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markfrankel18

Erasing History in the Internet Era - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...keller-erasing-history.html

TOK history internet

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 May 13 - Cached
  • Lorraine Martin, a nurse in Greenwich, was arrested in 2010 with her two grown sons when police raided her home and found a small stash of marijuana, scales and plastic bags. The case against her was tossed out when she agreed to take some drug classes, and the official record was automatically purged. It was, the law seemed to assure her, as if it had never happened.
  • Defamation is the publication of information that is both damaging and false. The arrest story was obviously true when it was first published. But Connecticut’s erasure law has already established that truth can be fungible. Martin, her suit says, was “deemed never to have been arrested.” And therefore the news story had metamorphosed into a falsehood.
  • They debate the difference between “historical fact” and “legal fact.” They dispute whether something that was true when it happened can become not just private but actually untrue, so untrue you can swear an oath that it never happened and, in the eyes of the law, you’ll be telling the truth.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Google’s latest transparency report shows a sharp rise in requests from governments and courts to take down potentially damaging material.
  • In Europe, where press freedoms are less sacred and the right to privacy is more ensconced, the idea has taken hold that individuals have a “right to be forgotten,” and those who want their online particulars expunged tend to have the government on their side. In Germany or Spain, Lorraine Martin might have a winning case.
  • The Connecticut case is just one manifestation of an anxious backlash against the invasive power of the Internet, a world of Big Data and ever more powerful search engines, in which it seems almost everything is permanently recorded and accessible to almost anyone — potential employers, landlords, dates, predators
  • The Times’s policy is not to censor history, because it’s history. The paper will update an arrest story if presented with evidence of an acquittal or dismissal, completing the story but not deleting the story.
  • Owen Tripp, a co-founder of Reputation.com, which has made a business out of helping clients manage their digital profile, advocated a “right to be forgotten” in a YouTube video. Tripp said everyone is entitled to a bit of space to grow up, to experiment, to make mistakes.
  • “This is not just a privacy problem,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, and author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” “If we are continually reminded about people’s mistakes, we are not able to judge them for who they are in the present. We need some way to put a speed-brake on the omnipresence of the past.”
  • would like to see search engine companies — the parties that benefit the most financially from amassing our information — offer the kind of reputation-protecting tools that are now available only to those who can afford paid services like those of Reputation.com. Google, he points out, already takes down five million items a week because of claims that they violate copyrights. Why shouldn’t we expect Google to give users an option — and a simple process — to have news stories about them down-ranked or omitted from future search results? Good question. What’s so sacred about a search algorithm, anyway?
Emily Horwitz

Upside of Distraction - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...upside-of-distraction

distractions human sciences writing

shared by Emily Horwitz on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Writing a book consists largely of avoiding distractions. If you can forget your real circumstances and submerge yourself in your subject for hours every day, characters become more human, sentences become clearer and prettier. But utter devotion to the principle that distraction is Satan and writing is paramount can be just as poisonous as an excess of diversion.
  • Monomania is what it sounds like: a pathologically intense focus on one thing.
  • It’s the opposite of the problem you have, in other words, if you are a normal, contemporary, non-agrarian 30-something.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • There was nothing to do besides read, write, reflect on God and drink. It was a circumstance favorable to writing fiction. But it was also conducive to depravity, the old Calvinist definition thereof: a warping of the spirit.
  • When I socialized, it was often with poets, who confirmed by their very existence that I had landed in a better, vanished time. Even their physical ailments were of the 19th century. One day, in the depths of winter, I came upon one of them picking his way across the snow and ice on crutches, pausing to drag on his cigarette.
  • The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under discussion. I could see everyone struggling to care. And then, trying feverishly to write something that would engage people, I got worse. First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.
  • It took me a long time to realize that the utter domination of my consciousness by the desire to write well was itself the problem.
  • When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane.
  • I purged myself of monomania — slowly, and somewhat unwittingly. I fell in love, an overpowering diversion, and began to spend more time at my girlfriend’s place, where she had Wi-Fi, a flat-screen TV and a DVD player.
  • One morning, after I diversified my mania, my writing no longer stank of decay.
  • I’m glad I went to 19th-century Russia. But I wish I had been more careful, more humble, and kept one foot in modernity. The thing about 19th-century Russia is that if you race in, heedless of all but conquest and glory, you get stuck.
  • Emily Horwitz on 05 Feb 13
     
