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runlai_jiang

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

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

Why coal-fired power handouts would be an attack on climate and common sense | Environm... - 0 views

  • The coal industry knows that to stop runaway climate change all coal-powered generators need to close Australia joined 174 countries and the European Union in 2015, signing the Paris agreement. In doing so, Australia agreed to do its part in keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2C.
  • According to data from the Office of the Chief Economist, the demand for coal-generated electricity has dropped by more than 15% in the past eight years.
  • Coal is now the most expensive form of new power. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the cost of energy from a new coal power plant would be $134-$203/MWh. That’s more expensive than wind, solar or highly efficient combined-cycle gas (costing $61-$118/MWh, $78-$140/MWh and $74-$90/MWh, respectively).
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  • The only people who still think we need the old-fashioned sort of “baseload power” that coal provides – power that is always running regardless of whether you need it – are those in the coal industry.
    • dicindioha
       
      This claim seems a bit extreme, saying that the only people still interested in coal are in the coal industry. It might be true, but I also feel as if some people do not think of where their power source comes from.
  • In the short term, that can be gas. But, in the longer term, to stop runaway climate change, that service will need to be supplied by renewable sources such as battery storage, hydro, solar thermal with storage or geothermal.
  • “As the world’s largest coal exporter, we have a vested interest in showing that we can provide both lower emissions and reliable baseload power with state-of-the-art, clean, coal-fired technology.”
  •  
    This article is really interesting because I think it goes to show that there is still some side of the global warming/climate change argument that is making progress. As we learned today, it is important to walk that middle line between over-skepticism and gullibility. Here people recognize that coal emissions are bad, and countries are taking a stand to try and lower that. It does make me wonder though what the future with coal holds, and if one day, we really will resort to renewable energy. It seems increasingly important. One more interesting thing I found was the use of the graphs to support the information, for graphs used to seem to me something people trust, but now I realize we have survival instincts associated even with data, and I wonder if some people would remark this as "fake news."
Javier E

