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Emily Horwitz

'I Wanna Eat You Up!' Why We Go Crazy for Cute | LiveScience - 1 views

www.livescience.com/-we-go-crazy-for-cuteness.html

psychology knowledge animals

shared by Emily Horwitz on 21 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • NEW ORLEANS — Ever reacted to the sight of a cute puppy or darling infant by squealing, "I want to eat you up!"? Or maybe you can't help but want to pinch your grandbaby's adorable cheeks. You're not alone. New research finds that seemingly strange aggressive responses to cuteness are actually the norm.
  • In the study, presented Friday (Jan. 18) here at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that people watching a slideshow of adorable pictures popped more bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap than did people viewing funny or neutral pictures.
  • yer got interested in what she and her colleagues call "cute aggression" after chatting with a fellow student about how adorable Internet pictures often produce the desire to squish or squeeze the cute critter. All the existing research on cuteness suggests the reaction should be the opposite, she told LiveScience. People should want to treat a cute thing with gentleness and care.
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  • The participants rated the pictures on cuteness and funniness, as well as on how much they felt the pictures made them lose control — for example, if they agreed with statements such as "I can't handle it!" The participants also rated the extent to which the pictures made them "want to say something like 'grr!'" and "want to squeeze something." Sure enough, the cuter the animal, the less control and more desire to "grrr" and squeeze something that people felt. Cute animals produced this feeling significantly more strongly than did funny animals. The funny critters in turn produced the feeling more strongly than did neutral animals, perhaps because the funny animals were perceived as cute, too, Dyer said.
  • That's exactly what happened. The people watching a cute slideshow popped 120 bubbles, on average, compared with 80 for the funny slideshow and just a hair over 100 for the neutral one.
  • It's possible that seeing a wide-eyed baby or roly-poly pup triggers our drive to care for that creature, Dyer said. But since the animal is just a picture, and since even in real life we might not be able to care for the creature as much as we want, this urge may be frustrated, she said. That frustration could lead to aggression.
  • Or the reason might not be specific to cuteness, Dyer said. Many overwhelmingly positive emotions look negative, as when Miss America sobs while receiving her crown. Such high levels of positive emotion may overwhelm people.
carolinewren

Shady Science: How the Brain Remembers Colors - 0 views

www.livescience.com/the-brain-remembers-color.html

science brain colors

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • When you bring home the wrong color of paint from the hardware store, it may not be your foggy memory at fault
  • Flombaum and his colleagues conducted four experiments on four different groups of people.
  • while the human brain can distinguish between millions of colors, it has difficulty remembering specific shades.
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  • The exercise was designed to find the perceived boundaries between colors, the researchers said
  • scientists showed different people the same colors, but this time they asked them to find the "best example" of a particular color.
  • researchers showed participants colored squares, and asked them to select the best match on the color wheel. In a fourth experiment, another group of participants completed the same task, but there was a delay of 90 milliseconds between when each color square was displayed and when they were asked to select the best match on the color wheel.
  • This tendency to lump colors together could explain why it's so hard to match the color of house paint based on memory alone, the researchers said
  • categories are indeed important in how people identify and remember colors.
  • participants who were asked to name the colors reliably saw five hues: blue, yellow, pink, purple and green
  • "Where that fuzzy naming happened, those are the boundaries"
Javier E

There's No Such Thing As 'Sound Science' | FiveThirtyEight - 1 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...d-science-demand-sound-science

science method research trade-off values fact objectivity

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • cience is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.
  • The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science.
  • Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.
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  • they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.
  • What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.
  • “Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”
  • alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.
  • The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.
  • Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”
  • While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.
  • “Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since
  • Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,
  • In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?
  • But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.
  • Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research
  • which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”
  • these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.
  • in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.
  • Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.
  • It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’
  • ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.
  • objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”
  • The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.
  • Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it
  • While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”
  • These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.
  • For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations
  • the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?
  • But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.
jmfinizio

