Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged magic

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Is Science Kind of a Scam? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...spooked-books-adam-gopnik

science knowledge physics einstein quantum facts social context history

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • No well-tested scientific concept is more astonishing than the one that gives its name to a new book by the Scientific American contributing editor George Musser, “Spooky Action at a Distance
  • The ostensible subject is the mechanics of quantum entanglement; the actual subject is the entanglement of its observers.
  • his question isn’t so much how this weird thing can be true as why, given that this weird thing had been known about for so long, so many scientists were so reluctant to confront it. What keeps a scientific truth from spreading?
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • it is as if two magic coins, flipped at different corners of the cosmos, always came up heads or tails together. (The spooky action takes place only in the context of simultaneous measurement. The particles share states, but they don’t send signals.)
  • fashion, temperament, zeitgeist, and sheer tenacity affected the debate, along with evidence and argument.
  • The certainty that spooky action at a distance takes place, Musser says, challenges the very notion of “locality,” our intuitive sense that some stuff happens only here, and some stuff over there. What’s happening isn’t really spooky action at a distance; it’s spooky distance, revealed through an action.
  • Why, then, did Einstein’s question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics? The reasons, unfolding through generations of physicists, have several notable social aspects,
  • What started out as a reductio ad absurdum became proof that the cosmos is in certain ways absurd. What began as a bug became a feature and is now a fact.
  • “If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.” The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.
  • Musser explains that the big issue was settled mainly by being pushed aside. Generational imperatives trumped evidentiary ones. The things that made Einstein the lovable genius of popular imagination were also the things that made him an easy object of condescension. The hot younger theorists patronized him,
  • There was never a decisive debate, never a hallowed crucial experiment, never even a winning argument to settle the case, with one physicist admitting, “Most physicists (including me) accept that Bohr won the debate, although like most physicists I am hard pressed to put into words just how it was done.”
  • Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this account, almost the way “Rock Around the Clock” displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts.
  • The same pattern of avoidance and talking-past and taking on the temper of the times turns up in the contemporary science that has returned to the possibility of non-locality.
  • the revival of “non-locality” as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: “Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.”
  • Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe.
  • The “indeterminacy” of the atom was, for younger European physicists, “a lesson of modernity, an antidote to a misplaced Enlightenment trust in reason, which German intellectuals in the 1920’s widely held responsible for their country’s defeat in the First World War.” The tonal and temperamental difference between the scientists was as great as the evidence they called on.
  • Science isn’t a slot machine, where you drop in facts and get out truths. But it is a special kind of social activity, one where lots of different human traits—obstinacy, curiosity, resentment of authority, sheer cussedness, and a grudging readiness to submit pet notions to popular scrutiny—end by producing reliable knowledge
  • What was magic became mathematical and then mundane. “Magical” explanations, like spooky action, are constantly being revived and rebuffed, until, at last, they are reinterpreted and accepted. Instead of a neat line between science and magic, then, we see a jumpy, shifting boundary that keeps getting redrawn
  • Real-world demarcations between science and magic, Musser’s story suggests, are like Bugs’s: made on the move and as much a trap as a teaching aid.
  • In the past several decades, certainly, the old lines between the history of astrology and astronomy, and between alchemy and chemistry, have been blurred; historians of the scientific revolution no longer insist on a clean break between science and earlier forms of magic.
  • Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-science) were sought and taken seriously—Karl Popper’s criterion of “falsifiability” was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another—many historians and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a naïve view of how the scientific enterprise actually works.
  • They see a muddle of coercion, old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures—all coming together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable logic.
  • Yet the old notion of a scientific revolution that was really a revolution is regaining some credibility.
  • David Wootton, in his new, encyclopedic history, “The Invention of Science” (Harper), recognizes the blurred lines between magic and science but insists that the revolution lay in the public nature of the new approach.
  • What killed alchemy was the insistence that experiments must be openly reported in publications which presented a clear account of what had happened, and they must then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses.
  • Wootton, while making little of Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, makes it up to him by borrowing a criterion from his political philosophy. Scientific societies are open societies. One day the lunar tides are occult, the next day they are science, and what changes is the way in which we choose to talk about them.
  • Wootton also insists, against the grain of contemporary academia, that single observed facts, what he calls “killer facts,” really did polish off antique authorities
  • once we agree that the facts are facts, they can do amazing work. Traditional Ptolemaic astronomy, in place for more than a millennium, was destroyed by what Galileo discovered about the phases of Venus. That killer fact “serves as a single, solid, and strong argument to establish its revolution around the Sun, such that no room whatsoever remains for doubt,” Galileo wrote, and Wootton adds, “No one was so foolish as to dispute these claims.
  • everal things flow from Wootton’s view. One is that “group think” in the sciences is often true think. Science has always been made in a cloud of social networks.
  • There has been much talk in the pop-sci world of “memes”—ideas that somehow manage to replicate themselves in our heads. But perhaps the real memes are not ideas or tunes or artifacts but ways of making them—habits of mind rather than products of mind
  • science, then, a club like any other, with fetishes and fashions, with schemers, dreamers, and blackballed applicants? Is there a real demarcation to be made between science and every other kind of social activity
  • The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think
julia rhodes