Why Silicon Valley can't fix itself | News | The Guardian - 1 views

  • After decades of rarely apologising for anything, Silicon Valley suddenly seems to be apologising for everything. They are sorry about the trolls. They are sorry about the bots. They are sorry about the fake news and the Russians, and the cartoons that are terrifying your kids on YouTube. But they are especially sorry about our brains.
  • Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook – who was played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network – has publicly lamented the “unintended consequences” of the platform he helped create: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
  • Parker, Rosenstein and the other insiders now talking about the harms of smartphones and social media belong to an informal yet influential current of tech critics emerging within Silicon Valley. You could call them the “tech humanists”. Amid rising public concern about the power of the industry, they argue that the primary problem with its products is that they threaten our health and our humanity.
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  • It is clear that these products are designed to be maximally addictive, in order to harvest as much of our attention as they can. Tech humanists say this business model is both unhealthy and inhumane – that it damages our psychological well-being and conditions us to behave in ways that diminish our humanity
  • The main solution that they propose is better design. By redesigning technology to be less addictive and less manipulative, they believe we can make it healthier – we can realign technology with our humanity and build products that don’t “hijack” our minds.
  • its most prominent spokesman is executive director Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google who has been hailed by the Atlantic magazine as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Harris has spent years trying to persuade the industry of the dangers of tech addiction.
  • In February, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, launched a related initiative: the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, which aims to “maximise the tech industry’s contributions to a healthy society”.
  • the tech humanists are making a bid to become tech’s loyal opposition. They are using their insider credentials to promote a particular diagnosis of where tech went wrong and of how to get it back on track
  • The real reason tech humanism matters is because some of the most powerful people in the industry are starting to speak its idiom. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has warned about social media’s role in encouraging “mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions”,
  • In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention.
  • After years of ignoring their critics, industry leaders are finally acknowledging that problems exist. Tech humanists deserve credit for drawing attention to one of those problems – the manipulative design decisions made by Silicon Valley.
  • these decisions are only symptoms of a larger issue: the fact that the digital infrastructures that increasingly shape our personal, social and civic lives are owned and controlled by a few billionaires
  • Because it ignores the question of power, the tech-humanist diagnosis is incomplete – and could even help the industry evade meaningful reform
  • Taken up by leaders such as Zuckerberg, tech humanism is likely to result in only superficial changes
  • they will not address the origin of that anger. If anything, they will make Silicon Valley even more powerful.
  • To the litany of problems caused by “technology that extracts attention and erodes society”, the text asserts that “humane design is the solution”. Drawing on the rhetoric of the “design thinking” philosophy that has long suffused Silicon Valley, the website explains that humane design “starts by understanding our most vulnerable human instincts so we can design compassionately”
  • this language is not foreign to Silicon Valley. On the contrary, “humanising” technology has long been its central ambition and the source of its power. It was precisely by developing a “humanised” form of computing that entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs brought computing into millions of users’ everyday lives
  • Facebook had a new priority: maximising “time well spent” on the platform, rather than total time spent. By “time well spent”, Zuckerberg means time spent interacting with “friends” rather than businesses, brands or media sources. He said the News Feed algorithm was already prioritising these “more meaningful” activities.
  • Tech humanists say they want to align humanity and technology. But this project is based on a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between humanity and technology: namely, the fantasy that these two entities could ever exist in separation.
  • They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us.
  • The story of our species began when we began to make tools
  • All of which is to say: humanity and technology are not only entangled, they constantly change together.
  • This is not just a metaphor. Recent research suggests that the human hand evolved to manipulate the stone tools that our ancestors used
  • The ways our bodies and brains change in conjunction with the tools we make have long inspired anxieties that “we” are losing some essential qualities
  • Yet as we lose certain capacities, we gain new ones.
  • The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology
  • Yet the assumption that it doesn’t change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be.
  • Messaging, for instance, is considered the strongest signal. It’s reasonable to assume that you’re closer to somebody you exchange messages with than somebody whose post you once liked.
  • Harris and his fellow tech humanists also frequently invoke the language of public health. The Center for Humane Technology’s Roger McNamee has gone so far as to call public health “the root of the whole thing”, and Harris has compared using Snapchat to smoking cigarettes
  • The public-health framing casts the tech humanists in a paternalistic role. Resolving a public health crisis requires public health expertise. It also precludes the possibility of democratic debate. You don’t put the question of how to treat a disease up for a vote – you call a doctor.
  • They also remain confined to the personal level, aiming to redesign how the individual user interacts with technology rather than tackling the industry’s structural failures. Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit.
  • This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.
  • Far from challenging Silicon Valley, tech humanism offers Silicon Valley a useful way to pacify public concerns without surrendering any of its enormous wealth and power.
  • these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities. That seems to be exactly what Facebook has planned.
  • reported that total time spent on the platform had dropped by around 5%, or about 50m hours per day. But, Zuckerberg said, this was by design: in particular, it was in response to tweaks to the News Feed that prioritised “meaningful” interactions with “friends” rather than consuming “public content” like video and news. This would ensure that “Facebook isn’t just fun, but also good for people’s well-being”
  • Zuckerberg said he expected those changes would continue to decrease total time spent – but “the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable”. This may describe what users find valuable – but it also refers to what Facebook finds valuable
  • not all data is created equal. One of the most valuable sources of data to Facebook is used to inform a metric called “coefficient”. This measures the strength of a connection between two users – Zuckerberg once called it “an index for each relationship”
  • Facebook records every interaction you have with another user – from liking a friend’s post or viewing their profile, to sending them a message. These activities provide Facebook with a sense of how close you are to another person, and different activities are weighted differently.
  • Holding humanity and technology separate clears the way for a small group of humans to determine the proper alignment between them
  • Why is coefficient so valuable? Because Facebook uses it to create a Facebook they think you will like: it guides algorithmic decisions about what content you see and the order in which you see it. It also helps improve ad targeting, by showing you ads for things liked by friends with whom you often interact
  • emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform.
  • “time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics
  • industrialists had to find ways to make the time of the worker more valuable – to extract more money from each moment rather than adding more moments. They did this by making industrial production more efficient: developing new technologies and techniques that squeezed more value out of the worker and stretched that value further than ever before.
  • there is another way of thinking about how to live with technology – one that is both truer to the history of our species and useful for building a more democratic future. This tradition does not address “humanity” in the abstract, but as distinct human beings, whose capacities are shaped by the tools they use.
  • It sees us as hybrids of animal and machine – as “cyborgs”, to quote the biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway.
  • The cyborg way of thinking, by contrast, tells us that our species is essentially technological. We change as we change our tools, and our tools change us. But even though our continuous co-evolution with our machines is inevitable, the way it unfolds is not. Rather, it is determined by who owns and runs those machines. It is a question of power
  • The various scandals that have stoked the tech backlash all share a single source. Surveillance, fake news and the miserable working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are profitable. If they were not, they would not exist. They are symptoms of a profound democratic deficit inflicted by a system that prioritises the wealth of the few over the needs and desires of the many.
  • If being technological is a feature of being human, then the power to shape how we live with technology should be a fundamental human right
  • The decisions that most affect our technological lives are far too important to be left to Mark Zuckerberg, rich investors or a handful of “humane designers”. They should be made by everyone, together.
  • Rather than trying to humanise technology, then, we should be trying to democratise it. We should be demanding that society as a whole gets to decide how we live with technology
  • What does this mean in practice? First, it requires limiting and eroding Silicon Valley’s power.
  • Antitrust laws and tax policy offer useful ways to claw back the fortunes Big Tech has built on common resources
  • democratic governments should be making rules about how those firms are allowed to behave – rules that restrict how they can collect and use our personal data, for instance, like the General Data Protection Regulation
  • This means developing publicly and co-operatively owned alternatives that empower workers, users and citizens to determine how they are run.
  • we might demand that tech firms pay for the privilege of extracting our data, so that we can collectively benefit from a resource we collectively create.
runlai_jiang

Airbus Sees 3,700 Jobs at Risk at Troubled Plane Programs - WSJ - 0 views

  • European plane maker Airbus EADSY -0.02% SE said Wednesday it plans to cut production of its flagship A380 superjumbo and A400M military transport aircraft, threatening thousands of jobs, though overall strong demand for airliners may mitigate staff cuts.
  • But Airbus’s A380 has missed out on the boom. Airlines worry that they won’t be able to fill an aircraft that seats more than 500 passengers. Plus, the superjumbo carries a price tag of $445.6 million before typical discounts,
  • Emirates Airline, the world’s largest by international traffic, in February signed an order for 20 A380s with an option for 16 more.
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  • The deal allows Airbus to sustain annual production at six planes, which it described as the minimum at which losses are manageable.
  • The bleak outlook for the A380 was punctuated late last year when the first of the jets put into operation was placed in long-term storage after Singapore Airlines opted not to extend an initial lease period. The carrier is the second biggest A380 customer, having ordered 24.
  • Boeing also has struggled to win orders for its biggest plane, the 747-8, leading to production cuts. For Airbus, the A400M cutback comes after years during which the company struggled to get the military transport out the door and develop some of the promised technical features. Airbus said it would build 15 of the planes this year, after delivering 19 last year. It plans to build 11 of the planes in 2019, and eight annually thereafter.
  • Airbus Chief Financial Officer Harald Wilhelm said last month said that lowering build rates for the A400M and the A380 would keep them in production and buy time to secure further deals.
marvelgr

