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caelengrubb

Pandemic caused 'staggering' economic, human impact in developing counties, research sa... - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210205150150.htm

shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year led to a devastating loss of jobs and income across the global south, threatening hundreds of millions of people with hunger and lost savings and raising an array of risks for children,
  • , in the journal Science Advances, found "staggering" income losses after the pandemic emerged last year, with a median 70% of households across nine countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America reporting financial losses.
  • By April last year, roughly 50% or more of those surveyed in several countries were forced to eat smaller meals or skip meals altogether, a number that reached 87% for rural households in the West African country of Sierra Leone.
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  • In the early months of the pandemic, the economic downturn in low- and middle-income countries was almost certainly worse than any other recent global economic crisis that we know of, whether the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the Great Recession that started in 2008, or the more recent Ebola crisis,
  • The pandemic has produced some hopeful innovations, including a partnership between the government of Togo in West Africa and UC Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) on a system to provide relief payments via digital networks.
  • The new study -- the first of its kind globally -- reports that after two decades of growth in many low- and middle-income countries, the economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic threatens profound long-term impact: Reduced childhood nutrition could have health consequences later in life.
  • The study was launched in spring 2020, as China, Europe and the U.S. led global efforts to check spread of the virus through ambitious lockdowns of business, schools and transit. Three independent research teams, including CEGA, joined to conduct surveys in the countries where they already worked.
  • "COVID-19 and its economic shock present a stark threat to residents of low- and middle-income countries -- where most of the world's population resides -- which lack the social safety nets that exist in rich countries,
  • Reports early in the pandemic suggested that developing countries might be less vulnerable because their populations are so much younger than those in Europe and North America.
  • In Colombia, 87% of respondents nationwide reported lost income in the early phase of the pandemic. Such losses were reported by more than 80% of people nationwide in Rwanda and Ghana.
  • In the Philippines, 77% of respondents nationwide said they faced difficulty purchasing food because stores were closed, transport was shut down or food supplies were inadequate. Similar reports came from 68% of Colombians and 64% of respondents in Sierra Leone; rates were similar for some communities within other countries.
  • Food insecurity rose sharply.
  • : In Bangladesh, 69% of landless agricultural households reported that they were forced to eat less, along with 48% of households in rural Kenya
  • Between April and early July 2020, they connected with 30,000 households, including over 100,000 people, in nine countries with a combined population of 500 million: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Sierra Leone in Africa; Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines in Asia; and Colombia in South America. The surveys were conducted by telephone.
  • The evidence we've collected shows dire economic consequences ... which, if left unchecked, could thrust millions of vulnerable households into poverty."
  • In North America and Europe, nations may be struggling with vaccination plans, but vaccines have barely arrived in most low-income countries, he said
  • If we can spread the wealth in terms of pandemic relief assistance and vaccine distribution, we're all going to get out of this hole faster."
caelengrubb

The Linguistic Colonialism of English - Brown Political Review - 0 views

brownpoliticalreview.org/...linguistic-colonialism-english

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, the West has spread its preferred systems of capitalism, democracy, and moral values.
  • As a result of this, contemporary English is detached from any specific cultural identity; it is a tool which links different societies in an increasingly smaller world.
  • The first population to speak English was the British. About five hundred years ago, between five and seven million people spoke the language; today, about 1.8 billion people do.
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  • Processes of violent imperialism have paved the way for the cultural pandemic originating in the West
  • Most former British colonies now use English as their official language (e.g. Ghana and South Africa). Ever since the US colonized Puerto Rico after winning the Spanish-American war (note the absence of Puerto Rico, or Cuba, in the name of the war), the official languages on the island became Spanish and, of course, English.
  • Today, English is the third most spoken language in the world and tops the list of second languages. English is a necessity for studying at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, a ticket to working almost anywhere in the world, and an instrument enabling a livelihood in the wealthiest nations.
  • This phenomenon feeds into the growth of social inequality linked to globalization. The majority of the time, English learned as a second language in public schools does not create a proficiency level adequate for working, studying, or relying on the language in daily life.
  • People dedicate their time and resources to learning and perfecting their understanding and knowledge of English, rather than preserving their own customs and culture.
  • The process of globalization leads people to visualize an array of opportunities and an exponentially better future linked to the English language. A language is not only an instrument of communication, however. It is also the tool of a society, made up of its culture, traditions, and sets of religious and ideological beliefs
  • English has also become the main language used in science. Doctors around the world use English to communicate their findings. Most research papers are written in English as a way to facilitate international scientific cooperation.
  • Although this may seem like a necessity to promote scientific discovery, the resulting gap is problematic. The researchers who have not had the chance to learn English are at a disadvantage.
  • These processes suggest a disconcerting implication – globalization is simply a more “socially acceptable” means of imperialism, without violence
  • Globalization and the expansion of the English language have resulted in oppression and inequality.
  • If the preservation of other cultures is given the same importance and value as spreading English is currently receiving, the language can be an addition, not a replacement, to a naturally evolving culture’s array of nuances.
johnsonel7