Q&A: Why It's Sometimes Rational to Be Irrational - Wired Science - 0 views

www.wired.com/...2

science research knowledge psychology brain science education rational magic irrational heuristics bias

shared by julia rhodes on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • I think it’s safe to claim that magical thinking emerges from basic underlying cognitive mechanisms — shortcuts that we take, biases, heuristics.
  • A more controversial claim, which is very possible, is that magical thinking is an exaptation. An exaptation is some adaptation that emerged as a byproduct of something else, but became so useful that evolution started to select for aspects of that in addition to the initial thing.
  • Some people have argued that belief in god probably emerged from dualism, anthropomorphism and teleological reasoning. But then it became such a useful idea on its own that now we’re evolving to have a stronger belief in god, because belief in god is evolutionarily adaptive.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • There are a lot of dangers to magical thinking.
  • It can lead to fatalism if you think your life is completely controlled by supernatural forces.
  • But if used carefully, magical thinking can have benefits, such as a sense of control or a sense of meaning in life. So I take this somewhat paradoxical stance of using irrationality rationally.
  • eling lucky is irrational because the charm or wish itself isn’t lucky. But feeling lucky gives you a sense of control, which increases your confidence and increases your performance in various challenges. So it’s rational to hold onto that irrational belief, on some level, because it can benefit you — even if the charm can’t.
Javier E

The Smart Set: I Have My Reasons - May 24, 2011 - 0 views

www.thesmartset.com/...article05241102.aspx

religion magic irrationality rationality

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Wasn’t the Enlightenment supposed to wash the world of its sins of superstition and religion? And yet humanity keeps clinging to its belief systems, its religious leaders, and its prayer. More than that, we’re dipping back into the magical realms — one would think that if superstition were to be eradicated through the power of reason and rationality, magic would be the first to go. It turns out our hunger for the irrational and the intuitive is more insatiable than previously assumed. We have our Kabbalah, our Chaos Magick, our Druids. We have our mystics and tarot card readers and our astrologers on morning news shows explaining why Kate and William are a match made by the gods. Wicca is a fast growing religion in the United States, and my German health insurance covers homeopathy and Reiki massage, both of which have always felt more like magic than science to me.
  • And yet the atheists keep on, telling us that we don’t have to believe in God. It maybe never occurred to them that perhaps we want to.
  • Magical belief, whether that entails an omnipotent God who watches over us or the conviction that we can communicate with “the other side,” fills a need in us. Some of us, I should say, as atheists would be quick to counter. How seriously we take that belief, and what we do with it varies from person to person. As the debates between the godless and the faithful continue — and these are so prevalent in our culture now, the religious figure versus the atheist, sponsored by every university and cultural center, that I read such a debate in a novel I had picked up — that perhaps these two kinds of people simply have a different set of needs. It’s like a new mother arguing with a woman who has never felt maternal a day in her life. Neither side will ever truly understand the longings of the other, and the fact that they can’t stop arguing and trying to convince is proof of that.
courtneylang3