Transparent screens are the cool new tech trend - CNN - 0 views

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

tech cnn tv

shared by jmfinizio on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • you can also see right through them.
  • LG (LPL) unveiled a transparent TV with a screen you can see through when on or off.
  • While 8k TVs may be the next true big bump in screen resolution, many TV manufacturers use CES as a testing ground to tease new innovations.
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  • In August, Xiaomi started selling a 55-inch transparent TV with a mighty high $7,200 price tag.
  • Although transparent TVs seem like a cool-but-unnecessary technology, industry experts say they are something we could see more in public spaces soon.
  • "The major use case is going to be commercial for now,"
  • It's not unusual for companies to release technologies without a clear market for them
  • . Doing so is a way to gauge people's initial response and interest
  • LG's move to hide a transparent TV in a bed for its promotional video shows how the technology could find a home beyond public places
  • it can be placed like a space divider or against a large glass window, which will only look like glass when it is not in us
katherineharron

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

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

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • 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.
charlottedonoho

Daylight Savings Time May Affect Your Sleeping Cycle More Than You Think « CB... - 0 views

detroit.cbslocal.com/...g-schedule-more-than-you-think

shared by charlottedonoho on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • In a nation that’s already sleep deprived, an hour of lost sleep can take its toll.
  • “There are more chances of errors the next day, more chances of drowsy driving,” Walia said. “It has been shown that more accidents occur the next day when the daylight changing time occurs so it can definitely have a significant impact on functioning as well.
katedriscoll

When is science credible? - OpenAIRE Blog - 0 views

www.openaire.eu/...when-is-science-credible

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The overarching goal of science is to deepen our understanding about the world we live in, and then to use this understanding, for example, to address social or medical problems. However, in order to pursue those goals effectively and efficiently, the scientific findings we base our actions on have to be credible. But how can we assess the credibility of research? Is a going through peer review enough, or being published? What if the study made it into in a “high-ranking” journal? Is that enough to deem findings credible?
  • Curate Science is committed to rewarding positive scientific behaviors, but does not punish questionable research practices or lower levels of transparency. Researchers are encouraged to adopt open and transparent practices, but to do so  at their own pace. LeBel explains, “we make it easy to get the most credit possible for conducting and reporting one's research only a little bit more transparently. That is, as transparent as you currently have time for and/or are comfortable with. For example, if you're uncomfortable publicly posting your data for an article, you could still earn credit by publicly posting your code and linking to it on Curate Science” (Only 1 transparency component is required for being added to the database).
sissij

Home Inspectors on Their Weirdest Discoveries - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...heir-weirdest-discoveries.html

new york times social media knowledge

shared by sissij on 25 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • When a home is sold, its many secrets can come out of the closet. Brokers, potential buyers and home inspectors step inside properties that may have been completely private for years.
  • Sometimes, owners hide flaws in the hopes a buyer will miss an expensive problem. Other times, homeowners are caught completely unaware that, say, a family of raccoons has taken up residence in the chimney.
  • The buyer, who was supposed to put down a large deposit that afternoon, was livid. The seller’s broker tried to assure her that the problem could be easily fixed.
  • sissij on 25 Mar 17
     
    I found this article very interesting as it talks about the job of home inspectors. Home inspectors are the middle man between seller and buyer to make sure that all the issues of the home and pricing of the rent is transparent and clear for both sides. It reminded me of the rating companies we talked about in economics. In the film "Inside Job", the rating company is supposed to give good guidance and create transparency between sellers and buyers. However, some rating companies failed to give honest advice to clients and this lack of information is one of the reason that causes the collapse of the economics. Every market need a responsible middleman to operate efficiently. --Sissi (3/24/2017)
Javier E