THE BASES OF THE MIND:THE RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT | by Koç Unive... - 0 views

  • We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”
  • Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship.
  • In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned.
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  • In conclusion, there is a nested relationship between language and thought. In the interaction processes mentioned above, the role of language changes. Even though the limits of our language are different from the limits of our thinking, it is inevitable that people prioritize concepts in their languages. This, however, does not mean that they cannot comprehend or think about concepts that do not exist in their language.
Javier E

The Future of Sex - The European - 1 views

  • Consider the most likely scenario for how human sexual behavior will develop over the next hundred years or so in the absence of cataclysm. Here’s what I see if we continue on our current path:
  • Like every other aspect of human life, our sexuality will become increasingly mediated by technology. The technology of pornography will become ever more sophisticated—even if the subject matter of porn itself will remain as primal as ever.
  • As the technology improves, society continues to grow ever more fragmented, and hundreds of millions of Chinese men with no hope of marrying a bona-fide, flesh-and-blood woman come of age, sex robots will become as common and acceptable as dildos and vibrators are today. After all, the safest sex is that which involves no other living things…
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  • As our sexuality becomes ever more divorced from emotion and intimacy, a process already well underway, sex will increasingly be seen as simply a matter of provoking orgasm in the most efficient, reliable ways possible.
  • Human sexuality will continue to be subjected to the same commodification and mechanization as other aspects of our lives. Just as the 21st century saw friends replaced by Facebook friends, nature replaced by parks, ocean fisheries replaced by commercially farmed seafood, and sunshine largely supplanted by tanning salons, we’ll see sexual interaction reduced to mechanically provoked orgasm as human beings become ever more dominated by the machines and mechanistic thought processes that developed in our brains and societies like bacteria in a petri dish.
  • Gender identity will fade away as sexual interaction becomes less “human” and we grow less dependent upon binary interactions with other people. As more and more of our interactions take place with non-human partners, others’ expectations and judgments will become less relevant to the development of sexual identity, leading to greater fluidity and far less urgency and passion concerning sexual expression.
  • the collapse of western civilization may well be the best thing that could happen for human sexuality. Following the collapse of the consumerist, competitive mind-set that now dominates so much of human thought, we’d possibly be free to rebuild a social world more in keeping with our preagricultural origins, characterized by economies built upon sharing rather than hoarding, a politics of respect rather than of power, and a sexuality of intimacy rather than alienation.
Emily Horwitz

¿Por qué tosemos más en los conciertos de música clásica? - BBC Mundo - Noticias - 0 views

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

What's the secret to learning a second language? - Salon.com - 0 views

  • “Arabic is a language of memorization,” he said. “You just have to drill the words into your head, which unfortunately takes a lot of time.” He thought, “How can I maximize the number of words I learn in the minimum amount of time?”
  • Siebert started studying the science of memory and second-language acquisition and found two concepts that went hand in hand to make learning easier: selective learning and spaced repetition. With selective learning, you spend more time on the things you don’t know, rather than on the things you already do
  • Siebert designed his software to use spaced repetition. If you get cup right, the program will make the interval between seeing the word cup longer and longer, but it will cycle cup back in just when you’re about to forget it. If you’ve forgotten cup entirely, the cycle starts again. This system moves the words from your brain’s short-term memory into long-term memory and maximizes the number of words you can learn effectively in a period. You don’t have to cram
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  • ARABIC IS ONE of the languages the U.S. Department of State dubs “extremely hard.” Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are the others. These languages’ structures are vastly different from that of English, and they are memorization-driven.
  • To help meet its language-learning goals, in 2003 the Department of Defense established the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language.
  • MICHAEL GEISLER, a vice president at Middlebury College, which runs the foremost language-immersion school in the country, was blunt: “The drill-and-kill approach we used 20 years ago doesn’t work.” He added, “The typical approach that most programs take these days—Rosetta Stone is one example—is scripted dialogue and picture association. You have a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and you have a sentence to go with it. But that’s not going to teach you the language.”
  • According to Geisler, you need four things to learn a language. First, you have to use it. Second, you have to use it for a purpose. Research shows that doing something while learning a language—preparing a cooking demonstration, creating an art project, putting on a play—stimulates an exchange of meaning that goes beyond using the language for the sake of learning it.Third, you have to use the language in context. This is where Geisler says all programs have fallen short.
  • Fourth, you have to use language in interaction with others. In a 2009 study led by Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington, researchers found that young children easily learned a second language from live human interaction while playing and reading books. But audio and DVD approaches with the same material, without the live interaction, fostered no learning progress at all. Two people in conversation constantly give each other feedback that can be used to make changes in how they respond.
  • our research shows that the ideal model is a blended one,” one that blends technology and a teacher. “Our latest research shows that with the proper use of technology and cognitive neuroscience, we can make language learning more efficient.” 
  • The school released its first two online programs, for French and Spanish, last year. The new courses use computer avatars for virtual collaboration; rich video of authentic, unscripted conversations with native speakers; and 3-D role-playing games in which students explore life in a city square, acting as servers and taking orders from customers in a café setting. The goal at the end of the day, as Geisler put it, is for you to “actually be able to interact with a native speaker in his own language and have him understand you, understand him, and, critically, negotiate when you don’t understand what he is saying.” 
  • The program includes the usual vocabulary lists and lessons in how to conjugate verbs, but students are also consistently immersed in images, audio, and video of people from different countries speaking with different accents. Access to actual teachers is another critical component.
dicindioha