Magic Viking Sunstone? Crystal's Secret Revealed by Scientist Read more: http://www.fo... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...-secret-revealed-by-scientists

science technology knowledge discovery

shared by courtneylang3 on 03 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • courtneylang3 on 03 Nov 11
     
    "The Vikings could have discovered this, simply by choosing a transparent crystal and looking through it through a small hole in a screen," study researcher Guy Ropars wrote in an email to LiveScience. "The understanding of the complete mechanism and the knowledge of the polarization of light is not necessary." Is knowledge of mechanism and process essential in understanding a scientific discovery? This also shows how be develop from believing in magical explination to scientific
sissij

Do You and Your Partner Fight Too Much, or Not Enough? Turns Out There's a "Magic Ratio... - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-for-much-couples-should-fight

psychology research brain science

shared by sissij on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Everyone knows couples break up when they fight too much. But what if they don't fight enough?
  • the “magic ratio” of positive and negative interactions in successful relationships is about 5 to 1.
  • So, too much fighting leads to breakups. That’s obvious. But what’s interesting about the theory is it implies that one sign of a doomed relationship could be not enough negativity.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The idea is that because people and environments are always changing, partners must provide one another with enough corrective feedback so they can be “on the same page.” 
  • Gottman and his colleagues found that couples who remained stoic during conflicts actually tended to fare worse than couples that were more “volatile".
  • These couples exert a healthy amount of influence on one another, both positively and negatively. But as long as their interactions favor the positive, they tend to enjoy relatively stable relationships over the long term.
  • The 5:1 ratio also seems to ring true in the business world.
  • The results showed that the most successful teams made an average of 5.6 positive comments per every negative one, while the average ratio among the lowest performing teams was just 0.36 to 1.
  • Negative feedback can prevent you from driving off a cliff.
  • sissij on 26 Apr 17
     
    I find it very interesting that sometimes having some negative things can result in a positive way. In TV series or books, we can always see a scene that when two people are arguing, there would be a third person saying that "wow, you guys have such a good relationship!" and they would reply "no" together. Bow there are research on that and we can see from the perspective of logic of evolution that human community needs correction and advices from others to adjust themselves. I think arguing may sometimes shorten the relationship between two people since they both show each other the worst side and there won't be much hide between them. --Sissi (4/26/2017)
magickidsnursery

Best Nursery in Sharjah, Al Qasimia | Preschool in Sharjah - 0 views

Magic Kids Nursery is the one-stop preschool-solution for parents who want the best for their little ones! The energetic ambience, effective learning methodologies and affectionate trainers bestow ...

Nursery in Sharjah Nursery in Al Qasimia Nursery in Rolla Nursery in Abu Shagara Nursery in Al Majaz Preschool In Sharjah Best Nursery in Sharjah

started by magickidsnursery on 13 Sep 22 no follow-up yet
kortanekev

Unbelievable: Why Americans Mistrust Science | SciBytes | Learn Science at Scitable - 0 views

www.nature.com/...unbelievable

science teaching education development

shared by kortanekev on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • 25% of American respondents answered that the sun orbits the Earth [1]. A recent AP-GFK poll found that as many as 4 in 10 American adults doubt evolution, over half aren't confident that the Big Bang took place, just under 40% don't believe that pollution is causing climate change
  • When teaching science, teachers have to contend with students' old ideas of how the world works, an uphill battle where the old ideas have the advantage.
  • Children are exposed to scientific ideas at around age eight, when they become able to understand abstract concepts. Before that age, children rely on "magical thinking" to explain how the world exists and works, so, science education faces a tough challenge right from the start
  • kortanekev on 07 Dec 16
     
    Interesting - before the age of 8 most children are unable to understand very abstract concepts and resort to forming ideas that make sense symbolically to them - "magical thinking." So we do not have fundamentally "scientific" minds, and instead must rewrite our preconceived notions.  (Evie - 12/6/16) 
Javier E

