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Javier E

Reasons for COVID-19 Optimism on T-Cells and Herd Immunity - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-cells-and-herd-immunity.html

immunity Covid-19 research science

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • It may well be the case that some amount of community protection kicks in below 60 percent exposure, and possibly quite a bit below that threshold, and that those who exhibit a cross-reactive T-cell immune response, while still susceptible to infection, may also have some meaningful amount of protection against severe disease.
  • early returns suggest that while the maximalist interpretation of each hypothesis is not very credible — herd immunity has probably not been reached in many places, and cross-reactive T-cell response almost certainly does not functionally immunize those who have it — more modest interpretations appear quite plausible.
  • Friston suggested that the truly susceptible portion of the population was certainly not 100 percent, as most modelers and conventional wisdom had it, but a much smaller share — surely below 50 percent, he said, and likely closer to about 20 percent. The analysis was ongoing, he said, but, “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80 percent. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
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  • one of the leading modelers, Gabriela Gomes, suggested the entire area of research was being effectively blackballed out of fear it might encourage a relaxation of pandemic vigilance. “This is the very sad reason for the absence of more optimistic projections on the development of this pandemic in the scientific literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our analysis suggests that herd-immunity thresholds are being achieved despite strict social-distancing measures.”
  • Gomes suggested, herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” she told Hamblin. “It’s very striking.” Such findings, if they held up, would be very instructive, as Hamblin writes: “It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.”
  • But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City
  • overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.
  • But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.
  • we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one
  • you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.
  • Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.
  • Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S
  • he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take
  • Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.
  • If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.
  • At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.
  • The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing
  • These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response
  • The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute
  • According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes
  • the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.
  • Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).
  • Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.
  • even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases
  • In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.
  • there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.
  • That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me
  • The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology
  • Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding
  • Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.
  • he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”
  • the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses
  • “This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”
  • “This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.
Javier E

Skinner Marketing: We're the Rats, and Facebook Likes Are the Reward - Bill Davidow - T... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...276613

marketing psychology conditioning behavior trigger reward

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • the age of Skinnerian Marketing. Future applications making use of big data, location, maps, tracking of a browser's interests, and data streams coming from mobile and wearable devices, promise to usher in the era of unprecedented power in the hands of marketers, who are no longer merely appealing to our innate desires, but programming our behaviors.
  • In the 1930's, B. F. Skinner developed the concept of operant conditioning. He put pigeons and rats in Skinner boxes to study how he could modify their behavior using rewards and punishments.
  • Skinner's techniques of operant conditioning and his notorious theory of behavior modification were denounced by his critics 70 years ago as fascist, manipulative vehicles that could be used for government control.
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  • They were right about control but wrong about the controllers. Our Internet handlers, not government, are using operant conditioning to modify our behavior today.
  • we now know how to design cue, activity, and reward systems to more effectively leverage our brain chemistry and program human behavior.
  • The beauty of the Internet is that by combining big data, behavioral targeting, wearable and mobile devices, and GPS, application developers can design more effective operant conditioning environments and keep us in virtual Skinner boxes as long as we have a smart phone in our pockets.
  • Operant conditioning techniques will and are currently being used to program the behavior of susceptible Internet users -- young men who play MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) for forty hours a week, women who commit hours to social networks, shoppers seeking the thrill of a deal, and poker players.
  • As smart devices become integrated into our lives, retailers who will know where we are standing in stores and fast food restaurants and bars will find ways to provide us with cues to trigger behaviors.
  • The real question is how many hundreds of millions of us will become susceptible to what I believe will prove to be history's most potent marketing techniques.
Javier E

Research Shows That the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive ... - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...iel-kahneman-bias-studies.html

psychology intelligence reasoning bias cognitive shortcut rationality

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.
  • When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions.
  • in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes—it can actually be a subtle curse.
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  • they wanted to understand how these biases correlated with human intelligence.
  • self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.”
  • Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.”
  • This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves.
  • it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.
  • intelligence seems to make things worse.
  • the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.
Javier E

