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katherineharron

Mysterious fast radio bursts helped detect missing matter in the universe, study says -... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • Mysterious fast radio bursts have been used to unlock another strange aspect of the universe: the case of the "missing matter."
  • Astronomers have yet to determine what causes these fast radio bursts, which are unpredictable but can be spotted and traced back to their origin using sensitive telescopes.
  • Normal matter, called baryonic matter in this study, is made of the protons and neutrons that comprise both humans and star stuff. But astronomers could only account for about half of it that should exist in the universe.
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  • Unaccounted for, this missing matter was predicted to exist, but hard to find. In fact, astronomers have been searching for it over the last 30 years, the researchers said. Measurements of the Big Bang show how much matter was present in the early days of the universe, suggesting its existence.
  • "It turned out that it was hiding in a density so low that it does not emit light, it doesn't absorb it, and it doesn't reflect it," he said.
  • "The radiation from fast radio bursts gets spread out by the missing matter in the same way that you see the colors of sunlight being separated in a prism," Macquart said.
  • "Their millisecond durations made it very easy to measure the effect of dispersion — the process by which their longer wavelength emission is delayed with respect to their shorter wavelength emission is delayed — and hence to measure exactly how much matter they have encountered on their multi-billion year intergalactic journeys to Earth," Macquart said.
  • Astronomers were able to pin down the source of a repeating fast radio burst in 2017. But single radio bursts are harder to pinpoint because they don't reoccur.
  • "ASKAP both has a wide field of view, about 60 times the size of the full Moon, and can image in high resolution," said Ryan Shannon, study coauthor and associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, in a statement. "This means that we can catch the bursts with relative ease and then pinpoint locations to their host galaxies with incredible precision.
  • "We've discovered the equivalent of the Hubble-Lemaître Law for galaxies, only for fast radio bursts," Macquart said. "The Hubble-Lemaître Law, which says the more distant a galaxy from us, the faster it is moving away from us, underpins all measurements of galaxies at cosmological distances."
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
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  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
demetriar

Spotify Wants Listeners to Break Down Music Barriers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...genres-dont-really-matter.html

spotify music knowledge genre categorization barriers social media radio exposure

shared by demetriar on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Their cultural acumen is entirely the product of technology — in particular, being introduced to new artists through Spotify, the world’s largest subscription music-streaming service. According to executives at Spotify, my children offer a peek at the future of music consumption.
  • On average, the company said, the service exposes each of these listeners to one new artist every day. That is making listeners less beholden to music of certain styles and eras. Instead, many of us will try anything, just because we can easily sample it online.
  • Spotify is betting that fixed musical genres will fade away. In its new version rolling out to iPhone users, the company has expanded its effort to program for moods and activities rather than merely certain kinds of musical tastes.
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  • If Spotify is right about our increasing willingness to try new stuff — and critics who follow the pop charts said it may be — the trend could upend how we think about music.
  • Until recently, because of the narrowcasting ethos of terrestrial radio, music was fiercely segregated by genre. In an era less bound by those niches and instead dominated by an online free-for-all, we may discover new artists more quickly than in the past — though, on the other side of the coin, we may also develop less fierce attachments to certain artists, flitting, as my children do, between anything and everything. For better or worse, streaming services may turn us into cultural nomads.
  • By suggesting tracks based on my activities and parts of the day, I found the service exposed me to music out of my comfort zone.
  • Programmers for radio stations also look at these services to decide what to add to their rotations.
  • “These were all songs that were different from what radio was playing, and radio tends to be a homogeneous medium,” Mr. Molanphy said.
  • demetriar on 05 Jun 15
     
    How online music streaming sorts music into categories other than by typical music genres, allowing people to be exposed to more types of music. Why do we categorize music by genres? How has online music streaming effected our knowledge of music?
johnsonel7

A new map reveals radio waves from tens of thousands of galaxies | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...-waves-galaxies-star-formation

scientific advancement astronomy

shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Radio telescopes are good probes of star formation. But until now, they haven’t been sensitive enough to see radio waves coming from the vast majority of galaxies that produced stars during the peak of star production, an epoch roughly 10 billion years ago known as cosmic noon (SN: 6/20/14).
  • In that image, more than 17,000 pinpoints of radio energy — nearly every one a star-forming galaxy — fill a patch of sky that, as seen from Earth, could be covered by about five full moons.
  • What’s more, he says, there are a little less than twice as many of these sources as expected, suggesting that star formation was much higher around cosmic noon than predicted by calculations based on infrared, optical and ultraviolet data
katherineharron

