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lucieperloff

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

science research extinction

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Although South Africa’s 30-plus species of smaller carnivores play important roles in their ecosystems by keeping populations of prey species in check, which in turn affects plant communities, managers give little, if any, thought to their protection.
  • scientists lack evidence about whether these predictions play out in the real world, especially in small reserves of the sort found in South Africa.
  • While the presence of lions slightly increases the number of small carnivore species living in an area, it decreases their overall range.
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  • If lions are present, they have usually been reintroduced.
  • After reintroduction, managers tend to invest significant money and effort into maintaining lion populations, i
  • They found that overall species counts were slightly higher in reserves with lions, but that, on average, lions reduced the amount of land that small carnivores are found on by roughly 30 percent.
  • “The question is, is this the natural role and a good thing for conservation, or is it a negative thing because we’re doing this in a very artificial way?”
  • More study will be required, but if smaller predators are being killed by lions or confined to certain locations where the big cats do not tread, that could lead to population declines of these species and create imbalances for other animals and plants.
  • “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”
  • “There’s more research needed before we can say how much management and conservation priorities are aligned.”
caelengrubb

Insider Trading - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...InsiderTrading.html

shared by caelengrubb on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Insider trading” refers to transactions in a company’s securities, such as stocks or options, by corporate insiders or their associates based on information originating within the firm that would, once publicly disclosed, affect the prices of such securities.
  • Corporate insiders are individuals whose employment with the firm (as executives, directors, or sometimes rank-and-file employees) or whose privileged access to the firm’s internal affairs (as large shareholders, consultants, accountants, lawyers, etc.) gives them valuable information.
  • Famous examples of insider trading include transacting on the advance knowledge of a company’s discovery of a rich mineral ore (Securities and Exchange Commission v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co.), on a forthcoming cut in dividends by the board of directors (Cady, Roberts & Co.), and on an unanticipated increase in corporate expenses (Diamond v. Oreamuno).
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  • Such trading on information originating outside the company is generally not covered by insider trading regulation.
  • Insider trading is quite different from market manipulation, disclosure of false or misleading information to the market, or direct expropriation of the corporation’s wealth by insiders.
  • Regulation of insider trading began in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, when judges in several states became willing to rescind corporate insiders’ transactions with uninformed shareholders.
  • One of the earliest (and unsuccessful) federal attempts to regulate insider trading occurred after the 1912–1913 congressional hearings before the Pujo Committee, which concluded that “the scandalous practices of officers and directors in speculating upon inside and advance information as to the action of their corporations may be curtailed if not stopped.”
  • The Securities Acts of 1933–1934, passed by the U.S. Congress in the aftermath of the stock market crash, though aimed primarily at prohibiting fraud and market manipulation, also targeted insider trading.
  • As of 2004, at least ninety-three countries, the vast majority of nations that possess organized securities markets, had laws regulating insider trading
  • Several factors explain the rapid emergence of such regulation, particularly during the last twenty years: namely, the growth of the securities industry worldwide, pressures to make national securities markets look more attractive in the eyes of outside investors, and the pressure the SEC exerted on foreign lawmakers and regulators to increase the effectiveness of domestic enforcement by identifying and punishing offenders and their associates operating outside the United States.
  • Many researchers argue that trading on inside information is a zero-sum game, benefiting insiders at the expense of outsiders. But most outsiders who bought from or sold to insiders would have traded anyway, and possibly at a worse price (Manne 1970). So, for example, if the insider sells stock because he expects the price to fall, the very act of selling may bring the price down to the buyer.
  • A controversial case is that of abstaining from trading on the basis of inside information (Fried 2003).
  • There is little disagreement that insider trading makes securities markets more efficient by moving the current market price closer to the future postdisclosure price. In other words, insiders’ transactions, even if they are anonymous, signal future price trends to others and make the current stock price reflect relevant information sooner.
  • Accurately priced stocks give valuable signals to investors and ensure more efficient allocation of capital.
  • The controversial question is whether insider trading is more or less effective than public disclosure.
  • Insider trading’s advantage is that it introduces individual profit motives, does not directly reveal sensitive intercorporate information, and mitigates the management’s aversion to disclosing negative information (
  • Probably the most controversial issue in the economic analysis of insider trading is whether it is an efficient way to pay managers for their entrepreneurial services to the corporation. Some researchers believe that insider trading gives managers a monetary incentive to innovate, search for, and produce valuable information, as well as to take risks that increase the firm’s value (Carlton and Fischel 1983; Manne 1966).
  • Another economic argument for insider trading is that it provides efficient compensation to holders of large blocks of stock
  • A common contention is that the presence of insider trading decreases public confidence in, and deters many potential investors from, equity markets, making them less liquid (Loss 1970).
  • Empirical research generally supports skepticism that regulation of insider trading has been effective in either the United States or internationally, as evidenced by the persistent trading profits of insiders, behavior of stock prices around corporate announcements, and relatively infrequent prosecution rates (Bhattacharya and Daouk 2002; Bris 2005).
  • Despite numerous and extensive debates, economists and legal scholars do not agree on a desirable government policy toward insider trading. On the one hand, absolute information parity is clearly infeasible, and information-based trading generally increases the pricing efficiency of financial markets. Information, after all, is a scarce economic good that is costly to produce or acquire, and its subsequent use and dissemination are difficult to control. On the other hand, insider trading, as opposed to other forms of informed trading, may produce unintended adverse consequences for the functioning of the corporate enterprise, the market-wide system of publicly mandated disclosure, or the market for information.
anonymous