How News Coverage of Coronavirus Compares to Ebola | Time - 0 views

time.com/...oronavirus-ebola-news-coverage

news bias west China coronavirus

shared by johnsonel7 on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A novel coronavirus that originated in China and has since spread to more than 20 other countries has dominated headlines across the globe since it was first announced in December 2019, as scientists and media outlets (including this one) scramble to understand the virus’ origins, trajectory and impact. The wall-to-wall coverage of the virus, known has 2019-nCoV, has been unusually heavy, even in comparison to other recent health threats, such as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that began in August 2018 and continues to this day.
  • Throughout January 2020, the first full month of the 2019-nCoV outbreak, more than 41,000 English-language print news articles mentioned the word “coronavirus,” and almost 19,000 included it in their headlines, LexisNexis data show. By contrast, only about 1,800 English-language print news articles published in August 2018, the first month of the DRC outbreak, mentioned “Ebola,” and only about 700 headlines mentioned the disease.
  • The two viruses have also produced two very different outbreaks. Ebola, which causes a hemorrhagic fever that’s deadly in about half of cases, is incredibly potent but has been mostly contained to the DRC, where it has killed 2,246 of the roughly 3,500 people who have contracted it, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. While the WHO declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” last year, Ebola has not spread far beyond the DRC. (The earlier West African outbreak was more widespread: It killed more than 11,000 people and spread to multiple continents.)
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  • Meanwhile, 2019-nCoV, which causes symptoms similar to the flu, has killed about 2% of the 31,500 people it has infected so far, but has spread to more than 20 countries—including, crucially (at least in terms of understanding media coverage), the U.S. Any time an issue affects the U.S., the Western press kicks into high gear, Miller says.
  • After the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, the U.S. press was criticized for overstating the possible threat to Americans.
tongoscar

Why Shen Yun's Music Resonates With Our Souls - 0 views

www.theepochtimes.com/es-with-our-souls_3195460.html

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Music has its beginning in sacred spaces. Whether in the East with the music of sages or in the West with our Gregorian chants, music has for centuries been used to convey a reverence for the heavens, express human emotion, and connect with the world around us.
  • With ancient China, the five tones of the pentatonic scale had direct relationships with the five elements in our physical world and the five major organs of our human bodies. Whether it be singing or playing tunes on a bamboo flute, music was meant to aid in the connection between heaven, earth, and humankind. 
  • While the task of combining two very different musical languages may be a Herculean one for arrangers, and playing the incredibly precise music a challenge for the musicians, the conductor, in a way, gets to reap the rewards with a powerful, versatile ensemble at her fingertips.
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  • Sometimes the story takes a turn and characters find themselves in a celestial palace, and the music has to be able to evoke a heavenly feeling, a sound so convincing you almost glimpse heaven. Sometimes the story calls for warriors on a battlefield, and the orchestra provides the strength and power and intensity of the battle. Sometimes the dance is an ethnic or folk dance, and the music takes on the sound of horses roaming the Mongolian grasslands, for example. 
  • “In ancient Chinese times, people also believed the ideas behind the music were more important than what’s on the surface … and that’s why I love Shen Yun music so much. It’s very inspiring and powerful—invigorating at the same time. It can be humorous, it can really cheer people up.”“It all ties into this mission to celebrate the best of humanity, both East and West, the values and the heroes from the past, or even today.”
Javier E

