Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by clairemann

Contents contributed and discussions participated by clairemann

Simple Middle Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics
clairemann

Many QAnon followers report having mental health diagnoses - 0 views

theconversation.com/mental-health-diagnoses-157299

science research knowledge brain science social media

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • QAnon is often viewed as a group associated with conspiracy, terrorism and radical action, such as the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. But radical extremism and terror may not be the real concern from this group.
  • I noticed that QAnon followers are different from the radicals I usually study in one key way: They are far more likely to have serious mental illnesses.
  • I found that many QAnon followers revealed – in their own words on social media or in interviews – a wide range of mental health diagnoses, including bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and addiction.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 68% reported they had received mental health diagnoses. The conditions they revealed included post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia and Munchausen syndrome by proxy
  • Research has long revealed connections between psychological problems and beliefs in conspiracy theories. For example, anxiety increases conspiratorial thinking, as do social isolation and loneliness.
clairemann

Glimpses of Sudan's Forgotten Pyramids - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sudan-archaeology-meroe.html

science research knowledge technology education

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Situated on the east bank of the Nile, some 150 miles by car northeast of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, the Meroe pyramids — around 200 in total, many of them in ruins — seemed to be in perfect harmony with the surrounding landscape, as if the wind had smoothed their edges to accommodate them among the dunes.
  • was the hope that the country’s archaeological sites might receive broader attention and protections, not simply from researchers and international visitors but also from Sudanese citizens themselves.
  • A wave of demonstrations filled the streets of several towns, far beyond the capital Khartoum. These were Sudanese of all ethnicities, classes and generations — but above all students and young professionals.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Perhaps the most infamous act of destruction at Meroe, however, is attributed to the Italian treasure hunter Giuseppe Ferlini, who in the 1830s destroyed several of the pyramids in a ruthless search for ancient artifacts.
  • “The Sudanese people have the right to reclaim their country,” she said, adding that she and her friends long for a democratic society that can be open and accessible to everyone.
clairemann

Some Covid-19 Patients Say They're Left With Ringing Ears - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-tinnitus.html

COVID brain science research knowledge

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Scientists are examining a possible link to tinnitus. A businessman’s suicide has lent urgency to the research.
  • Mr. Taylor suffered from a variety of symptoms following his illness, including severe tinnitus, his family said in a statement, adding that his suffering had become “unbearable.”
  • A study published on Monday in the Journal of International Audiology that looked at nearly 60 case reports and studies found that 15 percent of adults with Covid-19 reported symptoms of tinnitus.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • ‘I was so happy to read about this, because my doctor thought I was crazy when I mentioned tinnitus and now I know I’m not the only one.’”
  • A study published late last year in the journal Frontiers in Public Health surveyed 3,100 people with tinnitus and found that 40 percent of the 237 respondents who had contracted Covid-19 reported that their symptoms were “significantly exacerbated” following the infection.
  • A very small group of people in Dr. Beukes’s study — seven — reported that Covid-19 brought on tinnitus for the first time. Just over half of people with tinnitus said the illness had left their symptoms unchanged.
clairemann

Some Tourists Find Luck in the Caribbean with Covid-19 Vaccine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ne-tourism-virgin-islands.html

COVID science research technology

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Roughly 3 percent of vaccines in the U.S. Virgin Islands have gone to tourists, the governor said this week. “Nowhere else in the U.S. can you actually just walk in and get the vaccine,” he said.
  • “We were in and out within a matter of a few minutes,” Ms. Todman said. “It was amazing.”
  • “Have we become aware of the fact that people are seeking us out? Yes. And you know, we accommodate everyone,” said Angela East, the coordinator and director of the Covid-19 vaccine program at Plessen Healthcare, which has administered 44 percent of all Covid-19 vaccines in the territory. “We are going to give you the shot in the spirit of putting as many shots in arms as possible.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • ‘Listen, I have all this vaccine. And people are afraid to get it here,’” Ms. Platten recalled. “‘If you have any friends, or there’s anyone you know who wants a vaccine, please have them call me.’”
  • “The result has been a mini boom of visitors on an island whose tourism economy, like most others, has been brutalized by the pandemic.”
  • “Nowhere else in the U.S. can you actually just walk in and get the vaccine, anybody over 16,” Mr. Bryan said on Monday. On March 1, the islands also opened two federally supported community vaccination centers on St. Thomas and St. Croix.
  • “On the public health side, it’s a plus,” she said. “On the equity side, I don’t see it as significant issue.”
clairemann

