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caelengrubb

Microeconomics - Econlib - 0 views

  • The motivating force for the change came from the macro side, with modern macroeconomics being far more explicit than old-fashioned monetary theory about fluctuations in income and employment (as well as the price level).
  • Many different distortions can create similar anomalies. If cotton is subsidized, the price farmers get will exceed, by the amount of the subsidy, the value to consumers. Society thus stands to gain by eliminating the subsidy and moving to a price that is the same for both buyers and sellers.
  • Public finance (see public choice) looks at how the government enters the scene. Traditionally, its focus was on taxes, which automatically introduce “wedges” (differences between the price the buyer pays and the price the seller receives) and cause inefficiency.
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  • Applied welfare economics is the fruition of microeconomics.
  • It is hard to imagine a basic course in microeconomics failing to include numerous cases and examples drawn from all of the fields listed above. This is because microeconomics is so basic. It represents the trunk of the tree from which all the listed subfields have branche
  • The specialization of production and the institutions of trade, commerce, and markets long antedated the science of economics. Indeed, one can fairly say that from the very outset the science of economics entailed the study of the market forms that arose quite naturally (and without any help from economists) out of human behavior
  • In microeconomics this is translated into the notion of people maximizing their personal “utility,” or welfare.
  • At the beginning of the process, those who adopted the new hybrids made handsome profits.
  • The economics of supply and demand has a sort of moral or normative overtone, at least when it comes to dealing with a wide range of market distortions. In an undistorted market, buyers pay the market price up to the point where they judge further units not to be worth that price, while competitive sellers supply added units as long as they can make money on each increment.
  • The strength of microeconomics comes from the simplicity of its underlying structure and its close touch with the real world. In a nutshell, microeconomics has to do with supply and demand, and with the way they interact in various markets.
  • If price controls keep bread (or anything else) artificially cheap, the predictable result is that less will be supplied than is demanded.
  • Had the government given wheat farmers coupons, each of which permitted the farmer to market one bushel of wheat, wheat marketings could have been cut by the desired amount. Production inefficiencies could be avoided by allowing the farmers to buy and sell coupons among themselves.
  • monopoly represents the artificial restriction of production by an entity having sufficient “market power” to do so.
  • Modern monopolies are a bit less transparent, for two reasons. First, even though governments still grant monopolies, they usually grant them to the producers. Second, some monopolies just happen without government creating them, although these are usually short-lived.
  • A final example of what occurs with official prices that are too high is the phenomenon of “rent seeking,” which occurs when someone enters a business to earn a profit that the government has tried to make unusually high.
  • If the wage does not adjust downward to equate supply and demand, the rate of urban unemployment will rise until further migration is deterred. Still other examples are in banking and drugs.
  • Rent seeking also occurs when something of value (like import licenses or radio/TV franchises) is being given away or sold below its true value
  • The great unifying principles of microeconomics are, ever and always, supply and demand. The normative overtone of microeconomics comes from the fact that competitive supply price represents value as seen by suppliers, and competitive demand price represents value as seen by demanders.
katedriscoll

The Quest to Tell Science from Pseudoscience | Boston Review - 0 views

  • Of the answers that have been proposed, Popper’s own criterion—falsifiability—remains the most commonly invoked, despite serious criticism from both philosophers and scientists. These attacks fatally weakened Popper’s proposal, yet its persistence over a century of debates helps to illustrate the challenge of demarcation—a problem no less central today than it was when Popper broached it
  • pper’s answer emerged. Popper was born just after the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna—the birthplace of psychoanalysis—and received his doctorate in psychology in 1928. In the early 1920s Popper volunteered in the clinics of Alfred Adler, who had split with his former mentor, the creator of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud. Precocious interest in psychoanalysis, and his subsequent rejection of it, were crucial in Popper’s later formulation of his philosophical views on science.
  • At first, Popper was quite taken with logical empiricism, but he would diverge from the mainstream of the movement and develop his own framework for understanding scientific thought in his two influential books The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, revised and translated to English in 1959) and Conjectures and Refutations (1962). Popper claimed to have formulated his initial ideas about demarcation in 1919, when he was seventeen years old. He had, he writes, “wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very well that science often errs, and that pseudoscience may happen to stumble on the truth.”
caelengrubb

