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pier-paolo

The Year of Blur - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “The days are long, but the years are short.” Except in the pandemic, she said, “the days are long, and the year is also long.”
  • You’re not alone if you feel that 2020, perhaps the most dramatic and memorable year of our lifetimes — and that’s before Election Day — seems shuffled and disordered, like a giant blur. A dream state, or perhaps a nightmare.
  • That’s the paradox of 2020, or one of them: A year so momentous also feels, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.
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  • Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories,
  • the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time
  • there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing
  • For some who have recovered from Covid-19
  • Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.
  • Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation,
  • t doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually
  • If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.
  • The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability.
  • In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”
  • But even people in solitary confinement will tell you that the essence of that experience is something we’re all experiencing now — the deprivation of normal social contact. And human beings really do depend on each other to structure our lives and tell us who we are.”
  • “We’ve all had basically enough of wearing our masks and having our lives disrupted,” Ms. Spinney said, “which is what we’re seeing now with Covid fatigue.”
  • Or perhaps we just need to remember that time is a human construct.
margogramiak

Hand Sanitizer Could Ruin Your Ballot, So Use It After You Vote | HuffPost Life - 0 views

  • One of the sneakiest ways your vote may be disqualified is because of hand sanitizer
  • One of the sneakiest ways your vote may be disqualified is because of hand sanitizer
    • margogramiak
       
      Oh, wow.
  • “Poll workers and voters should ensure their hands are completely dry before handling these items.“
    • margogramiak
       
      I feel like more people should know this...
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  • On the other hand, the risk of getting your vote ruined from too much hand sanitizer is very, very real.
    • margogramiak
       
      Wow, that's very unsettling.
  • “Spread through inanimate objects such as pens, or touching the surface, or mail is theoretically extraordinarily low,”
    • margogramiak
       
      I didn't know that!
  • The CDC does recommend having hand sanitizer available
    • margogramiak
       
      Maybe poll workers could reminder voters to make sure their hands are dry? (since lots of people will be using)
  • Experts say you need to rub hand sanitizer until it is dry on your skin for it to be maximally effective.
    • margogramiak
       
      So if you're using it correctly, you shouldn't have an issue.
  • I just do it at the end
    • margogramiak
       
      That makes sense.
  • Just remember to keep the ballot dry.
    • margogramiak
       
      I hope everyone is somewhat aware of this!!
johnsonel7

What Is the Most Important Activity for Self-Transformation? | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • It makes sense; we all have a natural tendency to grow, transform, and live life as fully as we can. It is an internal drive to experience deeper fulfillment.
  • This “lack of self-worth” deeply buried idea about myself is just an example, there are numerous potential judgments, ideas, perceptions, assumptions, and feelings that I could be carrying in my own personal shadow.
  • The pain is due to the fact that there might be a reason behind the piece’s location in shadow of your psyche—it might be a threatening dimension of yourself, or a scary one, or one that is linked with some trauma or difficult past events—and you have pushed it into the unconscious so that you won't have to “meet” it as part of conscious awareness of yourself.
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  • Psychological research confirms the importance of self-awareness. It shows that self-awareness is crucial for us to experience self-development, take the perspective of others, exercise self-control, produce creative accomplishments, and experience high self-esteem.
  • Study – contemplative education is based upon introspection. You could take courses, workshops, retreats, and other learning opportunities that are inviting self-awareness. Those courses do not have to be titled “Self-awareness” – they just need to have the juice of introspection interwoven into their teaching. For example, mindfulness courses, and different mental health practitioner courses would offer you such introspection as they invite you to observe your own patterns and way of being.
johnsonel7