'Kid 90' and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...punky-brewster-real-world.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy
  • A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.
  • Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.”
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  • Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.
  • “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”
  • by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.
  • Moon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more.
  • These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell
  • Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.
  • “Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings.
  • I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch.
  • The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another
  • I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,”
  • Moon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s
  • In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles.
  • Peers called her Punky Boobster.
  • “It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,”
  • What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?
  • She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery.
  • A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance
  • I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on
  • There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one.
  • What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?
  • Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me
  • But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in.
anonymous

Opinion | 'This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-rights-resonstruction.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ‘This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes’
  • Senator Raphael Warnock’s first speech on the Senate floor brought the past into the present.
  • “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,”
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  • “This is Jim Crow in new clothes
  • I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.
  • The bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was first introduced in January 1870 by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and ardent opponent of slavery and race discrimination.
  • as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance to the Voting Rights Act, forcing covered jurisdictions to submit new voting plans for federal approval.
  • arnock is the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate and only the second elected from the South since Reconstruction.
  • His presence on the Senate floor is historic just on its own.
  • It represents progress — and yet it is also evocative of the past.
  • A Black lawmaker from the South, urging his mostly white colleagues to defend the voting rights of millions of Americans is, to my mind, an occasion to revisit one particular episode in the history of American democracy: the fight, in Congress, over the Civil Rights Act of 1875
  • The first Black members of the House of Representatives, some of them former slaves, were prominent in this battle
  • They saw the bill as vital in the fight against discrimination and race hierarchy.
  • Warnock argued, the Senate should pass the For the People Act, which would establish automatic voter registration nationally, provide for at least two weeks of early voting and preserve mail-in balloting,
  • “no citizen of the United States shall, by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, be excepted or excluded from full and equal enjoyment” of “common schools and public institutions of learning, the same being supported by moneys derived from general taxation or authorized by law.”
  • “viewed school desegregation as a necessary component of achieving a truly colorblind nation.”
  • Their opponents saw school desegregation as collapsing a distinction between public rights and social rights that would allow the government to
  • “invade all provinces of an individual’s life.”
  • And as their fellow Republicans struggled to pass the civil rights bill, these lawmakers used the debate to devise what Francois calls a “counter narrative to white supremacy” that repudiated Black inferiority in favor of a “vision of human equality.”
  • “It is not social rights we desire,” Representative John R. Lynch of Mississippi, a former slave, said. “What we ask is protection in the enjoyment of public rights.
  • I want to say we do not come here begging for our rights. We come here clothed in the garb of American citizenship. We come demanding our rights in the name of justice.
  • The civil rights bill passed Congress in February 1875, nearly a year after Sumner’s death. It did so without the schools clause.
  • By the end of the century, Jim Crow was in place throughout most of the former Confederacy.
  • It would be over 70 years before the South would send another Black American to Washington.
  • His speech is also part and parcel of a Black tradition of calling on the government to fulfill the nation’s professed values
  • The question, as always, is whether Congress will actually act to secure democracy for all of its citizens and whether we’ll withstand the inevitable backlash if it does.
Javier E

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 1 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=8608