The Linguistic Evolution of 'Like' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn’t sit still. It can’t. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber
  • Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse. After all, how often should a coherently minded person need to note that something is similar to something rather than just being that something?
  • First, let’s take like in just its traditional, accepted forms. Even in its dictionary definition, like is the product of stark changes in meaning that no one would ever guess.
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  • To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”
  • The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like
  • It was just that, step by step, the syllable lic, which to an Old English speaker meant “body,” came to mean, when uttered by people centuries later, “similar to”—and life went on.
  • Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly.
  • Like has become a part of compounds. Likewise began as like plus a word, wise, which was different from the one meaning “smart when either a child or getting old.”
  • Dictionaries tell us it’s pronounced “like-MINE-did,” but I, for one, say “LIKE- minded” and have heard many others do so
  • Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’”
  • What we are seeing in like’s transformations today are just the latest chapters in a story that began with an ancient word that was supposed to mean “body.”
  • It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like
  • The new like, then, is associated with hesitation.
  • So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population.
  • The problem with the hesitation analysis is that this was a thoroughly confident speaker.
  • It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.
  • Understandably so, of course—the meaning of like suggests that people are claiming that everything is “like” itself rather than itself.
  • The new like acknowledges unspoken objection while underlining one’s own point (the factuality). Like grandparents translates here as “There were, despite what you might think, actually grandparents.”
  • Then there is a second new like, which is closer to what people tend to think of all its new uses: it is indeed a hedge.
  • Then, the two likes I have mentioned must be distinguished from yet a third usage, the quotative like—as in “And she was like, ‘I didn’t even invite him.’
  • This is yet another way that like has become grammar. The meaning “similar to” is as natural a source here as it was for -ly: mimicking people’s utterances is talking similarly to, as in “like,” them.
  • Thus the modern American English speaker has mastered not just two, but actually three different new usages of like.
kaylynfreeman

Believe what you like: How we fit the facts around our prejudices - TOK Topics - 0 views

  • This idea of a gullible, pliable populace is, of course, nothing new. Voltaire said, “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. But no, says Mercier, Voltaire had it backwards: “It is wanting to commit atrocities that makes you believe absurdities”…
  • If someone says Obama is a Muslim, their primary reason may be to indicate that they are a member of the group of people who co-ordinate around that statement. When a social belief and a true belief are in conflict, Klintman says, people will opt for the belief that best signals their social identity – even if it means lying to themselves…
  • Such a “belief” – being largely performative – rarely translates into action. It remains what Mercier calls a reflective belief, with no consequences on one’s behaviour, as opposed to an intuitive belief, which guides decisions and actions.
katedriscoll

Sense Perception Notes - ToK - 0 views

  • "Perception by the senses rather than by the intellect." (Dictionary.com)
  • "Perception by or based on stimulation of the senses." (Medical Dictionary)
  • We perceive the world through our five senses. (Hearing, Sight, Smell, Touch, Taste) Our sense receptors are stimulated by sensory information. The brain translates the sensory information into sensations such as sound, taste, temperature, etc. Higher centres in the brain either ignore or recognize the sensations and their meanings, based on neuronal networks of past association and expectation. (Some of this stage 3 work actually involves reasoning).  Click the video to see a coffee-taste expert discuss the intricacies of how different coffees taste.    Sense perception is an important dimension of comprehending the world around us. It allows us to gather information from the outside world, so we can then go on to hopefully make sense of it
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  • Stimuli are involuntarily being compared and contrasted with previous experiences. For example, when you see when you see stop light change from red to green, your mind perceives this change in colour, not so much as a change in colour, but more as a signal to move forward.
  • What we perceive depends on what is important and interest in at the time for each person (Cultural Influences on Perception). Our perceptions and conceptions are affected by things such as biases, motivations emotions cultural perspectives interests, expectations and background experiences (existing knowledge)
  • Optical illusions are very popular with students just starting out in ToK. They are clear evidence that we have weaknesses in terms of how our mind interprets stimuli. Often things are not as they appear. Our previous experiences with similar stimulai impairs our perception.
margogramiak

Study sheds new light on how the brain distinguishes speech from noise -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

  • strongly influences sound processing in an important auditory region of the brain. The neuromodulator, acetylcholine, may even help the main auditory brain circuitry distinguish speech from noise.
  • strongly influences sound processing in an important auditory region of the brain. The neuromodulator, acetylcholine, may even help the main auditory brain circuitry distinguish speech from noise.
    • margogramiak
       
      This reminds me of a concept we covered in class. The brain searches for patterns in any type of sound, which is something we talked and read about. I'm assuming this article will have something to do with that idea.
  • it has rarely been studied at the more fundamental levels of the brain,
    • margogramiak
       
