that!
  • Look at these nine blocks and make a judgment about each one. Does that satellite image look like a situation where human beings have transformed the landscape in some way?” Inman explained.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      seems simple enough
  • It’s not always easy; that’s the point. For example, a brown patch in the trees could be the result of burning to clear land for agriculture (earning a check mark for human impact), or it could be the result of a natural forest fire (no check mark). Keen users might be able to spot subtle signs of intervention the computer would miss, like the thin yellow line of a dirt road running through the clearing. 
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I was thinking about this issue... that's a hard problem to solve.
  • SAS’s website offers a handful of examples comparing natural forest features and manmade changes. 
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I guess that would be helpful. What happens if someone messes up though?
  • users have analyzed almost 41,000 images, covering an area of rainforest nearly the size of the state of Montana. Deforestation caused by human activity is evident in almost 2 in 5 photos.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      wow.
  • The researchers hope to use historical images of these new geographies to create a predictive model that could identify areas most at risk of future deforestation. If they can show that their AI model is successful, it could be useful for NGOs, governments and forest monitoring bodies, enabling them to carefully track forest changes and respond by sending park rangers and conservation teams to threatened areas. In the meantime, it’s a great educational tool for the citizen scientists who use the app
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      But then what do they do with this data? How do they use it to make a difference?
  • Inman was surprised how willing people have been to spend their time clicking on abstract-looking pictures of the Amazon.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I'm glad so many people want to help.
  • we have still had people from 80 different countries come onto the app and make literally hundreds of judgments that enabled us to resolve 40,000 images,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I like how in a sense it makes all the users one big community because of their common goal of wanting to help the earth.
Javier E

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

chronicle.com/...135160

psychopathy psychology brain science reading historical development

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • 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?
Emily Horwitz

'I Wanna Eat You Up!' Why We Go Crazy for Cute | LiveScience - 1 views

www.livescience.com/-we-go-crazy-for-cuteness.html

psychology knowledge animals

shared by Emily Horwitz on 21 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • NEW ORLEANS — Ever reacted to the sight of a cute puppy or darling infant by squealing, "I want to eat you up!"? Or maybe you can't help but want to pinch your grandbaby's adorable cheeks. You're not alone. New research finds that seemingly strange aggressive responses to cuteness are actually the norm.
  • In the study, presented Friday (Jan. 18) here at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that people watching a slideshow of adorable pictures popped more bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap than did people viewing funny or neutral pictures.
  • The participants rated the pictures on cuteness and funniness, as well as on how much they felt the pictures made them lose control — for example, if they agreed with statements such as "I can't handle it!" The participants also rated the extent to which the pictures made them "want to say something like 'grr!'" and "want to squeeze something." Sure enough, the cuter the animal, the less control and more desire to "grrr" and squeeze something that people felt. Cute animals produced this feeling significantly more strongly than did funny animals. The funny critters in turn produced the feeling more strongly than did neutral animals, perhaps because the funny animals were perceived as cute, too, Dyer said.
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  • yer got interested in what she and her colleagues call "cute aggression" after chatting with a fellow student about how adorable Internet pictures often produce the desire to squish or squeeze the cute critter. All the existing research on cuteness suggests the reaction should be the opposite, she told LiveScience. People should want to treat a cute thing with gentleness and care.
  • That's exactly what happened. The people watching a cute slideshow popped 120 bubbles, on average, compared with 80 for the funny slideshow and just a hair over 100 for the neutral one.
  • It's possible that seeing a wide-eyed baby or roly-poly pup triggers our drive to care for that creature, Dyer said. But since the animal is just a picture, and since even in real life we might not be able to care for the creature as much as we want, this urge may be frustrated, she said. That frustration could lead to aggression.
  • Or the reason might not be specific to cuteness, Dyer said. Many overwhelmingly positive emotions look negative, as when Miss America sobs while receiving her crown. Such high levels of positive emotion may overwhelm people.
Javier E