Conspiracy theory psychology: People who claim to know the truth about JFK, UFOs, and 9... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...he_truth_about_jfk.single.html

conspiracy theory psychology skepticism alienation

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.
  • the prevalence of such belief, documented in surveys, has forced scholars to take it more seriously. Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many people embrace this way of interpreting history.
  • “People low in trust of others are likely to believe that others are colluding against them,” the authors proposed. This sort of distrust, in other words, favors a certain kind of belief. It makes you more susceptible, not less, to claims of conspiracy.
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  • The more you see the world this way—full of malice and planning instead of circumstance and coincidence—the more likely you are to accept conspiracy theories of all kinds. Once you buy into the first theory, with its premises of coordination, efficacy, and secrecy, the next seems that much more plausible.
  • The common thread between distrust and cynicism, as defined in these experiments, is a perception of bad character. More broadly, it’s a tendency to focus on intention and agency, rather than randomness or causal complexity. In extreme form, it can become paranoia
  • In mild form, it’s a common weakness known as the fundamental attribution error—ascribing others’ behavior to personality traits and objectives, forgetting the importance of situational factors and chance
  • Clearly, susceptibility to conspiracy theories isn’t a matter of objectively evaluating evidence. It’s more about alienation. People who fall for such theories don’t trust the government or the media. They aim their scrutiny at the official narrative, not at the alternative explanations
  • Conspiracy believers are the ultimate motivated skeptics. Their curse is that they apply this selective scrutiny not to the left or right, but to the mainstream. They tell themselves that they’re the ones who see the lies, and the rest of us are sheep. But believing that everybody’s lying is just another kind of gullibility.
demetriar

How Many of Your Memories Are Fake? - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281558

Memory Psychology brain science

shared by demetriar on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Special K for breakfast. Liverwurst and cheese for lunch. And I remember the song ‘You've Got Personality’ was playing as on the radio as I pulled up for work,” said Healy, one of 50 confirmed people in the United States with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, an uncanny ability to remember dates and events.
  • New research released this week has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories,” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune,” according to the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
  • Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who has spent decades researching how memories can become contaminated with people remembering—sometimes quite vividly and confidently—events that never happened. Loftus has found that memories can be planted in someone’s mind if they are exposed to misinformation after an event, or if they are asked suggestive questions about the past
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  • Loftus’s research has already rattled our justice system, which relies so heavily on eyewitness testimonies.
  • “It’s so powerful when somebody tells you something and they have a lot of detail,” Loftus said. “Especially when they express emotion. To just say, ‘Oh my god it must be true.’ But all those characteristics are also true of false memories, particularly the heavily rehearsed ones that you ruminate over. They can be very detailed. You can be confident. You can be emotional. So you need independent corroboration.”
  • When later asked about the events, the superior memory subjects indicated the erroneous facts as truth at about the same rate as people with normal memory.
  • been able to successfully convince ordinary people that they were lost in a mall in their childhood, pointed out that false memory recollections also occur among high profile people.
  • All memory, as McGaugh explained, is colored with bits of life experiences. When people recall, “they are reconstructing,” he said. “It doesn't mean it’s totally false. It means that they’re telling a story about themselves and they’re integrating things they really do remember in detail, with things that are generally true.”
  • “puzzling why (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) individuals remember some trivial details, such as what they had for lunch 10 years ago, but not others, such as words on a word list or photographs in a slideshow,” Patihis and colleagues noted in the PNAS study. “The answer to this may be that they may extract some personally relevant meaning from only some trivial details and weave them into the narrative for a given day.”
  • For all of us, the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated.
  • “Why did evolution do that?” McGaugh said. “Because it was essential for our survival.
  • We now know animals are likely susceptible to memory distortions too, as MIT researchers recently were able to successfully plant false memories in mice.
  • “We’re all creating stories. Our lives are stories in that sense.”
  • “but you as the writer have the obligation to get as close to the truth as you possibly can,” Meyer said
  • The mind and its memory do not just record and retrieve information and experiences, but also infer, fill in gaps, and construct, wrote Bryan Boyd wrote in On the Origin of Stories. “Episodic memory’s failure to provide exact replicas of experiences appears to not be a limitation of memory but an adaptive design.”
  • Roth johnson on 19 Nov 13
     