Happiness Is a Warm iPhone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...appiness-is-a-warm-iphone.html

computers tech social context virtual world

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • We fall in love with our technology. That’s how we talk about our gadgets — with the language of emotional attachment, with irrational expectations about happily ever after.
  • I loved what was possible with it. Even though I wasn’t able to actually make it do anything, I knew that someone could. And that was enough, the mere idea of a machine, one that anyone could have in their home, that would take strings of symbols and turn them into music, into movement, into something else out there in the world.
  • We’re certainly into the magic zone — and yet, the magic is somehow fading for me. Technology has crossed the uncanny valley; it is simply too good at representing our real world.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • since buying that first iPhone, I’ve grown too used to new worlds.
  • As everything gets faster and richer and denser with information, as a whole new dimension to our physical world evolves online, some possibilities open up, and others close down. The potential congeals into the actual, the possible calcifies into the practical. What is imaginable gets pared down into what was actually imagined
  • But things are by necessity amazing in a very specific way, and with a very specific visual grammar and conceptual environment — and that environment is one that is closed, controlled, packaged for us. We’re holding magic boxes, boxes that want to serve us and coddle us, instead of challenge us. And how can you love something that doesn’t challenge you?
Javier E

This is what your brain looks like on magic mushrooms (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...c-mushrooms-does-to-your-brain

brain science research neural nets consciousness drugs

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • In recent years, a focus on brain structures and regions has given way to an emphasis on neurological networks: how cells and regions interact, with consciousness shaped not by any given set of brain regions, but by their interplay.
  • Understanding the networks, however, is no easy task
  • In mathematical terms, said Petri, normal brains have a well-ordered correlation state. There's not much cross-linking between networks. That changes after the psilocybin dose. Suddenly the networks are cross-linking like crazy, but not in random ways. New types of order emerge.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Perhaps some aspects of consciousness arise from these meta-networks -- and to investigate the proposition, the researchers analysed fMRI scans of 15 people after being injected with psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and compared them to scans of their brain activity after receiving a placebo.
  • "One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synaesthesia" -- the experience, common during psychedelic experiences, of sensory mix-up: tasting colours, feeling sounds, seeing smells, and so on.
  • A truer way of visualising it, he said, would be in three dimensions, with connections between networks forming a sponge-like topography.
  • "The big question in neuroscience is where consciousness comes from," Petri said. For now, he said, "We don't know."
Javier E

Your Brain on a Magic Trick - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...ur-brain-on-a-magic-trick.html

choice perception cognitive bias reality change blindness magic

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 12 - Cached
  • a retention vanish: a false transfer that exploits a lag in the brain’s perception of motion, called persistence of vision. When done right, the spectator will actually see the coin in the left palm for a split second after the hands separate. This bizarre afterimage results from the fact that visual neurons don’t stop firing once a given stimulus (here, the coin) is no longer present. As a result, our perception of reality lags behind reality by about one one-hundredth of a second.
  • Another dark psychological secret magicians routinely take advantage of is known as change blindness — the failure to detect changes in consecutive scenes.
  • we are often blind to the results of our own decisions. Once a choice is made, our minds tend to rewrite history in a way that flatters our volition, a fact magicians have exploited for centuries. “If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely,” said Teller, of the duo Penn and Teller, to Smithsonian magazine. “This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Magicians have long used such cognitive biases to their advantage, and in recent years scientists have been following in their footsteps, borrowing techniques from the conjurer’s playbook in an effort not to mystify people but to study them.
  • Scientists have found a way to induce change blindness, with a machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, which uses a magnetic field to disrupt localized brain regions
  • Such blind spots confirm what many philosophers have long suspected: reality and our perception of it are incommensurate to a far greater degree than is often believed. For all its apparent fidelity, the movie in our heads is a “Rashomon” narrative pieced together from inconsistent and unreliable bits of information. It is, to a certain extent, an illusion.
Emily Horwitz