Some Elephants in Africa Are Just a Step From Extinction - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ephants-africa-endangered.html

education psychology science research animals

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The average savanna elephant mother gives birth at 25 years; forest elephant moms are 31 on average. Because the earliest surveys researchers could find were from the 1960s and 1970s, they could peer back only two generations for savanna elephants, and a single generation for forest elephants.
  • “The forest elephants, in most cases, have been largely ignored,” he said. Grouping the two elephants together probably masked just how bad things were for the forest elephant, he said.
clairemann

Protecting Lions Helps the Whole Food Chain? Actually, We Don't Know. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uth-africa-wildlife-parks.html

psychology science research animals

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The assumption has long been that adding lions to the top of the food chain would lead to healthier populations of these other carnivore species, and that any efforts to protect large predators, such as lions, automatically benefit smaller ones, too. However, scientists lack evidence about whether these predictions play out in the real world, especially in small reserves of the sort found in South Africa.
  • “Apex predators are very interactive in an ecosystem, and we need to take better into account their ecological effect.”
  • It could be that there are fewer individual small carnivores, because lions are killing or otherwise repressing them, he said, or that lions are causing small carnivores to avoid certain areas out of fear — or both.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Curveira-Santos says it is clear that the lions, when they are present, are influencing the distributions of these smaller carnivores.
  • “However, we need to take heed of the findings of this paper and direct research to ensure we have sufficient information to adapt management to a more holistic approach for the benefit of the whole ecosystem” she said.
clairemann

If You Look at Your Phone While Walking, You're an Agent of Chaos - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...distracted-walking-phone.html

psychology science research knowledge technology

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • An experiment by Japanese researchers revealed how just a few distracted walkers really can throw off the movements of a whole crowd.
  • And so it might not come as too much of a surprise to learn that a person staring down at a phone, lost in a private world while walking, really messes with the vibe, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
  • When those students were placed at the back of their group, the distraction did not affect how the groups moved past each other. But when the distracted walkers were at the front of the pack, there was a dramatic slowdown in the whole group’s walking pace. It also took longer for clear lanes to form.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Distracted people also did not move smoothly. They took big steps sideways or dodged others in a way that the researchers rarely saw when there were no distractions. The inattentive pedestrians in the experiment induced that behavior in others as well; the people who weren’t looking at their phones moved in a more choppy fashion than they did when there were no phone-gazers.
  • Looking at one’s phone might have that effect because it deprives others of the information contained in our gazes, the researchers suggest.
clairemann

Photos of Snowflakes Like You've Never Seen Them Before - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...es-photos-nathan-myhrvold.html

science research technology education

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Sextillions of snowflakes fell from the sky this winter. That’s billions of trillions of them, now mostly melted away as spring approaches.
  • “How do snowflakes form?” Dr. Libbrecht said during an online talk on Feb. 23 that was hosted by the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. “And how do these structures appear — and just, as I like to say, literally out of thin air?”
  • The “damn thing” was the camera system for photographing snowflakes. He wanted to use the best digital sensors, ones that captured a million pixels. “The real snowflake is very, very fragile,” he said. “It’s super intricate. So you want high resolution.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Dr. Myhrvold also found a special LED, manufactured by a company in Japan for industrial uses, that would emit bursts of light 1/1,000th as long as a typical camera flash. This minimizes heat emitted from the flash, which might melt the snowflake a bit.
  • Water is a simple molecule consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. When temperatures drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the molecules start sticking to one another — that is, they freeze.
  • “Because it has this complicated path through the clouds, it gives a complicated shape,” Dr. Libbrecht said. “They’re all following different paths, and so each one looks a little different, depending on the path.”
  • To counter Dr. Myhrvold’s claims, Mr. Komarechka took an image that he says was even higher resolution. Dr. Myhrvold responded with a lengthy rebuttal explaining why his images were, nonetheless, more detailed.
clairemann

Why some people like wearing masks - BBC Worklife - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...some-people-like-wearing-masks