    This is an interesting article about the fallacy of memory, and our perceptions of our memory.
Javier E

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534198

smartphone generation social media psychology teen

shared by Javier E on 03 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
  • The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household
  • Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
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  • the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.
  • The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.
  • it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
  • theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen
  • Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.
  • iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.
  • . I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
  • More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
  • Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
  • the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.
  • But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.
  • Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating.
  • only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.
  • The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer
  • The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.
  • Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.
  • In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.
  • In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half.
  • Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.
  • In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.
  • eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s.
  • The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.
  • So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.
  • despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone.
  • The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently.
  • Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.
  • The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.
  • The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.
  • There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness
  • Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media
  • If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen
  • Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.
  • This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online.
  • Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so.
  • The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.
  • It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out
  • Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.)
  • Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.
  • For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.
  • Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups.
  • Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.
  • Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”
  • Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much
  • The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys
  • Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.
  • I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning
  • the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived
  • Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.
  • Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived.
  • Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime.
  • Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety.
  • correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone.
  • What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them
  • Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.
margogramiak

Brain tissue yields clues to causes of PTSD -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201221160445.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  • diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      We have talked about PTSD in class, and how certain triggers associate with memories and feelings.
  • why women are more susceptible to it
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I didn't realize women were more susceptible.
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  • prefrontal cortex
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is another thing we have talked and read about.
  • Major differences in gene activity particularly affected two cell types in PTSD patients -- interneurons, which inhibit neural activity, and microglia, immune system cells in the central nervous system, the researchers report Dec. 21 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I had no idea there was any sort of genetic links with PTSD. That's very interesting, and I'm assuming important info to know from a medical standpoint.
  • About 8% of the general population has been diagnosed with PTSD.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's a lot of people.
  • as many as 35% exhibit PTSD symptoms.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Not that I know a lot about PTSD, but this makes sense to me.
  • These differences might help explain why women are more than twice as likely to develop PTSD and other anxiety disorders than men and why they are likely to experience more severe symptoms, the findings suggest.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's super interesting. Again, I had no idea how disproportionately women were affected.
  • "This is a new beginning for the PTSD field,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Awesome! Maybe that means closer to a cure.
  • "We need new treatments for PTSD, and studies like this will provide the scientific foundation for a new generation of medication development efforts."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's fantastic.
margogramiak

Why people choose to wear face coverings -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201218165103.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Wearing a face covering in public is dependent upon how often people observe others wearing them, according to recent findings.
  • Wearing a face covering in public is dependent upon how often people observe others wearing them, according to recent findings.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      In class, we're talking about science, and the trust of science. I'm confused about the beginning of this article, in that I don't think people wearing masks has anything to do with the fact that other people do. I think it has everything to do trust of science.
  • "In this study, we examined what motivators are behind an individual's choice to wear or not wear a face covering in public,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I can't think of a reason other than trust of science. I don't understand.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • No evidence was found that a perceived susceptibility to becoming ill and a perceived severity of COVID-19 correlated with an increase in the intent to use a face covering in public.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That is so confusing. I guess it doesn't matter people's intentions as long as they wear them though.
  • "Based on our findings, it is possible that messaging strategies that focus on susceptibility to and severity of COVID-19 may not be as effective as targeting actions that influence individual intentions and social norms."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Again, I simply don't understand that. I can say with complete honesty that regardless of who I was with or whether they were wearing a mask, I would have one on.
  • months before the vaccine is readily available to all individuals who seek it.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Those months have past and the time is now!
  • an essential component in the continuing effort to reduce the virus' transmission
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This piece of information should be reason enough to wear a mask. This article made me sort of disappointed in society.
lucieperloff