    An interesting article about the need for distractions - if we focus too much on one thing at a time, we lose the capacity to tell whether it is good or not.
Javier E

Study Finds That the Number of Protestant Americans Is Declining - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nt-americans-is-declining.html

religion US survey God agnosticism atheism trends

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • For the first time since researchers began tracking the religious identity of Americans, fewer than half said they were Protestants, a steep decline from 40 years ago when Protestant churches claimed the loyalty of more than two-thirds of the population.
  • it was not just liberal mainline Protestants, like Methodists or Episcopalians, who abandoned their faith, but also more conservative evangelical and “born again” Protestants. The losses were among white Protestants
  • When they leave, instead of switching churches, they join the growing ranks who do not identify with any religion. Nearly one in five Americans say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The largest single faith group is Catholics, who make up about 22 percent of the population. Their numbers have held steady, mostly because an influx of immigrants
  • more than one-third of those ages 18 to 22 are religiously unaffiliated.
  • The “Nones,” as they are called, now make up the nation’s second-largest religious grouping
  • “The significant majority of the religiously unaffiliated tend to be left-leaning, tend to support the Democratic Party, support gay marriage and environmental causes,”
  • it is not clear that Americans are necessarily moving toward the European model. The Pew report found that even among Americans who claimed no religion, few qualified as purely secular. Two-thirds say they still believe in God, and one-fifth say they pray every day. Only 12 percent of the religiously unaffiliated group said they were atheists and 17 percent agnostic.
Javier E

Candidates and the Truth About America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-truth-about-america.html

truth us politics exceptionalism problem censorship positive candidates

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • in the current fiscal environment, promising an ambitious effort to reduce poverty or counter global warming might imply big new spending, which is practically and politically anathema.
  • the reason talking directly about serious American problems is risky is that most voters don’t like it. Mark Rice, who teaches American studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., said students often arrived at his classes steeped in the notion that the United States excelled at everything
  • “Sure, we’re No. 1 in gross domestic product and military expenditures,” Mr. Rice says. “But on a lot of measures of quality of life, the U.S. ranking is far lower.
Javier E

How GOP Leaders Must Manage Their Political Lives in the Era of Donald Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...483354

politics politician compromise hypocrisy

shared by Javier E on 19 May 16 - No Cached
  • The day-in, day-out work of the politician is the management of electoral coalitions: coaxing, cajoling, compelling people to work together who—in the more natural course of things—might have nothing in common
  • Unlike writers and intellectuals, politicians don’t have the freedom to work only with people they like and admire. Unlike writers and intellectuals, they have no duty to speak aloud their inner convictions—their work would become impossible if they did.
  • Politics unfortunately abounds in shams that must be treated reverentially for every politician who would succeed. If you are the sort of man whose stomach revolts against treating shams reverentially, you will be well advised to stay out of politics altogether and set up as a prophet; your prophecies may perhaps sow good seed for some future harvest. But as a politician you would be impotent. For at any given time the bulk of your countrymen believe firmly and devoutly, not only in various things that are worthy of belief, but also in illusions of one kind and another; and they will never submit to have their affairs managed for them by one who appears not to share in their credulity.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • More F.S. Oliver: Nothing in politics is sadder than: the man of sterling character whose genius is so antipathetic to the particular emergency in which he finds himself as to stupefy his thoughts and paralyze his actions. He drifts to disaster, grappling blindfolded which are beyond his comprehension, failing without really fighting.
  • Bad choices over the past decade by Republican political leaders opened the way to Donald Trump, yes.  For a decade, Republican voters have signaled they wanted to protect Medicare, cut immigration, fight fewer wars, and nominate no more Bushes. Their party leaders interpreted those signals as demands to cut Medicare, increase immigration, put boots on the ground in Syria, and nominate another Bush.
  • Their task ahead, in the Biblical phrase, is to pluck the brands from the fire—rescue as much of their party as can be rescued—while simultaneously minimizing the damage to party and country by the nominee their rank-and-file has imposed on them. They need to maneuver so that Trump’s defeat is as solitary as possible, and so that he cannot shift the blame for the failure he has earned onto the heads of others
  • Trump’s taught Republican politicians that they’ve neglected the interests and values of their core supporters. He’s demonstrated that much of their party ideology is obsolete, and that their language no longer moves their voters. He’s proven that their party is less culturally conservative than they believed, less hostile to social insurance than they imagined, and more worried about the economic and social costs of mass migration than they realized. Those are valuable lessons that need to be absorbed and pondered.
  • He’s also demonstrated that he himself is a dangerous person
  • To save themselves and their country, Republican politicians will have to rediscover the politician’s arts of deftness, flexibility, and self-preservation—while stealthily hastening Trump toward the defeat that almost certainly awaits him in November.
  • That’s a big job and a hard job, all the harder because they cannot acknowledge what they are doing. They will seem to help Trump win, while actually working to ensure he fail
  • What Walter Lippman said of presidents is really true of all politicians: They are not “working through noble institutions to dear ends … but trying to grind out a few crude results from a decadent political machine.”
  • The harms they stop are more important than the good they cannot achieve. What they’re called upon to do is to practice statesmanship without fine phrases; to protect the republic without receiving any credit for it
katieb0305