Do Political Experts Know What They're Talking About? | Wired Science | Wired... - 1 views

www.wired.com/...know-what-theyre-talking-about

expertise politics economics research results

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • I often joke that every cable news show should be forced to display a disclaimer, streaming in a loop at the bottom of the screen. The disclaimer would read: “These talking heads have been scientifically proven to not know what they are talking about. Their blather is for entertainment purposes only.” The viewer would then be referred to Tetlock’s most famous research project, which began in 1984.
  • He picked a few hundred political experts – people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends” – and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their minds.
  • Most of Tetlock’s questions had three possible answers; the pundits, on average, selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. These results are summarized in his excellent Expert Political Judgment.
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  • Some experts displayed a top-down style of reasoning: politics as a deductive art. They started with a big-idea premise about human nature, society, or economics and applied it to the specifics of the case. They tended to reach more confident conclusions about the future. And the positions they reached were easier to classify ideologically: that is the Keynesian prediction and that is the free-market fundamentalist prediction and that is the worst-case environmentalist prediction and that is the best case technology-driven growth prediction etc. Other experts displayed a bottom-up style of reasoning: politics as a much messier inductive art. They reached less confident conclusions and they are more likely to draw on a seemingly contradictory mix of ideas in reaching those conclusions (sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right). We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).
  • The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).
  • Lehrer: Can non-experts do anything to encourage a more effective punditocracy?
  • Tetlock: Yes, non-experts can encourage more accountability in the punditocracy. Pundits are remarkably skillful at appearing to go out on a limb in their claims about the future, without actually going out on one. For instance, they often “predict” continued instability and turmoil in the Middle East (predicting the present) but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations. They are essentially impossible to pin down. If pundits felt that their public credibility hinged on participating in level playing field forecasting exercises in which they must pit their wits against an extremely difficult-to-predict world, I suspect they would be learn, quite quickly, to be more flexible and foxlike in their policy pronouncements.
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B Mannke

The War No Image Could Capture - Deborah Cohen - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354670

shared by B Mannke on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Essay December 2013 The War No Image Could Capture Photography has given us iconic representations of conflict since the Civil War—with a notable exception. Why, during the Great War, the camera failed. 
  • They could not be rescued yet, and so an anonymous official photographer attached to the Royal Engineers did what he could to record the scene. The picture he took, though, tells almost nothing without a caption. The landscape is flat and featureless. The dead and wounded look like dots. “Like a million bloody rugs,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald of the Somme carnage. In fact, you can’t make out blood. You can’t even tell you’re looking at bodies.
  • iconic representations of war
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  • World War I yielded a number of striking and affecting pictures. Some, included in the gallery of 380 presented in The Great War: A Photographic Narrative, are famous: the line of gassed men, blinded and clutching each other’s shoulders as they approach a first-aid station in 1918; the haunting, charred landscapes of the Ypres Salient in 1917. And yet in both cases, the more-renowned versions were their painted successors of 1919: John Singer Sargent’s oil painting Gassed, and Paul Nash’s semi-abstract rendering of the blasted Belgian flatland, The Menin Road. The essence of the Great War lies in the absence of any emblematic photograph.
  • The quest to communicate an unprecedented experience of combat began almost as soon as the war did, and it has continued ever since
  • All Quiet on the Western Front (1929): the war was unimaginable, dehumanizing, the unredeemable sacrifice of a generation. It marked the origin of our ironic sensibility
  • The central conundrum in representing the First World War is a stark one: the staggering statistics of matériel, manpower, and casualties threaten constantly to extinguish the individual. That was what the war poets understood, and why the images they summoned in words have been transmitted down a century. As Wilfred Owen did in “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917), the poets addressed their readers directly, unsettling them with a vision of the damage suffered by a particular man’s body or mind.
  • The British prime minister’s own eldest son, Raymond Asquith, was killed a few days later and a few miles away, at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette.
  • We felt they were mad.”
  • Needless to say, such a move was not repeated.
  • A great deal of the official photography of 1914 and 1915 borders on the risible: stiffly posed pictures that gesture to the heroic war that had been foretold rather than the war that was unfolding. In one picture, a marksman in a neat uniform crouches safely behind a fortification, intent on his quarry. In another, a dugout looks like a stage set, in which the actors have been urged to strike contemplative poses.
  • e Battle of Guillemont, a British and French offensive that was successful but at great cost, this image from September 1916, by the British official photographer John Warwick Brooke, is disorienting at first glance. Are the inert lumps on the ground dead bodies, or parts of dead bodies? They are neither. But the initial relief upon recognizing that they’re inanimate objects evaporates
  • Photography, of course, can’t capture sounds or bitter intonations—that devastatingly exact gargling, not gurgling
  • . All the way through—as he meticulously documents the laborious mobilization, the pointless charges, the dead and injured marooned in the field—Sacco’s perspective is from the British lines, which means the soldiers are seen mostly from the back. He gets the details of the carts, the guns, and the uniforms exactly right. The faces he draws are deliberately generic.
  • They visited the battlefields to find the small white headstone with their soldier’s name; when there was no grave, they touched the place where a name was engraved on a memorial. They held séances to summon the dead. But inevitably, as the decades roll on, what endures are the fearsome numbers.
grayton downing