tech brain science knowledge memory distraction smartphone learning creativity reasoning problem-solving silicon valley elite surveillance capitalism psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
  • By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.
  • Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.
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  • By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers
  • this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.
  • Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms
  • Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.
  • The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
  • So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
  • Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.
  • he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.
  • internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.
  • Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.
  • In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.
  • In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.
  • The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.
  • the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”
  •  Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.
  • They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.
  • A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.
  • Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains
  • Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.
  • In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”
  • The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o
  •  Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”
  • even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.
  • Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.
  • The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.
  • Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours
  • Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
  • A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.
  • As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores
  • In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.
  • Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it
  • The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”
  • as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”
  • Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
  • As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”
  • That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.
  • A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.
  • When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning
  • We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.
  • Google’s once-patient investors grew restive, demanding that the founders figure out a way to make money, preferably lots of it.
  • nder pressure, Page and Brin authorized the launch of an auction system for selling advertisements tied to search queries. The system was designed so that the company would get paid by an advertiser only when a user clicked on an ad. This feature gave Google a huge financial incentive to make accurate predictions about how users would respond to ads and other online content. Even tiny increases in click rates would bring big gains in income. And so the company began deploying its stores of behavioral data not for the benefit of users but to aid advertisers — and to juice its own profits. Surveillance capitalism had arrived.
  • Google’s business now hinged on what Zuboff calls “the extraction imperative.” To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users. It aggressively expanded its online services to widen the scope of its surveillance.
  • Through Gmail, it secured access to the contents of people’s emails and address books. Through Google Maps, it gained a bead on people’s whereabouts and movements. Through Google Calendar, it learned what people were doing at different moments during the day and whom they were doing it with. Through Google News, it got a readout of people’s interests and political leanings. Through Google Shopping, it opened a window onto people’s wish lists,
  • The company gave all these services away for free to ensure they’d be used by as many people as possible. It knew the money lay in the data.
  • the organization grew insular and secretive. Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements.
  • Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors.
  • What’s most remarkable about the birth of surveillance capitalism is the speed and audacity with which Google overturned social conventions and norms about data and privacy. Without permission, without compensation, and with little in the way of resistance, the company seized and declared ownership over everyone’s information
  • The companies that followed Google presumed that they too had an unfettered right to collect, parse, and sell personal data in pretty much any way they pleased. In the smart homes being built today, it’s understood that any and all data will be beamed up to corporate clouds.
  • Google conducted its great data heist under the cover of novelty. The web was an exciting frontier — something new in the world — and few people understood or cared about what they were revealing as they searched and surfed. In those innocent days, data was there for the taking, and Google took it
  • Google also benefited from decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and judges — decisions that granted internet companies free use of a vast taxpayer-funded communication infrastructure, relieved them of legal and ethical responsibility for the information and messages they distributed, and gave them carte blanche to collect and exploit user data.
  • Consider the terms-of-service agreements that govern the division of rights and the delegation of ownership online. Non-negotiable, subject to emendation and extension at the company’s whim, and requiring only a casual click to bind the user, TOS agreements are parodies of contracts, yet they have been granted legal legitimacy by the court
  • Law professors, writes Zuboff, “call these ‘contracts of adhesion’ because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not.” Fundamentally undemocratic, the ubiquitous agreements helped Google and other firms commandeer personal data as if by fiat.
  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
caelengrubb

As more are vaccinated, it makes economic sense to gradually open the economy, study finds -- ScienceDaily - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210322174957.htm

shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A University of New Mexico research team conducted a data analysis that has found that as a larger portion of the population gets vaccinated against COVID-19, it becomes economically advantageous to start relaxing social distancing measures and open businesses.
  • The study looked at data from four metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) within the United States: Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles and Houston from January 21 to July 8, 2020. The four cities were chosen because they have had divergent trends with the virus (Seattle and New York City were early hotspots, while Los Angeles and Houston peaked in the summer).
  • "Our work is quantitative, so it can hopefully offer some evidence that shows the vaccines are going to allow us to loosen social distancing measures, including opening businesses," he said. "It provides a measure of hope as we go forward and increase the percentage of citizens who are vaccinated."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Sorrentino said the study defined economic impact by the extent that a city's economy was closed -- businesses like restaurants, gyms, salons and airports that would lose business without people's physical presence.
  • The study took into account both the costs associated with quarantining (which requires supervision costs as well as costs due to lowered productivity) as well as social distancing (which incurs costs only due to productivity).
  • "But our model shows that even before we achieve herd immunity, we can relax social distancing compared to the situation prior to immunization."
  • The analysis looked at Seattle, beginning on December 14, 2020, when the vaccine was first being administered. Even with this limited data, the effect of vaccinations was dramatic, impacting the so-called "optimal control solution."
  • While the optimal interventions would vary depending on a number of factors, we always saw that a gradual relaxation of social distancing was possible after roughly 10% of the population got vaccinated," he said.
  • After just 20 days, the trend was becoming clear when comparing with the case in which the effects of vaccinations were not incorporated in the model.
  • Sorrentino emphasizes also that everyone should continue to follow the current policy and health guidelines, and that the relaxing of social distancing should adhere to these guidelines and be gradual. And of course, that guidance may change, based on the rates of spread of the virus and the variants.
cvanderloo