      So, in a sense, they're going back to the basics.
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  • "This study will likely bring new attention in the field to the ways in which circuits like this, widely considered a 'simple' one, are in fact highly complex and subject to modulatory influence like higher regions of the brain,"
    • margogramiak
       
      Cool. I wonder how research like this applies to medicine, or if it does at all. I always think research has more value if it's able to impact someone's life in a medical sense.
  • Additionally, they describe novel anatomical projections that provide acetylcholine input to the MNTB.
    • margogramiak
       
      So, contrary to my previous belief, the science is more complicated than just pattens.
  • "You can think of this modulation as akin to shifting an antenna's position to eliminate static for your favorite radio station."
    • margogramiak
       
      I love when complex info or science is translated into simpler terms or analogies like this.
  • the researchers identified for the first time a set of completely unknown connections in the brain between the modulatory centers and this important area of the auditory system.
    • margogramiak
       
      First time finds is very exciting!
  • understanding how other sensory information is processed in the brain.
    • margogramiak
       
      cool!
huffem4

The Power of Positive Thinking: Too Much and Never Enough - The Bulwark - 1 views

  • Peale was exceptional for cutting the flock some spiritual slack, encouraging them to look for the sunny side and conquer their inferiority complexes. In his world, you can have the economic gains minus the guilt, which seems perfectly suited to the American sensibility.
  • The book sold millions of copies and was eventually translated into more than 40 languages, and Peale, from his pulpit at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, became central to the spiritual life of the family of Fred Trump Sr., his wife, Mary, and the four Trump children, including the future president.
  • it was also well suited to justifying and exacerbating the pathologies of the Trump family and businesses
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  • Mary Trump (the president’s niece who also happens to have a Ph.D. in psychology) paints a portrait of Fred Trump Sr. as a sociopath, utterly uninterested in entering into the moral, emotional, and psychological world of his family or its members. In keeping with Peale’s teaching, he would no more hear about his wife’s or children’s problems than he would accept a failed business deal
  • Fred would just say, “Everything’s great, right Toots?” refusing to acknowledge, much less accommodate, her illness. 
  • Fred Jr. was then further abused, repeatedly denied authority, second-guessed at every turn, and blamed for every problem, setback, and failure in a perverse tag-team between Fred Sr. and Donald. The abuse fed his alcoholism, which, in the family’s Peale-informed understanding, was not a disease requiring treatment but the result of Fred Jr.’s negative thinking
  • Peale wanted people to be hopeful, kind, and optimistic, and to become “people persons.” The Trump family heard the positive thinking, personal empowerment parts, which integrated easily with its win-at-all-cost ideology, but they, or at least Donald, missed the bits about seeking counsel from others and living a life of dependence upon God.
  • Fred Jr.’s deepening alcoholism only elicited increasing abuse from his father and brother seemingly under the theory that if they were hard enough on him he would turn around. Even in his final crisis, afflicted by fatal, alcohol-induced cardiac problems, no member of the family went with him to the hospital (Donald Trump went to a movie instead). Dying, it appears, is the result of late-stage negative thought.
  • The consistent element in each of these has been to deny negative realities and keep moving. The casinos, the airline, the football league, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump University . . . all bear the same markings of hyper optimism and overpromise/underdeliver salesmanship
  • Trump’s just doing what he’s always done: conquering the challenge by blinding himself to it, just the way Reverend Peale taught him and his father insisted upon. 
  • My AEI colleague, Brad Wilcox, documented that men who identified as “evangelical” but infrequently attend church were more likely to engage in domestic violence than evangelicals who regularly attended church, mainline Protestants and those who never attend church. Wilcox believes this results from a kind of doctrinal cherry-picking—big on authority, sovereignty, and power but closed to other-directed teachings like altruism and self-sacrifice. Weak attachment to religious faith tends to put some of the worst behaviors on steroids.  
  • These are the problem-solving strategies that Donald Trump brought to his marriages, six corporate bankruptcies, presidential campaign, and now, what increasingly appears to be a failed presidency.
  • “prosperity gospel” (a belief popularized by televangelists that God intends Christians to be healthy and wealthy)
  • The purpose of these psychological and spiritual practices is to free individuals from self-doubt and feelings of inferiority and help them to become the people God truly intends them to be: happy, wealthy, popular, and professionally successful.
  • Now we have Trump COVID-19 and it’s following the same pattern. The virus is “very well under control” and “going to fade away.”
marleen_ueberall