Can Brain Science Help Us Break Bad Habits? | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.
  • Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use.
  • Our minds, Wood explains, have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability—a phenomenon known as the “introspection illusion”—and that may be why we overestimate its power.
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  • n Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, only a quarter of the subjects were able to resist eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. This implies that a large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life.
  • They were most successful at adopting productive behaviors not when they resolved to do better, or distracted themselves from temptation, but when they altered their environment. Instead of studying on a couch in a dorm, with a TV close by, they went to the library. They ate better when they removed junk food from the dorm refrigerator. “Successful self-control,” Wood writes, “came from essentially covering up the marshmallow.”
  • Both, too, emphasize the role of conscious effort—not in resisting habit but in analyzing it, the better to formulate a strategy for reform.
  • Wood advises us to come up with new rewards as substitutes for the ones the phone provided. I listened to music on the car radio. In the evening, instead of scrolling through tweets and e-mails, I sought out authors I’d never read. At the end of each day, I felt calmer, and free.
tongoscar

Australia fires: 8 things everyone should know about the bushfire disaster - Vox - 0 views

  • Since September, at least 24 million acres of Australia have burned in one of the country’s worst fire seasons on record.
  • The severity of the widespread fires is a symptom of global warming, and the blazes may even contribute to it — at least in the short term. Australia’s bushfires have released 400 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
  • Before the fires ignited, Australia was already enduring its hottest and driest year on record. It’s summertime in the southern hemisphere, and the heat keeps rising.
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  • This summer’s high temperatures and subsequent fires are linked to climate change, which drives long-term warming trends and makes these kinds of events more severe.
  • Australia is one of the great biodiversity hotspots in the world. The island continent was isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years, allowing evolution to take strange new paths, and until fairly recently, with little human influence.Around 244 species of mammals are found only in Australia. Before the fires, its great diversity of life was already threatened due to invasive species, habitat destruction, and climate change, according to Australia’s science research agency, CSIRO. Now, ecologists are fearing severe ecological consequences from so much land being burnt at once.
johnsonel7

Remember This: Memory Requires Intelligent Design | Evolution News - 0 views

  • Evidence from a new study shows that memory circuits assist the mind in recalling thoughts by associating them with sensations. The mind can use the brain’s storage mechanisms to sort more important or urgent memories for faster recall. 
  • In particular, it remains unknown whether factors that structure the retrieval of external stimuli also apply to thought recall, and whether some thought features affect their accessibility in memory.
  • These observations appear to support the view that the conscious self uses memory as a tool. The mind uses the brain; it is not a passive illusion conjured up by the brain. The brain is active and ready, storing each sensation as we walk through daily life, but thoughts that involve planning are more readily recalled. It’s as if the self tells the brain, “Remember this,” and the brain obliges like a computer operator or librarian, pigeonholing the data where it can be recalled more easily later.
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  • Many of these thoughts are likely forgotten, the authors say, probably because there is only so much a person can focus on in the sea of perceptions and stimuli going on around us. If the intuition is valuable enough to the self, the brain will assist future recall of the intuition
  • They also fit well with the idea that the greater accessibility of planning thoughts in memory results from an evolutionary process whereby mental contents that enhance survival chances are better remembered.
Javier E