Mysterious repeating fast radio burst traced to nearby galaxy - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Astronomers have traced the signal of an enigmatic repeating fast radio burst for only the second time -- and it's in a spiral galaxy similar to our own, not so far away.
  • Multiple individual fast radio bursts in past years have been traced back to their sources in other galaxies, although those have yet to shed light on what created them.But this newly discovered repeating FRB has a different source from the first one that was found in 2019, deepening the mystery of how these radio waves are created.
  • "The FRB is among the closest yet seen, and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said Mohit Bhardwaj, study co-author and McGill University doctoral student. "However, the observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."
Javier E

Wielding Claims of 'Fake News,' Conservatives Take Aim at Mainstream Media - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vatives-mainstream-media-.html

fake news right journalism fact-checking facts disinformation mainstream psychology language

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.”
  • Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”
  • As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!”
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  • Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online.
  • But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that that fake stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.
  • In defining “fake news” so broadly and seeking to dilute its meaning, they are capitalizing on the declining credibility of all purveyors of information, one product of the country’s increasing political polarization.
  • “Over the years, we’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with. And now it’s gone too far,” said John Ziegler, a conservative radio host, who has been critical of what he sees as excessive partisanship by pundits. “Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.”
  • Others see a larger effort to slander the basic journalistic function of fact-checking. Nonpartisan websites like Snopes and Factcheck.org have found themselves maligned when they have disproved stories that had been flattering to conservatives.
  • “Fake news was a term specifically about people who purposely fabricated stories for clicks and revenue,” said David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, the myth-busting website. “Now it includes bad reporting, slanted journalism and outright propaganda. And I think we’re doing a disservice to lump all those things together.”
  • Journalists who work to separate fact from fiction see a dangerous conflation of stories that turn out to be wrong because of a legitimate misunderstanding with those whose clear intention is to deceive. A report, shared more than a million times on social media, that the pope had endorsed Mr. Trump was undeniably false. But was it “fake news” to report on data models that showed Hillary Clinton with overwhelming odds of winning the presidency? Are opinion articles fake if they cherry-pick facts to draw disputable conclusions?
  • conservatives’ appropriation of the “fake news” label is an effort to further erode the mainstream media’s claim to be a reliable and accurate source.
  • Conservative news media are now awash in the “fake news” condemnations
  • Many conservatives are pushing back at the outrage over fake news because they believe that liberals, unwilling to accept Mr. Trump’s victory, are attributing his triumph to nefarious external factors.
  • The right’s labeling of “fake news” evokes one of the most successful efforts by conservatives to reorient how Americans think about news media objectivity: the move by Fox News to brand its conservative-slanted coverage as “fair and balanced.” Traditionally, mainstream media outlets had thought of their own approach in those terms, viewing their coverage as strictly down the middle. Republicans often found that laughable.
  • “They’re trying to float anything they can find out there to discredit fact-checking,”
  • There are already efforts by highly partisan conservatives to claim that their fact-checking efforts are the same as those of independent outlets like Snopes, which employ research teams to dig into seemingly dubious claims.
  • Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, has aired “fact-checking” segments on his program. Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist, has a web program, “Michelle Malkin Investigates,” in which she conducts her own investigative reporting.
  • The market in these divided times is undeniably ripe. “We now live in this fragmented media world where you can block people you disagree with. You can only be exposed to stories that make you feel good about what you want to believe,” Mr. Ziegler, the radio host, said. “Unfortunately, the truth is unpopular a lot. And a good fairy tale beats a harsh truth every time.”
johnsonel7

Opinion | World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...world-war-ii-anniversary.html

world war ii

shared by johnsonel7 on 11 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • The (relatively) new technology of the 1930s was the radio. “It is the miracle of radio that it welds 60,000,000 Germans into a single crowd, to be played upon by a single voice,”
  • the conviction that an opponent embodies an irredeemable evil, and that his destruction is therefore an act of indubitable good. That spirit of certitude that dominated the politics of the 1930s is not so distant from us today.
  • johnsonel7 on 11 Sep 19
     
    Two aspects of this article relate to our discussions in class. First, the radio made it easier to share knowledge/spread propaganda. If everyone received the same message, people begin to believe it. Second, in WWII as in slavery and other times in history, people justified their inhumane actions and attempted to put themselves on the moral high ground by saying that other groups up people were less than human.
qkirkpatrick