He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
  • Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
  • Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
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  • “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
  • Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
  • What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines.
  • In 2017, he published a paper in the journal Classical Antiquity that compared evidence from antiquity and the Black Atlantic to draw a more coherent picture of the religious life of the Roman enslaved. “It will not do merely to adopt a pose of ‘righteous indignation’ at the distortions and gaps in the archive,” he wrote. “There are tools available for the effective recovery of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.”
  • Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me.
  • He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system o
  • In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”
  • In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”
  • The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.”
  • Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today
  • To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.
  • . “What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.
  • ultimately, he decided that leaving enslaved characters out of the role play was an act of care. “I’m not yet ready to turn to a student and say, ‘You are going to be a slave.’”
  • Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,”
  • “I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.”
  • In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike.
  • Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race
  • Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”
  • Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period, as European universities emancipated themselves from the control of the church, the study of Greece and Rome gave the Continent its new, secular origin story. Greek and Latin writings emerged as a competitor to the Bible’s moral authority, which lent them a liberatory power
  • Historians stress that such ideas cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” Winkelmann wrote.
  • While Renaissance scholars were fascinated by the multiplicity of cultures in the ancient world, Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below.
  • Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.
  • Of the 2.5 million people living in America in 1776, perhaps only 3,000 had gone to college, but that number included many of the founders
  • They saw classical civilization as uniquely educative — a “lamp of experience,” in the words of Patrick Henry, that could light the path to a more perfect union. However true it was, subsequent generations would come to believe, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” that “without the classical example … none of the men of the Revolution on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”
  • Comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire became popular as the country emerged as a global power. Even after Latin and Greek were struck from college-entrance exams, the proliferation of courses on “great books” and Western civilization, in which classical texts were read in translation, helped create a coherent national story after the shocks of industrialization and global warfare.
  • even as the classics were pulled apart, laughed at and transformed, they continued to form the raw material with which many artists shaped their visions of modernity.
  • Over the centuries, thinkers as disparate as John Adams and Simone Weil have likened classical antiquity to a mirror. Generations of intellectuals, among them feminist, queer and Black scholars, have seen something of themselves in classical texts, flashes of recognition that held a kind of liberatory promise
  • The language that is used to describe the presence of classical antiquity in the world today — the classical tradition, legacy or heritage — contains within it the idea of a special, quasi-genetic relationship. In his lecture “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” Kwame Anthony Appiah (this magazine’s Ethicist columnist) mockingly describes the belief in such a kinship as the belief in a “golden nugget” of insight — a precious birthright and shimmering sign of greatness — that white Americans and Europeans imagine has been passed down to them from the ancients.
  • To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves
  • Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression.
  • Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.
  • if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
  • One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.
  • many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture.
  • Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”
  • There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.”
  • “In some moods, I feel that this is just a moment of despair, and people are trying to find significance even if it only comes from self-accusation,” he told me. “I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country. How distinctly wicked is classics? I don’t know that it is.”
  • “One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”
  • Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty.
  • “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”
  • Last June, as racial-justice protests unfolded across the nation, Padilla turned his attention to arenas beyond classics. He and his co-authors — the astrophysicist Jenny Greene, the literary theorist Andrew Cole and the poet Tracy K. Smith — began writing their open letter to Princeton with 48 proposals for reform. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” the letter began. “Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of microaggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.”
  • Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”
  • “There is a certain kind of classicist who will look on what transpired and say, ‘Oh, that’s not us,’” Padilla said when we spoke recently. “What is of interest to me is why is it so imperative for classicists of a certain stripe to make this discursive move? ‘This is not us.’
  • Joel Christensen, the Brandeis professor, now feels that it is his “moral and ethical and intellectual responsibility” to teach classics in a way that exposes its racist history. “Otherwise we’re just participating in propaganda,”
  • Christensen, who is 42, was in graduate school before he had his “crisis of faith,” and he understands the fear that many classicists may experience at being asked to rewrite the narrative of their life’s work. But, he warned, “that future is coming, with or without Dan-el.”
  • On Jan. 6, Padilla turned on the television minutes after the windows of the Capitol were broken. In the crowd, he saw a man in a Greek helmet with TRUMP 2020 painted in white. He saw a man in a T-shirt bearing a golden eagle on a fasces — symbols of Roman law and governance — below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,
peterconnelly

How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...blicans-blackrock-climate.html

companies climate action new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels.
  • Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.
  • Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
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  • In doing so, Mr. Moore and others have pushed climate change from the scientific realm into the political battles already raging over topics like voting rights, abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
  • “There is a coordinated effort to chill corporate engagement on these issues,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares
  • They have worked alongside a nonprofit organization that has run television ads, dispatched roaming billboard trucks and rented out a Times Square billboard criticizing BlackRock for championing what they call woke causes, including environmentalism.
  • That activism has often put companies at odds with the Republican Party, traditionally the ally of big business.
  • as pressure has grown from consumers and liberal groups to take action, corporations have warmed to the notion of using capital and markets to create a cleaner economy
  • When President Trump declared in 2017 that he would pull the United States from the Paris climate accord, more than 2,000 businesses and investors — including Apple, Amazon and Mars — signed a pledge to continue to work toward climate goals.
  • “Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net-zero world,” Mr. Fink wrote. “The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?”
  • And in January, Mr. Moore pulled about $20 million out of a fund managed by BlackRock because the firm has encouraged other companies to reduce emissions. BlackRock still manages several billion for West Virginia’s state retirement system. “We’re divesting from BlackRock because they’re divesting from us,” Mr. Moore said in an interview.
  • “These big banks are virtue signaling because they are woke,”
  • Mr. Fink of BlackRock has emerged as a main target of conservatives.
  • “We are perhaps the world’s largest investor in fossil fuel companies, and, as a long-term investor in these companies, we want to see these companies succeed and prosper,” BlackRock’s head of external affairs, Dalia Blass, wrote in a letter to Texas regulators in January.
  • “BlackRock is trying to have it all ways, acting like it is trying to please everyone.”
  • “ESG is a scam,” he said on Twitter on this month. “It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.” Shortly after that he shared a meme that declared an ESG score “determines how compliant your business is with the leftist agenda.”
  • “Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about,” adding, “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?”
  • That view is at odds with the findings of the world’s leading climate scientists. A major United Nations report warned last month that the world could reach a threshold by the end of this decade beyond which the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, droughts and wildfires — will grow considerably. In 2021, there were 20 weather or climate-related disasters in the United States that each cost more than $1 billion in losses, according to the federal government.
  • “Our ambition is to be the leading bank supporting the global economy in the transition to net zero,” he said.
Javier E