Why Is Language Important to Culture? - 0 views

  • Why Is Language Important?
  • It is a uniquely human gift which lets us communicate and differentiates us from primates.
  • language is much more than just a means of communication. It is also an inseparable part of our culture.
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  • different cultures have a predominant fashion in which they use their language and they have differences which cannot be underestimated.
  • one of the most well known linguists in the world, argues that all languages are dialects of one language, which is the human language. He says that even though they appear very different, they are in fact very similar.
  • there is no doubt that language and culture are closely connected.
  • Direct and Indirect Styles
  • We are encouraged to be direct and to speak our mind.
  • Asian cultures use an indirect style of communication. Words such as “perhaps" and “maybe" are used much more frequently than “yes", “no" or “for sure".
  • Personal and Contextual Styles
  • Two of the most frequently used words in our culture are “I" and “you".
  • American culture is not very formal, so it is appropriate to say “you" to your boss, to the President, to a stranger, to your spouse or to your child.
  • In Thai language there are twelve forms of the pronoun “you", which depend of factors such as status or level of intimacy.
  • The style of language is focused on speaker and depends on someone’s status and identity.
  • Japanese pay a lot of attention to someone’s status and they use linguistic forms called honorifics, which are used according to the rank of the person who is speaking
  • Untranslatable Words
  • Many people don’t realize that there are plenty of words that cannot be translated from one language to another simply because they don’t exist in another language.
  • The word “shopping", which describes one of the most favorite activities of Americans, doesn’t exist in some other languages (such as for example in Russian) as a noun.
  • Another interesting example is the word “ilunga".
  • Republic of Congo and is considered to be the most untranslatable word in the world.
  • a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first and a second time, but never for a third time.
  • Language Is Changing Along with the Culture
  • he and his were used generically in English language.
  • Since the United States and most of the English-speaking Western Europe are becoming less and less male-dominant cultures, the grammar rules have been changed and new gender agreement rules were created.
  • Fifty years ago nobody was suspecting that one day in the United States the words “mother" and “father" would become controversial and that some schools would agree to change them both to “parent".
johnsonel7

Computers Are Learning to Read-But They're Still Not So Smart | WIRED - 0 views

  • computers still weren’t very good at understanding the written word. Sure, they had become decent at simulating that understanding in certain narrow domains, like automatic translation or sentiment analysis (for example, determining if a sentence sounds “mean or nice,” he said). But Bowman wanted measurable evidence of the genuine article: bona fide, human-style reading comprehension in English. So he came up with a test
  • The machines bombed. Even state-of-the-art neural networks scored no higher than 69 out of 100 across all nine tasks: a D-plus, in letter grade terms. Bowman and his coauthors weren’t surprised. Neural networks — layers of computational connections built in a crude approximation of how neurons communicate within mammalian brains
  • It produced a GLUE score of 80.5. On this brand-new benchmark designed to measure machines’ real understanding of natural language — or to expose their lack thereof — the machines had jumped from a D-plus to a B-minus in just six months.
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  • The only problem is that perfect rulebooks don’t exist, because natural language is far too complex and haphazard to be reduced to a rigid set of specifications.
  • Researchers simply fed their neural networks massive amounts of written text copied from freely available sources like Wikipedia — billions of words, preformatted into grammatically correct sentences — and let the networks derive next-word predictions on their own. In essence, it was like asking the person inside a Chinese room to write all his own rules, using only the incoming Chinese messages for reference.“The great thing about this approach is it turns out that the model learns a ton of stuff about syntax,”
  • The nonsequential nature of the transformer represented sentences in a more expressive form, which Uszkoreit calls treelike. Each layer of the neural network makes multiple, parallel connections between certain words while ignoring others — akin to a student diagramming a sentence in elementary school. These connections are often drawn between words that may not actually sit next to each other in the sentence. “Those structures effectively look like a number of trees that are overlaid,” Uszkoreit explained.
  • But instead of concluding that BERT could apparently imbue neural networks with near-Aristotelian reasoning skills, they suspected a simpler explanation: that BERT was picking up on superficial patterns in the way the warrants were phrased.
tongoscar