Polling's Secrecy Problem - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pollings-secrecy-problem.html

poll bias methods secrecy politics survey

shared by Javier E on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • In the polling world, no survey firm releases its microdata in a timely manner. When pollsters release it at all — usually months after publication, to an archive that requires a paid subscription for access — they seldom provide the detailed methodological explanations necessary to replicate the survey results.
  • Critics have raised charges of full-scale fabrication, like that alleged in the LaCour study, about a handful of pollsters in recent years, and such a wholly fraudulent poll might well be able to evade detection.
  • But a bigger problem is that pollsters may be using questionable means to ensure that their results end up in a certain place. Any poll is required to make judgments about exactly how to weight the sample or decide who is likely to vote. But such choices can swing the results by several percentage points, and these decisions can be made with the results in mind.
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  • In particular, there is reason to think that pollsters engage in a behavior known as herding, in which they announce results that are similar to those of other recent polls
  • There is strong evidence that some firms have engaged in herding.
  • The firm has since switched to more conventional weighting techniques, bringing the wild swings in the racial composition of the electorate to an end. Its findings now resemble those of other pollsters: offering no obvious signs of herding, but also not providing the data that would rule it out.
  • the association recently began a transparency initiative intended to address some of the concerns.But few polling organizations have signed up so far, and the transparency initiative’s disclosure standards generally fall short of what is needed to allow others researchers to identify or deter dubious practices.
  • It’s hard to say what’s more telling: that the transparency standards wouldn’t be enough to preclude bad practices, or that so few pollsters seem willing to adhere to even those requirements.
sissij

The Future of Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-future-of-privacy.html

new york times privacy bias psychology

shared by sissij on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Turning Point: Apple resists the F.B.I. in unlocking an iPhone in the San Bernardino terrorism case.
  • Privacy confuses me, beyond my simplest understanding, which is that individuals prefer, to different degrees, that information about them not be freely available to others.
  • What does it mean, in an ostensible democracy, for the state to keep secrets from its citizens? The idea of the secret state seems antithetical to democracy, since its citizens, the voters, can’t know what their government is doing.
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  • If you have nothing to hide and you trust your government, what can you possibly have to fear? Except that one can just as readily ask: If you have nothing to hide, what do you really have, aside from the panoptic attention of a state, which itself keeps secrets?
  • Is individual privacy and state privacy the same thing?
  • In the short term, the span of a lifetime, many of us would argue for privacy, and therefore against transparency.
  • But history, the long term, is transparency; it is the absence of secrets.
  • The past, our own past, which our descendants will see us as having emerged from, will not be the past from which we now see ourselves emerging, but a reinterpretation of it, based on subsequently available information, greater transparency and fewer secrets.
  • our species is the poorer for every secret faithfully kept. Any permanently unbreakable encryption seems counter to that.
  • So perhaps that desire is as much a part of us, as a species, as our need to build these memory palaces.
  • sissij on 07 Dec 16
     
    I found this article very interesting because it talked about the dilemma in the definition of privacy. I found that our idea of privacy is very complicated. As everybody wants to keep their secret, they are curious of others' secret at the same time. This article also relate privacy with the democratic society. I think it shows one of the weakness of the democratic society: it trying to fulfill the desire of everybody and sometimes those desires contradicts each other. I think privacy is just like freedom, something very theoretical and does not exist in the reality. --Sissi (12/7/2016)
Emily Horwitz

Will Science Someday Rule Out the Possibility of God? | Physics vs. God | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/ence-religion-god-physics.html

science belief religion physics

shared by Emily Horwitz on 19 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious — the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe — can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science. 
  • good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.
  • Psychology research suggests that belief in the supernatural acts as societal glue and motivates people to follow the rules; further, belief in the afterlife helps people grieve and staves off fears of death.
Javier E

In Defense of Anonymous Political Giving - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nonymous-political-giving.html

spending politics economics anonymity giving

shared by Javier E on 22 May 15 - No Cached
  • In partisan terms, the growth of secrecy in campaign finance has been driven by the political right, as shown in the graphic at Figure 2. Of the $310.8 million in total political spending by nondisclosing groups in 2011-12, $265.2 million, or 85.5 percent, was spent by conservative, pro-Republican organizations (red in the pie chart), and $10.9 million, or 11.2 percent, was spent by liberal, pro-Democratic organizations (blue in the chart).
  • do you have a principled answer to the argument that efforts to influence the political and policy-making process should be as transparent and open as possible because voters deserve to know who is trying to persuade them to take stands on issues of major public importance? More simply: Is transparency an essential ingredient of democracy? What overrides transparency?
  • “The rationale behind donor anonymity, which is a form of First Amendment speech, is to protect against the threat of retaliation when someone or some group takes a stand, espouses their point of view or articulates a position on issues that may (or may not) be popular with the general public or the political party in majority power. There are many precedents to this: the Federalist Papers were published under pseudonyms and financed anonymously, out of fear of retribution.”
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  • Scalia declared that “a person who is required to put his name to a document is much less likely to lie than one who can lie anonymously.”Scalia concluded: “I can imagine no reason why an anonymous leaflet is any more honorable, as a general matter, than an anonymous phone call or an anonymous letter. It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of the anonymity.”
katedriscoll