Language Makes the Invisible Visible | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37012/title/Language-Makes-the-Invisible-Visible/

language scientist science research sense perception

shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Language helps the human brain perceive obscured objects,
  • While some scientists have argued that vision is independent from outside factors, such as sounds or the brain’s accumulated knowledge, the study indicates that language influences perception at its most basic level.
  • “I think [the study] makes a really important contribution to the field of visual perception and cognition in general,” said Michael Spivey,
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • tested the effects of language on perception by either saying or not saying a word and showing study participants either an obscured image that matched the word, an obscured image that did not match the word, or no image at all. Images ranged from kangaroos to bananas to laundry baskets. The researchers then asked the participants if they had perceived any objects and, if so, ascertained what they had seen.
  • participants were more likely to perceive an image if they had been given an accurate verbal cue first than if they had been given no cue or an incorrect one. With an accurate cue, they identified the object correctly around 50 percent and 80 percent of the time
  •  By using continuous flash suppression, Lupyan has “done the best job yet of showing where the interaction happening is in perception,” Spivey said.
  • Lupyan said that his work could help researchers discern whether people who speak different languages perceive the world differently. For instance, if two people spoke different languages that either did or did not have words for a certain color or texture, the person lacking language to describe the color or texture might be less likely to perceive it.
  • “More and more what the field is finding is that any cognitive or perceptual capacity you find interesting is probably richly connected with other ones.” “The visual system—and perception in general—uses all the information it can get to make sense of the inputs,” said Lupyan. “Vision is not just about the photons hitting the eye.”
  • “The visual system—and perception in general—uses all the information it can get to make sense of the inputs,” said Lupyan
demetriar

How Men And Women Process Emotions Differently - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...d-women-process_n_6510160.html

brain science emotions technology memory

shared by demetriar on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Previous research has shown that women generally experience higher levels of emotional stimulation than men. Now, a new large-scale study from the University of Basel suggests that gender differences in emotion processing are also linked to sex variation in memory and brain activity.
  • finding that women rated these images as more emotionally stimulating than men, particularly in the case of negative images. When presented with emotionally neutral imagery, however, the men and women responded similarly.
  • After being exposed to the images, the participants completed a memory test. The female participants were able to recall significantly more of the images than their male counterparts.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Then, fMRI data from 700 participants suggested that womens' stronger reactivity to negative emotional images is linked with increased activity of motor regions of the brain.
  • The findings may help scientists to come to a better understanding of gender differences in neuropsychiatric conditions, which may pave the way for improved treatment options.
  • "Women are more likely to develop major depression, anxiety disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are related to emotional dysregulation," Milnik said. "We hope that understanding the neural correlates of sex-specific emotional processing will be an important step towards elucidating the mechanisms linked to sex-dependent emotional dysregulation."
Javier E

What Does "Beauty" Look Like Around the World? - 5 views

www.flavorwire.com/...uty-look-like-around-the-world

beauty international comparison Internet research cultural aesthetics universal art

shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Like most aspects of our lives, our web surfing habits suffer from naïve provincialism. Image Atlas, an online image search tool that categorizes results by country, offers at least one way to remedy this shortsightedness. 
  • Image Atlas allows you to customize your search by selecting different countries from their list and sorting them either alphabetically or by GDP.
  • We thought it might be interesting to put Image Atlas to the test by choosing a handful of countries and taking a look at the search results for the term “beauty.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • seeing them categorized by country does reveal some striking patterns, differences, and commonalities, the most obvious of which is the fact that the images consist overwhelmingly of women.
  • with few exceptions, they tend even in non-Western countries to be of fair-skinned, Western-looking women.
  • even in countries with very different cultural backgrounds, search engines appear to be saturated with a heavily biased, Westernized ideal of attractiveness.
  • There’s a staggering number of beauty products, makeup applicators, and spa treatments, all of which essentially suggest that beauty is something to be purchased and applied.
  • What are some other key search terms that you find particularly revealing?
caelengrubb