COVID-19: Individually Rational, Collectively Disastrous - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • One major problem is that stopping the virus from spreading requires us to override our basic intuitions.
  • Three cognitive biases make it hard for us to avoid actions that put us in great collective danger.
  • if everyone who isn’t at especially high risk held similar dinner parties, some percentage of these events would lead to additional infections. And because each newly infected person might spread the virus to others, everyone’s decision to hold a one-off dinner party would quickly lead to a significant spike in transmissions.
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  • some activities, including dangerous ones, provide negative feedback only rarely. When I am in a rush, I often cross the street at a red light. I understand intellectually that this is stupid, but I’ve never once seen evidence of my stupidity.
  • Exposure to COVID-19 works the same way. Every time you engage in a risky activity—like meeting up with your friends indoors—the world is likely to send you a signal that you made the right choice. I saw my pal and didn’t get sick. Clearly, I shouldn’t have worried so much about socializing!
  • Let’s assume, for example, that going to a large indoor gathering gives you a one in 20 chance of contracting COVID-19—a significant risk. Most likely, you’ll get away with it the first time. You’ll then infer that taking part in such gatherings is pretty safe, and will do so again. Eventually, you are highly likely to fall sick.
  • 2. Individually Rational, Collectively DisastrousWe tend to think behavior that is justifiable on the individual level is also justifiable on the collective level, and vice versa. If eating the occasional sugary treat is fine for me it’s fine for all of us. And if smoking indoors is bad for me, it’s bad for all of us.
  • The dynamics of contagion in a pandemic do not work like that
  • 1. Misleading Feedback
  • The dynamic here is reminiscent of classic collective-action problems. If you go to one dinner, you’ll likely be fine. But if everyone goes to one dinner, the virus will spread with such speed that your own chances of contracting COVID-19 will also rise precipitously.
  • 3. Dangers Are Hard to Recognize and Avoid
  • Many of the dangers we face in life are easy to spot—and we have, over many millennia, developed biological instincts and social conventions to avoid them
  • When we deal with an unaccustomed danger, such as a new airborne virus, we can’t rely on any of these protective mechanisms.
  • The virus is invisible. This makes it hard to spot or anticipate. We don’t see little viral particles floating through the air
  • In time, we can overcome these biases (at least to some extent).
  • Social disapprobation can help
  • We all should do what we can to identify the biases from which we suffer—and try to stop them from influencing our behavior.
krystalxu

When You Fear Making the "Wrong" Decision - 0 views

  • “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
  • mind resists all attempts to make any kind of decision at all.
  • immobilized, unable to push through the debilitating fear.
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  • I realized that the issue isn’t about being afraid to go to Korea. The real issue is that I have an overall fear of making the “wrong” decisions in my life.
  • Understand that there are no “wrong” decisions.
  • Listening closely to my fears about Korea made me aware of some pretty negative beliefs I held about myself and doubts I had in my abilities.
  • Make peace with your emotions.
  • I’m hearing the messages my mind, body, and spirit are trying to tell me because I’ve made a conscious decision to listen
  • It really takes the pressure off if you understand that every experience you have, whether you characterize it as “good” or “bad,” is exactly the experience you need to have at that moment. Some choices may lead to more painful lessons than others, but nothing hurts like living in fear.
  • Intuition can use fear to help you grow.
  • Fear is often described as a psychological response to a perceived threat.
  • It only makes sense to avoid things that can potentially harm you.
  • many of us have developed fear from negative experiences in our past.
  • We have built a protective fence around our emotional scars, and learned to ward off anybody or anything that triggers an unconscious fear.
  • The next time you feel fear, embrace it, examine it, and if guided to do so, move boldly toward it.
blythewallick

The quiet loss of knowledge threatens indigenous communities -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

  • Plants play an important role for most indigenous communities in South America, and not merely as a source of food. They also provide the raw material for building materials, tools, medicine, and much more. The extinction of a plant species therefore also endangers the very foundation of these people's way of life. advertisement
  • The problem is that this is not written down. Passed down as a cultural inheritance, it exists only in the minds of the people -- and could therefore vanish almost unnoticed. "Very little is known about how vulnerable this knowledge is in the context of current global change," says Jordi Bascompte, professor of ecology at the University of Zurich.
  • "There is therefore an urgent need to find out how biological and cultural factors interact with each other in determining the services provided by biodiversity.."
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  • For their study, they analyzed knowledge held by 57 indigenous communities in the Amazon basin, the Andes and the Chocó region to collate their knowledge of palm trees. The researchers then depicted the different palm species and their uses in graphical form in a network, from which they could identify the local and regional links between the knowledge of indigenous communities.
  • "In this context, cultural diversity is just as important as biological diversity," says Jordi Bascompte. "In particular, the simultaneous loss of plant species and cultural inheritance leads to a much faster disintegration of the indigenous knowledge network."
  • However, the irreplaceable knowledge that is gradually disappearing from indigenous communities is equally important for the service that an ecosystem provides."
  • The study also highlights the value of transdisciplinary collaboration between ecology and social science: "The relationship established between biological and cultural diversity can help strengthen the resilience of indigenous communities in the face of global change."
sanderk