Religion, Science And Magic Fairy Cellphones : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 2 views

www.npr.org/...on-science-and-no-easy-answers

religion science npr belief

shared by Emily Horwitz on 25 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Heaven and Hell. God and the Devil. For many folks these polar opposites are what religion is all about. And for many folks in science who consider themselves atheists, this is what makes religion so impossible to bear. How can the nature of the world be seen in such simplistic terms? How can such beliefs co-exist with the technologies on which we've built our everyday lives?
  • What is remarkable about the fundamentalist perspective, however, is an unwillingness to see spiritual life in the same light. Instead of seeing subtlety and complication that require a lifetime of intense dedicated effort — a genuine personal investigation of the world — to understand, everything is reduced to magic-marker outlines with unwavering, absolute answers.
  • Acknowledging that truth, in both science and religion, could be one way to raise the discussion to a plane where we might all learn something.
kortanekev

6 Humans With Real "Superpowers" That Science Can't Explain - Collective Evolution - 0 views

www.collective-evolution.com/...wers-that-science-cant-explain

science humans fact fiction

shared by kortanekev on 04 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • was responsible for holding a number of sessions to test the validity of psychokinesis (moving objects with the mind). In these sessions, attendees were taught how to initiate their own PK events using various metal objects. Individuals were able to completely bend or contort their metal specimens with no physical force being applied whatsoever
  • kortanekev on 04 Mar 17
     
    great example of something we can never definitively prove or refute because of so many possible variables. how are we to synthesize a full understanding of all of our human inputs: for example, visual paredoilia, confirmation bias, a magic trick, or an actual genetic mutation ?? We do not know if sci-fi will become scientific reality. We do not even know what we don't know Evie K (3/4/17)
Javier E

Teaching a Different Shakespeare From the One I Love - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...peare-than-the-one-i-love.html

shakespeare language literature

shared by Javier E on 13 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley, Calif. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility. In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.
  • There are many well-rehearsed reasons for the change: the rise of television followed by the triumph of digital technology, the sending of instant messages instead of letters, the ‘‘visual turn’’ in our culture, the pervasive use of social media. In their wake, the whole notion of a linguistic birthright could be called quaint, the artifact of particular circumstances that have now vanished
  • For my parents, born in Boston, the English language was a treasured sign of arrival and rootedness; for me, a mastery of Shakespeare, the supreme master of that language, was like a purchased coat of arms, a title of gentility tracing me back to Stratford-upon-Avon.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • It is not that the English language has ceased to be a precious possession; on the contrary, it is far more important now than it ever was in my childhood. But its importance has little or nothing to do any longer with the dream of rootedness. English is the premier international language, the global medium of communication and exchange.
  • This does not mean that I should abandon the paper assignment; it is an important form of training for a range of very different challenges that lie in their future. But I see that their deep imaginative engagement with Shakespeare, their intoxication, lies elsewhere.
  • When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden; when I ask them to analyze a film clip, perform a scene or make a video, I stand a better chance of receiving something extraordinary.
  • as I have discovered in my teaching, it is a different Shakespeare from the one with whom I first fell in love. Many of my students may have less verbal acuity than in years past, but they often possess highly developed visual, musical and performative skills. They intuitively grasp, in a way I came to understand only slowly, the pervasiveness of songs in Shakespeare’s plays, the strange ways that his scenes flow one into another or the cunning alternation of close-ups and long views
  • The M.I.T. Global Shakespeare Project features an electronic archive that includes images of every page of the First Folio of 1623. In the Norton Shakespeare, which I edit, the texts of his plays are now available not only in the massive printed book with which I was initiated but also on a digital platform. One click and you can hear each song as it might have sounded on the Elizabethan stage; another click and you listen to key scenes read by a troupe of professional actors. It is a kind of magic unimagined even a few years ago or rather imaginable only as the book of a wizard like Prospero in ‘‘The Tempest.’
  • But it is not the new technology alone that attracts students to Shakespeare; it is still more his presence throughout the world as the common currency of humanity. In Taiwan, Tokyo and Nanjing, in a verdant corner of the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in an ancient garden in Kabul, in Berlin and Bangkok and Bangalore, his plays continue to find new and unexpected ways to enchant.
Javier E