Anxiety, loneliness and Fear of Missing Out: The impact of social media on young people... - 0 views

www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/...ia-young-peoples-mental-health

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • By 2021, it is forecast that there will be around 3 billion active monthly users of social media. From the statistics alone, it’s clear that social media has become an integral (and to a large extent, unavoidable) part of our lives.
  • One implication of social media’s rapid rise, that of its relationship with young people’s mental health, has gathered a significant amount of attention in recent years.
  • So-called ‘social media addiction’ has been referred to by a wide variety of studies and experiments. It is thought that addiction to social media affects around 5% of young people, and was recently described as potentially more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The ‘urge’ to check one’s social media may be linked to both instant gratification (the need to experience fast, short term pleasure) and dopamine production (the chemical in the brain associated with reward and pleasure).
  • The popular concept of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) refers to ‘a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent’ and is ‘characterised by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing’.
  • Data from qualitative studies has shown that using social media compulsively can damage sleeping patterns, having an adverse effect on young people’s performance in school
  • The University of Glasgow found that young people found it difficult to relax following night time social media use, reducing their brain’s ability to prepare for sleep. Sleep loss works in a vicious cycle of reinforcement with mental health; that is, that loss of sleep due to night time social media use can lead to poorer mental health, and poor mental health can lead to intense night time use and sleep loss
  • What is dangerous about this compulsive use is that, if gratification is not experienced, users may internalise beliefs that this is due to being ‘unpopular’, ‘unfunny’ etc. A lack of ‘likes’ on a status update may cause negative self-reflection, prompting continual ‘refreshing’ of the page in the hope of seeing that another person has ‘enjoyed’ the post, thus helping to achieve personal validation.
  • FOMO has been linked to intensive social media use and is associated with lower mood and life satisfaction.
  • Social media has been linked to poor self-esteem and self-image through the advent of image manipulation on photo sharing platforms. In particular, the notion of the ‘idealised body image’ has arguably been detrimental to self-esteem and image, especially that of young women. The 24/7 circulation of easily viewable manipulated images promotes and entrenches unrealistic expectations of how young people should look and behave.
  • The evidence suggests that social media use is strongly associated with anxiety, loneliness and depression
margogramiak

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

www.sciencedaily.com/...201022201407.htm

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

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices - Derek ... - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267255