Talking racism in the UK | Europe | Al Jazeera - 0 views

  • That is what it felt like this weekend, when on two separate instances celebrities called out racism in the United Kingdom. The reactions to their statements prove just how much we need to speak out on this topic in the first place.
  • In response to a question over whether the UK is still racist, he told Italian newspaper La Repubblica "definitely, 100 percent". This was swiftly and erroneously translated into headlines claiming Stormzy had said that the UK is 100 percent racist, followed by a social media troll-a-thon from people who think he is getting too big for his boots, citing a list of crimes against knowing your place. Highlights include accusations of ungratefulness and even calls for Stormzy to consider returning to his ethnic home of Ghana. Oh, the audacity.
  • It is a scary time to speak out against the racism and prejudice that permeates British society and its oldest institutions. It is a scary time to stand up for victims of racism whose plight is all too often rendered invisible by those who do not want to see the ugly truth. Those that do, be they sports commentators or chart-topping musicians, face being silenced or vilified with a swiftness that reminds us who is really in charge: people in power structures that will not be challenged.
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  • But challenge them we must. Support for Stormzy and Neville in the wake of their comments proves that many of us are willing to force the agenda and seek change. The UK does have a problem with racism, that is a fact. And the problem will not go away until those who refuse to see give way to those who do.
johnsonel7

Opinion | Do heuristics help us make good decisions in uncertain times? - 0 views

  • Do heuristics, the shortcuts that the brain takes, support efficient decision making or does it impede efficient decision making?
  • Humans have neither unlimited resources nor unlimited time to take decisions. So, the brain has always developed smart heuristics, shortcuts to take efficient decisions.
  • One other key thought put forward by Gigerenzer is that there is a big difference between risk and uncertainty. We are dealing with risk when you know all the alternatives, outcomes and their probabilities. We are dealing with uncertainty when you don’t know all the alternatives, outcomes or their probabilities.
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  • It has been found that if doctors are trained how to translate conditional probabilities into natural frequencies, the ability of the doctors to communicate the risk to their patients goes up dramatically. Just imagine the huge difference this can make to customer satisfaction in the healthcare business.
johnsonel7

Sensory perception | Science Features | Naked Scientists - 0 views

  • Deciphering how the brain processes sight and hearing could have implications for how we understand and treat conditions such as dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia.
  • schizophrenia
  • Through a project called SENSOCOM, she is exploring how sensory perception affects communication, focusing on the brain’s deep subcortical structures.By doing this, she and her team are exploring a part of the brain traditionally excluded by research trying to understand communication impairments found in autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia, conditions which affect around 53 million people in Europe.
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  • To do this they have been focusing on the sensory pathways linked to these deep structures. She and her group discovered that adults with dyslexia have weaker pathway connections between a visual subcortical structure (the left visual thalamus) with an area of the cortex called V5/MT, which is critical for the perception of visual motion. In the auditory mode, there was a similar finding. The team discovered weaker connections between the left auditory thalamus and a cortex structure linked to auditory motion, which is important for speech perception. These connections could therefore be important for reading and for predicting reading skill, according to Dr von Kriegstein.
  • So how might this translate into helping people with dyslexia? This is basic science, says Prof. von Kriegstein, so first it’s crucial to understand the mechanisms behind communications disorders before developing therapy training tools, although she is optimistic these could lie within reach.
  • The way the brain encodes information and in turn directs perception of that sensory experience is a highly variable process.
  • The sensory overload or distorted and heightened perceptions described by schizophrenia patients, for instance, could relate to these deficits. Sensory dysfunction has also been linked to delusions and hallucinations as well as difficulties with attention and reading the emotions or tone of others – all of which can affect social interaction.
  • According to Dr Fellin, decreased connectivity between nerve cells (neurons) appears to play an important role in the progression of schizophrenia. So far, Dr Fellin and his group have identified which specific neurons influence sensory responses in mouse studies, but not yet in animal models of schizophrenia, with similar investigations in glial cells  - the supporting cells of the nervous system.
manhefnawi

Never Underestimate The Value Of Language Skills And Participatory Development - 0 views

  • If you want to optimize the impacts of your global development organization, I can’t stress enough the value of in-depth communications made possible when nonprofit leaders prioritize local language skills. Language skills need to be a priority for international nonprofits and should be something that is invested in. While for some organizations, making language fluency a prerequisite for employment may be a good idea, language is something that can always be learned. I have seen organizations provide their staff with three months of language classes as part of their initial orientations. Good language skills lead to better community engagement and can avoid the potential for things to get lost in translation.
katherineharron

FBI arrests spotlight lessons learned after Charlottesville (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.
  • These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.
  • JUST WATCHEDOn GPS: What motivates white power activists?ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH position: absol
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  • Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.
  • The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.
  • One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.
  • This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.
manhefnawi