Study: D.C. insiders trust media more - POLITICO.com - 1 views

www.politico.com/...s-trust-media-more-207414.html

media knowledge language social media

shared by qkirkpatrick on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Washington insiders are trusting the media more, though they are sometimes overwhelmed by it, the fifth edition of National Journal’s Washington in the Information Age study found.
  • Conducted via online survey over the course of four weeks among 1,200 Washington insiders, the study included more than 120 Capitol Hill staff members, more than 600 respondents from the private-sector public affairs community and nearly 400 federal executives.
  • Respondents to the survey expressed higher levels of trust in individual media sources across the board since the last time the survey was conducted in 2012
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  • Capitol Hill staffers spend most of their morning media consumption on email newsletters on their mobile devices before switching to websites, then radio, then social media before bed. In contrast, a federal executive usually spends the morning watching television, listening to radio during the commute, reading email newsletters and websites during the day before radio again during the commute and television before bed.
  • And print is far from dead for Washington insiders — 69 percent of Capitol Hill respondents said they still consume print editions throughout the workday, mainly because of how readily available the printed versions are around the Hill.
kushnerha

A new atlas maps word meanings in the brain | PBS NewsHour - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...aps-word-meanings-in-the-brain

PBS brain science research language meaning models perception

shared by kushnerha on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • like Google Maps for your cerebral cortex: A new interactive atlas, developed with the help of such unlikely tools as public radio podcasts and Wikipedia, purports to show which bits of your brain help you understand which types of concepts.
  • Hear a word relating to family, loss, or the passing of time — such as “wife,” “month,” or “remarried”— and a ridge called the right angular gyrus may be working overtime. Listening to your contractor talking about the design of your new front porch? Thank a pea-sized spot of brain behind your left ear.
  • The research on the “brain dictionary” has the hallmarks of a big scientific splash: Published on Wednesday in Nature, it’s accompanied by both a video and an interactive website where you can click your way from brain region to brain region, seeing what kinds of words are processed in each. Yet neuroscientists aren’t uniformly impressed.
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  • invoked an old metaphor to explain why he isn’t convinced by the analysis: He compared it to establishing a theory of how weather works by pointing a video camera out the window for 7 hours.
  • Indeed, among neuroscientists, the new “comprehensive atlas” of the cerebral cortex is almost as controversial as a historical atlas of the Middle East. That’s because every word has a constellation of meanings and associations — and it’s hard for scientists to agree about how best to study them in the lab.
  • For this study, neuroscientist Jack Gallant and his team at the University of California, Berkeley played more than two hours’ worth of stories from the Moth Radio Hour for seven grad students and postdocs while measuring their cerebral blood flow using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Then, they linked the activity in some 50,000 pea-sized regions of the cortex to the “meaning” of the words being heard at that moment.
  • How, you might ask, did they establish the meaning of words? The neuroscientists pulled all the nouns and verbs from the podcasts. With a computer program, they then looked across millions of pages of text to see how often the words from the podcasts are used near 985 common words taken from Wikipedia’s List of 1,000 Basic Words. “Wolf,” for instance, would presumably be used more often in proximity to “dog” than to, say, “eggplant.” Using that data, the program assigned numbers that approximated the meaning of each individual word from the podcasts — and, with some fancy number crunching, they figured out what areas of the brain were activated when their research subjects heard words with certain meanings.
  • Everyone agrees that the research is innovative in its method. After all, linking up the meanings of thousands of words to the second-by-second brain activity in thousands of tiny brain regions is no mean feat. “That’s way more data than any human being can possibly think about,” said Gallant.
  • What they can’t agree on is what it means. “In this study, our goal was not to ask a specific question. Our goal was to map everything so that we can ask questions after that,” said Gallant. “One of the most frequent questions we get is, ‘What does it mean?’ If I gave you a globe, you wouldn’t ask what it means, you’d start using it for stuff. You can look for the smallest ocean or how long it will take to get to San Francisco.”
  • This “data-driven approach” still involves assumptions about how to break up language into different categories of meaning
  • “Of course it’s a very simplified version of how meaning is captured in our minds, but it seems to be a pretty good proxy,” she said.
  • hordes of unanswered questions: “We can map where your brain represents the meaning of a narrative text that is associated with family, but we don’t know why the brain is responding to family at that location. Is it the word ‘father’ itself? Is it your memories of your own father? Is it your own thinking about being a parent yourself?” He hopes that it’s just those types of questions that researchers will ask, using his brain map as a guide.
qkirkpatrick