rational choice rationality psychology consumer economics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 15 - No Cached
  • Atlantic.displayRandomElement('#header li.business .sponsored-dropdown-item'); Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website. More Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. All Posts RSS feed Share Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on twitter « Previous Thompson Email Print Close function plusOneCallback () { $(document).trigger('share'); } $(document).ready(function() { var iframeUrl = "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"; var toolsClicked = false; $('#toolsTop').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'top'; }); $('#toolsBottom').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'bottom'; }); $('#thanksForSharing a.hide').click(function() { $('#thanksForSharing').hide(); }); var onShareClickHandler = function() { var top = parseInt($(this).css('top').replace(/px/, ''), 10); toolsClicked = (top > 600) ? 'bottom' : 'top'; }; var onIframeReady = function(iframe) { var win = iframe.contentWindow; // Don't show the box if there's no ad in it if (win.$('.ad').children().length == 1) { return; } var visibleAds = win.$('.ad').filter(function() { return !($(this).css('display') == 'none'); }); if (visibleAds.length == 0) { // Ad is hidden, so don't show return; } if (win.$('.ad').hasClass('adNotLoaded')) { // Ad failed to load so don't show return; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('display', 'block'); var top; if(toolsClicked == 'bottom' && $('#toolsBottom').length) { top = $('#toolsBottom')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsBottom').height() - 310; } else { top = $('#toolsTop')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsTop').height() + 10; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('left', (-$('#toolsTop').offset().left + 60) + 'px'); $('#thanksForSharing').css('top', top + 'px'); }; var onShare = function() { // Close "Share successful!" AddThis plugin popup if (window._atw && window._atw.clb && $('#at15s:visible').length) { _atw.clb(); } if (iframeUrl == null) { return; } $('#thanksForSharingIframe').attr('src', "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"); $('#thanksForSharingIframe').load(function() { var iframe = this; var win = iframe.contentWindow; if (win.loaded) { onIframeReady(iframe); } else { win.$(iframe.contentDocument).ready(function() { onIframeReady(iframe); }) } }); }; if (window.addthis) { addthis.addEventListener('addthis.ready', function() { $('.articleTools .share').mouseover(function() { $('#at15s').unbind('click', onShareClickHandler); $('#at15s').bind('click', onShareClickHandler); }); }); addthis.addEventListener('addthis.menu.share', function(evt) { onShare(); }); } // This 'share' event is used for testing, so one can call // $(document).trigger('share') to get the thank you for // sharing box to appear. $(document).bind('share', function(event) { onShare(); }); if (!window.FB || (window.FB && !window.FB._apiKey)) { // Hook into the fbAsyncInit function and register our listener there var oldFbAsyncInit = (window.fbAsyncInit) ? window.fbAsyncInit : (function() { }); window.fbAsyncInit = function() { oldFbAsyncInit(); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); }; } else if (window.FB) { FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); } }); The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices By Derek Thompson he
  • First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb.
  • Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences.
  • The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us
  • neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.
  • The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.
  • the final message is that neither the physiology of pleasure nor the methods we use to make choices are as simple or as single-minded as the classical economists thought. A lot of behavior is consistent with pursuit of self-interest, but in novel or ambiguous decision-making environments there is a good chance that our habits will fail us and inconsistencies in the way we process information will undo us.
  • Our brains seem to operate like committees, assigning some tasks to the limbic system, others to the frontal system. The "switchboard" does not seem to achieve complete, consistent communication between different parts of the brain. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the limbic system, but not on one fixed "utility" or "self-interest" scale. Pleasure and pain have distinct neural pathways, and these pathways adapt quickly to homeostasis, with sensation coming from changes rather than levels
  • Social networks are sources of information, on what products are available, what their features are, and how your friends like them. If the information is accurate, this should help you make better choices. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for you to follow the crowd rather than engaging in the due diligence of collecting and evaluating your own information and playing it against your own preferences
Javier E

OUPblog » Blog Archive » While You Are/n't Sleeping - 1 views

blog.oup.com/...while-you-arent-sleeping

sleep nightmares unconscious memory studying

shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 10 - Cached
  • In sleep the unconscious selects new experiences to save in memory, particularly new experiences that have an emotional charge.
  • If you worked hard to learn something new you will remember it better after a period of sleep than if you stay awake before you need to remember that new learning.
  • Nightmares are defined as a vivid dream with strongly negative emotion that wakes the sleeper abruptly, with a clear memory of the dream. The awakening aborts the natural process of down-regulation of negative emotion. Therefore the dream is not completed and the process will repeat until some other experience allows the downloading of the negative emotion to take place. That is why small children have more nightmares than grown-ups. To children many experiences are frightening until we develop more coping skills
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Is there a treatment for nightmares that keep repeating? Yes. There is a new medication that works well especially when paired with a psychotherapy that trains the person to identify what the negative emotion is in response to. What is the fear? Or the anger? Or humiliation? Once identified, the person must name the opposite emotion, and develop an image to represent that alternative. If the nightmare is one of fear of being attacked, the dreamer is instructed to create an image of the opposite emotion: for example, relief over an escape. So, to overcome a nightmare it is important that the dreamer: 1) Identifies why the nightmare was so strong that it woke them, 2) Name the opposite feeling, 3) Create an opposite image to represent that good emotion, 4) Practice that new image several times a day until it is easy to experience it at will. This image rehearsal is very successful with nightmares once the person feels “in charge”.
runlai_jiang