Scientists Successfully Create Brain-to-Brain Link | Mental Floss - 0 views

  • Imagine a future where you could transmit a unique feeling, a hard-to-translate thought process, or precise motor movements via a neural pattern from your brain to someone else’s brain, sharing what can’t otherwise be easily communicated. This is the goal of new research conducted at the University of Washington (UW).
  • “We wanted to show that this brain-to-brain interface can be used to do something highly interactive and collaborative
  • The function of the experiment is conceptually simple, Stocco says. Two people sit apart in different buildings. One, the respondent, is wearing a cap connected to electroencephalography machine (EEG) that records electrical brain activity. A magnetic coil is placed behind the head of the other participant, the inquirer. The coil delivers “transcranial magnetic stimulation.” The respondent is given an object to think of, much like in the game Twenty Questions. Then the inquirer chooses questions to send to the respondent via the Internet. The respondent answers the questions using only their brainwaves, by thinking the answer “yes” or “no.”
Javier E

How the leading coronavirus vaccines made it to the finish line - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic’s silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases.
  • Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.
  • Long before the pandemic, Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance.
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  • Messenger RNA is a powerful, if fickle, component of life’s building blocks — a workhorse of the cell that is also truly just a messenger, unstable and prone to degrade.
  • . In 1990,
  • That same year, a team at the University of Wisconsin startled the scientific world with a paper that showed it was possible to inject a snippet of messenger RNA into mice and turn their muscle cells into factories, creating proteins on demand.
  • If custom-designed RNA snippets could be used to turn cells into bespoke protein factories, messenger RNA could become a powerful medical tool. It could encode fragments of virus to teach the immune system to defend against pathogens. It could also create whole proteins that are missing or damaged in people with devastating genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.
  • In 2005, the pair discovered a way to modify RNA, chemically tweaking one of the letters of its code, so it didn’t trigger an inflammatory response. Deborah Fuller, a scientist who works on RNA and DNA vaccines at the University of Washington, said that work deserves a Nobel Prize.
  • messenger RNA posed a bigger challenge than other targets.“It’s tougher — it’s a much bigger molecule, it’s much more unstable,”
  • Unlike fields that were sparked by a single powerful insight, Sahin said that the recent success of messenger RNA vaccines is a story of countless improvements that turned an alluring biological idea into a beneficial technology.
  • “This is a field which benefited from hundreds of inventions,” said Sahin, who noted that when he started BioNTech in 2008, he cautioned investors that the technology would not yield a product for at least a decade. He kept his word: Until the coronavirus sped things along, BioNTech projected the launch of its first commercial project in 2023.
  • “It’s new to you,” Fuller said. “But for basic researchers, it’s been long enough. . . . Even before covid, everyone was talking: RNA, RNA, RNA.”
  • All vaccines are based on the same underlying idea: training the immune system to block a virus. Old-fashioned vaccines do this work by injecting dead or weakened viruses
  • ewer vaccines use distinctive bits of the virus, such as proteins on their surface, to teach the lesson. The latest genetic techniques, like messenger RNA, don’t take as long to develop because those virus bits don’t have to be generated in a lab. Instead, the vaccine delivers a genetic code that instructs cells to build those characteristic proteins themselves.
  • They wanted the immune system to learn to recognize the thumb tack spike, so McLellan tasked a scientist in his laboratory with identifying genetic mutations that could anchor the protein into the right configuration. It was a painstaking process for Nianshuang Wang, who now works at a biotechnology company, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. After trying hundreds of genetic mutations, he found two that worked. Five journals rejected the finding, questioning its significance, before it was published in 2017.
  • That infection opened Graham’s eyes to an opportunity. HKU1 was merely a nuisance, as opposed to a deadly pneumonia; that meant it would be easier to work with in the lab, since researchers wouldn’t have to don layers of protective gear and work in a pressurized laboratory.
  • Severe acute respiratory syndrome had emerged in 2003. Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) broke out in 2012. It seemed clear to Graham and Jason McLellan, a structural biologist now at the University of Texas at Austin, that new coronaviruses were jumping into people on a 10-year-clock and it might be time to brace for the next one.
  • Last winter, when Graham heard rumblings of a new coronavirus in China, he brought the team back together. Once its genome was shared online by Chinese scientists, the laboratories in Texas and Maryland designed a vaccine, utilizing the stabilizing mutations and the knowledge they had gained from years of basic research — a weekend project thanks to the dividends of all that past work.
  • Graham needed a technology that could deliver it into the body — and had already been working with Moderna, using its messenger RNA technology to create a vaccine against a different bat virus, Nipah, as a dress rehearsal for a real pandemic. Moderna and NIH set the Nipah project aside and decided to go forward with a coronavirus vaccine.
  • On Jan. 13, Moderna’s Moore came into work and found her team already busy translating the stabilized spike protein into their platform. The company could start making the vaccine almost right away because of its experience manufacturing experimental cancer vaccines, which involves taking tumor samples and developing personalized vaccines in 45 days.
  • At BioNTech, Sahin said that even in the early design phases of its vaccine candidates, he incorporated the slight genetic changes designed in Graham’s lab that would make the spike look more like the real thing. At least two other companies would incorporate that same spike.
  • If all goes well with regulators, the coronavirus vaccines have the makings of a pharmaceutical industry fairy tale. The world faced an unparalleled threat, and companies leaped into the fight. Pfizer plowed $2 billion into the effort. Massive infusions of government cash helped remove the financial risks for Moderna.
  • But the world will also owe their existence to many scientists outside those companies, in government and academia who pursued ideas they thought were important even when the world doubted them
  • Some of those scientists will receive remuneration, since their inventions are licensed and integrated into the products that could save the world.
  • As executives become billionaires, many scientists think it is fair to earn money from their inventions that can help them do more important work. But McLellan’s laboratory at the University of Texas is proud to have licensed an even more potent version of their spike protein, royalty-free, to be incorporated into a vaccine for low and middle income countries.
  • “They’re using the technology that [Kariko] and I developed,” he said. “We feel like it’s our vaccine, and we are incredibly excited — at how well it’s going, and how it’s going to be used to get rid of this pandemic.”
  • “People hear about [vaccine progress] and think someone just thought about it that night. The amount of work — it’s really a beautiful story of fundamental basic research,” Fauci said. “It was chancy, in the sense that [the vaccine technology] was new. We were aware there would be pushback. The proof in the pudding is a spectacular success.”
  • The Vaccine Research Center, where Graham is deputy director, was the brainchild of Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It was created in 1997 to bring together scientists and physicians from different disciplines to defeat diseases, with a heavy focus on HIV.
  • the pandemic wasn’t a sudden eureka moment — it was a catalyst that helped ignite lines of research that had been moving forward for years, far outside the spotlight of a global crisis.
Javier E