Football and racist language: Reclaiming the Y-word | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...football-and-racist-language

racism language meaning

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Game theory Sports Previous Next Latest Game theory Latest from all our blogs Football and racist language Reclaiming the Y-word Nov 9th 2012, 16:28 by B.R. ENGLISH football grounds in the 1980s were not pleasant places. Fans were squeezed into caged terraces which were often left open to the elements. Hooliganism was rife and the country was in a state of moral panic as lurid images of fighting youths became a fixture on news bulletins. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, convened a "war cabinet". Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea football club, suggested electrifying the fences in the stadiums to keep the warring factions apart. By the end of the decade English football reached its nadir. In 1985, 39 Italian football fans had been killed in Heysel, Belgium after a riot by Liverpool supporters. In 1989, Liverpool supporters themselves were the victims as 96 lost their lives at Hillsborough as a result of incompetent policing.Some time toward the beginning of that decade, aged around ten, your correspondent was taken to his first away game by his father, a fanatical supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The game was a derby with Chelsea, a bitter London rival. Chelsea's fans were among the game’s most notorious. Many were skinheads; foot soldiers of extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. Tottenham, because of the area in North London in which it is situated, had a large and visible Jewish following. It did not make for a pleasant combination. At one point during the first half the hostile Chelsea crowd fell suddenly silent. Quietly at first came a hissing sound, like someone letting out gas from a canister. Before long the hissing reached crescendo. It was a terrifying sound for a small boy. But I was too young to grasp the significance. Only later was I filled in: the Chelsea fans were mimicking the sound of cyanide being released at a Nazi concentration camp. As the years wore on, the abuse towards Spurs fans became less subtle. When clubs with a large right-wing following came to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium, such as Chelsea, West Ham, Leeds and Manchester United, the anti-semitism was relentless. One common song ran:Spurs are on their way to BelsenHitler's going to gas ‘em againThe Yids from TottenhamThe Yids from White Hart Lane The Y-word. It was the most relentless chant of all. Thousand of opposition fans, faces snarled, would come together in spiteful mantra: “Yiddo! Yiddo!” It was directed towards Tottenham fans and players alike. It would go on for minutes at a time, many times in a game. After a while it was so commonplace that one became immune to it. At some point during that time, something odd began to happen. Tottenham fans began to appropriate the Y-word. Gradually they began to refer to themselves as Yids. The club’s supporters started to describe themselves as the “Yid Army”. Soon the word was being chanted solely by Tottenham fans referring to themselves in a spirit of celebration and of togetherness. It had been reclaimed in much the same way that the word “nigger” was taken back by black hip-hop artists and “queer” was by gays.As a result, the word died as an insult, at least within football grounds.
Emily Horwitz

Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning : Shots - Health ... - 1 views

www.npr.org/...stern-cultures-tackle-learning

knowledge learning asia america struggle intelligence

shared by Emily Horwitz on 12 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth grade math class.
  • and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do it and told him to go and put it on the board.'"
  • the kid didn't break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. "And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, 'How does that look, class?' And they all looked up and said, 'He did it!' And they broke into applause." The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.
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  • very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you're just not very smart," Stigler says. "It's a sign of low ability — people who are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it, that's our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity."
  • For the most part in American culture, intellectual struggle in schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern cultures it is not only tolerated, it is often used to measure emotional strength.
  • to understand why these two cultures view struggle so differently, it's good to step back and examine how they think about where academic excellence comes from.
  • American mother is communicating to her son that the cause of his success in school is his intelligence. He's smart — which, Li says, is a common American view.
  • "The idea of intelligence in believed in the West as a cause," Li explains. "She is telling him that there is something in him, in his mind, that enables him to do what he does."
  • "So the focus is on the process of persisting through it despite the challenges, not giving up, and that's what leads to success," Li says.
  • Obviously if struggle indicates weakness — a lack of intelligence — it makes you feel bad, and so you're less likely to put up with it. But if struggle indicates strength — an ability to face down the challenges that inevitably occur when you are trying to learn something — you're more willing to accept it.
  • American students "worked on it less than 30 seconds on average and then they basically looked at us and said, 'We haven't had this,'" he says.
  • Japanese students worked for the entire hour on the impossible problem.
  • Westerns tend to worry that their kids won't be able to compete against Asian kids who excel in many areas but especially in math and science. Jin Li says that educators from Asian countries have their own set of worries.
  • children are not creative. Our children do not have individuality. They're just robots. You hear the educators from Asian countries express that concern, a
  • in the Japanese classrooms that he's studied, teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the students can actually experience struggling with something just outside their reach. Then, once the task is mastered, the teachers actively point out that the student was able to accomplish it through the students hard work and struggle.
  • Emily Horwitz on 12 Nov 12
     
    An interesting look into the differences between how Eastern and Western cultures see academic struggle
Javier E