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

www.nytimes.com/...ces-2018-reader-questions.html

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • 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. Jump to topic: CES Internet of Things TV Wireless Expand All Collapse All /* SHOW LIBRARY ===================== */ .g-show-xsmall, .g-show-small, .g-show-smallplus, .g-show-submedium, .g-show-sub-medium, .g-show-medium, .g-show-large, .g-show-xlarge { display: none; } .g-show { display: block; } .lt-ie10 .g-aiImg { width: 100%; } /* story top */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { max-width: 720px; margin: 0 auto 10px; text-align: center; line-height: 2.844rem; font-size: 2.4rem; } @media only screen and (max-width: 1244px) { .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { line-height: 2.5596rem; font-size: 2.16rem; } } @media only screen and (max-width: 719px) { .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { line-height: 2.2752rem; font-size: 1.92rem; } } .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .interactive-leadin.summary { max-width: 460px; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; text-align: left; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1.6; } .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .byline-dateline { text-align: center; 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} .viewport-small-20 .g-map-key .g-key-row p { width: auto; max-width: none; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-rect { width: 22px; height: 10px; margin-top: 4px; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-circle { width: 9px; height: 9px; border-radius: 50%; margin-top: 4px; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-custom { width: 20px; height: 20px; background-size: 100%; display: block; float: left; width: 24px; height: 24px; margin: -4px 2px 0 0; } .viewport-small .g-map-key .g-key-row-title p { width: 100%; max-width: none; } .g-red-dot, .g-black-dot { display: inline-block; background: #d00; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20px; height: 20px; font: 700 14px/1.4 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; border-radius: 10px; line-height: 20px; } .g-black-dot { background: #222; } /* column text */ .g-column-container { max-width: 460px; margin: 20px auto 0 auto; } .viewport-medium .g-column-container { max-width: 1050px; } .viewport-large .g-column-container { margin-bottom: 30px; } .g-column-container .g-column-hed { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; 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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,
manhefnawi

Infants Can See Image Differences That Adults Cannot, Study Finds | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...nces-adults-cannot-study-finds

Perception

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Babies may be able to see image details that are invisible or imperceptible to adults. According to a recent study [PDF] from Japanese scientists Jiale Yang, So Kanazawa, Masami K. Yamaguchi, and Isamu Motoyoshi, three- and four-month-old infants may view certain images differently because they lack perceptual constancy. That means they can see small image differences that are invisible to adults because of changes in lighting conditions.
Javier E

Opinion | Imagination Is More Important Than You Think - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...imagination-empathy.html

imagination perspectives psychology knowledge

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Plato and Aristotle disagreed about the imagination
  • Plato gave the impression that imagination is a somewhat airy-fairy luxury good. It deals with illusions and make-believe and distracts us from reality and our capacity to coolly reason about it. Aristotle countered that imagination is one of the foundations of all knowledge.
  • What is imagination?
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  • Imagination is the capacity to make associations among all these bits of information and to synthesize them into patterns and concepts.
  • When you walk, say, into a coffee shop you don’t see an array of surfaces, lights and angles. Your imagination instantly coalesces all that into an image: “coffee shop.”
  • Neuroscientists have come to appreciate how fantastically complicated and subjective this process of creating mental images really is. You may think perception is a simple “objective” process of taking in the world and cognition is a complicated process of thinking about it. But that’s wrong.
  • Perception — the fast process of selecting, putting together, interpreting and experiencing facts, thoughts and emotions — is the essential poetic act that makes you you.
  • For example, you don’t see the naked concept “coffee shop.” The image you create is coated with personal feelings, memories and evaluations. You see: “slightly upscale suburban coffee shop trying and failing to send off a hipster vibe.” The imagination, Charles Darwin wrote, “unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results.”
  • Imagination helps you perceive reality, try on other realities, predict possible futures, experience other viewpoints. And yet how much do schools prioritize the cultivation of this essential ability?
  • “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” William Blake observed.
  • Can you improve your imagination? Yes. By creating complex and varied lenses through which to see the world
  • A person who feeds his or her imagination with a fuller repertoire of thoughts and experiences has the ability not only to see reality more richly but also — even more rare — to imagine the world through the imaginations of others.
  • This is the skill we see in Shakespeare to such a miraculous degree — his ability to disappear into his characters and inhabit their points of view without ever pretending to explain them.
  • Different people have different kinds of imagination. Some people mainly focus on the parts of the world that can be quantified.
  • it often doesn’t see the subjective way people coat the world with values and emotions and aspirations, which is exactly what we want to see if we want to glimpse how they experience their experience.
  • Furthermore, imagination can get richer over time. When you go to Thanksgiving dinner, your image of Uncle Frank contains the memories of past Thanksgivings, the arguments and the jokes, and the whole sum of your common experiences. The guy you once saw as an insufferable blowhard you now see — as your range of associations has widened and deepened — as a decent soul struggling with his wounds.
  • What happens to a society that lets so much of its imaginative capacity lie fallow? Perhaps you wind up in a society in which people are strangers to one another and themselves.
Javier E

Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...-true-on-the-internet-89843150

truth trust fake misinformation authenticity social media AI deepfake generative propaganda

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.
  • Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.
  • exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. 
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  • “When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’” says David Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who studies the creation, spread and impact of misinformation.
  • This problem, which has grown more acute in the age of generative AI, is known as the “liar’s dividend,
  • The combination of easily-generated fake content and the suspicion that anything might be fake allows people to choose what they want to believe, adds DiResta, leading to what she calls “bespoke realities.”
  • Examples of misleading content created by generative AI are not hard to come by, especially on social media
  • The signs that an image is AI-generated are easy to miss for a user simply scrolling past, who has an instant to decide whether to like or boost a post on social media. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s likely that such signs will be harder to spot in the future.
  • “What our work suggests is that most regular people do not want to share false things—the problem is they are not paying attention,”
  • in the course of a lawsuit over the death of a man using Tesla’s “full self-driving” system, Elon Musk’s lawyers responded to video evidence of Musk making claims about this software by suggesting that the proliferation of “deepfakes” of Musk was grounds to dismiss such evidence. They advanced that argument even though the clip of Musk was verifiably real
  • are now using its existence as a pretext to dismiss accurate information
  • People’s attention is already limited, and the way social media works—encouraging us to gorge on content, while quickly deciding whether or not to share it—leaves us precious little capacity to determine whether or not something is true
  • If the crisis of authenticity were limited to social media, we might be able to take solace in communication with those closest to us. But even those interactions are now potentially rife with AI-generated fakes.
  • what sounds like a call from a grandchild requesting bail money may be scammers who have scraped recordings of the grandchild’s voice from social media to dupe a grandparent into sending money.
  • companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are trying to spin the altering of personal images as a good thing. 
  • With its latest Pixel phone, the company unveiled a suite of new and upgraded tools that can automatically replace a person’s face in one image with their face from another, or quickly remove someone from a photo entirely.
  • Joseph Stalin, who was fond of erasing people he didn’t like from official photos, would have loved this technology.
  • In Google’s defense, it is adding a record of whether an image was altered to data attached to it. But such metadata is only accessible in the original photo and some copies, and is easy enough to strip out.
  • The rapid adoption of many different AI tools means that we are now forced to question everything that we are exposed to in any medium, from our immediate communities to the geopolitical, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who
  • To put our current moment in historical context, he notes that the PC revolution made it easy to store and replicate information, the internet made it easy to publish it, the mobile revolution made it easier than ever to access and spread, and the rise of AI has made creating misinformation a cinch. And each revolution arrived faster than the one before it.
  • Not everyone agrees that arming the public with easy access to AI will exacerbate our current difficulties with misinformation. The primary argument of such experts is that there is already vastly more misinformation on the internet than a person can consume, so throwing more into the mix won’t make things worse.
  • it’s not exactly reassuring, especially given that trust in institutions is already at one of the lowest points in the past 70 years, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, and polarization—a measure of how much we distrust one another—is at a high point.
  • “What happens when we have eroded trust in media, government, and experts?” says Farid. “If you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you, how do we respond to pandemics, or climate change, or have fair and open elections? This is how authoritarianism arises—when you erode trust in institutions.”
Javier E