A Theory About Conspiracy Theories - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ology-conspiracy-theories.html

social media conspiracy theories susceptibility knowledge education

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • More than 1 in 3 Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a weapon, and another third are convinced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated the threat of Covid-19 to undermine President Trump.
  • Another is less so: a more solitary, anxious figure, moody and detached, perhaps including many who are older and living alone.
  • all conspiring to use Covid-19 for their own dark purposes.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Taking advantage of a very realistic fear and making it much more dramatic
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Still, psychologists do not have a good handle on the types of people who are prone to buy into Big Lie theories, especially the horror-film versions.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      To an extent, most people are prone to buy into these theories
  • The theories afford some psychological ballast, a sense of control, an internal narrative to make sense of a world that seems senseless.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      People don't like thinking things are random!! They like having some semblance of control!!
  • “With all changes happening in politics, the polarization and lack of respect, conspiracy theories are playing a bigger role in people’s thinking and behavior possibly than ever,”
  • Conspiracy theories are as old as human society, of course, and in the days when communities were small and vulnerable, being on guard for hidden plots was likely a matter of personal survival,
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Believing conspiracy theories could have been important to survival at one point in time
  • More than 1 in 3 Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a weapon, and another third are convinced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated the threat of Covid-19 to undermine President Trump.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Conspiracy theories affect everyone around us. Constantly.
  • “You really have a perfect storm, in that the theories are directed at those who have fears of getting sick and dying or infecting someone else,”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Theories take advantage of those who already are extremely vulnerable and stressed
  • About 60 percent scored low on the scales, meaning they were resistant to such theories; the other 40 percent ranged above average or higher.
  • For example, qualities like conscientiousness, modesty and altruism were very weakly related to a person’s susceptibility. Levels of anger or sincerity bore no apparent relation; nor did self-esteem.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Are these the results scientists were expecting?
  • The personality features that were solidly linked to conspiracy beliefs included some usual suspects: entitlement, self-centered impulsivity, cold-heartedness (the confident injustice collector), elevated levels of depressive moods and anxiousness (the moody figure, confined by age or circumstance).
  • It’s a pattern of magical thinking that goes well beyond garden variety superstition and usually comes across socially as disjointed, uncanny or “off.”
  • when distracted, people are far more likely to forward headlines and stories without vetting their sources much, if at all.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Distractions can easily be undermined and make people believe conspiracy theories
  • They have a core constituency, and in the digital era its members are going to quickly find one another.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Spread through the internet and social media
anonymous

Can you trust your earliest childhood memories? - BBC Future - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...ur-earliest-childhood-memories

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.
  • Around four out of every 10 of us have fabricated our first memory, according to researchers. This is thought to be because our brains do not develop the ability to store autobiographical memories at least until we reach two years old.
  • Yet a surprising number of us have some flicker of memory from before that age
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Experts have managed to turn people off all sorts of foods by convincing them it had made them ill when they were a child
  • “People have a life story, particularly as they get older and for some people it needs to stretch back to the very early stage of life,”
  • The prevailing account of how we come to believe and remember things is based around the concept of source monitoring. “Every time a thought comes to mind we have to make a decision – have we experienced it [an event], imagined it or have we talked about it with other people,” says Kimberley Wade
  • Most of the time we make that decision correctly and can identify where these mental experiences come from, but sometimes we get it wrong.
  • Wade admits she has spent a lot of time recalling an event that was actually something her brother experienced rather than herself, but despite this, it is rich in detail and provokes emotion
  • Memory researchers have shown it is possible to induce fictional autobiographical memories in volunteers, including accounts of getting lost in a shopping mall and even having tea with a member of the Royal Family
  • Based on my research, everybody is capable of forming complex false memories, given the right circumstances – Julia Shaw
  • In some situations, such as after looking at pictures or a video, children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults. People with certain personality types are also thought to be more prone.
  • But carrying around false memories from your childhood could be having a far greater impact on you than you may realise too. The events, emotions and experiences we remember from our early years can help to shape who we are as adults, determining our likes, dislikes, fears and even our behaviour.
  • Memories before the age of three are more than likely to be false. Any that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video and experiencing a chronological account of a memory, could well also be made up. It is more likely that fuzzy fragments, or snapshots of moments are real, as long as they are not from too early in your life.
  • We crave a cohesive narrative of our own existence and will even invent stories to give us a more complete picture
  • Interestingly, scientists have also found positive suggestions, such as “you loved asparagus the first time you ate it” tend to be more effective than negative suggestions like “you got sick drinking vodka”
  • “Miscarriage of justice, incarceration, loss of reputation, job and status, and family breakdown occur,
  • One of the major problems with legal cases involving false memories, is that it is currently impossible to distinguish between true and fictional recollections
  • Efforts have been made to analyse minor false memories in a brain scanner (fMRI) and detect different neurological patterns, but there is nothing as yet to indicate that this technology can be used to detect whether recollections have become distorted.
  • the most extreme case of memory implantation involves a controversial technique called “regression therapy”, where patients confront childhood traumas, supposedly buried in their subconscious
  • “Memories are malleable and tend to change slightly each time we revisit them, in the same way that spoken stories do,”
  • “Therefore at each recollection, new elements can easily be integrated while existing elements can be altered or lost.”
  • This is not to say that all evidence that relies on memory should be discarded or regarded as unreliable – they often provide the most compelling testimony in criminal cases. But it has led to rules and guidelines about how witnesses and victims should be questioned to ensure their recollections of an event or perpetrator are not contaminated by investigators or prosecutors.
  • Any memories that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video, could well also be made up
  • While this may seem like a bit of fun, many scientists believe the “false memory diet” could be used to tackle obesity and encourage people to reach for healthier options like asparagus, or even help cut people’s alcohol consumption.
  • Children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults, especially after looking at photographs or films
  • And we may not want to rid ourselves of these memories. Our memories, whether fictional or not, can help to bring us closer together.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    This is a great and very detailed article about memory and how we change our own memories and are impacted by this change.
Javier E