Signs of the 'Human Age' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ropocene-epoch-definition.html

shared by katieb0305 on 30 May 16 - No Cached
  • In the last century, fertilizers used in crop production doubled the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil. Signals of these chemicals found within lake strata are now at their highest levels in the past 100,000 years.
  • Materials disposed in landfills and used in construction and mining have introduced the greatest number of new minerals to the environment since the Great Oxygenation Event 2.3 billion years ago.
  • Humans have transformed more than half of Earth’s land surface with buildings, roads, mines, farms and landfills, among other uses.
Megan Flanagan

Fearing Drugs' Rare Side Effects, Millions Take Their Chances With Osteoporosis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...osteoporosis-drugs-bones.html

drugs science research

shared by Megan Flanagan on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • terrified of exceedingly rare side effects from drugs that can help them.
  • thighbones to snap in two have shaken many osteoporosis patients so much that they say they would rather take their chances with the disease.
  • “Ninety percent of patients, when you talk to them about starting one of these drugs, won’t go on,”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “Ninety percent who are on the drugs want to come off. The fear factor is huge.”
  • A 50-year-old woman has a 50 percent chance of having an osteoporotic fracture in her remaining years. The drugs, meant to be started when bone density falls very low and the chance of a fracture soars, can reduce that risk by half, studies show.
  • “You only need to treat 50 people to prevent a fracture, but you need to treat 40,000 to see an atypical fracture,”
  • hopes were dashed when Amgen announced the same problems in a clinical trial of a drug called romosozumab: a sudden shattering of a thigh bone in one patient and an area of jawbone that inexplicably rotted in two.
  • She worries about another spine fracture or, even worse, a fractured hip. But she resists taking osteoporosis drugs, she said, because she tends to have side effects with almost any drug
  • Many patients with osteoporosis have multiple fractures of their spines.
  • the drugs off patent, there is no longer an aggressive advertising push to make people aware of them.
  • “I hobble around on a cane,” she said. “I am a cripple.” She called the drug she took for osteoporosis “that wretched, dreadful stuff.”
Megan Flanagan

The Big Search to Find Out Where Dogs Come From - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-out-where-dogs-come-from.html

science research dogs

shared by Megan Flanagan on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient bond originated
  • agree that they evolved from ancient wolves
  • he essence of the idea is that people actively bred wolves to become dogs just the way they now breed dogs to be tiny or large, or to herd sheep.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Wolves are hard to tame, even as puppies, and many researchers find it much more plausible that dogs, in effect, invented themselves.
  • gradually evolved to become tamer and tamer, producing lots of offspring because of the relatively easy pickings
  • researchers question whether dogs experience feelings like love and loyalty, or whether their winning ways are just a matter of instincts that evolved because being a hanger-on is an easier way to make a living than running down elk.
  • dogs and wolves interbreed easily and some scientists are not convinced that the two are even different species
  • generally agree that there is good evidence that dogs were domesticated around 15,000 years ago
  • “Maybe dog domestication on some level kicks off this whole change in the way that humans are involved and responding to and interacting with their environment,
  • most dog breeds were invented in the 19th century during a period of dog obsession that he called “the giant whirlwind blender of the European crazy Victorian dog-breeding frenzy.
  • “There’s hardly a person working in canine genetics that’s not working on that project
  • Almost every group has a different origination hypothesis
  • jaws and occasionally nearly complete skulls from old and recent dogs, wolves and canids that could fall into either category.
  • will be able to determine whether the domestication process occurred closer to 15,000 or 30,000 years ago,
  • major achievement in the world of canine science, and a landmark in the analysis of ancient DNA to show evolution, migrations and descent,
  • based on DNA evidence and the shape of ancient skulls, that dog domestication occurred well over 30,000 years ago.
  • he became fed up with the lack of ancient DNA evidence in papers about the origin of dogs.
  • identified a skull about 32,000 years old from a Belgian cave in Goyet as an early dog.
  • arguing that the evidence just wasn’t there to call the Goyet skull a dog,
  • claims are controversial and is willing, like the rest of the world of canine science, to risk damage to the fossils themselves to get more information on not just the mitochondrial DNA but also the nuclear DNA.
  • geneticists try to establish is how different the DNA of one animal is from another. Adding ancient DNA gives many more points of reference over a long time span.
  • will be able to identify changes in the skulls or jaws of those wolves that show shifts to more doglike shapes, helping to narrow the origins of domestication
  • the project will publish a flagship paper from all of the participants describing their general findings
  • a group in China was forming with the goal of sequencing 10,000 dog genomes
  • growing increasingly confident that they will find what they want, and come close to settling the thorny question of when and where the tearing power of a wolf jaw first gave way to the persuasive force of a nudge from a dog’s cold nose.
Megan Flanagan