How Do Kids See the World on a Family Trip? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We gave six families 360-degree video cameras to show us a trip through the eyes of a child.
  • Dr. Klass talked about the perspective of children from the ages of 3 to 15 and how families can better understand what experiences would be the most compelling to them.
  • “An older child might accept the challenge to find the self-portrait,” she said, “but a younger child might be more interested in the question of who is and who isn’t wearing underwear.”
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  • “One of the things you want to do as a parent traveling is, look for places where you can interact a little more with objects and push the buttons,” Dr. Klass said.
  • “You can bring a bunch of 7-year-olds into a room, and some will be drawn to sports equipment, some drawn to animals. They have really distinct interests you’ll want to play to,”
  • “They haven’t yet decided that anything you’re interested in may not be the coolest thing. And they probably still want to know what you are excited about,”
  • As for teenagers, they may want to lead the way, and they may show you things about the world you never knew.”
  •  
    This article is really unique as it compares the way different ages view the world. Earlier in the year we learned about how our perspective is greatly based upon former experiences. Young kids want to interact with whatever they can hands on, and teenages may eventually not want to travel with their parents; it depends partly on what has happened before in their life.
Javier E

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

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

The Chemistry (Literally) of Social Interaction - 0 views

  • experimental psychologist
  • research on how social interactions affect biology in humans and animals.
  • t women living together in a Wellesley College dormitory tended to menstruate at the same time.
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  • chemical communication between humans in laboratory experiments
  • Whether pheromones play a role in human life outside the lab remains unknown. In animals pheromones affect the whole panoply of behavior - mating, aggression and fear.
  • rats that fear change have shorter lives than their more flexible counterparts, and that social isolation can also affect the longevity of rodents
  • the social and psychological world changes the fundamental mechanisms of biology, and vice versa
  • I've tried to situate biology in a rich social and psychological context and make it simple.
  • the chemosignal. Molecules produced by a person or animal that can change behaviors of others, even though they are not detected as an odor.
  • for two months, we exposed nonlactating women to this breast-feeding compound, which is found naturally in nursing mothers and infants. Women with regular sex partners reported a 24 percent increase in sexual desire; those without partners increased their sexual fantasies by 17 percent
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    Research on how social interactions affect biology in humans and animals
Javier E

Opinion | The Apps on My Phone Are Stalking Me - The New York Times - 0 views

  • There is much about the future that keeps me up at night — A.I. weaponry, undetectable viral deepfakes
  • but in the last few years, one technological threat has blipped my fear radar much faster than others.That fear? Ubiquitous surveillance.
  • I am no longer sure that human civilization can undo or evade living under constant, extravagantly detailed physical and even psychic surveillance
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  • as a species, we are not doing nearly enough to avoid always being watched or otherwise digitally recorded.
  • our location, your purchases, video and audio from within your home and office, your online searches and every digital wandering, biometric tracking of your face and other body parts, your heart rate and other vital signs, your every communication, recording, and perhaps your deepest thoughts or idlest dreams
  • in the future, if not already, much of this data and more will be collected and analyzed by some combination of governments and corporations, among them a handful of megacompanies whose powers nearly match those of governments
  • Over the last year, as part of Times Opinion’s Privacy Project, I’ve participated in experiments in which my devices were closely monitored in order to determine the kind of data that was being collected about me.
  • I’ve realized how blind we are to the kinds of insights tech companies are gaining about us through our gadgets. Our blindness not only keeps us glued to privacy-invading tech
  • it also means that we’ve failed to create a political culture that is in any way up to the task of limiting surveillance.
  • few of our cultural or political institutions are even much trying to tamp down the surveillance state.
  • Yet the United States and other supposedly liberty-loving Western democracies have not ruled out such a future
  • like Barack Obama before him, Trump and the Justice Department are pushing Apple to create a backdoor into the data on encrypted iPhones — they want the untrustworthy F.B.I. and any local cop to be able to see everything inside anyone’s phone.
  • the fact that both Obama and Trump agreed on the need for breaking iPhone encryption suggests how thoroughly political leaders across a wide spectrum have neglected privacy as a fundamental value worthy of protection.
  • Among other revelations: Advertising companies and data brokers are keeping insanely close tabs on smartphones’ location data, tracking users so precisely that their databases could arguably compromise national security or political liberty.
  • Americans are sleepwalking into a future nearly as frightening as the one the Chinese are constructing. I choose the word “sleepwalking” deliberately, because when it comes to digital privacy, a lot of us prefer the comfortable bliss of ignorance.
  • Tracking technologies have become cheap and widely available — for less than $100, my colleagues were able to identify people walking by surveillance cameras in Bryant Park in Manhattan.
  • The Clearview AI story suggests another reason to worry that our march into surveillance has become inexorable: Each new privacy-invading technology builds on a previous one, allowing for scary outcomes from new integrations and collections of data that few users might have anticipated.
  • The upshot: As the location-tracking apps followed me, I was able to capture the pings they sent to online servers — essentially recording their spying
  • On the map, you can see the apps are essentially stalking me. They see me drive out one morning to the gas station, then to the produce store, then to Safeway; later on I passed by a music school, stopped at a restaurant, then Whole Foods.
  • But location was only one part of the data the companies had about me; because geographic data is often combined with other personal information — including a mobile advertising ID that can help merge what you see and do online with where you go in the real world — the story these companies can tell about me is actually far more detailed than I can tell about myself.
  • I can longer pretend I’ve got nothing to worry about. Sure, I’m not a criminal — but do I want anyone to learn everything about me?
  • more to the point: Is it wise for us to let any entity learn everything about everyone?
  • The remaining uncertainty about the surveillance state is not whether we will submit to it — only how readily and completely, and how thoroughly it will warp our society.
  • Will we allow the government and corporations unrestricted access to every bit of data we ever generate, or will we decide that some kinds of collections, like the encrypted data on your phone, should be forever off limits, even when a judge has issued a warrant for it?
  • In the future, will there be room for any true secret — will society allow any unrecorded thought or communication to evade detection and commercial analysis?
  • How completely will living under surveillance numb creativity and silence radical thought?
  • Can human agency survive the possibility that some companies will know more about all of us than any of us can ever know about ourselves?
Javier E