Suhas Dara Blogs: "All knowledge depends on the recognition of patterns and anomalies."... - 0 views

suhas-dara.blogspot.com/...depends-on-recognition-of.html

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In the study of TOK in DP-1 (11th grade), I have learnt about the ways of knowing, and two of the areas of knowledge - natural sciences and human sciences. Of all the discussions and explorations done into these areas of knowledge, there can be patterns observed in the methods of experimentation, data collection, data analysis and also assumptions being made when generalizing situations. In some of the above points, human sciences is similar to natural sciences, while in the others, the ideologies and working is different.
  • Natural sciences and human sciences for instance both use experiments as a form of data collection but the methods and outputs are different. Natural scientists have lesser moral values to take care of compared to human scientists such as psychologists. Psychologists are directly dealing with humans and hence need to take more ethical implications into consideration. Secondly, human scientists conduct experiments on a large set of people - not limited to one race or gender unless it is required. Natural scientists do not require survey type data. Here, a single scientist conducts the experiments. Both the types of experiments are empirical based though, direct experimentation is more in natural sciences while human sciences are more observation based. But experiments in human sciences have more unpredictable results due to what is known as the Hawthorne effect. This effect explains that when a particular group comes to know that they are under observation for a experiment or an analysis, they tend to be more productive. These cause errors in results of human science experiments especially the ones of psychology.
Javier E

The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers » Pressthink - 2 views

pressthink.org/...-nowhere-questions-and-answers

journalism objectivity bias US impartiality

shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.
  • Who gets credit for the phrase, “view from nowhere?” # A. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title.
  • Q. What does it say? # A. It says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.” #
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  • But there are limits to this motion. We can’t transcend all our starting points. No matter how far it pulls back the camera is still occupying a position. We can’t actually take the “view from nowhere,” but this doesn’t mean that objectivity is a lie or an illusion. Our ability to step back and the fact that there are limits to it– both are real. And realism demands that we acknowledge both.
  • Q. So is objectivity a myth… or not? # A. One of the many interesting things Nagel says in that book is that “objectivity is both underrated and overrated, sometimes by the same persons.” It’s underrated by those who scoff at it as a myth. It is overrated by people who think it can replace the view from somewhere or transcend the human subject. It can’t.
  • When MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating without company permission to candidates he supports– that’s dumb. When NPR forbids its “news analysts” from expressing a view on matters they are empowered to analyze– that’s dumb. When reporters have to “launder” their views by putting them in the mouths of think tank experts: dumb. When editors at the Washington Post decline even to investigate whether the size of rallies on the Mall can be reliably estimated because they want to avoid charges of “leaning one way or the other,” as one of them recently put it, that is dumb. When CNN thinks that, because it’s not MSNBC and it’s not Fox, it’s the only the “real news network” on cable, CNN is being dumb about itself.
  • Let some in the press continue on with the mask of impartiality, which has advantages for cultivating sources and soothing advertisers. Let others experiment with transparency as the basis for trust. When you click on their by-line it takes you to a disclosure page where there is a bio, a kind of mission statement, and a creative attempt to say: here’s where I’m coming from (one example) along with campaign contributions, any affiliations or memberships, and–I’m just speculating now–a list of heroes and villains, or major influences, along with an archive of the work, plus anything else that might assist the user in placing this person on the user’s mattering map.
  • if objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense.
  • If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us… yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad
  • I think we are in the midst of shift in the system by which trust is sustained in professional journalism. David Weinberger tried to capture it with his phrase: transparency is the new objectivity. My version of that: it’s easier to trust in “here’s where I’m coming from” than the View from Nowhere. These are two different ways of bidding for the confidence of the users.
  • In the newer way, the logic is different. “Look, I’m not going to pretend that I have no view. Instead, I am going to level with you about where I’m coming from on this. So factor that in when you evaluate my report. Because I’ve done the work and this is what I’ve concluded…”
  • it has unearned authority in the American press. If in doing the serious work of journalism–digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat–you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The View from Nowhere doesn’t know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.
  • Who gets credit for the phrase, “view from nowhere?” # A. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title.
  • It says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.”
peterconnelly