psychology science knowledge

shared by clairemann on 26 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Some people welcome face coverings for reasons ranging from the convenient and expedient to the more complex and psychological. But is this a helpful coping mechanism?
  • Since I've been wearing the mask, my awkward interactions with friends and family have significantly reduced,” he says. Now, he goes to the shops whenever he wants, without worrying about whom he might see. He hopes that, even after the pandemic ends, it will still be socially acceptable to wear a mask.
  • Some welcome the way face coverings reduce or change interactions that might otherwise spark social anxiety. But is this a helpful coping mechanism – and what happens when the pandemic comes to an end?
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • They have ditched their old makeup and shaving routines and are saving money, time and stress. Others have discovered that hiding their mouths affords them unexpected freedoms. Some restaurant servers and retail workers say they no longer feel obliged to fake-smile at customers, potentially lifting the burden of emotional labour.
  • “During a pandemic, we’re under severe stress, and whether you’re worrying about your appearance or you’re worried about someone harassing you or whistling at you, the masks can provide a respite from those things that can occupy our mind when we’re out in public. You have more freedom to be meditating or thinking about whatever you want.”
  • “Anonymity carries power,” adds Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and psychology professor at California State University, Los Angeles. “It can feel like trying on a different ‘role’ and the associated expectations of that role, perhaps freeing us of what can feel exhausting and insincere about smiling (especially when we aren't having a good day).”
  • “For introverts, it can feel great that you don’t have to talk to people you don’t know that well, but in the long run, when you get out of your comfort zone and challenge yourself… [you might form] a really fulfilling or positive relationship,”
  • Think back to the last time you failed or made an important mistake. Do you still blush with shame, and scold yourself for having been so stupid or selfish? Do you tend to feel alone in that failure, as if you were the only person to have erred? Or do you accept that error is a part of being human, and try to talk to yourself with care and tenderness?
  • “Most of us have a good friend in our lives, who is kind of unconditionally supportive,” says Kristin Neff, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who has pioneered this research. “Self-compassion is learning to be that same warm, supportive friend to yourself.”
clairemann

Opinion | The Mental Virtues - The New York Times - 4 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-mental-virtues.html

shared by clairemann on 14 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Is it possible to display and cultivate character if you are just an information age office jockey, alone with a memo or your computer?
  • Some people are just more ardently curious than others, either by cultivation or by nature.
clairemann

'At 47, I discovered I am autistic - suddenly so many things made sense' | Life and sty... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...enly-so-many-things-made-sense

psychology science research brain science knowledge

shared by clairemann on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • I knew I was different and I had always been told I was “too sensitive”. But I don’t fit the dated Rain Man stereotype. I’m a CEO, I’m married, I have two children. Autism is often a hidden disability.
  • I always operated with some level of confusion.
  • My mind is always going a million miles an hour and I don’t really have an off switch. I need to finish what I start at any cost. Now I understand that is part of being autistic.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Einstein, Mozart, Michelangelo, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates – all these overachievers are widely believed to be, or have been, on the spectrum.
  • I used recreational drugs to smooth me through the challenges of social communication.
  • With every interaction, verbal or written, I go through a mental checklist: is my response appropriate? Is it relevant? Is this something only I am going to find interesting? Is my tone right? Trying to follow social rules and adapt to an allistic [non-autistic] world is exhausting. No one sees what is going on inside my head.
  • Misunderstandings in communication can blow up quite quickly.
  • I burnt out in my late 20s.
  • My greatest fear has been something I’ve always referred to as “the big alone”. Even when I’ve been in loving relationships, as I am now, there has been a terrible aloneness in not understanding why I am not like other people.
  • I was able to look back at situations and misunderstandings and understand what had happened. I’d been told my communication could be “off” sometimes – a bit intense, a bit abrupt.
  • Autistic children spend a lot of time “masking”, imitating so-called “normal” behaviour. They need to be able to experience their authentic selves.
  • Over the past five or 10 years, the concept of neurodiversity – the idea that these differences in our brains should be celebrated – has become better known. We deserve equality, respect and full social inclusion.
  • We need to start making space for neurodivergent people at school, at work, in life generally. Autistic people bring a whole new set of skills with them.
clairemann

Do all dogs go to heaven? Pet owners increasingly think so, says study | Life and style... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...creasingly-think-so-says-study

afterlife research bias knowledge

shared by clairemann on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The definition of dog heaven is straightforward enough: bottomless biscuits, walks on demand, squirrels you can actually catch.
  • owners of all kinds of domestic animals have become more likely to believe in a pet afterlife
  • “By the mid-20th century, a greater proportion of animal gravestones suggest owners were awaiting a reunion in the afterlife.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • owners are careful not to challenge contemporary Christian orthodoxy and only suggest a hope of reunion.
  • found other evidence that pet owners were increasingly likely to view animals as part of the family. He wrote that an increasing number of gravestones used family names after the second world war
  • He also found that owners would increasingly often refer to themselves by familial pronouns like “Mummy”, “Dad”, or “Auntie”.
  • Since then, cremation has become more common for those who wish to mark their pet’s death.
  • Other modern pet memorial services include paw prints cast in clay, framed collars, and even the chance to turn their ashes into diamonds. But many owners still opt for the simpler approach of burying them in the back garden – or what is euphemistically termed “communal pet cremation”.
  • Christianity has traditionally held that animals have no hope of an afterlife. But Pope John Paul II said in 1990 that animals do have souls and are “as near to God as men are”.
  • “what lies ahead … is not an annihilation of the universe and all that surrounds us. Rather, it brings everything to its fullness of being, truth and beauty.”
clairemann