How Will Brain Science Affect The Tsarnaev Trial? | Radio Boston - 0 views

radioboston.wbur.org/...tsarnaev-brain-science

education brain science memory

shared by qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Jury selection continues for the second week in the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
  • Later this week, the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys are expected to question prospective jurors. They will ask about jurors’ backgrounds, their feelings about the death penalty and whether they already have an opinion about Tsarnaev.
  • . Some say brain science is likely to play a role in the trial, because courts are increasingly looking at what neuroscience tells us about adolescence and the developing brain.
  • qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15
     
    a radio broadcast talking about how the brain can affect a trial. Connects with how we talked about witnesses and memory.
runlai_jiang

A New Antidote for Noisy Airports: Slower Planes - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-for-noisy-airports-1520429994

technology airplane noise

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220
  • It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.
  • Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.
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  • The FAA says it’s impressed and is moving forward with recommendations Boston has made.
  • . A working group is forming to evaluate the main recommendation to slow departing jets to a speed limit of 220 knots during the climb to 10,000 feet, down from 250 knots.
  • New routes put planes over quiet communities. Complaints soared. Phoenix neighborhoods sued the FAA; Chicago neighborhoods are pushing for rotating runway use. Neighborhoods from California to Washington, D.C., are fighting the new procedures that airlines and the FAA insist are vital to future travel.
  • “It’s a concentration problem. It’s a frequency problem. It’s not really a noise problem.”
  • “The flights wake you up. We get a lot of complaints from young families with children,” says Mr. Wright, a data analyst who works from home for a major health-care company.
  • In Boston, an analysis suggested only 54% of the complaints Massport received resulted from noise louder than 45 decibels—about the level of background noise. When it’s relentless, you notice it more.
  • With a 30-knot reduction, noise directly under the flight track would decrease by between 1.5 and 5 decibels and the footprint on the ground would get a lot skinnier, sharply reducing the number of people affected, Mr. Hansman says.
  • The industry trade association Airlines for America has offered cautious support of the Boston recommendations. In a statement, the group said the changes must be safe, work with a variety of aircraft and not reduce the airport’s capacity for takeoffs and landings.
  • Air-traffic controllers will need to delay a departure a bit to put more room between a slower plane and a faster one, or modify its course slightly.
Javier E

The Real Loser - Truth - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-real-loser-truth.html

truth partisan discourse election politics Romney fact-checking

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Candidates accordingly believed that being caught in an outright lie could damage their careers. (As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”) They tended only to bend the truth, not break it.
  • At least four factors since the 1970s have lowered the cost for politicians who lie and, more important, repeat their fabrications through their attack ads. First is the overall decline in respect for institutions and professionals of all kinds, from scientists and lawyers to journalists and civil servants.
  • Second are changes in media regulation and ownership
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  • For decades, radio and television broadcasters had been required to present multiple viewpoints on contentious public debates on the grounds that they were stewards of the public airwaves. But in 1987, members appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Federal Communications Commission abolished this “fairness doctrine.” The change facilitated the creation of conservative talk radio and cable outlets to combat perceived liberal bias. Liberals followed suit with programming (albeit less effective) of their own.
  • a third trend developed as political operatives realized they had more room to stretch the truth. In 2004, an aide to President George W. Bush dismissed a journalist for being part of a “reality-based community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” 
  • A fourth factor: most news organizations (with notable exceptions) abandoned their roles as political referees. Many resorted to an atrophied style that resembled stenography more than journalism, presenting all claims as equally valid. Fact checking, once a foundation for all reporting, was now deemed the province of a specialized few.
  • PolitiFact has chronicled 19 “pants on fire” lies by Mr. Romney and 7 by Mr. Obama since 2007, but Mr. Romney’s whoppers have been qualitatively far worse: the “apology tour,” the “government takeover of health care,” the “$4,000 tax hike on middle class families,” the gutting of welfare-to-work rules, the shipment by Chrysler of jobs from Ohio to China. Said one of his pollsters, Neil Newhouse, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
  • the Obama campaign has certainly had its own share of dissembling and distortion, including about Mr. Romney’s positions on abortion and foreign aid. But nothing in it — or in past campaigns, for that matter — has equaled the efforts of the Romney campaign in this realm. Its fundamental disdain for facts is something wholly new.
Javier E