Make Good Decisions Faster | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • According to studies done by Sheena Iyengar at Columbia University, Americans make an average of 70 decisions each day. We make mundane decisions about what to have for lunch and which route to take to work, as well as defining decisions such as where to live, whom to marry, and whether to keep this job or accept that other offer. As Albert Camus said "life is the sum of our choices."  
  • the longer you spend waffling over what to have for breakfast, the harder it will be to make a good decision with a customer or co-worker later that morning.  The more we hem and haw about what to buy at the mall on Saturday afternoon, the more likely we are to choose to throw back a pound of fries and double dose of fudge dessert on Saturday evening.
  • A simple Know-Think-Do framework can help solve this problem by enabling us to make all of our decisions--big and small; daily and defining--quicker without sacrificing quality.
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  • The quickest, easiest, most effective way to do this is by "consulting an Anti-You" before you make every decision. As one banking executive explained to me, "It's amazing how many poor decisions can be avoided simply by asking one other person for their opinion."
  • The act of explaining your situation to another person often gives you new insights about the decision before the other person even responds.  And the fresh perspective they offer in response is the second bonus.
  • The purpose of a decision is not to find the perfect option. The purpose of a decision is to get you to the next decision.
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

The New History Wars - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Critical historians who thought they were winning the fight for control within the academy now face dire retaliation from outside the academy. The dizzying turn from seeming triumph in 2020 to imminent threat in 2022 has unnerved many practitioners of the new history. Against this background, they did not welcome it when their association’s president suggested that maybe their opponents had a smidgen of a point.
  • a background reality of the humanities in the contemporary academy: a struggle over who is entitled to speak about what. Nowhere does this struggle rage more fiercely than in anything to do with the continent of Africa. Who should speak? What may be said? Who will be hired?
  • ne obvious escape route from the generational divide in the academy—and the way the different approaches to history, presentist and antiquarian, tend to map onto it—is for some people, especially those on the older and whiter side of the divide, to keep their mouths shut about sensitive issues
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  • The political and methodological stresses within the historical profession are intensified by economic troubles. For a long time, but especially since the economic crisis of 2008, university students have turned away from the humanities, preferring to major in fields that seem to offer more certain and lucrative employment. Consequently, academic jobs in the humanities and especially in history have become radically more precarious for younger faculty—even as universities have sought to meet diversity goals in their next-generation hiring by expanding offerings in history-adjacent specialties, such as gender and ethnic studies.
  • The result has produced a generational divide. Younger scholars feel oppressed and exploited by universities pressing them to do more labor for worse pay with less security than their elders; older scholars feel that overeager juniors are poised to pounce on the least infraction as an occasion to end an elder’s career and seize a job opening for themselves. Add racial difference as an accelerant, and what was intended as an interesting methodological discussion in a faculty newsletter can explode into a national culture war.
  • One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.
  • Much of academia is governed these days by a joke from the Soviet Union: “If you think it, don’t speak it. If you speak it, don’t write it. If you write it, don’t sign it. But if you do think it, speak it, write it, and sign it—don’t be surprised.”
  • Yet this silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking
  • mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place—and that insertion sometimes requires that new history be fabricated altogether, the “bad history” that Sweet tried to warn against.
  • If it is not the job of the president of the American Historical Association to confront those questions, then whose is it?
  • Sweet used a play on words—“Is History History?”—for the title of his complacency-shaking essay. But he was asking not whether history is finished, done with, but Is history still history? Is it continuing to do what history is supposed to do? Or is it being annexed for other purposes, ideological rather than historical ones?
  • Advocates of studying the more distant past to disturb and challenge our ideas about the present may accuse their academic rivals of “presentism.”
  • In real life, of course, almost everybody who cares about history believes in a little of each option. But how much of each? What’s the right balance? That’s the kind of thing that historians do argue about, and in the arguing, they have developed some dismissive labels for one another
  • Those who look to the more recent past to guide the future may accuse the other camp of “antiquarianism.”
  • The accusation of presentism hurts because it implies that the historian is sacrificing scholarly objectivity for ideological or political purposes. The accusation of antiquarianism stings because it implies that the historian is burrowing into the dust for no useful purpose at all.
  • In his mind, he was merely reopening one of the most familiar debates in professional history: the debate over why? What is the value of studying the past? To reduce the many available answers to a stark choice: Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one?
  • Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?
  • The August edition of the association’s monthly magazine featured, as usual, a short essay by the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Within hours of its publication, an outrage volcano erupted on social media. A professor at Cornell vented about the author’s “white gaze.”
Javier E