When Your Facebook Friend Is Racist - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...274706

facebook conformity superficial complicity racism

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Psychologists Shannon Rauch and Kimberley Schanz published their work in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. They sampled 623 Internet users (all white, 70 percent students), asking them to indicate the frequency of their Facebook usage. The group then read one of three versions of a Facebook Notes page they were told was written by a 26-year-old named Jack Brown. "Jack" was white and male. The first version of Jack's message contained what the researchers call a "superiority message": It "contrasted the behaviors of black and white individuals, only to find consistent superiority of the whites."
  • The researchers then asked participants, for each version of the post, to rate factors like "how much they agreed with the message," "how accurate they found it," "how much they liked the writer," and, significantly, how likely they were to share the post with others
  • Their findings? "Frequent users are particularly disposed to be influenced by negative racial messages." The group of more-frequent Facebook users didn't differ from others in their reaction to the egalitarian message. But those users "were more positive toward the messages with racist content -- particularly the superiority message." 
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Facebook, for all the unprecedented connection it fosters among previously atomized people, fosters a very particular kind of connection: one that is mediated, at all times, by Facebook. And one that therefore makes very particular kinds of assumptions about how and why people connect in the first place. Facebook "connection" is defined -- semantically, at least -- by friendship. ("Facebook friends," "friending people," etc.) While it doesn't assume that every connection is an actual friend, in the narrow and maybe even old-fashioned sense of the word, Facebook's infrastructure does assume esteem among people who friend each other.
  • The study itself, in fact, is confirming the hypothesis that Rauch and Schanz started with: "We predict," they noted, "that due to potential chronic traits and/or their adaptation to a Facebook culture of shallow processing and agreement, frequent Facebook users are highly susceptible to persuasive messages compared to less frequent users.
  • This is, to say the least, troubling.
  • Facebook, as a result, is structured as an aggressively upbeat place.
  • social complicity. You can argue on Facebook, but it is not really encouraged. And the interactions Facebook fosters as it expands -- the status updates, the information sharing, the news consumption -- stem from that default-positive place. "Like," but not "Dislike." "Recommend," but not "Reject."
  • That's significant, because Facebook wants to expand from social connection into informational connection. The News Feed as the "personalized newspaper"; the just-introduced Home as a mobile locus of that newspaper.
  • Heavy users of Facebook tend to use the site because of a desire for social inclusion. In that context, the study suggests, those users are primed to agree with fellow users rather than to criticize the information those users share. And not just in terms of their public interactions, but in terms of their private beliefs. This potent combination -- "a need to connect and an ethos of shallow processing" -- provides a warm, moist breeding ground for the spread of opinions, publicly and not-so-publicly. Racist ones among them.
  • What will happen if information gets fully social -- according to Facebook's definition of "fully social"? What will take place when the Jack Browns of the world aren't just our friends, but our news sources?
Javier E