New Statesman - The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...world-secular-means-god

secularism postmodernism dogmatism truth love

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Art & Design Books Film Ideas Music & Performance TV & Radio Food & Drink Blog Return to: Home | Culture | Books The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now By George Levine Reviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011 82 comments Print version Email a friend Listen RSS Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.
  • Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere
  • Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't.
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  • he suspects that Christian faith is other-worldly in the sense of despising material things. Material reality, in his view, is what art celebrates but religion does not. This is to forget that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit. It is also to misunderstand the doctrine of Creation
  • Adam Phillips writes suggestively of human helplessness as opposed to the sense of protectedness that religious faith supposedly brings us, without noticing that the signifier of God for the New Testament is the tortured and executed corpse of a suspected political criminal.
  • None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power.
  • Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.
  • The Christian paradigm of love, by contrast, is the love of strangers and enemies, not of those we find agreeable. Civilised notions such as mutual sympathy, more's the pity, won't deliver us the world we need.
  • What exactly," he enquires, "does the invocation of some supernatural being add?" A Christian might reply that it adds the obligations to give up everything one has, including one's life, if necessary, for the sake of others. And this, to say the least, is highly inconvenient.
  • If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus.
  • Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place
  • Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age - if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.
carolinewren

How Media Bias Is Killing Black America - The Root - 0 views

www.theroot.com/..._is_killing_black_america.html

media bias

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • leads to both the erasure and criminalization of marginalized communities, has had dire consequences for both the psyches and lived experiences of black people in the United States since at least the 18th century,
  • “This is the press, an irresponsible press,” he said. “It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
  • Many studies have tackled implicit racial bias in law enforcement, health care and the legal field. In recent years, the phrase has become a buzzword used to broadly frame bigotry and racism as something so entrenched that some people aren’t aware that they subconsciously harbor racist feelings, associating black skin with negative behavior
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  • their “conditioning has been conditioned,” and marginalized groups are often left to pick up the pieces in the wake of brutality and/or neglect by those in positions of power, trust and influence.
  • tackles media bias (pdf) and how it indiscriminately pathologizes communities of color for mass consumption.
  • “Implicit bias impacts the way black communities are treated across practically all sectors of life in America, from courtrooms to doctors’ offices,
  • “The media is no different, whether it be the use of pejorative terms like ‘thug’ and ‘animal’ to describe protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore, or the widespread overreporting of crime stories involving black suspects in New York City.”
  • Media bias not only negatively impacts black America’s relationship with law enforcement and the judicial system (pdf) but also extends to how African Americans are perceived in society at large.
  • “Television newsrooms are nearly 80 percent white, according to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, while radio newsrooms are 92 percent white,”
  • “The percentage of minority journalists has remained between 12 and 14 percent for more than a decade.”
  • This lays the groundwork for an intrinsically racist media structure that, according to The Atlantic’s Riva Gold, means “news organizations are losing their ability to empower, represent, and—especially in cases where language ability is crucial—even to report on minority populations in their communities.”
anonymous

Freakonomics » The Three Hardest Words in the English Language: A New Freakon... - 0 views

freakonomics.com/...new-freakonomics-radio-podcast

language words english TOK

shared by anonymous on 09 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • So what are the three hardest words? Conventional wisdom suggests: “I love you.”
  • the hardest three words in the English language are “I don’t know,” and that our inability to say these words more often can have huge consequences.
  • It has varied between studies, but you’d be looking at two-thirds to three-quarters of children—and we’re talking in the age range here of about five to eight years old—would say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a yes/no question that we know they don’t know the answer to.
  • anonymous on 09 Feb 15
     
    This article analyses our difficulty to say "I don't know"
sissij

It Turns Out Cosmic Dust Is Everywhere | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-out-cosmic-dust-is-everywhere

science research education

shared by sissij on 15 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Who among us doesn’t thrill to catch a glimpse of a meteorite streaking across the night sky? Except for a few colorful cases — a living room in Connecticut, an explosion in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia — these beauties disappear into our atmosphere.
  • Now a new picture book, In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micro-Meteorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters, reveals that, really, it’s everywhere. 
  • The cosmic stuff is so ubiquitous that we probably eat it in our salads all the time.
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  • Instead of trying to identify bits from space, he would instead teach himself to recognize the terrestrial source of all the samples he collected.
  • something that anybody can do. It could and should become part of teachings in schools, an aspect of citizen science.
  • The key is knowing what to look for.
  • sissij on 15 Mar 17
     