Turn "Anti-Vaxx" into "Defund the Police" - by Jonathan V. Last - The Triad - 0 views

  • You will hear, variously, that the “survival rate” for COVID is 99.0 percent, or 99.5 percent, or 99.8 percent.
  • These numbers are all statistical constructs based on the age distribution of a given population. The older your society, the lower your survival rate. But just for fun, let’s pretend it’s 99.8 percent.
  • If 99.8 percent of people who experience a rare event survive, then that number is comforting. If 99.8 percent of people survived being bitten by a shark, for instance, you’d think this was encouraging.
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  • On the other hand, if you’re talking about 99.8 percent of a common event which translates into some very large number . . . well, suddenly it’s not great, Bob:
  • 2,900,000 passengers fly on airlines each day. If 99.8% of them made it safely to their destinations, 5,800 people a day would be dying in crashes and people like you would never step on an airplane ever again.July 25th 20211 Retweet4 Likes
Javier E

Opinion | Barack Obama's smart way to change the disinformation debate - The Washington... - 0 views

  • The former president spoke at Stanford University on April 21 to lay out his vision for fighting disinformation on the Internet. His focus on the subject is fitting; the dusk of his administration marked a turning point from techno-optimism to pessimism after election interference revealed how easily malicious actors could exploit the free flow of information.
  • His diagnosis is on target. The Internet has given us access to more people, more opportunities and more knowledge
  • This has helped activists drum up attention for overlooked causes. It has also enabled the nation’s adversaries to play on our preexisting prejudices and divisions to sow discord
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  • Mr. Obama starts where most lawmakers are stuck: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives platforms immunity from legal liability for most third-party posts. He suggested a “higher standard of care” for ads than for so-called organic content that everyday users post. This would strike a sensible balance between eviscerating Section 230, making sites accountable for everything they host, and doing nothing.
  • On top of that, “an instant, 24/7 global information stream,” from which audiences can pick and choose material that confirms their biases, has deepened the social divides that bad actors seek to exploit.
  • Mr. Obama identified another problem with the Section 230 talk: homing in on what material platforms do and don’t take down risks missing how the “very design” of these sites privileges polarizing, inflammatory posts.
  • With this, Mr. Obama adds something vital to the mainstream debate over social media regulation, shifting attention away from a debate about whack-a-mole content removal and toward the sites’ underlying structures. His specific suggestions, while fuzzy, also have promise — from slowing down viral material to imposing transparency obligations that would subject social media companies’ algorithms to scrutiny from researchers and regulators.
  • Mr. Obama calls this “democratic oversight.” But the material companies reveal could be highly technical. Ideally, it would get translated into layman’s terms so that everyday people, too, can understand how decisions so significant in their daily lives and the life of the country are made.
Javier E