Amazon Warehouse Workers To Decide Whether To Form Company's 1st U.S. Union : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-form-companys-first-u-s-union

amazon laborunion election fair

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Some 6,000 workers at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., will begin voting next month on a groundbreaking possibility: the first union in the company's U.S. history.
  • Both parties agreed that hundreds of seasonal workers should be eligible to cast ballots.
  • "The biggest thing is Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the United States, and they're heavily, heavily anti-union,"
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Unions are a prominent presence at Amazon in Europe, but for years, the company successfully fought off labor organizing efforts in the United States.
  • "The onsite voting proposal, which is in the best interest of all parties — associate convenience, vote fidelity, and timeliness of vote count — was not accepted," Knox said. "We will continue to insist on measures for a fair election, and we want everyone to vote, so our focus is ensuring that's possible."
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      Sounds similar to the US election controversy
  • The workers' union-backed website calls for changes to procedures in disciplining, dismissals and safety.
cvanderloo

Broken New Year's Resolutions? Time To Reframe Your Health Goals : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ts-ok-to-give-yourself-a-break

newyears goals covid stress mentalhealth

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This year, it's OK to give ourselves a break, says Dr. Rachelle Scott, director of psychiatry at Eden Health, a concierge-style health care start-up with offices in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
  • "There are days we're just getting up and showering and, you know, just doing basic activities of daily living. And that's OK,"
  • A Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll conducted in mid-July 2020 found 53% of adults in the U.S. reported that their mental health has been negatively impacted due to stress over COVID-19. That's up from 32% in March.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • And then there's the added stress of recent racial unrest and political riots at the U.S. Capitol. "You've got the chronic COVID-19 [stress] response and then you've got the acute layer on top of that,"
  • a lot of Millennials who define themselves by their productivity and their ability to hustle. Because of the pandemic, many of them are now isolated from family members, out of work, or juggling small children who are learning from home.
  • Science suggests that small acts of kindness — like actually listening to someone else — can make them feel loved and supported.
  • Try practicing gratitude, which improves our relationships and is good for our hearts.
  • If you've got a big goal, consider breaking it down into smaller parts. "Break it down into 12 steps so that the beginning of each month is an opportunity to continue to work on that goal,"
  • Choose something specific, short-term and positive, agrees Randi Kofsky
  • "Goals are not a program we follow," Kofsky adds "They are not a task master. They are a destination. When we map out the path to take one step at a time, goals become our guide in the process."
  • With all the stress we're carrying right now, "just meeting ourselves where we're at is important,"
colemorris

Los Angeles becomes first county to hit 1 million Covid-19 cases - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...it-1-million-covid-19-n1254498

covid

shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Los Angeles on Saturday became the first county in the nation to record 1 million coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic.
  • “The presence of the U.K. variant in Los Angeles County is troubling, as our healthcare system is already severely strained with more than 7,500 people currently hospitalized,
  • On Saturday, Los Angeles reported 1,003,923 confirmed Covid-19 infections and 13,741 deaths.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The state of California is also reporting staggering numbers with more than 2.9 million confirmed cases, according to NBC News counts. Texas, with 2 million cases, and Florida, with 1.5 million, are the next two states with the most infections. New York, which was one of the country’s first and biggest hot spots, has recorded 1.2 million cases to date.
  • But its faster spread will lead to more cases overall, the study authors wrote, "exacerbating the burden on an already strained health care system, and resulting in more deaths."
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      sad to think that things can get worse than this
  • Since then, rates have increased by 1,000 percent and have disproportionately affected Latinos, who comprise roughly half of the total population.
  • It will take a number of months to reach the level of vaccination needed in the population to curb ongoing transmission of the virus."
jmfinizio

Donald Trump just pushed Rudy Giuliani under the bus - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump giuliani impeached

shared by jmfinizio on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In the wake of his second impeachment at the hands of the House on Wednesday, Trump told people around him to stop paying Giuliani's legal fees.
  • "Trump has been blaming his longtime personal attorney and many others for the predicament he now finds himself in
  • but has been left out of most conversations thus far."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will "protect your job."
  • Trump, you see, is incapable of self-reflection. Or of accepting blame.
  • he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades
  • Rather than the face of America's resolve in the face of terrorism, Giuliani is now known as the steady presence at Trump's side
  • What's 60 lawsuits between friends people you owe money and refuse to pay!
  • The rise and fall of Giuliani would be tragic if the former mayor hadn't had so much agency in his demise.
  • That day has now come. But none of us -- least of all Giuliani -- should be surprised. This is who Trump is. This is what he does.
huffem4