Hidden Side of the College Dream: Mediocre Graduation Rates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...op-out-follow-the-dollars.html

college rates psychology education

shared by Megan Flanagan on 02 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • “go to college” is such a proven prescription
  • college graduates have lower unemployment rates, earn higher wages and even have longer-lasting marriages
  • 7.2 million students who need federal loans to attend college
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Of the 1,027 private colleges studied, 761 have graduation rates of less than 67 percent.
  • the rate is even lower, 46 percent
  • high schools in which more than a third of students do not graduate on time are labeled to receive special attention by federal standards.
  • a college can have a graduation rate as low as 2 percent and still preserve its accreditation
  • colleges are not fulfilling their promise of upward mobility to students, particularly those who are trying to become the first in their families to earn a degree
  • “Graduation rates are primarily two factors: what the student brings and what the college brings to the experience,”
  • Colleges with lower graduation rates tend to admit a higher percentage of students with Pell grants, which usually go to lower-income students.
  • money is a huge roadblock to graduation.
  • “That is the No. 1 reason our students give when they drop out,”
  • any setback or poor grade can make them question whether they should be in college in the first place
  • “We act as if they’re all the same right now. In K-12 we differentiate.”
  • “It’s not that the low-income students are destined to fail,” Mr. Shireman said. “It’s just that they have more challenges, so it takes a lot more resources to ensure that they succeed.”
alliefulginiti1

Infection Raises Specter of Superbugs Resistant to All Antibiotics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...istant-to-all-antibiotics.html

infection antibiotics

shared by alliefulginiti1 on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • dentified the first patient in the United States to be infected with bacteria that are resistant to an antibiotic
  • superbugs that could cause untreatable infections,
  • The resistance can spread
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • We have that genetic element that would allow for bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic.”
  • colistin
  • We are one step away from CRE strains that cannot be treated with antibiotics.
  • overuse of antibiotics in people and in animals put human health at risk by reducing the power of the drugs,
Javier E

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-trust-in-real-reporting.html

fake news facebook culture crisis informed citizenry reporting social media

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force.
  • During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else.
  • I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them.
  • This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.”
  • Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself
  • This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained
  • Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms
  • This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen.
  • This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are.
  • the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway.
  • Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces
  • Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and votin
  • Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy
  • the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force
  • Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns
  • Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.
sissij

Lessons from Playing Golf with Trump - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...s-from-playing-golf-with-trump

new yorker social media bias

shared by sissij on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • “I will buy one only if it has the potential to be the best. I’m not interested in having a nine.”
  • A friend asked me later whether Trump wasn’t “in on the joke” of his public persona, and I said that, as far as I could tell, the Trump we were used to seeing on television was the honest-to-god authentic Trump: a ten-year-old boy who, for unknown reasons, had been given a real airplane and a billion dollars. In other words, a fun guy to hang around with.
  • He was upset that I hadn’t written that he’d shot 71—a very good golf score, one stroke under par.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • He complained to me that golf publications never rank his courses high enough, because the people who do the rating hold a grudge against him, but he also said that he never allows raters to play his courses, because they would just get in the way of the members.
  • He wanted the number, and the fact that I hadn’t published the number proved that I was just like all the other biased reporters, who, because we’re all part of the anti-Trump media conspiracy, never give him as much credit as he deserves for being awesome.
  • In Trump’s own mind, I suspect, he really did shoot 71 that day, if not (by now) 69. Trump’s world is a parallel universe in which truth takes many forms, none of them necessarily based on reality.
  • sissij on 15 Jan 17
     