How the Disney Animated Film 'Frozen' Took Over the World : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...rozen-took-over-the-world.html

hit causes movie hollywood

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • In the end, though, Litman concluded, the findings were complicated: these factors could largely tell a dog from a general success, but they couldn’t predict the true runaway sensations.
  • few things continued to stand out: story and social influence. The most important figure in determining ultimate creative success, Simonton found, was the writer. “We can learn a great deal about what makes a successful film just by focusing on the quality of the screenplay,” he declared. Still, as he’d found earlier, quality did not always translate to quantity
  • And the thing that could potentially be even more, or at least equally, predictive wasn’t easy to quantify: so-called information cascades (basically, a snowball effect) that result from word-of-mouth dynamics.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “The character identification is the driving force,” says Wells, whose own research focusses on perception and the visual appeal of film. “It’s why people tend to identify with that medium always—it allows them to be put in those roles and experiment through that.”
  • one theme seemed to resonate: everyone could identify with Elsa. She wasn’t your typical princess. She wasn’t your typical Disney character. Born with magical powers that she couldn’t quite control, she meant well but caused harm, both on a personal scale (hurting her sister, repeatedly) and a global one (cursing her kingdom, by mistake). She was flawed—actually flawed, in a way that resulted in real mistakes and real consequences. Everyone could interpret her in a unique way and find that the arc of her story applied directly to them
  • what does all of this mean for “Frozen”? On the one hand, the movie shares many typical story elements with other Disney films. There are the parents dead within the first ten minutes (a must, it seems, in Disney productions), royalty galore, the quest to meet your one true love, the comic-relief character (Olaf the Snowman) to punctuate the drama. Even the strong female lead isn’t completely new
  • She recalls the sheer diversity of the students who joined the discussion: a mixture, split evenly between genders, of representatives of the L.G.B.T. community, artists, scientists.
  • the story keeps the audience engaged because it subverts expected tropes and stereotypes, over and over. “It’s the furthest thing from a typical princess movie,”
  • It also, unlike prior Disney films, aces the Bechdel Test: not only are both leads female, but they certainly talk about things other than men. It is the women, in fact, not the men, who save the day, repeatedly—and a selfless act of sacrifice rather than a “kiss of true love” that ends up winning.
  • In 2012, he and Simonton conducted a study of two hundred and twenty family films released between 1996 and 2009, to see whether successful children’s movies had certain identifying characteristics. They found that films that dealt with nuanced and complex themes did better than those that played it safe, as measured both by ratings on metacritic.com, rottentomatoes.com, and IMDb and by over-all financial performance.
  • “A good story, issues to think about and wrestle with,”
  • Simonton and Kaufman were able to explain only twenty to twenty-four per cent of variance in critical success and twenty-five in domestic gross earnings.
  • The other element, of course, is that intangible that Litman calls “buzz” and Simonson calls “information cascades,” the word of mouth that makes people embrace the story,
  • Part of the credit goes to Disney’s strategy. In their initial marketing campaign, they made an effort to point out the story’s uniqueness.
  • And their lawyers allowed the music to spread naturally through social media.
  • part of the credit goes to Jennifer Lee’s team, for the choices they consciously made to make the screenplay as complex as it was. Elsa was once evil; Elsa and Anna weren’t originally sisters; the prince wasn’t a sociopath. Their decisions to forego a true villain—something no Disney film had successfully done—and to make the story one driven by sibling love rather than romantic infatuation have made “Frozen” more than simply nuanced and relatable. They’ve made it more universally acceptable.
  • In contrast to other recent Disney films, like “Tangled,” “Frozen” isn’t politically fraught or controversial: you can say it’s good without fear of being accused of being a racist or an apologist or an animal-rights opponent
  • to echo the words of the screenwriting legend William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” In the end, it may just be a bit of magic.
Javier E

Revisiting the prophetic work of Neil Postman about the media » MercatorNet - 1 views

mercatornet.com/...68239

postman media analysis social media psychology brain science technology education

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.
  • “We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”
  • What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Postman also recognised that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits.
  • Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use
  • Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,
  • “Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”
  • “Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
  • As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.
  • Many Americans tuned in to the presidential debate looking for something substantial and meaty
  • It was simply another manifestation of the incoherence and vitriol of cable news
  • “When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.
  • Technology Is Never Neutral
  • As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.
  • The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
  • This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.
  • with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”
  • Is There Any Solution?
  • Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.
  • Politics as Entertainment
  • “How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment
  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.
  • The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.
  • This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa
  • Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.
  • Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.
  • Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”
  • does Postman offer any solutions to this seemingly uncontrollable technological juggernaut?
  • Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”
  • Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.
  • Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship
  • Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.
  • We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.
Javier E