My White Friend Asked Me on Facebook to Explain White Privilege. I Decided to Be Honest - Yes! Magazine - 1 views

www.yesmagazine.org/...ivilege-i-decided-to-be-honest

social media bias racism white privilege

shared by huffem4 on 10 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • I realized many of my friends—especially the white ones—have no idea what I’ve experienced/dealt with unless they were present (and aware) when it happened. There are two reasons for this: 1) because not only as a human being do I suppress the painful and uncomfortable in an effort to make it go away, I was also taught within my community (I was raised in the ’70s and ’80s—it’s shifted somewhat now) and by society at large NOT to make a fuss, speak out, or rock the boat. To just “deal with it,” lest more trouble follow (which, sadly, it often does); 2) fear of being questioned or dismissed with “Are you sure that’s what you heard?” or “Are you sure that’s what they meant?” and being angered and upset all over again by well-meaning-but-hurtful and essentially unsupportive responses.
  • the white privilege in this situation is being able to move into a “nice” neighborhood and be accepted not harassed, made to feel unwelcome, or prone to acts of vandalism and hostility.
  • if you’ve never had a defining moment in your childhood or your life where you realize your skin color alone makes other people hate you, you have white privilege.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • if you’ve never been ‘the only one’ of your race in a class, at a party, on a job, etc. and/or it’s been pointed out in a “playful” fashion by the authority figure in said situation, you have white privilege.
  • if you’ve never been on the receiving end of the assumption that when you’ve achieved something it’s only because it was taken away from a white person who “deserved it,” you have white privilege.
  •  if no one has ever questioned your intellectual capabilities or attendance at an elite institution based solely on your skin color, you have white privilege
  • if you have never experienced or considered how damaging it is/was/could be to grow up without myriad role models and images in school that reflect you in your required reading material or in the mainstream media, you have white privilege
  • if you’ve never been blindsided when you are just trying to enjoy a meal by a well-paid faculty member’s patronizing and racist assumptions about how grateful black people must feel to be in their presence, you have white privilege
  • if you’ve never been on the receiving end of a boss’s prejudiced, uninformed “how dare she question my ideas” badmouthing based on solely on his ego and your race, you have white privilege
  • if you’ve never had to mask the fruits of your success with a floppy-eared, stuffed bunny rabbit so you won’t get harassed by the cops on the way home from your gainful employment (or never had a first date start this way), you have white privilege
  • if you’ve never had to rewrite stories and headlines or swap photos while being trolled by racists when all you’re trying to do on a daily basis is promote positivity and share stories of hope and achievement and justice, you have white privilege
  • As to you “being part of the problem,” trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody. Just like nobody should be mad at me for being black. Or female. Or whatever. But what IS being asked of you is to acknowledge that white privilege DOES exist and not only to treat people of races that differ from yours “with respect and humor,” but also to stand up for fair treatment and justice, not to let “jokes” or “off-color” comments by friends, co-workers, or family slide by without challenge, and to continually make an effort to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, so we may all cherish and respect our unique and special contributions to society as much as we do our common ground.
anonymous

Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception - 0 views

theconversation.com/lity-of-human-perception-48160

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception
  • Nontrivial numbers of Americans believe in the paranormal.
  • Part of the attraction of the audio recorder for paranormal researchers is its apparent objectivity. How could a skeptic refute the authenticity of a spirit captured by an unbiased technical instrument? To the believers, EVP seem like incontrovertible evidence of communications from beyond.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • But recent research in my lab suggested that people don’t agree much about what, if anything, they hear in the EVP sounds – a result readily explained by the fallibility of human perception.
  • In some instances, alleged EVP are the voices of the investigators or interference from radio transmissions – problems that indicate shoddy data collection practices. Other research, however, has suggested that EVP have been captured under acoustically controlled circumstances in recording studios.
  • Research in mainstream psychology has shown that people will readily perceive words in strings of nonsensical speech sounds.
  • People’s expectations about what they’re supposed to hear can result in the illusory perception of tones, nature sounds, machine sounds, and even voices when only acoustic white noise – like the sound of a detuned radio – exists.
  • Interpretations of speech in noise – a situation similar to EVP where the alleged voice is difficult to discern – can shift entirely based upon what the listener expects to hear.
  • In my lab, we recently conducted an experiment to examine how expectations might influence the perception of purported EVP
  • So suggesting a paranormal research topic mattered only when the audio was ambiguous.
  • when people said they heard a voice in the EVP, only 13% agreed about exactly what the voice said. To compare, 95% percent of people on average agreed about what the voice said when they heard actual speech.
  • These findings suggest that paranormal researchers should not use their own subjective judgments to confirm the contents of EVP.
  • But perhaps most importantly, we showed that the mere suggestion of a paranormal research context made people more likely to hear voices in ambiguous stimuli, although they couldn’t agree on what the voices were saying.
  • pareidolia – the tendency to perceive human characteristics in meaningless perceptual patterns
  • There are many visual examples of pareidolia – things like seeing human faces in everyday objects (such as Jesus in a piece of toast).
  • Research from cognitive psychology has shown that paranormal believers may be especially prone to misperceiving chance events.
  • Another characteristic of pseudoscience is a lack of integration with related areas of inquiry. There is a rich history of using experimental methods to examine auditory perception, yet EVP enthusiasts are either unaware or willfully ignorant of this relevant work.
  • parsimony – the idea that the simplest explanation is preferred
  • we need a theory to account for how and why a human listener sometimes misperceives ambiguous stimuli.
  • In fact, this very tendency is one of many well-documented cognitive shortcuts that may have adaptive value. A voice may indicate the presence of a potential mate or foe, so it may be useful to err on the side of perceiving agency in ambiguous auditory stimuli.
  • Currently, there is only limited, tentative evidence to link exposure to pseudoscience on television to pseudoscientific beliefs. Still, one study showed that people find paranormal research to be more credible and scientific when it is shown using technological tools such as recording devices. Other evidence has suggested that popular opinion may outweigh scientific credibility when people evaluate pseudoscientific claims.
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 20
     