Ad About Women's Self-Image Creates a Sensation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eates-an-online-sensation.html

women beauty self-image

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • An online video, presented in three- and six-minute versions, shows a forensic sketch artist who is asked to draw a series of women based only on their descriptions. Seated at a drafting table with his back to his subject, the artist, Gil Zamora, asks the women a series of questions about their features. “Tell me about your chin,” he says in the soft voice reminiscent of a therapist’s. Crow’s feet, big jaws, protruding chins and dark circles are just some of the many physical features that women criticized about themselves. After he finishes a drawing of a woman, he then draws another sketch of the same woman, only this time it is based on how someone else describes her. The sketches are then hung side by side and the women are asked to compare them. In every instance, the second sketch is more flattering than the first.
  • The video, shot in a loft in San Francisco, has become a sensation online. The three-minute version has been viewed more than 7.5 million times on the Dove YouTube channel, and the version that is twice as long has been viewed more than 936,000 times.
  • Dove executives said the campaign resulted from company research that showed only 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “As women we are so hard on ourselves physically and emotionally,” Ms. Olive said. “It gets you to stop and think about how we think of ourselves.”
  • Ms. Brice took issue with the tag line for the ad, “You’re More Beautiful Than You Think.” “I think it makes people much more susceptible to absorbing the subconscious messages,” Ms. Brice said, “that at the heart of it all is that beauty is still what defines women. It is a little hypocritical.”
  • “What if I did look like that woman on the left?” she said, referring to the less flattering sketches of the women. “There are people that look like that.”
Javier E

Reports of Rape of 5-Year-Old Set Off New Furor in India - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ld-in-india-set-off-furor.html

beauty women advertising

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Seated at a drafting table with his back to his subject, the artist, Gil Zamora, asks the women a series of questions about their features. “Tell me about your chin,” he says in the soft voice reminiscent of a therapist’s. Crow’s feet, big jaws, protruding chins and dark circles are just some of the many physical features that women criticized about themselves. After he finishes a drawing of a woman, he then draws another sketch of the same woman, only this time it is based on how someone else describes her. The sketches are then hung side by side and the women are asked to compare them. In every instance, the second sketch is more flattering than the first.
  • The video, shot in a loft in San Francisco, has become a sensation online. The three-minute version has been viewed more than 7.5 million times on the Dove YouTube channel, and the version that is twice as long has been viewed more than 936,000 times.
  • Dove executives said the campaign resulted from company research that showed only 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “As women we are so hard on ourselves physically and emotionally,” Ms. Olive said. “It gets you to stop and think about how we think of ourselves.”
  • After watching the video a few times she wrote a post on her Tumblr site, which has become the dissident voice toward the campaign on social media. In a telephone interview, Ms. Brice took issue with the tag line for the ad, “You’re More Beautiful Than You Think.” “I think it makes people much more susceptible to absorbing the subconscious messages,” Ms. Brice said, “that at the heart of it all is that beauty is still what defines women. It is a little hypocritical.”
Megan Flanagan

Football's dangers, illustrated by one man's brain - CNN.com - 0 views

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

football brain

shared by Megan Flanagan on 12 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Michael Keck has added more fuel to the fire about whether young children should play football.
  • diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the Alzheimer's-like disease
  • telltale sign of the disease is tangles of the protein tau, which takes over parts of the brain. They result from repeated hits to the head
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • I have never seen this (brain) pathology in someone under the age of 30"
  • he had more than 10 concussions
  • He lost consciousness, suffered headaches, neck pain, insomnia and anxiety. He couldn't remember things or concentrate.
  • ventually saw a neurologist, who prescribed him a muscle relaxant and anti-seizure medication, but they did little and the symptoms continued
  • he stopped playing football because the symptoms were so strong
  • he had great opportunities, and he had to turn these opportunities down because of something that was taking over his brain
  • teach proper technique
  • Keck believed he suffered from CTE, but it cannot be diagnosed in living people.
  • Keck died from cardiac arrest in 2013, and it does appear his life was lost to CTE.
  • Usually there's a latent period. He seemed to develop it while he was playing. Even after he quit playing, it seemed to get worse."
  • factors such as environment and genetics may have a role.
  • I think its becoming more and more clear that the developing brain is more susceptible to concussion; it has a delayed recovery from concussion,"
  • "We really need to limit the amount of head contact that young children and adolescents are experiencing
  • became increasingly depressed and suicidal
  • We are taking out unnecessary head contact out of the sport, out of practice. We're enforcing rule changes
mcginnisca