Facebook-parent Meta to share more details with researchers about political ad targetin... - 0 views

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

cnn meta

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • (CNN Business)Facebook-parent Meta on Monday said it would soon offer more transparency and information to researchers about how political and social ads are targeted to users on the platform, months before the US midterm elections.
  • The effort, dubbed the Facebook Open Research and Transparency project, was created to help qualified academic researchers study social media's impact on society with measures included to protect users' privacy, according to the company.
  • The data provided to researchers will include information such as the interest categories, which can include everything from "environmentalism" to "frequent travelers," chosen to help target each individual ad.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • we hope to help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies
karenmcgregor

Is ComputerNetworkAssignmentHelp.com a Legitimate Source for Network Security Assignmen... - 0 views

In the dynamic landscape of academic support services, finding a trustworthy platform for network security assignment writing help is crucial. Today, we'll delve into the legitimacy of https://www....

#networksecurityassignmentwritinghelp #networksecurity #onlineassignmenthelp education

started by karenmcgregor on 08 Jan 24 no follow-up yet
Javier E

Commentary: The problem with Wikipedia - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-dc76641cb8d4_singlePage.html

wikipedia policies

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The site does not allow corporations, individuals or organizations to defend themselves transparently or submit information on their own behalf. This is a serious flaw and a real challenge for a site that has become a fundamental source for so many around the world. This policy results in many articles on the site that are inaccurate or even blatantly false.
  • I decided to provide a resource to the Wikipedia editors and help them get the story straight. I signed up as a Wikipedia editor under the name QorvisEditor. Under this handle, my goal was not to edit client or Qorvis pages, but to become a direct source from which established Wikipedia editors could ask questions about our company and work. Within minutes of signing up, I was blocked by established editors for personally representing the interests of the firm — not for editing anything incorrectly, mind you. This action prevented me from having any direct interaction with any editor in the future, and thus prevented me from providing any first-hand information to any editor. This action also prevents any other Wikipedia editor from having a direct dialogue with the firm.
  • This inane policy would violate the basic tenets of even the most partisan of small-town newspapers or the most crooked court rooms. This dangerous policy violates the fundamental rules of reporting, of debate and of discussion
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Wikipedia thus has a responsibility to find an avenue for living subjects to contribute directly to articles. It is a disservice to not allow direct, transparent contributions by primary sources — especially since these sources often hide their identities in an effort to have their arguments heard.
Javier E

Web Privacy, and How Consumers Let Down Their Guard - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mers-let-down-their-guard.html