    Why do we hear voices or weird noises and think of spooky stories or ghosts? It all has to do with perception of the audible information we're taking in and how we've been influenced about this topic.
katedriscoll

Supernumerary phantom limb in a patient with basal ganglia hemorrhage - a case report and review of the literature - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC5591514

shared by katedriscoll on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a rare neurologic phenomenon, in which a patient misperceives an extra limb in addition to the original set of limbs. We report a case of SPL in a patient with a right basal ganglia hemorrhage and review the previous literature about this peculiar phenomenon.
  • Two days after the event of a right basal ganglia hemorrhage, a 78-year-old male reported a phantom arm protruding from his left shoulder. He could not see or touch the phantom arm but he felt the presence of an addition arm lateral to his paretic arm. Pain or sensory discomfort were absent in either the paretic arm or the phantom arm. He stated that he could intentionally move the phantom arm independent of his paretic arm. The examination showed that the passive movement of his paretic arm did not elicit any movement of his phantom arm. We diagnosed the SPL as a complication of the hypertensive basal ganglia hemorrhage and treated him with anti-hypertensive medications. His phantom arm persisted for 3 weeks, and it gradually faded away.
  • SPL had been reported as a rare complication of various types of cerebral lesions. Right hemispheric lesions were most frequently associated with the SPL. Considering the intentional movement of the phantom arm, we deduced that the SPL might result from the impairment of the sensory feedback system for both internal body image and motor movement.
  • katedriscoll on 03 Nov 20
     
    This is a real life example of the supernumerary phatom limb which we talked about in TOK.
runlai_jiang

Human Microbiome and Microbiota - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/robiome-and-microbiota-4146796

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The human microbiota consists of the entire collection of microbes that live in and on the body. In fact, there are 10 times as many microbial inhabitants of the body than there are body cells. Study of the human microbiome is inclusive of inhabitant microbes as well as the entire genomes of the body's microbial communities. These microbes reside in distinct locations in the ecosystem of the human body and perform important functions that are necessary for healthy human development.
  • Microbes of the BodyMicroscopic organisms that inhabit the body include archaea, bacteria, fungi, protists, and viruses. Microbes start to colonize the body from the moment of birth. An individual's microbiome changes in number and type throughout his or her lifetime, with the numbers of species increasing from birth to adulthood and decreasing in old age. These microbes are unique from person to person and can be impacted by certain activities, such as hand washing or taking antibiotics. Bacteria are the most numerous microbes in the human microbiome.
  • Human skin is populated by a number of different microbes that reside on the surface of the skin, as well as within glands and hair. Our skin is in constant contact with our external environment and serves as the body's first line of defense against potential pathogens. Skin microbiota help to prevent pathogenic microbes from colonizing the skin by occupying skin surfaces. They also help to educate our immune system by alerting immune cells to the presence of pathogens and initiating an immune response
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The human gut microbiome is diverse and dominated by trillions of bacteria with as many as one-thousand different bacterial species. These microbes thrive in the harsh conditions of the gut and are heavily involved in maintaining healthy nutrition, normal metabolism, and proper immune function. They aid in the digestion of non-digestible carbohydrates, the metabolism of bile acid and drugs, and in the synthesis of amino acids and many vitamins. A number of gut microbes also produce antimicrobial substances that protect against pathogenic bacteria.
  • Microbiota of the oral cavity number in the millions and include archaea, bacteria, fungi, protists, and viruses. These organisms exist together and most in a mutualistic relationship with the host, where both the microbes and the host benefit from the relationship. While the majority of oral microbes are beneficial, preventing harmful microbes from colonizing the mouth, some have been known to become pathogenic in response to environmental changes. Bacteria are the most numerous of the oral microbes and include Streptococcus, Actinomyces, Lactobacterium, Staphylococcus, and Propionibacterium.
runlai_jiang