Photo of Officer Giving Boots to Barefoot Man Warms Hearts All Over Web - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-man-warms-hearts-online.html

morality exemplar police poverty

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • On a cold November night in Times Square, Officer Lawrence DePrimo was working a counterterrorism post when he encountered an older, barefooted homeless man. The officer disappeared for a moment, then returned with a new pair of boots, and knelt to help the man put them on.
  • The officer, normally assigned to the Sixth Precinct in the West Village, readily recalled the encounter. “It was freezing out and you could see the blisters on the man’s feet,” he said in an interview. “I had two pairs of socks and I was still cold.” They started talking; he found out the man’s shoe size: 12.
  • As the man walked slowly down Seventh Avenue on his heels, Officer DePrimo went into a Skechers shoe store at about 9:30 p.m. “We were just kind of shocked,” said Jose Cano, 28, a manager working at the store that night. “Most of us are New Yorkers and we just kind of pass by that kind of thing. Especially in this neighborhood.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The photo was taken by Jennifer Foster, a civilian communications director for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona. She said the moment resonated for personal reasons: She remembered as a young girl seeing her father, a 32-year veteran of the Phoenix police force, buy food for a homeless man. “He squatted down, just like this officer,” she said.
Javier E

The Geography Of The Good Life « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...the-geography-of-the-good-life

role model good relations community pressure

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • If you already live in the heartland, the message is to stay. If you come from the heartland and have left, the message is to return. But what if you’re one of the tens of millions of people who can’t stay in or go home to the heartland because your home — your roots — are in the BosWash corridor of the Northeast or the urbanized areas of the West Coast? …
  • is this even possible in a place where paying my mortgage and other bills requires that my wife and I — like my equally striving neighbors — devote ourselves to high-stress work during nearly every waking hour of our days? If I were independently wealthy, perhaps the good life that Dreher describes would be a possibility in the Philadelphia suburbs. But alas…
  • There are trade-offs in all things, and no perfect solution, geographical or otherwise. Thing is, life is short, and choices have to be made. It’s not that people living in these workaholic suburbs are bad, not at all; it’s that the culture they (we) live in defines the Good in such a way that choosing to “do the right thing” ends up hollowing out your life, leaving you vulnerable in ways you may not see until tragedy strikes.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • [M]aybe the lesson is that the good life is not possible in the Philadelphia suburbs, or any place where in order to keep your head above water, your job has to own you and your wife, and it keeps you from building relationships.
  • The life Ruthie lived is a compelling alternative, the witness of which changed my heart. And like the Good Book says, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Javier E

Break All the Rules - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...edman-break-all-the-rules.html

israel palestine us policy

shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • On Israel-Palestine, the secretary of state should publicly offer President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority the following: the U.S. would recognize the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as the independent State of Palestine on the provisional basis of the June 4, 1967, lines, support its full U.N. membership and send an ambassador to Ramallah, on the condition that Palestinians accept the principle of “two states for two peoples” — an Arab state and a Jewish state in line with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 — and agree that permanent borders, security and land swaps would be negotiated directly with Israel. The status of the refugees would be negotiated between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
sissij

Does the Language I Speak Influence the Way I Think? | Linguistic Society of America - 1 views

www.linguisticsociety.org/...-i-speak-influence-way-i-think

psychology language

shared by sissij on 25 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • What we have learned is that the answer to this question is complicated. To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them?
  • There's a language called Guugu Yimithirr (spoken in North Queensland, Australia) that doesn't have words like left and right or front and back. Its speakers always describe locations and directions using the Guugu Yimithirr words for north, south, east, and west. So, they would never say that a boy is standing in front of a house; instead, they'd say he is standing (for example) east of the house. They would also, no doubt, think of the boy as standing east of the house, while a speaker of English would think of him as standing in front of the house.
  • Whorf believed that because of this difference, Hopi speakers and English speakers think about events differently, with Hopi speakers focusing more on the source of the information and English speakers focusing more on the time of the event.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But not always. You can easily conjure up mental images and sensations that would be hard to describe in words.
  • Not really, but if the new language is very different from your own, it may give you some insight into another culture and another way of life.
  • sissij on 25 Oct 16
     
    I found it very interesting that how we speak can have some influence on how we think. It may even have a slice of the logic and ideology of our culture. As my second language, English is very different from Chinese. We may have different description for the same event because we value things differently. --Sissi (10/24/2016)
mcginnisca