untitled - 0 views

  • Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts.
  • the work was a giant step toward developing computerized laboratories that could carry out many thousands of experiments much faster than is possible now, helping scientists penetrate the mysteries of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
  • cancer is not a one-gene problem; it’s a many-thousands-of-factors problem.”
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  • This kind of modeling is already in use to study individual cellular processes like metabolism. But Dr. Covert said: “Where I think our work is different is that we explicitly include all of the genes and every known gene function. There’s no one else out there who has been able to include more than a handful of functions or more than, say, one-third of the genes.”
  • The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules — including DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules known as metabolites, which are generated by cell processes.
  • They called the simulation an important advance in the new field of computational biology, which has recently yielded such achievements as the creation of a synthetic life form — an entire bacterial genome created by a team led by the genome pioneer J. Craig Venter. The scientists used it to take over an existing cell.
  • A decade ago, scientists developed simulations of metabolism that are now being used to study a wide array of cells, including bacteria, yeast and photosynthetic organisms. Other models exist for processes like protein synthesis.
  • “Right now, running a simulation for a single cell to divide only one time takes around 10 hours and generates half a gigabyte of data,” Dr. Covert wrote. “I find this fact completely fascinating, because I don’t know that anyone has ever asked how much data a living thing truly holds. We often think of the DNA as the storage medium, but clearly there is more to it than that.”
  • scientists chose an approach called object-oriented programming, which parallels the design of modern software systems. Software designers organize their programs in modules, which communicate with one another by passing data and instructions back and forth.
  • “The major modeling insight we had a few years ago was to break up the functionality of the cell into subgroups, which we could model individually, each with its own mathematics, and then to integrate these submodels together into a whole,”
Javier E