Is Facebook Bad for You? It Is for About 360 Million Users, Company Surveys Suggest - WSJ - 0 views

  • Facebook FB 1.57% researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
  • These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. They were perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social-media platform
  • A Facebook team focused on user well-being suggested a range of fixes, and the company implemented some, building in optional features to encourage breaks from social media and to dial back the notifications that can serve as a lure to bring people back to the platform.
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  • Facebook shut down the team in late 2019.
  • “We have a role to play, which is why we’ve built tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use our services,” she said in the statement. “Furthermore, we have a dedicated team working across our platforms to better understand these issues and ensure people are using our apps in ways that are meaningful to them.”
  • They wrote that they don’t consider the behavior to be a clinical addiction because it doesn’t affect the brain in the same way as gambling or substance abuse. In one document, they noted that “activities like shopping, sex and Facebook use, when repetitive and excessive, may cause problems for some people.”
  • In March 2020, several months after the well-being team was dissolved, researchers who had been on the team shared a slide deck internally with some of the findings and encouraged other teams to pick up the work.
  • The researchers estimated these issues affect about 12.5% of the flagship app’s more than 2.9 billion users, or more than 360 million people. About 10% of users in the U.S., one of Facebook’s most lucrative markets, exhibit this behavior
  • In the Philippines and in India, which is the company’s largest market, the employees put the figure higher, at around 25%.
  • “Why should we care?” the researchers wrote in the slide deck. “People perceive the impact. In a comparative study with competitors, people perceived lower well-being and higher problematic use on Facebook compared to any other service.
  • Facebook’s findings are consistent with what many external researchers have observed for years,
  • said Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine and dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas
  • His research group followed about a thousand people over six months in a nationally representative survey and found that the amount of social media that a person used was the No. 1 predictor of the variables they measured for who became depressed.
  • In late 2017, a Facebook executive and a researcher wrote a public blog post that outlined some of the issues with social-media addiction. According to the post, the company had found that while passive consumption of social media could make you feel worse, the opposite was true of more active social-media use.
  • Inside Facebook, the researchers registered concern about the direction of Facebook’s focus on certain metrics, including the number of times a person logs into the app, which the company calls a session. “One of the worries with using sessions as a north star is we want to be extra careful not to game them by creating bad experiences for vulnerable populations,” a researcher wrote, referring to elements designed to draw people back to Facebook frequently, such as push notifications.
  • Facebook then made a switch to more heavily weigh “meaningful social interactions” in its news feed as a way to combat passive consumption. One side effect of that change, as outlined in a previous Journal article in The Facebook Files, was that the company’s algorithms rewarded content that was angry or sensational, because those posts increased engagement from users.
  • Facebook said any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.
  • “Every second that I wasn’t occupied by something I had to do I was fooling around on my phone scrolling through Facebook,” Ms. Gandy said. “Facebook took over my brain.”
  • “Actively interacting with people—especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions—is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said.
  • The well-being team, according to people familiar with the matter, was reshuffled at least twice since late 2017 before it was disbanded, and could get only about half of the resources the team requested to do its work.
  • In 2018, Facebook’s researchers surveyed 20,000 U.S. users and paired their answers with data about their behavior on Facebook. The researchers found about 3% of these users said they experienced “serious problems” in their sleep, work or relationships related to their time on Facebook that they found difficult to change. Some of the researchers’ work was published in a 2019 paper.
  • According to that study, the researchers also said that a liberal interpretation of the results would be that 14% of respondents spent “a lot more time on Facebook than they want to,” although they didn’t label this group problematic users.
  • In 2019, the researchers had come to a new figure: What they called problematic use affects 12.5% of people on Facebook, they said. This survey used a broader definition for the issue, including users who reported negative results on key aspects of their life as well as feelings of guilt or a loss of control, according to the documents.
  • The researchers also asked Facebook users what aspects of Facebook triggered them most. The users said the app’s many notifications sucked them in. “Red dots are toxic on the home screen,” a male young adult in the U.S. told the researchers, referring to the symbol that alerts a user to new content.
  • One entrepreneur came up with his own solution to some of these issues. In 2016, software developer Louis Barclay manually unfollowed all the people, pages and groups he saw on Facebook in an attempt to be more deliberate about how he used technology. The process, which isn’t the same as unfriending, took him days, but he was happy with the result: an empty newsfeed that no longer sucked him in for hours. He could still visit the profile pages of everyone he wanted to connect with on Facebook, but their content would no longer appear in the never-ending scroll of posts.
  • Thinking other people might benefit from a similar experience on Facebook, he built a tool that would enable anyone to automate the process. He created it as a piece of add-on software called a browser extension that anyone could download. He called it Unfollow Everything and made it available on Chrome’s web store free of charge.
  • In July, Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, which the inventor earlier wrote about for Slate, saying his tool was a breach of its terms of service for automating user interactions. It also permanently disabled Mr. Barclay’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.
  • Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Mr. Barclay’s extension could pose risks if abused, and said Facebook offers its own unfollow tool that allows users to manually unfollow accounts.
Javier E