We Talked to One of the World Trade Center Bombers About ISIS and Mass Shootings | VICE... - 0 views

www.vice.com/...lamic-state-and-mass-shootings

world trade center US politics history ISIS terrorism language ambiguity

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Eyad Ismoil is one of the half-dozen men convicted for carrying out the World Trade Center bombings in 1993
  • sentenced to 240 years in prison for driving a rental van packed with a bomb into a garage, killing six and injuring about 1000 more
  • for someone who's supposed to "hate the infidels," he shows no signs of loathing towards the many prisoners and staff who openly despise him.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • People over in America ask why ISIS did this. [But] people in the Middle East ask, "Why is the US doing this to us?" Put yourself in their shoes—France is dropping bombs for a year in Iraq and [more recently] Syria, destroying everything, women, children, buildings... A bomb doesn't discriminate between ISIS or women and children—it just destroys.
  • when I first asked Ismoil about ISIS after the Paris attacks, he asked me one question back: "Why do you think they did it?" I responded with the only thing I knew: "They hate us."
  • He said that to resolve the conflicts between extremists in the Middle East and the West, it was important to talk "human to human," but he also made it clear that he empathizes at least somewhat with the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, many of his views would be considered appalling to the vast majority of Americans, but our conversation gave me a window into the worldview of people who think the US is to blame for terrorism.
  • ISIS is not jihadists recruited from all over to fight. They are the Sunni Muslims that have lived through 25 years of wars, torture, and rapes. They are the Iraqi and Syrian people that have suffered from unjust wars started by the US government. And when the US government [mostly pulled out of] Iraq in 2010, the Shia and Maliki government started killing the Sunni day and night under the watch of the Americans.
  • You don't have to recruit people for ISIS. They're Muslims from all over the world that have seen an injustice after 25 years and want to help their brothers. What you have to understand is the Iraqi people are the most stubborn of the Muslim world. They won't accept occupation or humiliation.
  • "hate the infidels,"
  • Imagine the Iraq and Syrian people. After a year of bombing, you see your people killed, land destroyed, children scared to do anything more than hide in the corners all day. All this coming from bombs in the sky and you can't stop it. What would you do?
  • So, the question should be who is the first to be blamed? Tell both sides of the story.
  • My religion prohibits attacks on civilians. Unfortunately, many Muslims don't know much about Islam
  • What about the Planned Parenthood attack?What this man did is worse then what the doctors do. If this is what he's angry at, taking life, he did worse. Islam doesn't believe in abortion—all life is precious....[But] what he did was kill adult people who are grown. How is he trying to solve the issue?
  • For every action, there's a reaction. If you throw a ball against a wall, it's going to come back at you. If you throw a ball hard, it's going to come back at you hard. This is the problem with all sides in these wars. We hit you, you hit back. We hit you hard, you hit back harder. Back and forth, back and forth. Nobody wins. Both sides end up with death and destruction.
  • The Arabs are not radicalizing themselves. Your government action is radicalizing the Arabs
  • The only thing that keeps us just is Islam. Because in Islam, the peace, the justice, comes from the sky. The one who created earth and man, he knows best.
  • To solve the problem from the root, everyone has to become human. They need to talk, human to human. Let the people decide what they want. Leave them alone. Everyone can come together and say enough is enough. How long are we going to keep this action up? For the rest of our lives?It's the law of the jungle that we're living in right now. We were given more sense than this. We walk on two legs, with our heads high. But right now, we are walking with our heads down. We need to lift our heads up, and use the brains God created for us.
mcginnisca

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

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

terrorism politics islamophobia language bias anchoring heuristic conspiracy theory

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Who is the enemy and what is the enemy's 'Threat Doctrine?'"
  • "the mythical 'moderate' Muslims who embrace traditional Islam but want a peaceful coexistence with the West is effectively non-existent."
  • They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, and Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The purpose of the group is to "[promote] national security and [defeat] terrorism"—two goals which are, in the group's view, intrinsically threatened by the Islamic faith. The rhetoric of their meetings doesn't suggest that the problem is radical Islam, but Islam itself.
  • Just hours after the attacks in Paris, a mosque in St. Petersburg, Florida received a voicemail from a man who said he planned to shoot all Muslims, including children, in the head.
  • Act for America has flourished
  • the basic doctrine of the Quran, which is a personal, moral code for Muslims—as a threat to American security. It doesn't matter that the majority of American mass shootings are committed by young, white males (and often fanatical Christians), or that gun regulations play a role in terrorism-related events. Here, the group's mission is to "educate and effect change"—meaning, the Muslims have to go.
  • Yerushalmi claimed that 80 percent of mosques in the United States are "strictly Sharia," which he equated to Muslims following the same dogma as Al-Qaeda terrorists.
  • "national security expert," where her advice tends to be "get rid of the Muslims."
  • By his logic, when a Muslim attends an American mosque, he is not only learning a violent doctrine but is also susceptible to be recruited by ISIS
  • Yerushalmi was suggesting further alienation. "Syrian immigrants, when they come here, where are they going to go to those mosques; the reservoir of support is there."
  • "The threat is real!" Yerushalmi concluded. "Sharia is not a peaceful, feel-good Islam."
  • "If my Roman Catholic church was preaching death to Muslims, Jews, everyone else, I'm sure it would be closed down with a blink of an eye," she continued. "So this is where we have to stop the growth of mosques!"
  • some members believe that the White House "is controlled by Muslims."
  • "They don't want peace and prosperity. They want to live by Sharia," said an angry old man.
  • President Obama delivered a speech responding to the San Bernardino shootings, calling for religious tolerance. He harshly condemned those who wish to discriminate against others based on their religion and addressed the plight of Muslim Americans who are currently enduring the ongoing Islamophobic backlash
nataliedepaulo1