    I think this article has a very interesting interpretation on Trump's personalities and behaviors. Something we think is absurd might be totally normal in other people's perspective. For example, in this article, the author states that Trump values social status and potential profit more than the real person or the real thing. It shows how people see this world differently and this affects how they make their moves and decisions. I think the overwhelming critics on Trump is partly because we don't understand Trump and don't even try to understand and accept him. He is an anomaly. Also, I think everybody observe the universe through their unique senses and perception, so we cannot tell whose reality is truer than others. Condemning others' reality won't bring us a good negotiation. --Sissi (1/14/2017)
dicindioha

These Foods Aren't Genetically Modified but They Are 'Edited' - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...cally-edited-foods-crispr.html

shared by dicindioha on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • dicindioha on 11 Jan 17
     
    this is very interesting at the beginning because people may not know that their food was altered in a way, even though they are saying this just cuts short certain aspects of the genes in order to change them, instead of cross breeding or something like that. it seems not all knowledge that is shared is shared to all, and it can depend on status, or even just job here. they regulate gene expression, but that is still an alteration made by humans. this begs the question of if this is a somewhat natural thing or is it still under the category of GMOs? Genetics are an interesting area of science in regards to human editing them, one that is very controversial, and this article presents gene editing as seemingly okay, but it would be interesting to hear another side.
  • dicindioha on 15 Jan 17
     
    I apologize, for some reason my highlights did not come up on this article, and only two on the article about climate change and the incoming trump government that I did right before this. Sorry I'm not sure how to fix that -Hailey
maxwellokolo

News Report on Global Temperatures Is Wrong, Scientists Say - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ming-daily-mail-breitbart.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 06 Dec 16
     
    Scientists on Friday debunked a widely circulated news media report suggesting that recent record-high global temperatures were unrelated to climate change. The report, which first appeared in the British tabloid The Daily Mail and was summarized in Breitbart News, the right-wing opinion and news site, cited incomplete data and drew incorrect conclusions, the scientists said.
Javier E

Trump Fires Adviser's Son From Transition for Spreading Fake News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...michael-flynn-son-trump.html

trump adviser NSC fake news conspiracy theory psychology

shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • At the Defense Intelligence Agency, his staff members even coined their own name for his sometimes dubious assertions: “Flynn facts.”
  • “He has regularly engaged in the reckless public promotion of conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact, with disregard for the risks that giving credence to those theories could pose to the public,” Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday.
  • “Someone who is so oblivious to the facts, or intentionally ignorant of them, should not be entrusted with policy decisions that affect the safety of the American people,” Mr. Smith added.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • His son, in contrast, showed no such restraint in the weeks before he was fired, regularly posting on Twitter about conspiracy theories involving Mrs. Clinton and her campaign staff well after the election.He continued to push his support for the fake news about Comet Ping Pong after his messages on Twitter about Sunday’s episode began attracting widespread attention. It was not until shortly before 3:30 p.m. Monday that he went silent on Twitter.
  • In one of the last messages he posted, he shared a post from another Twitter user who sought to spread a conspiracy theory that sprang up on the right-wing fringes after the shooting: that the suspect arrested at Comet Ping Pong, Edgar M. Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N.C., was actually an actor, and that the episode was a hoax cooked up to discredit the claim of a sex trafficking ring at the restaurant.
maxwellokolo

Monkeys Could Talk, but They Don't Have the Brains for It - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...monkeys-speech.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 11 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 11 Dec 16
     
    Primates are unquestionably clever: Monkeys can learn how to use money, and chimpanzees have a knack for game theory. But no one has ever taught a nonhuman primate to say "hello." Scientists have long been intrigued by the failure of primates to talk like us.
  • maxwellokolo on 11 Dec 16
     
    i found this article interesting because it is mind boggling to think that there could be a world in which humans are not the only animal speaking. Also, I learned that monkeys have a vocal track in which language could potentially come through but it would be very limiting.
maxwellokolo

Four New Names Officially Added to the Periodic Table of Elements - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...riodic-table-new-elements.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 07 Dec 16
     