Visiting an Anti-Muslim Hate Group at the Peak of America's Islamophobia | VICE | Unite... - 0 views

www.vice.com/...f-americas-of-islamaphobia-511

terrorism politics islamophobia language bias anchoring heuristic conspiracy theory

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Who is the enemy and what is the enemy's 'Threat Doctrine?'"
  • "national security expert," where her advice tends to be "get rid of the Muslims."
  • They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, and Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The purpose of the group is to "[promote] national security and [defeat] terrorism"—two goals which are, in the group's view, intrinsically threatened by the Islamic faith. The rhetoric of their meetings doesn't suggest that the problem is radical Islam, but Islam itself.
  • Just hours after the attacks in Paris, a mosque in St. Petersburg, Florida received a voicemail from a man who said he planned to shoot all Muslims, including children, in the head.
  • Act for America has flourished
  • the basic doctrine of the Quran, which is a personal, moral code for Muslims—as a threat to American security. It doesn't matter that the majority of American mass shootings are committed by young, white males (and often fanatical Christians), or that gun regulations play a role in terrorism-related events. Here, the group's mission is to "educate and effect change"—meaning, the Muslims have to go.
  • Yerushalmi claimed that 80 percent of mosques in the United States are "strictly Sharia," which he equated to Muslims following the same dogma as Al-Qaeda terrorists.
  • "the mythical 'moderate' Muslims who embrace traditional Islam but want a peaceful coexistence with the West is effectively non-existent."
  • By his logic, when a Muslim attends an American mosque, he is not only learning a violent doctrine but is also susceptible to be recruited by ISIS
  • Yerushalmi was suggesting further alienation. "Syrian immigrants, when they come here, where are they going to go to those mosques; the reservoir of support is there."
  • "The threat is real!" Yerushalmi concluded. "Sharia is not a peaceful, feel-good Islam."
  • "If my Roman Catholic church was preaching death to Muslims, Jews, everyone else, I'm sure it would be closed down with a blink of an eye," she continued. "So this is where we have to stop the growth of mosques!"
  • some members believe that the White House "is controlled by Muslims."
  • "They don't want peace and prosperity. They want to live by Sharia," said an angry old man.
  • President Obama delivered a speech responding to the San Bernardino shootings, calling for religious tolerance. He harshly condemned those who wish to discriminate against others based on their religion and addressed the plight of Muslim Americans who are currently enduring the ongoing Islamophobic backlash
sissij

War Goes Viral: The Atlantic's November Issue - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...503630

atlantic social media technology

shared by sissij on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • the use of social media as both a tool in conflict and a shaper of it, tracking how online chatter has begun to intersect with real-life violence in dozens of armed confrontations around the globe.
  • ISIS is a prime example...and many others are successfully taking cues from the ISIS playbook.
  • Many of the new connections in the coming years will be concentrated in regions most susceptible to violence and conflict.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In China, the “internet hive” no longer roils at foreigners alone, but also at China’s own military; and the U.S. military is now training for the “SMEIR” or “Social Media Environment and Internet Replication.”
  • How is Silicon Valley voting? Clinton: 88%; Undecided: 7%; Neither: 5%; Trump: 0%.
  • In the state, black students like Kenny are nearly four times as likely as their white peers to be charged with disturbing school. At least 22 states have disturbing school laws on the books, varying in their definition of the crime: whether it’s acting “in an obnoxious manner,” prohibiting “boisterous” behavior, or punishing students for “annoying conduct.”
  • sissij on 06 Dec 16
     