Reality Is Broken. We Have AI Photos to Blame. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ave-ai-photos-to-blame-de00b23

reality photos AI

shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • AI headshots aren’t yet perfect, but they’re so close I expect we’ll start seeing them on LinkedIn, Tinder and other social profiles. Heck, we may already see them. How would we know?
  • Welcome to our new reality, where nothing is real. We now have photos initially captured with cameras that AI changes into something that never was
  • Or, like the headshot above, there are convincingly photographic images AI generates out of thin air.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Adobe ADBE 7.19%increase; green up pointing triangle, maker of the Photoshop, released a new tool in Firefly, its generative-AI image suite, that lets you change and add in parts of a photo with AI imagery. Earlier this month, Google showed off a new Magic Editor, initially for Pixel phones, that allows you to easily manipulate a scene. And people are all over TikTok posting the results of AI headshot services like Try It On.
  • After testing a mix of AI editing and generating tools, I just have one question for all of you armchair philosophers: What even is a photo anymore?
  • I have always wondered what I’d look like as a naval officer. Now I don’t have to. I snapped a selfie and uploaded it to Adobe Firefly’s generative-fill tool. One click of the Background button and my cluttered office was wiped out. I typed “American flag” and in it went. Then I selected the Add tool, erased my torso and typed in “naval uniform.” Boom! Adobe even found me worthy of numerous awards and decorations.
  • Astronaut, fighter pilot, pediatrician. I turned myself into all of them in under a minute each. The AI-generated images did have noticeable issues: The uniforms were strange and had odd lettering, the stethoscope seemed to be cut in half and the backgrounds were warped and blurry. Yet the final images are fun, and the quality will only get better. 
  • In FaceApp, for iOS and Android, I was able to change my frown to a smile—with the right amount of teeth! I was also able to add glasses and change my hair color. Some said it looked completely real, others who know me well figured something was up. “Your teeth look too perfect.”
  • The real reality-bending happens in Midjourney, which can turn text prompts into hyper-realistic images and blend existing images in new ways. The image quality of generated images exceeds OpenAI’s Dall-E and Adobe’s Firefly.
  • it’s more complicated to use, since it runs through the chat app Discord. Sign up for service, access the Midjourney bot through your Discord account (via web or app), then start typing in prompts. My video producer Kenny Wassus started working with a more advanced Midjourney plugin called Insight Face Swap-Bot, which allows you to sub in a face to a scene you’ve already made. He’s become a master—making me a Game of Thrones warrior and a Star Wars rebel, among other things.
  • We’re headed for a time when we won’t be able to tell how manipulated a photo is, what parts are real or fake.
  • when influential messages are conveyed through images—be they news or misinformation—people have reason to know a photo’s origin and what’s been done to it.
  • Firefly adds a “content credential,” digital information baked into the file, that says the image was manipulated with AI. Adobe is pushing to get news, tech and social-media platforms to use this open-source standard so we can all understand where the images we see came from.
  • So, yeah, our ability to spot true photos might depend on the cooperation of the entire internet. And by “true photo,” I mean one that captures a real moment—where you’re wearing your own boring clothes and your hair is just so-so, but you have the exact right number of teeth in your head.
Javier E

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

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

truth trust fake misinformation authenticity social media AI deepfake generative propaganda