Opinion | How to Talk to Friends and Family Who Share Conspiracy Theories - The New Yor... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...onspiracy-theories-family.html

election trump thinking conspiracy social media Technology education

shared by clairemann on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Online, somebody they know and love has stumbled into the treacherous world of online conspiracy theories and, in some cases, might not even know it.
  • How do you talk to people you care about who might be on the precipice of or headed down the conspiratorial rabbit hole?
  • Conspiracy theories (like Pizzagate and now QAnon, anti-vaccine claims, disinformation around the coronavirus suggesting the virus was engineered in a laboratory) are a chronic condition that will long outlive the 2020 election.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • I’d non-defensively ask them, ‘Do you know how Google works?’ ‘What do you think my news feed looks like? Do you know why yours looks that way?’”
  • I would expect the following to happen.’ I
  • cognitive dissonance.
  • is to acknowledge that some conspiracies do exist — Watergate, the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals, the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s network of underage sexual abuse.
  • And if people better understood the mechanisms and the economics, maybe then you can talk about the content.”
  • Witnesses come forward, then victims. And journalists circle like sharks to get the story. I try to get them to think about concrete things and logistical details, including the bureaucracy that’s required to maintain these vast alleged plots.”
  • “Sometimes it’s about turning the ‘do your research’ paradigm back on them,” he said. “I never appeal to authorities like the government or mainstream media, but I subtly imply that what they’re saying doesn’t match the historical record, which works better than outright dismissing them.”
  • Unfortunately, social platforms are often the worst forum for talking about these thorny issues. In many cases, a face-to-face conversation is a better place to voice your concerns.
  • They can also allow participants to pick up on subtle facial and body language expressions — or tone of voice — that may dissolve tensions.
  • “There it is. Biden’s wearing a wire.” It’s actually just a crease in his shirt. And a popular meme among teens was the claim that Wayfair is shipping children in industrial-grade cabinets.
  • The main gist of QAnon is that elite satanic pedophiles are everywhere and they’re coming to get your kids. More specifically, pedophiles are everywhere among liberals, celebrities, and the media.
  • “Q is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” There are now 87 QAnon supporters who have run for Congress, and the first will be elected this November. “I think it’s something worth listening to and paying attention to.” And Trump refuses to push back against QAnon because QAnon loves Trump.
  • One of the major reasons QAnon is on the rise right now is because when the world is scary and uncertain, we are drawn to magical thinking.
clairemann

Jonathan Haidt on the Pandemic and America's Polarization - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...612025

thinking Politics Democrats Republicans reason rational pandemic

shared by clairemann on 26 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The best way to approach this question, he replied, is to look at the trajectory of American democracy over the past decade and a half or so.
  • increasingly concerned by how politically polarized America was becoming, and polarization has only worsened over the past dozen years. “
  • Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse; you can’t just extrapolate from the present. “
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “You can’t get compromise. You get exactly the situation that the Founders feared, that [James] Madison wrote about in ‘Federalist 10,’ which is faction, which is people care more about defeating the other side than they do about the common good.”
  • Social media essentially gives a megaphone to the extremes, so it’s very hard to know what most people really think.
  • it’s quite clear that this pandemic is turning into just another culture-war issue, where people on the left see what they want to see and people on the right see what they want to see.”
  • the pandemic is having the sort of unifying effect that major crises tend to have.
  • For example, 90 percent of Americans believe that “we’re all in it together,” compared to just 63 percent in the fall of 2018. The share of Americans who describe the country as “unified” has grown from 4 percent in 2018 to 32 percent today
  • Other polls show that the divide between Republicans and Democrats on social-distancing measures isn’t all that large.
clairemann

'The Righteous Mind,' by Jonathan Haidt - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html

Politics Democrats Republicans reason rational thinking

shared by clairemann on 26 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • You’re wrong.
  • You’re wrong.
  • who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational.
  • Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.
  • They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected.
  • Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.
  • They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours.
  • Haidt’s account of reason is a bit too simple — his whole book, after all, is a deployment of reason to advance learning — and his advice sounds cynical.
  • Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided.
  • The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression.
  • When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.
  • He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology.
  • parochial altruism, the inclination to care more about members of your group — particularly those who have made sacrifices for it —than about outsiders.
  • The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds.
  • “fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.”
  • Can we tolerate cultures of female subjugation? And how far should we trust our instincts? Should people who find homosexuality repugnant overcome that reaction?
  • But Haidt is right that we must learn what we have been, even if our nature is to transcend it.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 58 of 58
Showing 20▼ items per page