An Introduction to Dog Intelligence and Emotion - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/dog-intelligence-4157526

psychology science

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The Science of Animal CognitionOver the past several years, one of the biggest advances in our human understanding of doggie cognition has been the use of MRI machines to scan dog brains. MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging, the process of taking an ongoing picture of what parts of the brain are lighting up through what external stimuli.Dogs, as any doggie parent knows, are highly trainable. This trainable nature makes dogs great candidates for MRI machines, unlike non-domesticated wild animals like birds or bears.
  • Through ongoing research, McGowan has found out a lot about animal cognition and feelings. In a study done in 2015, McGowan found that a human’s presence leads to increased blood flow to a dog’s eyes, ears and paws, which means the dog is excited.
  • As Smart as ChildrenAnimal psychologists have clocked dog intelligence at right around that of a two to two-and-a-half year old human child. The 2009 study which examined this found that dogs can understand up to 250 words and gestures. Even more surprising, the same study found that dogs can actually count low numbers (up to five) and even do simple math.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Do you imagine they feel something like human jealousy? Well, there’s science to back this up, too.
  • Dogs have been studied for their empathy, as well. A 2012 study examined dogs’ behavior towards distressed humans that weren’t their owners. While the study concluded that dogs display an empathy-like behavior, the scientists writing the re
  • Numerous other studies on dog behavior, emotion, and intelligence have found that dogs “eavesdrop” on human interactions to assess who is mean to their owner and who isn’t and that dogs follow their human’s gaze.These studies may just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our learning about dogs. And as for doggie parents? Well, they may know a lot more than the rest of us, just by observing their best canine companions every day.
katherineharron

Blackout Tuesday: Why posting a black image with the hashtag #blm is doing more harm than good - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 02 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • It's Blackout Tuesday, a day promoted by activists to observe, mourn and bring about policy change in the wake of the death of George Floyd. This movement has spread on social media, where organizations, brands and individuals are posting solemn messages featuring stark black backgrounds, sometimes tagging the posts with #BlackLivesMatter.
  • Here's the problem. While these posts may be well-intended, several activists and influencers have pointed out that posting a blank black image with a bunch of tags clogs up critical channels of information and updates.
  • One, the actual tags used on Blackout Tuesday posts. Two, the actual purpose of posting a black image in the first place.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • one of the most common ways to keep track of all of this is by monitoring or searching tags.
  • it gets automatically added to a searchable feed, which people can find using that tag. It's a common way for people to monitor a situation or interest. And since people have been including the #BlackLivesMAtter tag, in the words of activist Feminista Jones, the protests have been erased from Instagram.
  • "When you check the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, it's no longer videos, helpful information, resources, documentation of the injustice, it's rows of black screens,
  • Blackout Tuesday gained traction from the work of music executives Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, who led an effort in the music community to pause normal business operations on June 2nd "in observance of the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard."
  • However, there's concern that while what amounts to a virtual moment of silence may be a powerful reminder to some, it comes at a time when the voices of black activists and advocates are needed the most.
  • However, some people have taken the call to action to mean a pause on posting about personal things or issues unrelated to Black Lives Matter or the ongoing protests rather than complete silence. Some widely shared posts about the day encourage people to refrain from self-promotion and use their presence on various platforms to uplift members of the black community instead.
katherineharron

Asking yourself 'What's the meaning of life?' may extend it - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • "What is the meaning of life?" It's one of those enormous questions that's so important -- both philosophically and practically, in terms of how we live our lives -- and yet we rarely, if ever, stop to really think about the answer.
  • After studying 1,300 subjects from ages 21 to more than 100, the authors found that older people were more likely to have found their life's purpose, while younger people were more likely still searching. That's logical, given that wisdom is often born from experience. According to research by Stanford education professor William Damon, the author of "The Path to Purpose," only 20% of young adults have a fully realized sense of their life's meaning.And according to the new study, the presence of meaning in one's life showed a positive correlation to one's health, including improved cognitive function, while searching for it may have a slight negative effect. Mental and physical well-being was self-reported, and having a sense of purpose tended to peak around age 60, the study found.
  • According to two other studies published in 2014 -- one among 9,000 participants over age 65 and another among 6,000 people between 20 and 75 -- those who could articulate the meaning and purpose of their lives lived longer than those who saw their lives as aimless. It didn't seem to matter what meaning participants ascribed to their life, whether it was personal (like happiness), creative (like making art) or altruistic (like making the world a better place). It was having an answer to the question that mattered.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Great thinkers (and celebrities) have given the question thought, so you can look to the words attributed to them for inspiration. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago, is believed to have written that the essence of life is "to serve others and to do good," and the Roman philosopher Cicero, born 280 years later, came to the same conclusion. As did Russian author Leo Tolstoy, who wrote, "The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity." And His Holiness the Dalai Lama added, "if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them."
  • My favorite answer, though, is the Zen-like circular reasoning attributed to writer Robert Byrne, who put it, "The purpose of life is a life of purpose."
  • Some have concluded that life's meaning is subjective. "There is not one big cosmic meaning for all," Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary. "There is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person."
  • In 1997, my answer was "the discovery, pursuit and attainment of one's bliss," inspired by myth expert Joseph Campbell. A year later, is was to make "the world a better place." In 2002, the year I got engaged, it was simply "Love." And the year we conceived our oldest daughter, it was the less-romantic "continuation of one's DNA to the next generation." But most years, my answer is some combination of love, legacy, happiness, experience and helping others.
johnsonel7