The Scoreboards Where You Can't See Your Score - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The characters in Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Super Sad True Love Story” inhabit a continuously surveilled and scored society.
  • Consider the protagonist, Lenny Abramov, age 39. A digital dossier about him accumulates his every health condition (high cholesterol, depression), liability (mortgage: $560,330), purchase (“bound, printed, nonstreaming media artifact”), tendency (“heterosexual, nonathletic, nonautomotive, nonreligious”) and probability (“life span estimated at 83”). And that profile is available for perusal by employers, friends and even strangers in bars.
  • Even before the appearance of these books, a report called “The Scoring of America” by the World Privacy Forum showed how analytics companies now offer categorization services like “churn scores,” which aim to predict which customers are likely to forsake their mobile phone carrier or cable TV provider for another company; “job security scores,” which factor a person’s risk of unemployment into calculations of his or her ability to pay back a loan; “charitable donor scores,” which foundations use to identify the households likeliest to make large donations; and “frailty scores,” which are typically used to predict the risk of medical complications and death in elderly patients who have surgery.
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  • In two nonfiction books, scheduled to be published in January, technology experts examine similar consumer-ranking techniques already in widespread use.
  • While a federal law called the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires consumer reporting agencies to provide individuals with copies of their credit reports on request, many other companies are free to keep their proprietary consumer scores to themselves.
  • Befitting the founder of a firm that markets reputation management, Mr. Fertik contends that individuals have some power to influence commercial scoring systems.
  • “This will happen whether or not you want to participate, and these scores will be used by others to make major decisions about your life, such as whether to hire, insure, or even date you,”
  • “Important corporate actors have unprecedented knowledge of the minutiae of our daily lives,” he writes in “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard University Press), “while we know little to nothing about how they use this knowledge to influence important decisions that we — and they — make.”
  • Data brokers amass dossiers with thousands of details about individual consumers, like age, religion, ethnicity, profession, mortgage size, social networks, estimated income and health concerns such as impotence and irritable bowel syndrome. Then analytics engines can compare patterns in those variables against computer forecasting models. Algorithms are used to assign consumers scores — and to recommend offering, or withholding, particular products, services or fees — based on predictions about their behavior.
  • It’s a fictional forecast of a data-deterministic culture in which computer algorithms constantly analyze consumers’ profiles, issuing individuals numeric rankings that may benefit or hinder them.
  • Think of this technique as reputation engine optimization. If an algorithm incorrectly pegs you as physically unfit, for instance, the book suggests that you can try to mitigate the wrong. You can buy a Fitbit fitness tracker, for instance, and upload the exercise data to a public profile — or even “snap that Fitbit to your dog” and “you’ll quickly be the fittest person in your town.”
  • Professor Pasquale offers a more downbeat reading. Companies, he says, are using such a wide variety of numerical rating systems that it would be impossible for average people to significantly influence their scores.
  • “Corporations depend on automated judgments that may be wrong, biased or destructive,” Professor Pasquale writes. “Faulty data, invalid assumptions and defective models can’t be corrected when they are hidden.”
  • Moreover, trying to influence scoring systems could backfire. If a person attached a fitness device to a dog and tried to claim the resulting exercise log, he suggests, an algorithm might be able to tell the difference and issue that person a high score for propensity toward fraudulent activity.
  • “People shouldn’t think they can outwit corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars,” Professor Pasquale said in a phone interview.Consumers would have more control, he argues, if Congress extended the right to see and correct credit reports to other kinds of rankings.
anonymous

The Science of Older and Wiser - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The question remains compelling: What is wisdom, and how does it play out in individual lives?
  • Most psychologists agree that if you define wisdom as maintaining positive well-being and kindness in the face of challenges, it is one of the most important qualities one can possess to age successfully — and to face physical decline and death.
  • Based on an analysis of their answers, she determined that wisdom consists of three key components: cognition, reflection and compassion.
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  • While younger people were faster in tests of cognitive performance, older people showed “greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences,” the study found.
  • one must take time to gain insights and perspectives from one’s cognitive knowledge to be wise (the reflective dimension). Then one can use those insights to understand and help others (the compassionate dimension).
  • Wisdom, she has found, is the ace in the hole that can help even severely impaired people find meaning, contentment and acceptance in later life.
  • “Wise people are able to accept reality as it is, with equanimity,” Professor Ardelt said.
  • True personal wisdom involves five elements, said Professor Staudinger, now a life span psychologist and professor at Columbia University. They are self-insight; the ability to demonstrate personal growth; self-awareness in terms of your historical era and your family history; understanding that priorities and values, including your own, are not absolute; and an awareness of life’s ambiguities.
  • True wisdom involves recognizing the negative both within and outside ourselves and trying to learn from it, she said.
  • If you are wise, she said, “You’re not only regulating your emotional state, you’re also attending to another person’s emotional state.” She added: “You’re not focusing so much on what you need and deserve, but on what you can contribute.”
  • Continuing education can be an important way to cultivate wisdom in the later years, researchers say, for one thing because it combats isolation.
  • Reflecting on the meaning and structure of their lives, she said, can help people thrive after the balance shifts and there is much less time left than has gone before.
Emily Horwitz