    This article talks about how media can be misused and weaponized using the example of ISIS. It also tangent on the politics within America as the media was so one sided during the election. I think the rate of support to Clinton showed by the silicon tech companies also reflects the overwhelming support on medias because they tech-based. --Sissi (12/6/2016)
sissij

The Danger of Only Seeing What You Already Believe | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...eeing-what-you-already-believe

research psychology bias social media

shared by sissij on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • the blank canvas, an empty page, the unfilled columns in ProTools awaiting sonic imagination. Once completed, another journey begins. The distance between zero and popularity is complex. 
  • The creator is always in a relationship with their audience.
  • Humans are neopholic, by which Thompson means we are “curious to discover new things” as well as neophobic, “afraid of anything that’s too new.” 
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • For example, my dopamine receptors tingled when Thompson mentioned Joseph Campbell and Jeff Buckley, given that they’re both huge inspirations to me.
  • Thompson notes that as we age our explicit memory system wanes. We become more susceptible to confuse a statement that “feels right” with one that is correct.
  • sissij on 24 Mar 17
     
    I found this article very interesting as it discussed the logic fallacy and confirmation bias in humane mind.The danger of only seeing what they already believe is especially obvious in the era of Internet. More and more social medias use filter system to give viewers what they like to see based on their viewing history. Although this filter system can satisfy the viewers, viewers get a limited range of information. I think it limits the mindset of the viewers. --Sissi (3/23/2017)
Javier E

The Folly of Fools - By Robert Trivers - Book Review - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...obert-trivers-book-review.html

deceit evolution disease theory cooperation

shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Fooling others yields obvious benefits, but why do we so often fool ourselves? Trivers provides a couple of answers. First, believing that we’re smarter, sexier and more righteous than we really are — or than others consider us to be — can help us seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via the placebo effect, for example. And the more we believe our own lies, the more sincerely, and hence effectively, we can lie to others.
  • One intriguing theme running through “The Folly of Fools” is that self-­deception can affect our susceptibility to disease, for ill or good.
Sophia C

New Truths That Only One Can See - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ths-that-only-one-can-see.html

research knowledge

shared by Sophia C on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • eproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true
  • With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.
  • any hypotheses already start with a high chance of being wrong
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the human tendency to see what we want to see, unconscious bias is inevitable. Without any ill intent, a scientist may be nudged toward interpreting the data so it supports the hypothesis, even if just barely.
  • He found that a large proportion of the conclusions were undermined or contradicted by later studies.
  • He and his colleagues could not replicate 47 of 53 landmark papers about cancer
  • esearchers deeply believed that their findings were true. But that is the problem. The more passionate scientists are about their work, the more susceptible they are to bias
  • “The slightest shift in their microenvironment can alter the results — something a newcomer might not spot. It is common for even a seasoned scientist to struggle with cell lines and culture conditions, and unknowingly introduce changes that will make it seem that a study cannot be reproduced.
julia rhodes

The Little Bit of Neanderthal in All of Us - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ls-leave-their-mark-on-us.html

neanderthal brain brain science language technology research knowledge

shared by julia rhodes on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Ever since the discovery in 2010 that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of living humans, scientists have been trying to determine how their DNA affects people today.
  • Among the findings, the studies have found clues to the evolution of skin and fertility, as well as susceptibility to diseases like diabetes. More broadly, they show how the legacy of Neanderthals has endured 30,000 years after their extinction.
  • By 2010 they had reconstructed most of the Neanderthal genome. When they compared it with the genomes of five living humans, they found similarities to small portions of the DNA in the Europeans and Asians.The researchers concluded that Neanderthals and modern humans must have interbred.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “They’d be bumping into Neanderthals at every street corner,” he joked.
  • Both studies suggest that Neanderthal genes involved in skin and hair were favored by natural selection in humans. Today, they are very common in living non-Africans.
  • “We don’t understand enough about the biology of those particular genes yet,” he said. “It makes it hard to pinpoint a reason why they’re beneficial.”
  • “This experiment of nature has been done,” said Dr. Reich, “and we can study it.”
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