She's Crazy | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...shes-crazy

gender race psychology research bias language

shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Psychological research comparing women and men on measures of anger find that they are more alike than different. Men and women are equally likely to experience anger and the intensity of their anger is remarkably similar. Regardless of gender, we get angry when frustrated, criticized, betrayed, rejected, or disrespected. When someone behaves immorally or unethically it can also lead to our anger and outrage.
  • But anger is “gendered.” It’s perceived through gendered (and racial) lenses. While most emotion is identified as feminine, anger is considered more of a masculine emotion. Anger and its expression are contrary to traditional beliefs about women’s essential “nature” as compassionate, passive, and other-centered. Meanwhile, anger and its expression as aggression and violence, is viewed as naturally male, and masculine. “Boys will be boys,” so many people say.
  • Their apologies likely reflect an awareness that anger and assertiveness are generally more acceptable for men than they are for women, and that they must be careful not to appear “too emotional” as this is sometimes used to justify the exclusion of women from political leadership roles.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Only the women candidates responded with an apology, and both apologized for their occasional anger. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren, “I will ask for forgiveness. I know that sometimes I get really worked up. And sometimes I get a little hot. I don’t really mean to.” Senator Amy Klobuchar said, “Well, I’d ask for forgiveness, any time any of you get mad at me. I can be blunt, but I am doing this because I think it is so important to pick the right candidates here.”
  • Expressing anger can help you influence others and can help you make change or get your way. But this seems to be truer if you’re a man, especially a white man.
  • expressions of anger detracted from the credibility and influence of women and African Americans relative to White males. The authors suggest that angry women and angry African Americans are perceived as “emotional” and this is used to discredit them, and consequently their social influence is reduced. 
manhefnawi

If You've Ever Seen a Ghost, Science May Explain Why | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...-ghost-science-may-explain-why

Psychology

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Despite all the reports of ghost sightings (28 percent of Americans report having ghostly encounters), there’s zero evidence to support the presence of supernatural beings among us. Science may not prove the existence of ghosts, but it can help explain why people think they see ghosts in the first place.
tongoscar

Trump's Iran strike could present an opportunity to China - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Last June, however, world leaders flocked to the capital of Kyrgyzstan for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a key regional security and political alliance. Attendees included Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, as well as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, with whom they posed alongside in photos from the event. It was a pertinent reminder of Tehran's strong ties with two of the world's foremost powers, further underlined when the three countries held joint naval exercises near the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz in the Indian Ocean last month.
  • A statement added that Tehran hoped China could "play an important role in preventing escalation of regional tensions."Such sentiments are also likely shared well beyond Iran's borders, including among other Middle Eastern powers which are no fans of Tehran. The killing of Soleimani could present Beijing with a major opportunity, not only to prevent another disastrous war, but to increase its influence in the region, supplanting an increasingly unpredictable Washington.
  • "China's emphasis on noninterference, state-led economic development, and regional stability resonates with many autocratic leaders in the Middle East, allowing China to promote its 'alternative' model of great power leadership."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • So far -- in no small part thanks to its humungous checkbook -- China has managed to thread the needle of maintaining ties with traditional allies such as Iran and Syria, while also improving relations with their rivals in Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Beijing has also resisted strong pressure from Washington to ditch both Tehran and Damascus, using its role as a United Nations Security Council member to rein in some international action against them.
  • Tehran's enemies may frown at Beijing's refusal to ditch its old ally to make new ones, but this policy will appear far more attractive in the wake of Soleimani's death. And the distinct chance we could now be headed for another Middle Eastern conflict -- or at the very least a period of saber-rattling and disruption to global trade -- could prop up Beijing's ability to play all sides, perhaps indefinitely.
  • "China is not a revisionist state. It does not want to reshape the Middle East and take over the responsibility of securing it. It wants a predictable, stable region -- as much as that is possible -- in which it can trade and invest,"
  • Such a role will likely be welcomed by many players in the region. Indeed, it's difficult to think of a more pertinent example of the contrast between Chinese and US policy than Trump threatening -- just as Beijing was calling for calm -- to target Iranian cultural sites, in what could well be a war crime if it was carried out.
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