    I have listened to a radio show. There was a guest speaker one time that he talks about meteorite. He said that cosmic dust is the smallest and most common meteorite. I think it is really amazing to think about because those mysterious meteorites that are sold high in the auction are actually al around us. There is one quote that I really like from this article: "The key is knowing what to look for". I think this is pretty true in our daily life. For example, when I was doing my IA chemistry lab, once I understand the mechanics behind the lab procedure, the whole process becomes more meaningful for me. It feels like that I switch to a different perspective after understanding the lab. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
anonymous

Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception - 0 views

theconversation.com/lity-of-human-perception-48160

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception
  • Nontrivial numbers of Americans believe in the paranormal.
  • Part of the attraction of the audio recorder for paranormal researchers is its apparent objectivity. How could a skeptic refute the authenticity of a spirit captured by an unbiased technical instrument? To the believers, EVP seem like incontrovertible evidence of communications from beyond.
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  • But recent research in my lab suggested that people don’t agree much about what, if anything, they hear in the EVP sounds – a result readily explained by the fallibility of human perception.
  • In some instances, alleged EVP are the voices of the investigators or interference from radio transmissions – problems that indicate shoddy data collection practices. Other research, however, has suggested that EVP have been captured under acoustically controlled circumstances in recording studios.
  • Research in mainstream psychology has shown that people will readily perceive words in strings of nonsensical speech sounds.
  • People’s expectations about what they’re supposed to hear can result in the illusory perception of tones, nature sounds, machine sounds, and even voices when only acoustic white noise – like the sound of a detuned radio – exists.
  • Interpretations of speech in noise – a situation similar to EVP where the alleged voice is difficult to discern – can shift entirely based upon what the listener expects to hear.
  • In my lab, we recently conducted an experiment to examine how expectations might influence the perception of purported EVP
  • So suggesting a paranormal research topic mattered only when the audio was ambiguous.
  • when people said they heard a voice in the EVP, only 13% agreed about exactly what the voice said. To compare, 95% percent of people on average agreed about what the voice said when they heard actual speech.
  • These findings suggest that paranormal researchers should not use their own subjective judgments to confirm the contents of EVP.
  • But perhaps most importantly, we showed that the mere suggestion of a paranormal research context made people more likely to hear voices in ambiguous stimuli, although they couldn’t agree on what the voices were saying.
  • pareidolia – the tendency to perceive human characteristics in meaningless perceptual patterns
  • There are many visual examples of pareidolia – things like seeing human faces in everyday objects (such as Jesus in a piece of toast).
  • Research from cognitive psychology has shown that paranormal believers may be especially prone to misperceiving chance events.
  • Another characteristic of pseudoscience is a lack of integration with related areas of inquiry. There is a rich history of using experimental methods to examine auditory perception, yet EVP enthusiasts are either unaware or willfully ignorant of this relevant work.
  • parsimony – the idea that the simplest explanation is preferred
  • we need a theory to account for how and why a human listener sometimes misperceives ambiguous stimuli.
  • In fact, this very tendency is one of many well-documented cognitive shortcuts that may have adaptive value. A voice may indicate the presence of a potential mate or foe, so it may be useful to err on the side of perceiving agency in ambiguous auditory stimuli.
  • Currently, there is only limited, tentative evidence to link exposure to pseudoscience on television to pseudoscientific beliefs. Still, one study showed that people find paranormal research to be more credible and scientific when it is shown using technological tools such as recording devices. Other evidence has suggested that popular opinion may outweigh scientific credibility when people evaluate pseudoscientific claims.
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 20
     
    Why do we hear voices or weird noises and think of spooky stories or ghosts? It all has to do with perception of the audible information we're taking in and how we've been influenced about this topic.
Javier E