    It's official. Chemistry's highest gatekeepers have accepted the newly proposed names for elements 113, 115, 117 and 118. Please welcome to the periodic table: Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson. Scientists first synthesized the new elements between 2002 and 2010, but it wasn't until December of 2015 that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry officially recognized the discoveries.
Javier E

Do Your Friends Actually Like You? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...friends-actually-like-you.html

friendship psychology research

shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Recent research indicates that only about half of perceived friendships are mutual. That is, someone you think is your friend might not be so keen on you. Or, vice versa, as when someone you feel you hardly know claims you as a bestie.
  • “The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other’s company has, in a way, become a lost art,” replaced by volleys of texts and tweets, Mr. Sharp said. “People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.”
  • It’s a concern because the authenticity of one’s relationships has an enormous impact on one’s health and well-being.
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  • The study analyzed friendship ties among 84 subjects (ages 23 to 38) in a business management class by asking them to rank one another on a five-point continuum of closeness from “I don’t know this person” to “One of my best friends.” The feelings were mutual 53 percent of the time while the expectation of reciprocity was pegged at 94 percent. This is consistent with data from several other friendship studies conducted over the past decade, encompassing more than 92,000 subjects, in which the reciprocity rates ranged from 34 percent to 53 percent.
  • “Friendship is difficult to describe,” said Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, who in his latest book, “On Friendship,” spends almost 300 pages trying to do just that. “It’s easier to say what friendship is not and, foremost, it is not instrumental.”
  • It is not a means to obtain higher status, wangle an invitation to someone’s vacation home or simply escape your own boredom. Rather, Mr. Nehamas said, friendship is more like beauty or art, which kindles something deep within us and is “appreciated for its own sake.
  • “Treating friends like investments or commodities is anathema to the whole idea of friendship,” said Ronald Sharp, a professor of English at Vassar College, who teaches a course on the literature of friendship. “It’s not about what someone can do for you, it’s who and what the two of you become in each other’s presence.”
  • Some blame human beings’ basic optimism, if not egocentrism, for the disconnect between perceived and actual friendships. Others point to a misunderstanding of the very notion of friendship in an age when “friend” is used as a verb, and social inclusion and exclusion are as easy as a swipe or a tap on a smartphone screen.
  • By his definition, friends are people you take the time to understand and allow to understand you.
  • Because time is limited, so, too, is the number of friends you can have, according to the work of the British evolutionary psychologist Robin I.M. Dunbar. He describes layers of friendship, where the topmost layer consists of only one or two people, say a spouse and best friend with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection and concern and who require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends with whom you invest less time and tend to have a less profound and more tenuous connection. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. You may be friendly with them but they aren’t friends.
  • “There is a limited amount of time and emotional capital we can distribute, so we only have five slots for the most intense type of relationship,” Mr. Dunbar said. “People may say they have more than five but you can be pretty sure they are not high-quality friendships.
  • Such boasting implies they have soul mates to spare in a culture where we are taught that leaning on someone is a sign of weakness and power is not letting others affect you. But friendship requires the vulnerability of caring as well as revealing things about yourself that don’t match the polished image in your Facebook profile or Instagram feed, said Mr. Nehamas at Princeton. Trusting that your bond will continue, and might even be strengthened, despite your shortcomings and inevitable misfortunes, he said, is a risk many aren’t willing to take.
  • According to medical experts, playing it safe by engaging in shallow, unfulfilling or nonreciprocal relationships has physical repercussions. Not only do the resulting feelings of loneliness and isolation increase the risk of death as much as smoking, alcoholism and obesity; you may also lose tone, or function, in the so-called smart vagus nerve, which brain researchers think allows us to be in intimate, supportive and reciprocal relationships in the first place.
  • In the presence of a true friend, Dr. Banks said, the smart or modulating aspect of the vagus nerve is what makes us feel at ease rather than on guard as when we are with a stranger or someone judgmental. It’s what enables us to feel O.K. about exposing the soft underbelly of our psyche and helps us stay engaged and present in times of conflict. Lacking authentic friendships, the smart vagus nerve is not exercised. It loses tone and one’s anxiety remains high, making abiding, deep connections difficult.
grayton downing