Trump's Anti-Science Campaign - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...trumps-anti-science-campaign

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Over the past few months, we’ve seen Donald Trump lower, again and again, the bar for political discourse. All the while, though, he’s been lowering the scientific bar, too. In May, for instance, while speaking to an audience of West Virginia coal miners, Trump complained that regulations designed to protect the ozone layer had compromised the quality of his hair spray. Those regulations, he continued, were misguided, because hair spray is used mainly indoors, and so can have no effect on the atmosphere outside. No wonder Hillary Clinton felt the need to include, in her nomination speech, the phrase “I believe in science.”
  • The positions taken by Trump and the Republicans have consequences beyond science itself. Essentially, they are betting that, for a significant portion of the country, empirical reality doesn’t matter; they are also signalling that empirical reasoning won’t be the basis of their public policy. Today, of course, we face global challenges such as climate change, which are more urgent than any we have ever confronted. These challenges require a sober assessment of reality. When science is distorted on the campaign trail, it may produce applause lines. But if those distortions lead to bad public policy, the quality of people’s lives will suffer.
maxwellokolo

Lemons teach about breast cancer - 0 views

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

shared by maxwellokolo on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 16 Jan 17
     
    "Had I not seen that photo, I would have assumed that it was an indentation from the underwire of my bra," Chieze, 38, a nursing student at West Hills College in Lemoore, California, told CNN. Within five days of noticing the indentation, she was told she had breast cancer.
Javier E

Should we even go there? Historians on comparing fascism to Trumpism | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nald-trump-historians-trumpism

fascism hitler resistance democracy

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • “What are the necessary social and psychological conditions that allow populists of Hitler’s ilk to gain a mass following and attain power?”
  • “There are certain traits you can recognize that Hitler and Trump have in common,” Ullrich says. “I would say the egomania, the total egocentricity of both men, and the inclination to mix lies and truth – that was very characteristic of Hitler.”
  • Like Trump, “Hitler exploited peoples’ feelings of resentment towards the ruling elite.” He also said he would make Germany great again. Ullrich also notes both men’s talent at playing the media, making use of new technology and their propensity for stage effects.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • “I think the differences are still greater than the similarities,” he says. “Hitler was not only more intelligent, but craftier. He was not just a powerful orator, but a talented actor who succeeded in winning over various social milieus. So not just the economically threatened lower middle classes which Trump targeted, but also the upper middle classes. Hitler had many supporters in the German aristocracy.”
  • Trump was also democratically elected, while Hitler never had a majority vote. “He was appointed by the president of the German Reich.” Then there’s the fact that Trump does not lead a party “which is unconditionally committed to him”.
  • “A further obvious difference is that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, as Hitler did with the SA, which he used in his first months after coming to power to settle scores with his opponents, like the Communists and Social Democrats. You can’t possibly imagine something similar with Trump – that he’ll be locking Democrats up into concentration camps
  • “Finally, the American constitution is based on a system of checks and balances. It remains to be seen how far Congress will really limit Trump or if, as is feared, he can override it. It was different with Hitler, who, as we know, managed to eliminate all resistance in the shortest space of time and effectively establish himself as an all-powerful dictator. Within a few months, there was effectively no longer any opposition.”
  • “Hitler profited from the fact that his opponents always underestimated him,” Ullrich explains. “His conservative allies in government assumed they could tame or ‘civilise’ him – that once he became chancellor he’d become vernünftig (meaning sensible, reasonable). Very quickly it became clear that was an illusion.”
  • “There were many situations where he could have been stopped. For example in 1923 after the failed Munich putsch – if he’d served his full prison sentence of several years, he wouldn’t have made a political comeback. Instead, he only spent a few months behind bars, [having been released after political pressure] and could rebuild his movement.”
  • The western powers made the same mistake with their appeasement politics, indecision and indulgence. “In the 1930s Hitler strengthened, rather than weakened, his aggressive intentions,” Ullrich says. “So you could learn from this that you have to react faster and much more vigorously than was the case at the time.”
  • llrich also contends that if Hindenburg, the president of the Reich, had allowed Chancellor Brüning, of the Centre party, to remain chancellor to the end of 1934, rather than responding to pressure from conservatives to dismiss him in 1932, “then the peak of the economic crisis would have passed and it would have been very questionable whether Hitler could still have come to power”.
  • At the same time, Hitler’s ascent was no mere fluke. “There were powerful forces in the big industries, but also in the landowning class and the armed forces, which approved of a fascist solution to the crisis.”
  • If fascism “now just means aggressive nationalism, racism, patriarchy and authoritarianism, then maybe it is back on the agenda,” Bosworth continues. But today’s context is fundamentally different
  • Today’s “alt-right” agitators “live in a neoliberal global order where the slogan, ‘all for the market, nothing outside the market, no one against the market’ is far more unquestionably accepted than the old fascist slogan of ‘all for the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state’”.
  • Schama is clear: Trump is obviously not Hitler. “But, you know, if you like, he’s an entertainment fascist, which may be less sinister but is actually in the end more dangerous. If you’re not looking for jackboots and swastikas – although swastikas are indeed appearing – there’s a kind of laundry list of things which are truly sinister and authoritarian and not business as usual.”
  • Schama also points to deeply worrying messaging, such as “the parallel universe of lies which are habitual, massive, cumulative”; the criminalization of political opponents; the threat to change the libel laws against the press and the demonization of different racial and ethnic groups, going as far as proposing a Muslim registry.
  • “What is that if it’s not racially authoritarian?” asks Schama. “If you want to call it fascist, fine. I don’t really care if it’s called that or not. It’s authoritarian, you know, ferociously authoritarian.”
  • Don’t ignore what people vote fo
  • f you’re of German heritage, it’s hard to understand how so many people could have bought Mein Kampf and gone on to vote for Hitler. Maybe no one really read it, or got beyond the first few pages of bluster, or took antisemitism seriously, you tell yourself. “Or they liked what he said,
  • “I think one of the mistakes this time around would be not to think that the people who voted for Trump were serious. They may have been serious for different reasons, but it would be a big mistake not to try and figure out what their reasons were.
  • Hitler presented himself as a “messiah” offering the public “salvation”, Ullrich points out. With austerity and hostility to the EU and to immigrants riding high, there is fertile ground for European populists next year to seduce with equally simplistic, sweeping “solutions”.
  • The problem, in Mazower’s view, is that establishment politicians currently have no response
  • “The Gestapo was piddling compared with the size and reach of surveillance equipment and operations today,
  • “Very belatedly, everyone is waking up to the fact that there was a general assumption that no government in the west would fall into the wrong hands, that it was safe to acquiesce in this huge expansion of surveillance capabilities, and the debate wasn’t as vigorous as it could have been.”
  • “Now, there is a lot of discussion about allowing this kind of surveillance apparatus in the wrong hands,” he adds. “And we’ve woken up to this a bit late in the day.”
  • Ullrich calls crises, “the elixir of rightwing populists”, and urges that politicians “do everything they can to correct the inequalities and social injustice which have arisen in the course of extreme financial capitalism in western countries”
  • Jane Caplan, a history professor at Oxford University who has written about Trump and fascism, highlights the want of “dissenting voices against marketisation and neoliberalism
  • The failure to resist the incursion of the market as the only criterion for political utility, or economic utility, has been pretty comprehensive.
  • Paranoia, bullying and intimidation are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. They are also alive and well in our culture today, where online trolls, violent thugs at rallies, threats of expensive libel action and of course terrorist acts are equally effective in getting individuals and the press to self-censor.
Javier E