Strange things are taking place - at the same time - 0 views

edition.pagesuite.com/...dynamic_article_popover.aspx

coincidence miracle randomness fate psychology research

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.
  • Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.
  • “What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”
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  • Beitman defines a coincidence as “two events coming together with apparently no causal explanation.” They can be life-changing, like his experience with his father, or comforting, such as when a loved one’s favorite song comes on the radio just when you are missing them most.
  • Although Beitman has long been fascinated by coincidences, it wasn’t until the end of his academic career that he was able to study them in earnest. (Before then, his research primarily focused on the relationship between chest pain and panic disorder.)
  • He started by developing the Weird Coincidence Survey in 2006 to assess what types of coincidences are most commonly observed, what personality types are most correlated with noticing them and how most people explain them. About 3,000 people have completed the survey so far.
  • he has drawn a few conclusions. The most commonly reported coincidences are associated withmass media: A person thinks of an idea and then hears or sees it on TV, the radio or the internet. Thinking of someone and then having that person call unexpectedly is next on the list, followed by being in the right place at the right time to advance one’s work, career or education.
  • People who describe themselves as spiritual or religious report noticing more meaningful coincidences than those who do not, and people are more likely to experience coincidences when they are in a heightened emotional state — perhaps under stress or grieving.
  • The most popular explanation among survey respondents for mysterious coincidences: God or fate. The second explanation: randomness. The third is that our minds are connected to one another. The fourth is that our minds are connected to the environment.
  • “Some say God, some say universe, some say random and I say ‘Yes,’ ” he said. “People want things to be black and white, yes or no, but I say there is mystery.”
  • He’s particularly interested in what he’s dubbed “simulpathity”: feeling a loved one’s pain at a distance, as he believes he did with his father. Science can’t currently explain how it might occur, but in his books he offers some nontraditional ideas, such as the existence of “the psychosphere,” a kind of mental atmosphere through which information and energy can travel between two people who are emotionally close though physically distant.
  • In his new book published in September, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen,” he shares the story of a young man who intended to end his life by the shore of an isolated lake. While he sat crying in his car, another car pulled up and his brother got out. When the young man asked for an explanation, the brother said he didn’t know why he got in the car, where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He just knew he needed to get in the car and drive.
  • David Hand, a British statistician and author of the 2014 book “The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day,” sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Beitman. He says most coincidences are fairly easy to explain, and he specializes in demystifying even the strangest ones.
  • “When you look closely at a coincidence, you can often discover the chance of it happening is not as small as you think,” he said. “It’s perhaps not a 1-in-a-billion chance, but in fact a 1-in-a-hundred chance, and yeah, you would expect that would happen quite often.”
  • the law of truly large numbers. “You take something that has a very small chance of happening and you give it lots and lots and lots of opportunities to happen,” he said. “Then the overall probability becomes big.”
  • But just because Hand has a mathematical perspective doesn’t mean he finds coincidences boring. “It’s like looking at a rainbow,” he said. “Just because I understand the physics behind it doesn’t make it any the less wonderful.
  • Paying attention to coincidences, Osman and Johansen say, is an essential part of how humans make sense of the world. We rely constantly on our understanding of cause and effect to survive.
  • “Coincidences are often associated with something mystical or supernatural, but if you look under the hood, noticing coincidences is what humans do all the time,”
  • Zeltzer has spent 50 years studying the writings of Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychologist who introduced the modern Western world to the idea of synchronicity. Jung defined synchronicity as “the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning.”
  • One of Jung’s most iconic synchronistic stories concerned a patient who he felt had become so stuck in her rationality that it interfered with her ability to understand her psychology and emotional life.
  • One day, the patient was recounting a dream in which she’d received a golden scarab. Just then, Jung heard a gentle tapping at the window. He opened the window and a scarab-like beetle flew into the room. Jung plucked the insect out of the air and presented it to his patient. “Here is your scarab,” he said.The experience proved therapeutic because it demonstrated to Jung’s patient that the world is not always rational, leading her to break her own identification with rationality and thus become more open to her emotional life, Zeltzer explained
  • Like Jung, Zeltzer believes meaningful coincidences can encourage people to acknowledge the irrational and mysterious. “We have a fantasy that there is always an answer, and that we should know everything,”
  • Honestly, I’m not sure what to believe, but I’m not sure it matters. Like Beitman, my attitude is “Yes.”
Javier E

How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File - Conor Friedersdor... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...264855

conservative media truth ideology distortion information bias

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?"
  • It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio.
  • Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.
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  • Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses.
  • Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously? 
  • Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who'd lose worse than George McGovern.
  • How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don't Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn't grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man's record nor repudiate it.
  • Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.
  • On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.   It ought to be an eye-opening moment.   
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