Korean philosophy is built upon daily practice of good habits | Aeon Essays - 0 views

  • ‘We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887
  • This seeking after ourselves, however, is not something that is lacking in Buddhist and Confucian traditions – especially not in the case of Korean philosophy. Self-cultivation, central to the tradition, underscores that the onus is on the individual to develop oneself, without recourse to the divine or the supernatural
  • Korean philosophy is practical, while remaining agnostic to a large degree: recognising the spirit realm but highlighting that we ourselves take charge of our lives by taking charge of our minds
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  • The word for ‘philosophy’ in Korean is 철학, pronounced ch’ŏrhak. It literally means the ‘study of wisdom’ or, perhaps better, ‘how to become wise’, which reflects its more dynamic and proactive implications
  • At night, in the darkness of the cave, he drank water from a perfectly useful ‘bowl’. But when he could see properly, he found that there was no ‘bowl’ at all, only a disgusting human skull.
  • Our lives and minds are affected by others (and their actions), as others (and their minds) are affected by our actions. This is particularly true in the Korean application of Confucian and Buddhist ideas.
  • Wŏnhyo understood that how we think about things shapes their very existence – and in turn our own existence, which is constructed according to our thoughts.
  • In the Korean tradition of philosophy, human beings are social beings, therefore knowing how to interact with others is an essential part of living a good life – indeed, living well with others is our real contribution to human life
  • he realised that there isn’t a difference between the ‘bowl’ and the skull: the only difference lies with us and our perceptions. We interpret our lives through a continual stream of thoughts, and so we become what we think, or rather how we think
  • As our daily lives are shaped by our thoughts, so our experience of this reality is good or bad – depending on our thoughts – which make things ‘appear’ good or bad because, in ‘reality’, things in and of themselves are devoid of their own independent nature
  • We can take from Wŏnhyo the idea that, if you change the patterns that have become engrained in how you think, you will begin to live differently. To do this, you need to change your mental habits, which is why meditation and mindful awareness can help. And this needs to be practised every day
  • Wŏnhyo’s most important work is titled Awaken your Mind and Practice (in Korean, Palsim suhaeng-jang). It is an explicit call to younger adherents to put Buddhist ideas into practice, and an indirect warning not to get lost in contemplation or in the study of text
  • While Wŏnhyo had emphasised the mind and the need to ‘practise’ Buddhism, a later Korean monk, Chinul (1158-1210), spearheaded Sŏn, the meditational tradition in Korea that espoused the idea of ‘sudden enlightenment’ that alerts the mind, accompanied by ‘gradual cultivation’
  • we still need to practise meditation, for if not we can easily fall into our old ways even if our minds have been awakened
  • his greatest contribution to Sŏn is Secrets on Cultivating the Mind (Susim kyŏl). This text outlines in detail his teachings on sudden awakening followed by the need for gradual cultivation
  • hinul’s approach recognises the mind as the ‘essence’ of one’s Buddha nature (contained in the mind, which is inherently good), while continual practice and cultivation aids in refining its ‘function’ – this is the origin of the ‘essence-function’ concept that has since become central to Korean philosophy.
  • These ideas also influenced the reformed view of Confucianism that became linked with the mind and other metaphysical ideas, finally becoming known as Neo-Confucianism.
  • During the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), the longest lasting in East Asian history, Neo-Confucianism became integrated into society at all levels through rituals for marriage, funerals and ancestors
  • Neo-Confucianism recognises that we as individuals exist through plural relationships with responsibilities to others (as a child, brother/sister, lover, husband/wife, parent, teacher/student and so on), an idea nicely captured in 2000 by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy when he described our ‘being’ as ‘singular plural’
  • Corrupt interpretations of Confucianism by heteronormative men have historically championed these ideas in terms of vertical relationships rather than as a reciprocal set of benevolent social interactions, meaning that women have suffered greatly as a result.
  • Setting aside these sexist and self-serving interpretations, Confucianism emphasises that society works as an interconnected set of complementary reciprocal relationships that should be beneficial to all parties within a social system
  • Confucian relationships have the potential to offer us an example of effective citizenship, similar to that outlined by Cicero, where the good of the republic or state is at the centre of being a good citizen
  • There is a general consensus in Korean philosophy that we have an innate sociability and therefore should have a sense of duty to each other and to practise virtue.
  • The main virtue of Confucianism is the idea of ‘humanity’, coming from the Chinese character 仁, often left untranslated and written as ren and pronounced in Korean as in.
  • It is a combination of the character for a human being and the number two. In other words, it signifies what (inter)connects two people, or rather how they should interact in a humane or benevolent manner to each other. This character therefore highlights the link between people while emphasising that the most basic thing that makes us ‘human’ is our interaction with others.
  • Neo-Confucianism adopted a turn towards a more mind-centred view in the writings of the Korean scholar Yi Hwang, known by his pen name T’oegye (1501-70), who appears on the 1,000-won note. He greatly influenced Neo-Confucianism in Japan through his formidable text, Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (Sŏnghak sipto), composed in 1568, which was one of the most-reproduced texts of the entire Chosŏn dynasty and represents the synthesis of Neo-Confucian thought in Korea
  • with commentaries that elucidate the moral principles of Confucianism, related to the cardinal relationships and education. It also embodies T’oegye’s own development of moral psychology through his focus on the mind, and illuminates the importance of teaching and the practice of self-cultivation.
  • He writes that we ourselves can transform the unrestrained mind and its desires, and achieve sagehood, if we take the arduous, gradual path of self-cultivation centred on the mind.
  • Confucians had generally accepted the Mencian idea that human nature was embodied in the unaroused state of the mind, before it was shaped by its environment. The mind in its unaroused state was taken to be theoretically good. However, this inborn tendency for goodness is always in danger of being reduced to passivity, unless you cultivate yourself as a person of ‘humanity’ (in the Confucian sense mentioned above).
  • You should constantly try to activate your humanity to allow the unhampered operation of the original mind to manifest itself through socially responsible and moral character in action
  • Humanity is the realisation of what I describe as our ‘optimum level of perfection’ that exists in an inherent stage of potentiality due our innate good nature
  • This, in a sense, is like the Buddha nature of the Buddhists, which suggests we are already enlightened and just need to recover our innate mental state. Both philosophies are hopeful: humans are born good with the potential to correct their own flaws and failures
  • this could hardly contrast any more greatly with the Christian doctrine of original sin
  • The seventh diagram in T’oegye’s text is entitled ‘The Diagram of the Explanation of Humanity’ (Insŏl-to). Here he warns how one’s good inborn nature may become impaired, hampering the operation of the original mind and negatively impacting our character in action. Humanity embodies the gradual realisation of our optimum level of perfection that already exists in our mind but that depends on how we think about things and how we relate that to others in a social context
  • For T’oegye, the key to maintaining our capacity to remain level-headed, and to control our impulses and emotions, was kyŏng. This term is often translated as ‘seriousness’, occasionally ‘mindfulness’, and it identifies the serious need for constant effort to control one’s mind in order to go about one’s life in a healthy manner
  • For T’oegye, mindfulness is as serious as meditation is for the Buddhists. In fact, the Neo-Confucians had their own meditational practice of ‘quiet-sitting’ (chŏngjwa), which focused on recovering the calm and not agitated ‘original mind’, before putting our daily plans into action
  • These diagrams reinforce this need for a daily practice of Confucian mindfulness, because practice leads to the ‘good habit’ of creating (and maintaining) routines. There is no short-cut provided, no weekend intro to this practice: it is life-long, and that is what makes it transformative, leading us to become better versions of who were in the beginning. This is consolation of Korean philosophy.
  • Seeing the world as it is can steer us away from making unnecessary mistakes, while highlighting what is good and how to maintain that good while also reducing anxiety from an agitated mind and harmful desires. This is why Korean philosophy can provide us with consolation; it recognises the bad, but prioritises the good, providing several moral pathways that are referred to in the East Asian traditions (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) as modes of ‘self-cultivation’
  • As social beings, we penetrate the consciousness of others, and so humans are linked externally through conduct but also internally through thought. Humanity is a unifying approach that holds the potential to solve human problems, internally and externally, as well as help people realise the perfection that is innately theirs
Emily Horwitz