Football and racist language: Reclaiming the Y-word | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...football-and-racist-language

racism language meaning

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Game theory Sports Previous Next Latest Game theory Latest from all our blogs Football and racist language Reclaiming the Y-word Nov 9th 2012, 16:28 by B.R. ENGLISH football grounds in the 1980s were not pleasant places. Fans were squeezed into caged terraces which were often left open to the elements. Hooliganism was rife and the country was in a state of moral panic as lurid images of fighting youths became a fixture on news bulletins. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, convened a "war cabinet". Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea football club, suggested electrifying the fences in the stadiums to keep the warring factions apart. By the end of the decade English football reached its nadir. In 1985, 39 Italian football fans had been killed in Heysel, Belgium after a riot by Liverpool supporters. In 1989, Liverpool supporters themselves were the victims as 96 lost their lives at Hillsborough as a result of incompetent policing.Some time toward the beginning of that decade, aged around ten, your correspondent was taken to his first away game by his father, a fanatical supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The game was a derby with Chelsea, a bitter London rival. Chelsea's fans were among the game’s most notorious. Many were skinheads; foot soldiers of extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. Tottenham, because of the area in North London in which it is situated, had a large and visible Jewish following. It did not make for a pleasant combination. At one point during the first half the hostile Chelsea crowd fell suddenly silent. Quietly at first came a hissing sound, like someone letting out gas from a canister. Before long the hissing reached crescendo. It was a terrifying sound for a small boy. But I was too young to grasp the significance. Only later was I filled in: the Chelsea fans were mimicking the sound of cyanide being released at a Nazi concentration camp. As the years wore on, the abuse towards Spurs fans became less subtle. When clubs with a large right-wing following came to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium, such as Chelsea, West Ham, Leeds and Manchester United, the anti-semitism was relentless. One common song ran:Spurs are on their way to BelsenHitler's going to gas ‘em againThe Yids from TottenhamThe Yids from White Hart Lane The Y-word. It was the most relentless chant of all. Thousand of opposition fans, faces snarled, would come together in spiteful mantra: “Yiddo! Yiddo!” It was directed towards Tottenham fans and players alike. It would go on for minutes at a time, many times in a game. After a while it was so commonplace that one became immune to it. At some point during that time, something odd began to happen. Tottenham fans began to appropriate the Y-word. Gradually they began to refer to themselves as Yids. The club’s supporters started to describe themselves as the “Yid Army”. Soon the word was being chanted solely by Tottenham fans referring to themselves in a spirit of celebration and of togetherness. It had been reclaimed in much the same way that the word “nigger” was taken back by black hip-hop artists and “queer” was by gays.As a result, the word died as an insult, at least within football grounds.
Javier E

Taking back the economy: the market as a Res Publica | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...-economy-market-as-res-publica

political theory economics democracy government market state

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Freedom in the republican tradition requires enjoyment of the fundamental liberties with the security that only a rule of law can provide. You must be publicly protected and resourced in such a way that it is manifest to you and to all that under local (not unnecessarily restrictive) conventions: you can speak your mind, associate with your fellows, enjoy communal resources, locate where you will, move occupation and make use of what is yours, without reason for fearing anyone or deferring to anyone. You have the standing of a liber or free person; you enjoy equal status under the public order and you share equally in control over that order.
  • The rules of public order constitute the possibility of private life in the way in which the rules of a game like chess constitute the possibility of playing that game. They represent enabling (or enabling-cum-constraining) rules, not rules that merely regulate a pre-existing domain.
  • This republican image runs into sharp conflict with a more received picture, celebrated by right-wing libertarians, according to which the rules of public order regulate the private sphere rather than serving – now in the fashion of one culture, now in the fashion of another – to make it possible
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  • The conflict between the images is important because it shows up in alternative visions of the economy and the relationship between the economy and the state.
  • On the republican picture, owning is a relationship that presupposes law, if only the inchoate law of informal custom.
  • You own something only insofar as it is a matter of accepted convention that given the way you came to hold it — given public recognition of the title you have to the property — you enjoy public protection against those who would take it from you
  • This view of property, prominent in Rousseau and presupposed in the broader republican tradition, is scarcely questionable in view of the salient diversity in systems of property
  • These observations, scarcely richer than platitudes, are important for giving us a perspective on the market and the economy, undermining the libertarian image. That picture represents the market as a res privata, a private thing, suggesting that the role of the state is merely to lay low the hills in the way of the market and smooth the paths for its operation. And so it depicts any other interventions of government in the market as dubious on philosophical, not just empirical, grounds.
  • this image accounts for the continuing attachment to austerity among those on the right. They are philosophically opposed to Keynesianism, not just opposed on empirical grounds, and their ideological stance makes empirically based arguments for Keynesianism invisible to them.
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