privacy consumers web psychology research identity personal data technology

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • We are hurried and distracted and don’t pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse.
  • his research argues that when it comes to privacy, policy makers should carefully consider how people actually behave. We don’t always act in our own best interest, his research suggests. We can be easily manipulated by how we are asked for information. Even something as simple as a playfully designed site can nudge us to reveal more of ourselves than a serious-looking one.
  • “His work has gone a long way in trying to help us figure out how irrational we are in privacy related decisions,” says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor of law who studies digital privacy at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “We have too much confidence in our ability to make decisions.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Solutions to our leaky privacy system tend to focus on transparency and control — that our best hope is knowing what our data is being used for and choosing whether to participate. But a challenge to that conventional wisdom emerges in his research. Giving users control may be an essential step, but it may also be a bit of an illusion.
  • personal data is what fuels the barons of the Internet age. Mr. Acquisti investigates the trade-offs that users make when they give up that data, and who gains and loses in those transactions. Often there are immediate rewards (cheap sandals) and sometimes intangible risks downstream (identity theft). “
  • “The technologist in me loves the amazing things the Internet is allowing us to do,” he said. “The individual who cares about freedom is concerned about the technology being hijacked, from a technology of freedom into a technology of surveillance.”
  • EARLY in his sojourn in this country, Mr. Acquisti asked himself a question that would become the guiding force of his career: Do Americans value their privacy?
  • If we have something — in this case, ownership of our purchase data — we are more likely to value it. If we don’t have it at the outset, we aren’t likely to pay extra to acquire it. Context matters.
  • “What worries me,” he said, “is that transparency and control are empty words that are used to push responsibility to the user for problems that are being created by others.”
  • We are constantly asked to make decisions about personal data amid a host of distractions, like an e-mail, a Twitter notification or a text message. If Mr. Acquisti is correct, those distractions may hinder our sense of self-protection when it comes to privacy.
  • His latest weapon against distraction is an iPad application, which lets him create a to-do list every morning and set timers for each task: 30 minutes for e-mail, 60 minutes to grade student papers, and so on.
  • it is not surprising that he is cautious in revealing himself online. He says he doesn’t feel compelled to post a picture of his meals on Instagram. He uses different browsers for different activities. He sometimes uses tools that show which ad networks are tracking him. But he knows he cannot hide entirely, which is why some people, he says, follow a policy of “rational ignorance.”
  • The online advertising industry insists that the data is scrambled to make it impossible to identify individuals.
  • Mr. Acquisti offers a sobering counterpoint. In 2011, he took snapshots with a webcam of nearly 100 students on campus. Within minutes, he had identified about one-third of them using facial recognition software. In addition, for about a fourth of the subjects whom he could identify, he found out enough about them on Facebook to guess at least a portion of their Social Security numbers.
  • The point of the experiment was to show how easy it is to identify people from the rich trail of data they scatter around the Web, including seemingly harmless pictures. Facebook can be especially valuable for identity thieves, particularly when a user’s birth date is visible to the public.
  • Does that mean Facebook users should lie about their birthdays (and break Facebook’s terms of service)? Mr. Acquisti demurred. He would say only that there are “complex trade-offs” to be made. “I reveal my date of birth and hometown on my Facebook profile and an identity thief can reconstruct my Social Security number and steal my identity,” he said, “or someone can send me ‘happy birthday’ messages on the day of my birthday, which makes me feel very good.”
kortanekev

Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue | Color Perception - 0 views

www.livescience.com/color-red-blue-scientists.html

science research psychology knowledge brain science

shared by kortanekev on 21 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Anyone with normal color vision agrees that blood is roughly the same color as strawberries, cardinals and the planet Mars. That is, they're all red. But could it be that what you call "red" is someone else's "blue"?
  • kortanekev on 21 Sep 16
     
    An example of personal knowledge vs. shared knowledge-- e.g. is my green someone else's yellow? (Evie Kortanek 9/21/16)
sissij

Trash dove: how a purple bird took over Facebook | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...purple-bird-took-over-facebook

the guardian social media language

shared by sissij on 16 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • As noted by meme database Know Your Meme, Trash Dove exploded in popularity after it was featured alongside a dancing cat on a Thai Facebook page with millions of followers
  • Pigeons are such strange birds, they have very beautiful mottled, shimmery feathers, but they waddle around and bob their heads and beg for crumbs. They’re like beautiful doves, except they eat trash.
  • The fan art and nice comments have been the highlight for me, but I’m amazed at how mean people can be to someone they’ve never met, because of something silly online.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It’s better to spend time building a dedicated viewer base that will support you for you.
  • sissij on 16 Feb 17
     
    The popularity of a meme can sometimes reflect on the culture online and how people feel about the current events. I think the popularity of the Trash Dove might be suggesting that people feel negative about this world because the meaning behind the Trash Dove is that "They're like beautiful doves, except they eat trash". I feel like this meaning is ironic. Internet is such transparent space that every big hit somehow reflect people's value and opinion. --Sissi (2/16/2017)
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