The Stereotypes About Math That Hold Americans Back - Jo Boaler - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281303

stereotypes math americans teaching

shared by grayton downing on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Mathematics education in the United States is broken. Open any newspaper and stories of math failure shout from the pages: low international rankings, widespread innumeracy in the general population, declines in math majors. Here’s the most shocking statistic I have read in recent years: 60 percent of the 13 million two-year college students in the U.S. are currently placed into remedial math courses; 75 percent of them fail or drop the courses and leave college with no degree.
  • We need to change the way we teach math in the U.S., and it is for this reason that I support the move to Common Core mathematics.
  • One of the reasons for these results is that mathematical problems that need thought, connection making, and even creativity are more engaging for students of all levels and for students of different genders, races, and socio-economic groups. This is not only shown by my research but by decades of research in our field.
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  • ways of working are critical in mathematical work and when they are taught and valued, many more students contribute, leading to higher achievement
  • mathematics education we suffer from the widespread, distinctly American idea that only some people can be “math people.” This idea has been disproved by scientific research showing the incredible potential of the brain to grow and adapt. But the idea that math is hard, uninteresting, and accessible only to “nerds” persists. 
  • harsh stereotypical thinking—mathematics is for select racial groups and men. This thinking, as well as the teaching practices that go with it, have provided the perfect conditions for the creation of a math underclass.
  • There is a good reason for this: Justification and reasoning are two of the acts that lie at the heart of mathematics. They are, in many ways, the essence of what mathematics is.  Scientists work to prove or disprove new theories by finding many cases that work or counter-examples that do not. Mathematicians, by contrast prove the validity of their propositions through justification and reasoning.
  • does not simply test a mathematical definition, as the first does. It requires that students visualize a triangle, use transformational geometry, consider whether different cases satisfy the mathematical definition, and then justify their thinking.
  • online platform explaining research evidence on ability and the brain and on good mathematics teaching, for teachers and parents. The course had a transformative effect. It was taken by 40,000 people, and 95 percent said they would change their teaching or parenting as a result.
  • The young people who are successful in today’s workforce are those who can discuss and reason about productive mathematical pathways, and who can be wrong, but can trace back to errors and work to correct them.
  • American idea that those who are good at math are those who are fast. Speed is revered in math classes across the U.S., and students as young as five years old are given timed tests—even though these have been shown to create math anxiety in young children. Parents use flash cards and other devices to promote speed, not knowing that they are probably damaging their children’s mathematical development
  • The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant
  • gives more time for depth and exploration than the curricula it has replaced by removing some of the redundant methods students will never need or use.
Javier E

How Stanford Took On the Giants of Economics - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-the-giants-of-economics.html

science social science economics rivalry

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • it is a reflection of a broader shift in the study of economics, in which the most cutting-edge work increasingly relies less on a big-brained individual scholar developing mathematical theories, and more on the ability to crunch extensive sets of data to glean insights about topics as varied as how incomes differ across society and how industries organize themselves.
  • “Who wouldn’t want to be where the future of the world is being made?” said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University (and regular contributor to The New York Times) who often blogs about trends in academic economics. Stanford’s economics department, he said, “has an excitement about it which Boston and Cambridge can’t touch.”
  • In economics, Stanford has frequently been ranked just behind Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton and the University of Chicago, including in the most recent U.S. News & World Report survey
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  • In the last four years, Stanford has increased the number of senior faculty by 25 percent, and 11 scholars with millions in cumulative salary have either been recruited from other top programs or resisted poaching attempts by those programs.
  • The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.
  • the scholars who have newly signed on with Stanford described a university particularly well suited to research in that vein, with a combination of lab space, strong budgets for research support and proximity to engineering talent.
  • The Chicago School, under the intellectual imprint of Milton Friedman, was a leader in neoclassical thought that emphasizes the efficiency of markets and the risks of government intervention. M.I.T.’s economics department has a long record of economic thought in the Keynesian tradition, and it produced several of the top policy makers who have guided the world economy through the tumultuous last several years.
  • “There isn’t a Stanford school of thought,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the university’s economics department. “This isn’t a doctrinaire place. Generally doctrine involves simplification, and increasingly we recognize that these social issues we’re trying to figure out are phenomenally complicated. The consensus at Stanford has focused around the idea that you have to be open to a lot of approaches and ways of thinking about things, and to be rigorous, thorough and careful in bringing the highest standard of craft to bear on your research.”
  • “My sense is this is a good development for economics,” Mr. Chetty said. “I think Stanford is going to be another great department at the level of Harvard and M.I.T. doing this type of work, which is an example of economics becoming a deeper field. It’s a great thing for all the universities — I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game.”
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