'The Fourth Turning' Enters Pop Culture - The New York Times - 0 views

  • According to “fourth turning” proponents, American history goes through recurring cycles. Each one, which lasts about 80 to 100 years, consists of four generation-long seasons, or “turnings.” The winter season is a time of upheaval and reconstruction — a fourth turning.
  • The theory first appeared in “The Fourth Turning,” a work of pop political science that has had a cult following more or less since it was published in 1997. In the last few years of political turmoil, the book and its ideas have bubbled into the mainstream.
  • According to “The Fourth Turning,” previous crisis periods include the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. America entered its latest fourth turning in the mid-2000s. It will culminate in a crisis sometime in the 2020s — i.e., now.
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  • One of the book’s authors, Neil Howe, 71, has become a frequent podcast guest. A follow-up, “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” comes out this month.
  • The play’s author, Will Arbery, 33, said he heard about “The Fourth Turning” while researching Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing firebrand and former adviser to President Donald J. Trump, who is a longtime fan of the book and directed a 2010 documentary based on its ideas.
  • He described it as “this almost fun theory about history,” but added: “And yet there’s something deeply menacing about it.”
  • Mr. Arbery, who said he does not subscribe to the theory, sees parallels between the fourth turning and other nonscientific beliefs. “I modeled the way that Teresa talks about the fourth turning on the way that young liberals talk about astrology,” he said.
  • The book’s outlook on the near future has made it appealing to macro traders and crypto enthusiasts, and it is frequently cited on the podcasts “Macro Voices,” “Wealthion” and “On the Margin.”
  • In the new book, he describes what a coming civil war or geopolitical conflict might look like — though he shies away from casting himself as a modern-day Nostradamus.
  • “The Fourth Turning” captured a mood of decline in recent American life. “I remember feeling safe in the ’90s, and then as soon as 9/11 hit, the world went topsy-turvy,” he said. “Every time my cohort got to the point where we were optimistic, another crisis happened. When I read the book, I was like, ‘That makes sense.’”
  • “The Fourth Turning” was conceived during a period of relative calm. In the late 1980s, Mr. Howe, a Washington, D.C., policy analyst, teamed with William Strauss, a founder of the political satire troupe the Capitol Steps.
  • Their first book, “Generations,” told a story of American history through generational profiles going back to the 1600s. The book was said to have influenced Bill Clinton to choose a fellow baby boomer, Al Gore, as his running mate
  • when the 2008 financial crisis hit at almost exactly the point when the start of the fourth turning was predicted, it seemed to many that the authors might have been onto something. Recent events — the pandemic, the storming of the Capitol — have seemingly provided more evidence for the book’s fans.
  • Historically, a fourth turning crisis has always translated into a civil war, a war of great nations, or both, according to the book. Either is possible over the next decade, Mr. Howe said. But he is a doomsayer with an optimistic streak: Each fourth turning, in his telling, kicks off a renaissance in civic life.
  • “I’ve read ‘The Fourth Turning,’ and indeed found it useful from a macroeconomic investing perspective,” Lyn Alden, 35, an investment analyst, wrote in an email. “History doesn’t repeat, but it kind of gives us a loose framework to work with.”
  • “This big tidal shift is arriving,” Mr. Howe said. “But if you’re asking me which wave is going to knock down the lighthouse, I can’t do that. I can just tell you that this is the time period. It gives you a good idea of what to watch for.”
peterconnelly

Indigenous and local knowledge can help build effective environmental policies: Calgary... - 0 views

  • Meaningful integration and co-production of Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) can help accelerate effective environmental policies, a new University of Calgary study said.
  • Indigenous and local knowledge often provide sustainable and holistic perspectives on nature that are often ignored in Western science.
  • “For Indigenous communities, including my own, humans are perceived to be equal to the lands, and this concept of sustainability is embedded in many Indigenous worldviews,” Sidorova said.
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  • “Indigenous knowledge provides a very unique perspective because it provides a more respectful and reciprocal view on nature and animals, and these are passed from generation to generation.”
  • But Sidorova notes that the integration of ILK is only a first step and should not be used to tokenize Indigenous communities.
  • Sidorova says policymakers, governments and organizations need to adequately fund Indigenous-led CBEM and research programs to ensure partnerships with Indigenous and local communities last long term.
  • The programs should also focus on Indigenous languages because Indigenous roles have spiritual elements that show connections to the land that can’t necessarily be fully translated into English, she added.
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