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

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

Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II) » Cybo... - 1 views

  • social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.
  • the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.
  • I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.
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  • Through social media, “sharing with friends” is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing: we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to “the list,” or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we’ve read or watched or listened to is then “shared” or “scrobbled” to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we’ve done our half of the friendship-labor by ‘pushing’ the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs. It’s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by ‘pulling’ the information we share from those platforms.
  • We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out amongst themselves who is and isn’t interested. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient. Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.
  • sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to ‘pull’ friendship-content instead of receiving it in a ‘push’, we can pick and choose which content items to pull. We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures—whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about
  • I’ve been thinking since, however, on what it means to view our friends as “generalized others.” I may now feel like less of like “creepy stalker” when I click on a song in someone’s Spotify feed, but I don’t exactly feel ‘shared with’ either. Far as I know, I’ve never been SpotiVaguebooked (or SubSpotified?); I have no reason to think anyone is speaking to me personally as they listen to music, or as they choose not to disable scrobbling (if they make that choice consciously at all). I may have been granted the opportunity to view something, but it doesn’t follow that what I’m viewing has anything to do with me unless I choose to make it about me. Devolved friendship means it’s not up to us to interact with our friends personally; instead it’s now up to our friends to make our generalized broadcasts personal.
  • While I won’t go so far as to say they’re definitely ‘problems,’ there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor.
  • In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.
  • The second thing worth noting is that devolved friendship is also depersonalized friendship.
  • Personal interaction doesn’t just happen on Spotify, and since I was hoping Spotify would be the New Porch, I initially found Spotify to be somewhat lonely-making. It’s the mutual awareness of presence that gives companionate silence its warmth, whether in person or across distance. The silence within Spotify’s many sounds, on the other hand, felt more like being on the outside looking in. This isn’t to say that Spotify can’t be social in a more personal way; once I started sending tracks to my friends, a few of them started sending tracks in return. But it took a lot more work to get to that point, which gets back to the devolution of friendship (as I explain below).
  • Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking.
  • When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’
  • It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.
  • We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers—even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social” (something Nathan Jurgenson and I discuss together in greater detail here). It’s not super-rewarding to be one of ten people who “like” your friend’s shared link, but it can feel rewarding to get 10 “likes” on something you’ve shared—even if you have hundreds or thousands of ‘friends.’ Sharing is easy; dealing with all that shared content is hard.
  • t I wonder sometimes if the shifts in expectation that accompany devolved friendship don’t migrate across platforms and contexts in ways we don’t always see or acknowledge. Social media affects how we see the world—and how we feel about being seen in the world—even when we’re not engaged directly with social media websites. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.
julia rhodes