The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...101213fa_fact_lehrer

science empiricism philosophy scientific method decline research statistics method bias truth

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
  • But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.
  • This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?
  • Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”
  • The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time.
  • yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time!
  • this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics
  • In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance.
  • Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them
  • publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”
  • While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts.
  • Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for
  • Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments.
  • One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
  • suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.
  • after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.”
  • Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”
  • Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the “sho
  • horning” process.
  • “A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.”
  • For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.
  • John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. “These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common,” he says. “It’d be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don’t. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading.”
  • In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.
  • the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
  • the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
  • According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher.
  • One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials.
  • The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong.
  • “It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies
  • That’s why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. “We’re wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments,”
  • The current “obsession” with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design.
  • “Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they’re going to use, and what exactly they’re testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments.”
  • Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,”
  • scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging.
  • The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand.
  • The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected
  • This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that.
  • Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests.
  • Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.)
  • Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.)
  • The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦
silveiragu

Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated "Polysyllabic Truisms"... - 0 views

www.openculture.com/...ated-polysyllabic-truisms.html

chomsky science

shared by silveiragu on 07 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • we recently featured an interview in which Noam Chomsky slams postmodernist intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan as “charlatans” and posers.
  • The turn against postmodernism has been long in coming,
  • Chomsky characterizes leftist postmodern academics as “a category of intellectuals who are undoubtedly perfectly sincere”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • in his critique, such thinkers use “polysyllabic words and complicated constructions” to make claims that are “all very inflated” and which have “a terrible effect on the third world.
  • It’s considered very left wing, very advanced. Some of what appears in it sort of actually makes sense, but when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. It’s perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men, it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields, and it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures.
  • you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.
  • Chomsky’s cranky contrarianism is nothing new, and some of his polemic recalls the analytic case against “continental” philosophy or Karl Popper’s case against pseudo-science, although his investment is political as much as philosophical.
  • silveiragu on 07 Jun 16
     
    An interesting synopsis and analysis, linked to a relatively short interview with a great thinker.
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