Ah, Wilderness! Nature Hike Could Unlock Your Imagination : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

  • Want to be more creative? Drop that iPad and head to the great outdoors.
  • David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist in Uta
  • t sent students out into nature with computers, to test their attention spans. "It was an abysmal failure,
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  • students didn't want to be anywhere near the computers
  • pencil-and-paper creativity quiz, the so-called Remote Associates Test, which asks people to identify word associations that aren't immediately obvious. Four days into the trip, they took the test again
  • 45 percent improvement.
  • hardly scientific.
  • took the test four days into the wilderness did 50 percent better than those who were still immersed in modern lif
  • Outward Bound is notoriously strict about bringing artifacts of modern life into the wilderness.
  • Half of the 56 hikers took the test before going backpacking in the wilderness, and the other half took the RAT test on the fourth day of their trip. The groups went into the wild in Alaska, Colorado, Maine and Washington.
  • researchers had already taken the test once.
  • exposure to nature over a number of days, which has been shown in other studies to improve thinking
  • exercise
  • abandoning electronic devices
  • constant texting and checking in on Facebook are not making us think more clearly.
  •  
    An interesting connection between being in nature and being creative and mentally present.
Javier E

5 things art is not - 3 views

  • 5 Things Art is Not
  • in over two decades of study through my work as a curator, college professor, and critic, art has become more mysterious, eluding my attempts to pin it down, to fully understand it, becoming so much more and other than I had expected.
  • But what I have learned are a few things about what art is not, things that I have believed about art over the years that I have gradually had to abandon.
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  • 1. Art is not an abstract category.
  • You do not stand in front of "Art" in a museum or a gallery, you stand in front of particular painting. The artist Barnett Newman once quipped, "aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds."
  • 2. Art is not a political weapon
  • The value of art is not found in its capacity to effect political change "out there" but to work on us—you and me—to connect with our pain and suffering, hope and yearning, to have the run of our "inner chambers,"
  • Any cultural practice that is worth taking seriously, that has a history and tradition, whether cooking, ballroom dancing, or chess, takes practice, and thus requires effort to learn
  • 3. Art is not easy
  • Each work of art is a response to a conversation that spans centuries, each artist receives and passes on this tradition in their own distinctive way
  • 4. Art is not a visual illustration of the artist’s worldview
  • No human being possesses a unified "worldview" that is manifest in and through each of her intentional acts or artifacts she produces
  • An artist does not paint a picture to express what she already knows or believes. She paints to learn something about herself and the world—something she doesn’t already know.
  • 5. Art does not form virtue
  • Art always pushes against the pragmatism, moralism, and utilitarianism that shapes life inside as well as outside the church. It starts with our weakness, desperation, and brokenness in its search for hope and beauty and stakes its existence and relevance on the belief that all appearances deceive.
grayton downing

Inhibit Mitochondria to Live Longer? | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