Emergence in Social Groups and in Brains | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Emergence is an important occurrence in social systems ranging in size from small families to large international organizations.
  • A system is demergent if the whole is less than the sum of its parts, that is, if the interaction of the parts prevents the whole from having valuable properties that it otherwise might have.
  • My current favorite example of a demergent system is the U.S. Congress, which has many talented people but is failing horribly to pass legislation because of toxic behaviors and interactions.
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  • Of course, the problem with the House of Representatives is not just interactions, because some of its parts (members) have serious ideological defects.
  • But collaborations can also be demergent, if individuals do not have the intellectual flexibility to build new ideas rather than stick with old ones and waste each other’s time.
  • The brain is a marvel of emergence. I am currently working on a new theory of consciousness that explains it as the result of three neural mechanisms: representation by patterns of firing in neural populations, binding by neural processes that combine representations into new ones called semantic pointers, and competition among semantic pointers to represent the most salient aspects of the current situation.
  • For example the concept of zero cannot be based on perception, but can come about by combining the concepts of quantity and absence.
  • When brains malfunction, however, they can have demergent properties.
  • In epilepsy, individual neurons fire appropriately, but the whole brain develops abnormal patterns that can lead to unconsciousness or convulsions.
  • Figuring out how to have emergence replace demergence is important for neural functioning, and also for effective social functioning.
grayton downing

Send in the Bots | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

  • any hypothesis, his idea needed to be tested. But measuring brain activity in a moving ant—the most direct way to determine cognitive processing during animal decision making—was not possible. So Garnier didn’t study ants; he studied robots. U
  • The robots then navigated the environment by sensing light intensity through two sensors on their “heads.”
  • , several groups have used autonomous robots that sense and react to their environments to “debunk the idea that you need higher cognitive processing to do what look like cognitive things,”
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  • a growing number of scientists are using autonomous robots to interrogate animal behavior and cognition. Researchers have designed robots to behave like ants, cockroaches, rodents, chickens, and more, then deployed their bots in the lab or in the environment to see how similarly they behave to their flesh-and-blood counterparts.
  • robots give behavioral biologists the freedom to explore the mind of an animal in ways that would not be possible with living subjects, says University of Sheffield researcher James Marshall, who in March helped launch a 3-year collaborative project to build a flying robot controlled by a computer-run simulation of the entire honeybee brain.
  • “I really think there is a lot to be discovered by doing the engineering side along with the science.”
  • Not only did the bots move around the space like the rat pups did, they aggregated in remarkably similar ways to the real animals.3 Then Schank realized that there was a bug in his program. The robots weren’t following his predetermined rules; they were moving randomly.
  • Animal experiments are still needed to advance neuroscience.” But, he adds, robots may prove to be an indispensable new ethological tool for focusing the scope of research. “If you can have good physical models,” Prescott says, “then you can reduce the number of experiments and only do the ones that answer really important questions.”
  • animal-mimicking robots is not easy, however, particularly when knowledge of the system’s biology is lacking.
  • However, when the researchers also gave the robots a sense of flow, and programmed them to assume that odors come from upstream, the bots much more closely mimicked real lobster behavior. “That was a demonstration that the animals’ brains were multimodal—that they were using chemical information and flow information,” says Grasso, who has since worked on robotic models of octopus arms and crayfish.
  • some sense, the use of robotics in animal-behavior research is not that new. Since the inception of the field of ethology, researchers have been using simple physical models of animals—“dummies”—to examine the social behavior of real animals, and biologists began animating their dummies as soon as technology would allow. “The fundamental problem when you’re studying an interaction between two individuals is that it’s a two-way interaction—you’ve got two players whose behaviors are both variable,”
  • building a robot that animals will accept as one of their own is complicated, to say the least.
  • handful of other researchers have also successfully integrated robots with live animals—including fish, ducks, and chickens. There are several notable benefits to intermixing robots and animals; first and foremost, control. “One of the problems when studying behavior is that, of course, it’s very difficult to have control of animals, and so it’s hard for us to interpret fully how they interact with each other
kushnerha

Diversity Makes You Brighter - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Diversity improves the way people think. By disrupting conformity, racial and ethnic diversity prompts people to scrutinize facts, think more deeply and develop their own opinions. Our findings show that such diversity actually benefits everyone, minorities and majority alike.
  • When trading, participants could observe the behavior of their counterparts and decide what to make of it. Think of yourself in similar situations: Interacting with others can bring new ideas into view, but it can also cause you to adopt popular but wrong ones.
  • It depends how deeply you contemplate what you observe. So if you think that something is worth $100, but others are bidding $120 for it, you may defer to their judgment and up the ante (perhaps contributing to a price bubble) or you might dismiss them and stand your ground.
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  • When participants were in diverse company, their answers were 58 percent more accurate. The prices they chose were much closer to the true values of the stocks. As they spent time interacting in diverse groups, their performance improved.In homogeneous groups, whether in the United States or in Asia, the opposite happened. When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction. Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In the diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.
  • For our study, we intentionally chose a situation that required analytical thinking, seemingly unaffected by ethnicity or race. We wanted to understand whether the benefits of diversity stem, as the common thinking has it, from some special perspectives or skills of minorities.
  • What we actually found is that these benefits can arise merely from the very presence of minorities.
  • before participants interacted, there were no statistically significant differences between participants in the homogeneous or diverse groups. Minority members did not bring some special knowledge.
  • When surrounded by people “like ourselves,” we are easily influenced, more likely to fall for wrong ideas. Diversity prompts better, critical thinking. It contributes to error detection. It keeps us from drifting toward miscalculation.
  • Our findings suggest that racial and ethnic diversity matter for learning, the core purpose of a university. Increasing diversity is not only a way to let the historically disadvantaged into college, but also to promote sharper thinking for everyone.
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