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

Could A 'Brain Pacemaker' Someday Treat Severe Anorexia? : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-someday-treat-severe-anorexia

neuroscience anorexia

shared by Emily Horwitz on 09 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Many people who get anorexia recover after therapy and counseling. But in about 20 to 30 percent of cases, the disease becomes a chronic condition that gets tougher and tougher to treat.
  • Neurosurgeons from the University of Toronto tried a technique called deep brain stimulation to see if it might help patients with severe anorexia.
  • The results didn't meet the statistical tests for significance.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "But since we don't have anything that works well for these individuals — that have a high risk of mortality – it warrants cautious optimism and further study."
  • doctors implant tiny electrodes next to a region of the brain thought to be dysfunctional. A device, similar to a heart pacemaker, then sends waves of electricity through a wire to the electrodes.
  • In the latest study, neurosurgeons in Toronto implanted the electrodes in the brains of six women with chronic anorexia. Five of them had been struggling with the disease for over a decade. All of them had experienced serious health problems from it, including heart attacks in some cases.
  • "My symptoms were so severe. I would wake up in the middle of night and run up and down the stairs for hours or go for a five-hour run," she tells Shots. "I became very isolated. I didn't want to be around anyone because they kept me from exercising."
  • "It was brain surgery! But I had had a heart attack at 28 and two strokes, " she says. "My mom was in the midst of planning my funeral. If I didn't take this chance, I knew my path would probably lead to death."
  • Rollins admits that the deep brain stimulation wasn't a magic bullet. She's had to continue her anorexia treatment to get where she is. "I still see a psychiatrist regularly and a dietitian. It [the deep brain stimulation] enables me to do the work that I need to do a lot easy."
  • Deep brain stimulation can cause serious side effects, Lipsman says, like seizures, and more milder ones, like pain and nausea. "This is a brain surgery – there's no sugarcoating that," he says. "The primary objective of this study was to establish that this a safe procedure for these patients who have been quite ill before the surgery. That's all we can say right now."
  • Emily Horwitz on 09 Mar 13
     
    an interesting article that seems to pose the question: can our habits/perceptions be changed by brain stimulation?
Javier E

Richard Mourdock's Pious Cruelty - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...264030

rape God moral reasoning moral

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • to argue that the female body has the means to "shut that whole thing down," or that the torture of women is somehow divinely sanctioned takes more than just an accident of biology. It takes the ability to speak about things of which you are ignorant as though you are informed. It takes unacknowledged blindness. It takes an appetite for cruelty. 
sissij

Does a Protest's Size Matter? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...es-a-protests-size-matter.html

new york times social media psychology

shared by sissij on 29 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The Women’s March on Saturday, which took place in cities and towns all across the United States (and around the world), may well have been the largest protest in American history. There were an estimated 3.5 million participants.
  • After studying protests over the last two decades, I have to deliver some bad news: In the digital age, the size of a protest is no longer a reliable indicator of a movement’s strength.
  • A protest does not have power just because many people get together in one place. Rather, a protest has power insofar as it signals the underlying capacity of the forces it represents.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Protesters are saying, in effect, “If we can pull this off, imagine what else we can do.”
  • The march drew a quarter of a million people, but it represented much more effort, commitment and preparation than would a protest of similar size today.
  • This is one reason that recent large protests have had less effect on policy than many were led to expect.
  • The protesters failed to transform into an electoral force capable of defeating him in the 2004 election.
  • Two enormous protests, two disappointing results. Similar sequences of events have played out in other parts of the world.
  • A large protest today is less like the March on Washington in 1963 and more like Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus. What used to be an endpoint is now an initial spark.
  • But the Tea Party protesters then got to work on a ferociously focused agenda: identifying and supporting primary candidates to challenge Republicans who did not agree with their demands, keeping close tabs on legislation and pressuring politicians who deviated from a Tea Party platform.
  • But there is no magic power to marching in the streets that, on its own, leads to any other kind of result.
  • sissij on 29 Jan 17
     
    This article explains how protest work. I have always been thinking that protests are all about the number of people we can gather. The larger the population, the more powerful the protests are. However, I have never looked deep into the mechanism behind protests. I really like the analogy made in the article. The main purpose of a protest should be showing the potential strength the public have over the issues. If we don't do anything after the gathering, then the protest won't be power enough to influence the policy of the government because the government will know that we are actually not that firm on our position. The analogy I come up with is that our attendance can't reflect how much we learn in school. Attending the school doesn't ensure that we are taking away knowledge from school. Merely attending a protest doesn't mean we can put pressure on the government. --Sissi (1/29/2017)
1 - 20 of 65 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page