  • Although previous work had indirectly suggested that changing mitochondrial function affected lifespan, “this is the first clear demonstration [that it] extends mouse lifespan,” Miller added.
  • well known that mitochondria are linked to health. Some evidence suggests that inhibiting mitochondrial function can be harmful—as in the case of diabetes or obesity—but earlier data from nematodes and fruit flies also suggest a link to lifespan increase. The latest findings are a step toward untangling one of the current debates in the field—whether inhibiting mitochondrial function is detrimental or beneficial,
  • The average lifespan of BXD mice range from 1 year to almost 2.5 years. The researchers were able to link 3 genes to longevity variability, including mitochondrial ribosomal protein S5 (Mrps5), which encodes a protein integral to mitochondrial protein synthesis. They found that BXD strains with 50 percent less Mrps5 expression lived about 250 days longer than BXD mice with more robust Mrps5 expression.
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  • researchers were also able to activate the mitochondrial UPR via pharmacological means. Dosing worms with the antibiotic doxycyline, which inhibits bacterial and mitochondrial protein translation, also activated the mitochondrial UPR and extended worm lifespans. Rapamycin, shown to enhance longevity in mice, also extended worm lifespan and induced mitonuclear protein imbalance and the mitochondrial UPR in mouse hepatocytes.
  • mitochondrial ribosomal proteins are not to be trifled with. “There are a number of well-defined severe disorders in humans, including neonatal lethality, due to defects in those exact proteins,”
  • is beginning to cast a wider net, looking to see whether mitonuclear protein imbalance could explain longevity induced by other means, such as caloric restriction. Auwerx hopes that the work will aid in designing a drug intervention “to pump up this response via pharmacological tools.”
  • he’s optimistic that his team has identified a “common thread” demonstrating that longevity is not affected so much by inhibiting or stimulating mitochondria, but how the organelles “deal with proteins.”
Javier E

Documenting Sports With Tech, or It Didn't Happen - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The real-life issues now so embedded with the sports world — like debates over racial injustice, brain damage, the ethics of college sports and cheating at the Olympics, plus 100 other things — cannot be parsed to 140 characters.
  • ? Twitter has turned a lot of sports reporting into play-by-play, hot takes and snarky one-liners. With retweets and replies, the echo can be deafening.
  • The biggest transformation has been the use of social media, and Twitter is the opium of the sports-reporting masses
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  • I’m learning I can have nothing but an iPhone and I’m fine.
  • The game changer was the smartphone. It's not only my office phone. I can also use it to record interviews (its microphone is better than the one in my old Olympus, which is important in crowded, noisy places), take pictures and videos to help me remember the details of what I see, and even type or speak notes and interview answers into emails that I send myself.
  • I use it the way other people use their phones. I email, text, tweet, post to Instagram, get directions, set timers and alarms, change flights, check weather, update my calendar, map my jogs, and listen to podcasts and Spotify during long drives or plane rides. On assignment, I’ve had entire conversations with Google Translate, two of us passing my phone back and forth.
  • Besides being an all-in-one communication tool, the iPhone helps my writing. I take photographs of places I know I’ll want to describe in detail later — the inside of someone’s home, a rocky mountain summit, a piece of jewelry that a subject is wearing, the shape of the clouds and the color of the sky. I take videos of places, too, and narrate them as I shoot so that I can watch and listen later.
  • I often do stories overseas, and for the last couple of years, I have constantly connected with sources, interview subjects and my own family on my phone through WhatsApp, a brilliant messaging service that seems to be well known everywhere except the United States.
  • I use it to text, but also to trade photographs, short videos and voice messages, instantly. And you can call from it, even use it for face-to-face video conversations, free if you’re on Wi-Fi.
  • More than anything, technology has brought the sports world into the “now.”
  • Now we can see almost any game on television, in a dozen sports from anywhere in the world, with a computer on our laps and a phone in our hands. We receive and give instant analysis through the world of social media. We can track statistics for our fantasy teams. We can tweet nasty messages to famous athletes and coaches who disappoint us. Like so many other parts of society, we’re probably watching sports more physically alone than ever, but more connected in other ways.
Javier E

Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said.
  • Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.
  • In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug.
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  • Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize
  • “The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.
  • Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional
  • Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum
  • The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre
  • Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu’s trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. “It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out,” he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China’s current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that “the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated.”
  • Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.
  • Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”
  • Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.
  • Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future
  • The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”
  • Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good
  • In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.
  • “I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”
  • Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.”
  • Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,”
  • It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes
  • “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.
  • Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. “China is a futuristic country,” he said. “I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up.”
  • “We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don’t memorialize those, the individuals.” He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. “This is how we Chinese have always been,” he said. “When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories.”
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